Organizations, Certifications, and Other Letters after Your Name

CFP, CFA, FINRA, NAFPA and many other abbreviations often pop up when you deal with someone in the financial and investment business. What they mean or what they do can get very confusing and all sound very professional to you, the investing consumer. Let's see if we can help straighten things out.

Most organizations are designed to help and advocate for the client. Let's take NAPFA is the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors. It is their mission to educate consumers about client-centered financial planning rather than the biased commission driven advice of brokers and salespeople.

Sounds great, right?

However, these groups and other abbreviations you may see on advisors' business cards do not provide any assurance that you are going to have better results.

Remember, the key to your financial success comes from having a program designed to fit you and have a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of your plan!

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To hear the full Smart Money Radio Show where Bruce discusses this topic and more, Please Click Here! (about 25 minutes long)

Long-Term Investment vs. Long-Term Strategy

A long-term investment is one you buy and hold for a long time, just like the name suggests. A long-term strategy involves establishing an allocation of assets, and funding each part of that with a high quality asset that is routinely reviewed for continued suitable.

We do not agree with long-term investments. Owning a bad investment for a long period of time is rarely a benefit for anyone. For example, we have seen many senior adults with General Electric or General Motors for some or their entire portfolio. For years, these stocks were good to them in the form of strong dividends and positive growth.

As the overall picture changed for these companies, they were becoming less and less suitable for senior adults. We were advising many people who owned these investments prior to becoming our clients to lower the amount they were holding or to sell completely out of these holdings. The continuing decline of those companies significantly reduced the wealth of those who kept them.

Long-term investing had these people holding General Electric and General Motors indefinitely; a long-term strategy suggests they pick an alternative as these once global leaders dropped in quality.

It is often very difficult to convince people to get rid of an investment they have held onto for a long time for two reasons.

The first reason is emotion. We often hear that the stock has been good to the clients. It paid a high dividend or that it showed positive growth from the original investment. But you should never buy or hold onto an investment because of emotion if the stock is underperforming.

The second reason is taxes. People are deathly afraid of paying taxes to the point where they will let a stock lose 30% to 50% of their account so they do not have to pay taxes on any of their gains. If they would've sold out and paid the taxes on the gain, they would have a lot more money now than they do because they didn't sell. Taxes need to be considered, but should never be a reason to hold onto a bad investments.

History has shown us that you can get rich by owning a single stock, but you usually can't STAY rich.


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To hear the full Smart Money Radio Show where Bruce discusses this topic and more, Please Click Here! (about 25 minutes long)

Steps You Should Take to Help Make Smarter Choice for Your Finances

There is a lot of information available. You need to be able to filter, evaluate, and decide what information is important to you. But before you get started down that path, there are questions you need to ask yourself to help make smarter choices for your finances.

As a getting started (or getting started over) guide, we are going to provide you the questions you need to answer honestly!

Question 1- Where are you and where have you been? Look at your investments and get a clear picture. Understand the strengths and weaknesses you have seen as you went along. This is a learning process and service you have already paid for! Start using it.

Question 2- Are you satisfied? Be honest because it is YOUR money. There are no maybes allowed here!

Question 3*- If YOU could do BETTER, would you want to know how? If not, then nothing really matters. You must take an active interest and align your finances to your goals and your risks. *This is a very critical question!

Question 4 - Are you equipped to routinely perform all the duties necessary to properly manage your retirement or investment wealth. Routine evaluation is key here. If you cannot self manage your investments, regardless of the reason, you need to seek a professional manager.

To hear the Smart Money Radio Show segment focused on this topic, Please Click Here! (about 7 minutes long)




To hear the full Smart Money Radio Show where Bruce discusses this topic and more, Please Click Here! (about 25 minutes long)

Who is Responsible for Making or Losing Me Money?

Often we hear people complain that their broker, advisor, planner, or manager lost them money. However, this is rarely the case. A broker typically gives you an opinion of what you should do with your money, introduces you to the investments, and sells you a financial solution.

A wealth manager oversees the criteria for selecting investments, hiring and firing the individual managers of each of your investments. The criteria are predetermined so your portfolio is accountable to the design.

