A Better Price

Cost control is a critically important component of investment success. Many advisors understand this and wisely recommend the use of low-cost funds. Many of these same advisors, however, haven’t looked in the mirror: They somehow always find a way to justify their own exorbitant advisory fees (and, yes, a 1% AUM fee at any tier is exorbitant).

At Planvesting, we charge a simple, flat fee that’s actually related to the amount of work involved in managing your portion – typically between $2,000 and $4,000 per year.

A Better Portfolio

Risk and return are closely related. But not all risks are created equal. Some risks – like diversified exposure to global stock markets and the use of short-term, high-quality bond portfolios – have positive expected returns. Other risks – like active management, market timing, concentrated stock positions, and excessive  fees – have negative expected returns.

At Planvesting, we strive to eliminate or significantly reduce unnecessary portfolio risks.

A Better Plan

Monte Carlo Analysis (MCA) has become the de facto standard planning tool for many (perhaps most) financial advisors. It replaced “straight-line” spreadsheets because, theoretically, it does a better job of modeling risk and can, therefore, give investors some level of confidence that their investment plan will succeed.

But those “probabilities of success” are completely dependent upon whatever capital market assumptions (i.e., risks and returns of all the major asset classes) they’ve been programmed to simulate. The problem is that the future is unknowable so all that sophisticated programming simply results in a sophisticated guess.

In addition, MCA does a poor job of modelling extreme (“Black Swan”) events and it doesn’t properly capture return sequence risk. It also over-emphasizes the role of investment returns within a financial plan. While building a proper investment plan is important, lifestyle choices and expense control often have the biggest influence on a plan’s success or failure.

At Planvesting, we take a simple (but highly customized) approach to investment planning using old-school Excel spreadsheets and lots of common sense.

A Better Partner

Planvesting was founded by Michael L. Gay, MBA, CFP® after working for several other investment advisory firms. What he discovered was disheartening: The financial services industry, in general, was not putting its clients’ interest first. Whether it was charging exorbitant fees, performing tricks with statistics to make their portfolios’ performance look better than it should, or putting their clients in unnecessarily risky portfolios, many advisors simply weren’t acting as stewards for their clients’ financial well-being.

As an independent Registered Investment Advisor, Planvesting is required by law to act as a fiduciary; to put our clients’ interests ahead of our own. And we wouldn’t have it any other way.