Client Service Philosophy
- Our passion is helping our clients to uncover, nurture and achieve their dreams. To do this, we must build trusting relationships with our clients by demonstrating our integrity in everything we do. We do this by;
- listening to our clients’ wants and concerns,
- putting our clients’ interest first,
- delivering on our promises,
- being transparent in our advice, and
- delivering value for money.
- The future is uncertain and constantly changing. As such, we believe that financial planning is a dynamic process comprised of a series of regular, disciplined decisions.
- We deliver comprehensive financial advice and place equal importance on each major area of financial planning, including: cash flow management, asset ownership and protection, insurance, estate planning, finance, investments, superannuation and tax.
- We seek to control the controllable (eg costs, taxes, insurance, estate planning), and where the outcome is not controllable (i.e. short term investment outcomes), to use experience and academic research to devise strategies which maximize the chances of success and minimize the risks of unpleasant surprises;
- By delivering clear and concise advice, we seek to empower our clients to understand their entire financial situation now and in the future, thereby allowing them to make decisions and implement their plans with confidence;
- We believe that client education is an essential element in empowering our clients to make financial decisions and increase their control over their future;
Investment Philosophy
- Investment markets are largely efficient, meaning that financial returns are almost always fairly priced for the risk / uncertainty involved. Therefore if you seek higher returns, you need to take higher risk;
- Diversification reduces risk.
- It is largely impossible to “beat the market” consistently over medium to long periods of time (research shows this to be the case for both professional managers or passive investors).
- Overtrading investments increases cost and often destroys long term after tax returns (i.e. research shows that it is time in the market, rather than timing the market, which leads to the best long term investment returns).
- Higher fees materially reduce long term investment returns.
As a result of our philosophy, we maintain an approved product list which includes low cost “index” funds and value for money active managed funds which provide exposure to investments not available via index funds. We then design investment portfolio’s for our clients which:
- Use academically robust strategies to maximize the probability of top quartile after tax returns.
- Focus on Diversification. We generally follow long term asset allocation strategies to diversify investment risk in line with our clients’ risk and return profile.
- Minimise transaction costs and overtrading. We do however actively manage clients investment exposures where we feel this is in our clients’ best interests;
- Minimise the clients’ administration burden and maximizes the quality of management reporting
- Minimise costs by using low cost, high quality administration services and fund managers;