However, the real people responsible for your profits and losses are people you have never met. The executives of a company you own stock in, the fund manager who is in charge of choosing the investments inside your mutual funds, or the head of an organization which is issuing bonds are the people who make and lose you money each and every day. They are the ones that need to be held accountable to their duties.

To hear the Smart Money Radio Show segment focused on this topic, Please Click Here! (about 7 minutes long)


To hear the full Smart Money Radio Show where Bruce discusses this topic and more, Please Click Here! (about 25 minutes long)

Money Management Does Not Need to Be Complex

With an open mind, some common sense, and advice that puts your interests ahead of everyone else's, managing your money does not have to be difficult.

Unfortunately, finding advice that puts YOU first is often the hardest ingredient to find. There is so much information available to you, but most of it is either speculative opinions or slanted toward someone else's goals and not yours!

You can call up one of the big firms like Fidelity or Charles Schwab (we see their commercials so much today) and ask for advice. They are often seen as an alternative to paying for advice from an expensive broker. Their recommendations maximize benefits to their company and oftentimes are mediocre at best. YOU are still making a final decision based on their professional but biased advice.

Vanguard, popularized because of their low fees, is another common company we see investors use. However, certain categories of their funds do not perform well. You are taking the risk of a category and paying lower fees, but the net return may be better in a fund with higher fees with the same risk.

To hear the Smart Money Radio Show segment focused on this topic, Please Click Here! (about 7 minutes long)



To hear the full Smart Money Radio Show where Bruce discusses this topic and more, Please Click Here! (about 25 minutes long)

Choosing Investments

When we talk to people about the universe of investments that are available (over 25,000 mutual funds alone!), they often ask we go about choosing specific investments for our clients. Like Coke, KFC, and Bush's Baked beans, we aren't going to tell you the whole formula, but we do like to give a little bit of insight into our process.

If we are looking to fulfill a growth portion of your portfolio, we filter the 25,000 available funds down to the 7,200 that are suitable for that. Next, we get rid of any fund that is less than 3 years old. We found this timeline gives us enough data to evaluate the fund. Now, we are down to roughly 2,000 funds that are suitable for growth. We continue this filtering process over 26 different points of data, totaling over 3 million pieces, and finally boil the list from 25,000 funds to around 150 choices.

This search allows us to identify funds that do well in both up markets and down markets. They CONSISTENTLY earn respectable returns in up markets and minimize losses in down markets. They have the highest quality of management in their category.

None of these funds are exclusive to our clients, but you typically cannot get some of them from a broker. They have minimums ranging from $25 to $5 million, but in many cases the minimum is waived for a private wealth manager.

Since we do not get paid a commission, a mutual fund with a sales charge is useless to us. However, we do not throw funds with a sale charge out during our filtering process. We are searching for funds with the highest net performance for our clients. The high charge funds typically eliminate themselves with lower net performances.

To hear the Smart Money Radio Show segment focused on this topic, Please Click Here! (about 7 minutes long)


To hear the full Smart Money Radio Show where Bruce discusses this topic and more, Please Click Here! (about 25 minutes long)

I Need Help!!!

Many factors can lead you to the decision that you need help with your investments. You may not have enough time. You may lack certain necessary skills. Maybe you can't filter out what really applies to you. Or, like many of our clients, you want to focus on other parts of your life.

First, notice we said help. Management must be a team effort and you still need to be involved in your investments to find the best fit.

How do you find an advisor or manager to help you? Well, it's a lot like looking for a doctor who specializes in your particular ailment. My wife had a back problem and needed surgery. All of our friends (and clients) recommended their doctor that did their back surgery. They told us how much they liked their doctor. So we interviewed several before we decided on would do her surgery.

Financial professionals, like doctors, have many different paths to choose form for treatment of a problem. You want the doctor who can produce the expected results, not the doctor who is most popular.

The first person you talk to may not be the best, but they get chosen just so you can get it out of the way. Then, you may never revisit that choice even if you have suffered significant losses or mediocre returns.

If you had a serious illness, you would take a genuine interest in finding the best choice to treat you. WealthKare is as important as your healthcare. You need to choose a person or group that give you simple, clear, and solid solutions.

To hear the Smart Money Radio Show segment focused on this topic, Please Click Here! (about 7 minutes long)



To hear the full Smart Money Radio Show where Bruce discusses this topic and more, Please Click Here! (about 25 minutes long)