Do you know your financial advisor’s incentives?

Most financial advisors are brokers, investment advisors, or both (dually registered). Understanding how and by whom they are paid is important to determining how they weigh your priorities against theirs.

• Brokers are paid by product companies. The more they sell to you, the more money they make.
• Investment advisors are paid by your investment accounts. The more of your accounts you move there – and the larger those accounts are – the more money they make.
• Brokers and investment advisers will often provide a financial plan for free or a small cost since the “real” revenue is in the commissions on sales and fees on the assets. There is the potential for the financial plan to justify the products rather than the other way around. This would be a conflict of interest.

Time is your most valuable asset. We’ll help you spend just the right amount of it thinking about your finances, so you can dedicate the rest to what you enjoy most, such as your life and profession. We will help:

• Align your current savings capacity with your goals
• Ensure you are taking advantage of every benefit and savings opportunity, at your employer and beyond
• Maximize tax efficiency and minimize present and future tax liability
• Optimize your investments for specific goals
• Ensure you have safety nets around your most precious assets, such as your ability to work and be around

Here’s how we can work with you:

• Develop a plan around your income and taxes
• Help implement tax-efficient withdrawal and transfer strategies
• Help time your Social Security and other fixed/guaranteed income streams
• Ensure your estate plan is in order

Here’s how we can work with you:

• Simple and transparent pricing: we charge our tiered hourly rate and apply it to the six-minute increment (we don’t charge the full last hour if you don’t use it), on the time we spend meeting with you.
• We review your investment portfolio across your accounts, and we will identify potential areas of improvement, if available
• Beyond investments, we will provide comprehensive financial advice that addresses not just investments, but planning around taxes, safety nets (insurance), estate planning, cash flow, and workplace benefits, and more.
• We’re involved if and when you choose. No hard sells, no products, no conflict!

Your Financial Sounding Board

• We want to work with you in a way that is different from almost anywhere else. We’ve decoupled our fees from your assets, net worth, or the amount of product you purchase. Furthermore, we’ve made our services on demand rather than establish a monthly or a quarterly membership or retainer schedule where you’d need to pay us regardless of the involvement we have.

• We have faith in our ability to help you discover meaningful ways to improve your financial acumen and get closer to your goals. We also believe you are the one who is most invested in our success. As such, we believe you’ll recognize if and when you’ll want to tag us in to assist.

Helping with [some of] the leg work

• Throughout our experience, we’ve found that simplicity doesn’t always mean hands-on. Some of our clients do appreciate having someone else execute some of the actionable steps on their behalf, handle the processes, and ensure accuracy.
  
• At Whistle Stop, we decided early on that investments and investment-related activities are an area we could offer our planning clients the convenience to outsource to us.
• Our investment philosophy is rooted in Simplicity, so we follow a passive index-based approach to build our client portfolios. This allows us to charge an industry-leading convenience fee for our portfolio management as well as other investment-related activities such as funding, rebalancing, dollar cost averaging, tax harvesting, and other tax-control transactions.
• Because what we do not only appears simple, but actually is simple, our clients often find themselves capable or educated enough to take the reins back over.