Independent Wealth Management
Who scrutinizes your investments, designs and tests your retirement and education plan, searches for new investment ideas, patrols insurance agents and mortgage brokers, shows you strategies designed to reduce your investment costs and income taxes, monitors your 401(k), promptly responds to your email, provides one monthly statement, day-to-day net performance across all of your accounts and does all of your paperwork...We do!
Recession Proof your Portfolio
Recession proofing your retirement assets and investment accounts is an activity that is typically overlooked until it’s too late. When the economy is doing well and financial assets and real estate are appreciating in value is exactly the time to consider the impact of a less favorable environment. Unfortunately, most investors only become concerned about their portfolios after values begin to deteriorate when economists start talking about the "R" word or Recession. Will your retirement portfolio hold up to a short (or even worse) long term recession? How about a severe personal dislocation like job loss or business failure?
The best advice: know how to diversify your retirement investments to avoid key areas where recessions hurt most...
Rafael Velez
Developing Your Child's Work Ethic
“Oh no, not that...anything but that”, my then eight year old son would cry when I asked him to sweep the courtyard. Now, at thirteen, the protests have turned to negotiations regarding payment for services rendered. I am happy with the progress, but realize I have a ways to go to reach my goal of raising an independent, competent, economically-viable adult.
Launching one’s children into adult life, with the skills and education they need to support themselves, is a major long-term goal for most parents. Successful attainment of this objective has both financial and non-financial rewards for both parents and children alike. Self supporting adult children, give parents the freedom to follow their retirement dreams unencumbered. Retirement income is for the exclusive benefit of the parents. Whereas the children have the ability to forge their own lives, meet their financial responsibilities, and yes, save for their own retirement and their children’s education.
Buffett Partnership Letters, Part 1
The market is unkind to the impatient. To endure violent market travails with robotic control is a cruel quest. Even more complex is mastering the counter-intuition that calls rising stocks a sell, and declining equities a buy. Inarguably, no one has mastered the art of "wait" like Warren Buffett. Widely known is the wealth generated from his Berkshire Hathaway outfits. In less circulation are the original partnerships that served as training ground for what would be accomplishments of unimaginable scale.
Buffett Partnership, Ltd. was in operation from 1957-1969. It consisted of a small group of invited partners for whom Buffett invested, and managed assets. During this time, multiple well-written partnership letters were produced. A diligent reading of his words almost 50 years later leaves one with a new found respect, not for his wealth, but his mind. If success leaves clues, Buffett has unknowingly provided a forward-leaning past. He sheds a wisdom that could seamlessly be inserted into a Wharton classroom. Let’s magnify closer his inadvertent investment guide.
Why Investment Managers Fail
Modern portfolio theorists associate higher volatility with greater
risk – and apply beta as their quantitative measuring stick. It
appears that most portfolio managers subscribe to a similar view, in
stark contrast to what the many stewards of capital describe as risk;
the likelihood of permanent capital loss.
At a recent meeting of the American Association of Individual Investors in New York City with the notable value manager...
