We are strictly Advice-Only, meaning we never charge a fee based on Assets Under Management (AUM) or sell commissionable products. This ensures our recommendations are entirely objective and always in your best financial interest. 

Our service is clearly structured into two billable components:

Virtual Consultation Time (Online) is the time we spend meeting virtually to discuss your financial plan. The frequency and duration are completely flexible and dictated by your needs—whether it is an annual hour or more frequent check-ins. It is entirely up to you whether we meet one hour per year, or more. 

Analysis and Preparation Time (Offline): the essential groundwork, comprehensive portfolio analysis (via secure account aggregation), in-depth document review (via our secure vault), and detailed recommendation preparation. For predictability, this billing component is capped at three hours in the initial 12 months, and at one hour for subsequent engagements. 

In general, our clients are high-income earners, don’t mind paying for advice but hate paying a price tied to assets under management or hidden commissions from product sales masked as financial planning. 

Overwhelmingly, our clients are physicians at various career stages (including retirees). Physicians have a demanding and bandwidth-consuming profession, often start saving much later in life, and are often loaded with high student debt that competes for their savings capacity. At the same time, due to their high earning profession, they are a prime target of financial professionals, some of whom are pursuing their own interests. These factors make physicians the perfect clients for our model of simplicity, transparency, and avoidance of conflict of interest.

Our clients are also comfortable doing elemental financial activities such as purchasing a mutual fund or an ETF at their chosen investment custodian or retirement plan. Or, they are comfortable following step by step written directions or live instructions through a screen-share platform. 

If you prefer a more hands-off approach to your financial advice relationship—where your financial advisor implements most if not all agreed-upon strategies—we might not be the right partner for you.

We serve as your objective financial quarterback, providing integrated guidance that covers every component of your financial life, from current cash flow to long-term legacy planning.

Our advice is comprehensive, covering core areas including:

Wealth & Retirement: maximizing tax-advantaged savings, optimizing investment strategies, and long term goal setting. 

Cash Flow & Liquidity: structuring emergency funds, managing debt efficiently, and planning for current income needs.

Risk Management: evaluating the need for robust safety nets, including life and disability insurance coverage.

Tax Strategy: analyzing your financial profile to identify opportunities for greater tax efficiency, including Roth Conversions, Tax Harvesting, Charitable Giving, timing of Social Security and other guaranteed income sources, IRMAA brackets, and more. 

Legacy & Estate: reviewing the financial implications of your estate plan and developing strategies for wealth transfer.

We can provide an unvarnished and unbiased opinion on your financial situation and how your financial advisor is doing. Based on our business model, we have little interest in you firing a competent financial advisor. So if your advisor is doing well on your behalf, we will share our opinion and give you peace of mind. On the other hand, if necessary, we will arm you with important education and insight that will ensure you can adjust your course before it is too late.

Likely, yes! If you don’t, we will be able to determine that in our no-cost introductory call. (Most of our clients are like you, by the way!).

(Check out our Clients section where we describe how we work with validators!)

We review your investments, and the accounts they are held on, and identify potential improvements if necessary. These may include portfolio reallocation, rebalancing, tax harvesting, and so forth. Our clients utilize our advice and implement it by themselves. 

We believe passive index investing is the simplest and best way to harvest what markets can give you. We believe reducing fees (management and expense ratios) is a 100% sure way to improve your return over the long term, by keeping more of it. On the other hand, active investing is a low-odds returns-improving endeavor that relies on many factors outside our control. Our philosophy is to not play a game we have low or no chance of winning.

You will work directly with our founder, Ilir Shkurti. We are a one-person shop for the foreseeable future, so we expect that to be the case for as long as you work with us.

Our founder and principal practitioner, Ilir Shkurti, holds a Chartered Financial Analyst designation and is fully licensed and credentialed as a financial planner.

We are located in Birmingham, Michigan. However, we practice virtually, so where you live or where we live should not be of much relevance.