Our Approach
We regularly ensure that your financial life plan both motivates and reassures you.
We regularly ensure that your financial life plan both motivates and reassures you.
If you haven't noticed already, we're different than most traditional financial services firms, and proud of it. Starting with our first conversation, we carefully craft an experience that will add clarity, confidence, and flexibility to your financial and other life decisions. Here are a few of the things that set us apart.
Our process starts with helping you develop a personal philosophy to guide your decision-making. Probing questions will help you discern your core values, priorities, motivations, and dreams, revealing a detailed vision of your ideal life. For example, you could identify values like:
I’m risk-averse
Family always comes first
I try to give back to the community
I want to send my four children to Harvard
I want time to help care for my elderly parents
I want to relax more
We can't even begin to design the appropriate tax, investment, and financial planning recommendations until we have clarity on what it is you want. We work with you to craft this vision, so that it can guide you through all of the ups and downs that life (and the financial markets) have to offer.
Once we have a complete picture of your personal philosophy we will take inventory of your resources. These will include your available time and energy as well as your financial resources. We will discuss what strategies you are using now to achieve your goals, and whether or not they are producing the returns you deserve.
Using a combination of technology and self-assessment, Libra Wealth will help you develop a Financial Life Plan based on your unique circumstances and personal philosophy. This plan will optimize your financial wealth while keeping other areas of your life in balance. For example, if your work schedule prevents you from spending enough time with your family or having an active lifestyle, Libra can help you identify compromises to rebalance your priorities. Integrated into your Financial Life Plan will be an investment strategy that’s right for you, reflecting your core values and allocating your resources accordingly. Libra Wealth incorporates the latest academic research, market data, tax law, outside experts, and other tools to design and implement a holistic plan for achieving the life that you want.
Periodically reviewing your plan helps to ensure that you're on track for meeting your financial and life goals. Are your resources (money, time, and energy) effectively allocated in line with your personal philosophy and Financial Life Plan? From time to time, new problems or opportunities may emerge. For example, we may learn about a new goal or life event that requires considerable planning. Perhaps market conditions require a course correction inside your portfolio or the implementation of a contingency plan. We can help you prepare for whatever comes your way.
We leverage decades of academic and Nobel Prize-winning research. We design and implement investment strategies rooted in discipline, with a focus on tax efficiency, reducing costs, and managing risk.
At Libra Wealth we believe that free markets do a good job of setting prices for the buyers and sellers of securities. The return on an investment is bound to the amount of capital put at risk, but even within a class of similar investments, risks and worthiness will differ. We review rigorous peer-reviewed studies, market observations, and tested theory to ensure you are adequately compensated for taking risks. Libra Wealth will recommend securities for your portfolio that efficiently capture market premiums at your preferred risk level.
Your ability, willingness, and need to tolerate risk is a major consideration when allocating your resources within asset classes. Libra Wealth will efficiently structure an allocation of your capital into certain asset classes, which research suggests is far more likely to boost portfolio performance than the selection of any particular securities or market timing.
Libra Wealth always recommends diversification. A globally diversified, balanced portfolio containing thousands of underlying securities reduces the risks associated with individual countries, currencies, markets, sectors, and issuers. Libra also helps mitigate risk by diversifying among asset classes having a low correlation to one another. We do this by recommending both Stocks and Bonds, both US and International Stocks, both Small and Large Stocks, both Value and Growth Stocks, and often other asset classes such as Real Estate.
As an investor, you cannot control the markets, but Libra Wealth can help you minimize fees and taxes. We carefully analyze fund expense ratios, trading costs, and bid/ask spreads so you can keep more of your gains, and better realize the power of compounding. While many investors focus on their pre-tax gains, Libra encourages you to understand the potential tax drag on your portfolio’s performance. Libra will consider fund turnover, ETFs (exchange-traded funds), asset placement, and tax-managed investments and recommend the most tax-efficient portfolio for you.
Financial decisions can have an emotional component, so even sophisticated investors should arm themselves with a long-term perspective and a disciplined approach. Abandoning a planned investment strategy can be costly, and our research indicates that some of the most significant derailers are behavioral: particularly the failure to re-balance, the allure of market-timing, and the temptation to chase performance. Our experience and our research repeatedly demonstrate that a program of steady saving is more dependable than the markets. Libra Wealth will encourage you to make regular contributions to your portfolio and increase them over time, making a surprisingly powerful impact on your long-term results.
