UlTImATE SUccESS GUIdEwith significant financial worth, we have a greater burden than do bro-
kers at the average investment outfit. The fiduciary standard requires
us to recommend not what might be an appropriate investment for a
client, but we must recommend only those investments that are in the
best interest of our clients. To that end, and with a desire for complete
transparency in mind, we recommend and encourage investors to an-
swer the following questions to ascertain whether they are receiving the
best advice or not.
Do you have mutual funds? If yes, you might not be transparent.
Do you have a Broker or a Fiduciary Advisor?
Did you create an Initial Plan or receive a blueprint? If not, how will
you measure the meeting of your investment needs? Your portfolio may
not be transparent.
Is anyone following up with you to tell you what your investments have
done? If yes, good for you, if no, it may be time to check in with your
financial professional.
Ask anyone about how they feel presently and, say, how they differ
from ten or twenty years prior, and that person can likely laundry list
for you how different his life is from then until now. While most of our
clients can tell how they have changed physically from 30 to 60, many
of them have no idea that their investment needs have changed as well.
We share the story of our client, a physician, who likely would not have
treated a 40-year-old patient exactly the way he would a 60-year-old pa-
tient. Yet when it came to his retirement investing, he had been doing
exactly that. The doctor was 60 years old and approaching retirement, but
his investments were risk/growth oriented for the aggressive portfolio of
a 40-year-old in his earning prime. When we first met with him, his entire
portfolio carried a risk of 40-50% and was loaded with mostly mutual
funds. It is imperative that investors approaching retirement transition
from growth-driven investing to income-driven investing. Our analysis
of his portfolio determined that he had a high-risk, growth portfolio that
included a mega insurance policy with a sizeable cash value that would
have been lost if not removed before he died, several variable annuities
with hidden fees galore and a large amount invested in 30-year bonds.