Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

This is great foundational work and the basis of strong financial literacy. Our fiduciary duty encourages us to tell you: you may still be leaving certain elements of holistic financial planning and your future success to chance.

There are other pillars of personal finance that you should at least be aware of before taking a more ‘laissez-faire’ approach to your planning i.e. pay taxes, save “some of it”, and spend the remainder.

In this scenario, there are definitive, quantitative considerations you may want to seek out, such as what is your actual retirement income goal and are you on track to hitting that number with a reasonable certainty when you are no longer working (no longer receiving active income), while factoring in:

• Short, mid, long-term expenses (variable, fixed and dynamic across both expected and unexpected scenarios)
• Inflation i.e. your purchasing power now, leading up and throughout your retirement and beyond
• Education funding and aspirational goal setting for yourself and your family
• An ‘always-on’ tax mitigation strategy that evolves to where you are in your accumulation, conservation and decumulation / distribution lifecycle stage
• Retaining v. transferring risk considerations for earning potential and loss of life
• Long-term care events, elder planning and the proper balance of retaining v. transferring risk
• Your estate mechanics, legacy and value over time

If after a proper diagnosis via fee-based financial plan, you are not on track to hitting your number: what are the strategies and tactics for course correction before you are forced to make decisions because you have to, not because you genuinely want to.

Playing an active role in your finances is an excellent start to financial literacy and we typically advise clients to build up at least a basic fluency in personal finance (time-permitting).

The question for high-earners with intense professions, such as physicians, is always: does it make good sense to spend your non-work, leisure and / or discretionary time attempting to learn a new discipline / specialty such as financial planning? Or is it more efficient and effective (think cost-benefit analysis) to outsource elements of financial planning and defer to CFP® experts with a fiduciary responsibility?

To use a familiar juxtaposition: you have spent decades learning and delving into your specialty throughout med school, then into residency, then powering through fellowship (and then putting into practice the applied learning of your specialty, internalizing nuances along the way and creating an internal knowledge base on how to gain efficiency in what you do i.e. the definition of true expertise…)

Do you believe someone with only a part-time inclination and dedication to learn your specialty would be as effective as you?

As for having a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), we typically see high-earners and physicians have accountants who focus intently on ensuring tax compliance with the IRS from year-to-year. Certified financial planners (CFP®), particularly those who are specialists in creative problem solving via tax mitigation strategies as part of a wider financial roadmap, can help with the ‘forward-look’ and how to achieve your and your family’s goals in the most efficient manner possible. That said, a true partnership between a CFP® and CPA can potentially provide the highest level of tax mitigation available for a client household, not only for today but in the future.

Again, the answer boils down to high-leverage work, time commitment and ability to become the expert yourself vs. vetting, outsourcing expertise and managing a potential team who serves you. 

There is no cut and dry answer for this – if you would like to try your hand at DIY financial planning, we encourage you to immerse yourself in as much information as possible and start very small in terms of implementation. In other words, perform a trial run, analyze success and failures through multiple stress tests and iterate from there.

If instead you want to simply manage the team and free-up the already limited time you do have, registered investment advisors with a fiduciary responsibility, outstanding track record, and proactive sense of urgency / depth in understanding the high-earning physician clientele, are usually a good choice. These are the trained specialists in helping you achieve your financial goals in the most efficient manner possible.

There are three qualities we would typically recommend as table stakes criteria for vetting a financial planner.

The first is that the individual is a fiduciary with an aligned incentive to succeed. A fiduciary responsibility means the advisor has a legal-bound duty to act in the best interest of the client. This can be achieved either through credential, such as the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERS (CFP™) or business structure, such as a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA). As a pro tip, you can look up your potential financial planner on cfp.net for validation of their credentials.

The second quality is that the individual is efficiency-minded and respectful to pace, but willing to push judiciously to complete important financial matters. Time is the great equalizer both in the markets and staving off the very real, statistically significant threat of old age, morbidity, unexpected health issues, etc. Being proactive is (as always) better than reactivity and in almost all cases, allows for a better solution to be ideated and actioned.

The last defining quality is that the individual has both emotional intelligence, deep expertise and a creative problem solving mindset, that is, 1) being able to identify the emotive elements that are very much in play when making financial decisions, 2) tailor an actionable idea to the nuanced situation at hand and 3) gaming-out both the strengths and interrogating for weakness.

We are a Registered Investment Advisory (RIA) firm specializing in comprehensive financial planning for busy, specialist physicians who are trying to do more of the things they want to do, not the things they have to do.

We deploy proprietary frameworks, deep expertise and creative financial problem solving to help execute the most efficient roadmap for helping our clients achieve the vision they want for themselves and their families; one that safeguards against uncertainty and adds clarity and empowerment to the decisions they make both now and in the future.

We have seen over 3 generations of leadership spanning the course of 50+ years and have been at the forefront of implementing creative financial strategies on behalf of our specialist clients. Our mission is disarmingly simple: we’re in the business of serving those who serve others.

We deploy a fee-only business model. As such, our initial engagement pricing is based on the complexity of a client’s lifestyle, vector of their goals / aspirations and subsequent planning required.