Money Architects co-author and Brooks, Hughes & Jones partner Allyn Hughes has added the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and Chartered Life Underwriter designations to his list of credentials.
Each of these designations reflects an exceptional amount of time invested in education, exams and experience helping clients understand options for how to invest their money, protect their risks and pursue their goals.
Allyn joins Brooks, Hughes & Jones partners Nancy Jones and Gary Brooks as CFP® certificant. This means that Brooks, Hughes & Jones is the only independent Registered Investment Adviser in Tacoma with three CFPs on staff. We work together to provide clients with investment management and financial planning insight from three perspectives for the price of one advisor.
We provide wealth management services for individuals and families with at least $500,000 of invested assets. We limit the size of our client base to make sure that our clients receive adequate attention and access to our best combination of service and insight.
If you are looking for confidence in how your money is managed and comfort with the people who provide your advice, consider what Brooks, Hughes & Jones can do for you.
We help clients grow and maintain financial security in many ways:
- Retirement income planning (sustainable withdrawal rates, pension and Social
- Security maximization, required minimum distributions from qualified retirement
- plans, etc.)
- Managing Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs)
- Understanding small business retirement accounts
- Planning for IRA rollovers from employer plans (401k, 403b, profit sharing, etc.)
- Determining college savings strategies
- Cash flow management
- Developing strategies to improve generational wealth transfer
- Identifying charitable giving opportunities
- Investment management for Foundations and Donor Advised Funds
- Custom asset protection strategies using life, disability and long-term care
insurance
In all cases, we adhere to the Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct adopted
by the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ Board of Standards.
Please visit our web site BHJadvisors.com or call 253-534-8888 for more information.
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You Get What You Pay For … Financial Planning Edition
Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig, one of our favorites in the personal finance space, wrote an article August 7 about a new service for delivering low-cost, yet “comprehensive” financial planning to the masses.
Certainly, there are millions of people who are not engaged with a professional advisor and could benefit from guidance regarding their money decisions.
But we wonder whether this new service from Veritat Advisors will demonstrate value given the exceptionally personal and specific questions that most people have about how to protect their risks and build financial security through a lifetime of events and decisions.
In Veritat’s advisory model, customers submit financial information and high-level goals to Veritat’s financial planning engine. A financial plan is produced and customers then meet with a Veritat advisor via video link on the internet.
The advisors then help customers work with other providers to open and manage investment accounts, purchase insurance and complete basic estate planning documents.
Veritat charges a monthly fee from $25-$40, in addition to the initial financial plan fee of $250. It’s a low cost for the basics of a fairly generic, but suitable plan and investment strategy.
Zweig writes that Veritat expects, given the leverage of automated systems, that a single advisor could work with 1,000 clients per year.
Let’s review some basic math about this workload. If the advisor works 50 weeks a year at 40 hours per week, that’s 2,000 working hours. If the advisor had incredible productivity and spent every minute of those hours actually working on a customer’s financial plan or reviewing it with them, the advisor could spend just two hours per year per client. Of course, it’s not possible to be that efficient. There are many other obligations over a year of work that require the time of any kind of employee. So, being generous, a customer’s financial plan and ongoing recommendations likely would get an hour and a half or less of a Veritat advisor’s time over the course of a year.
The upside of this is maybe more people will seek financial advice and be able to better manage their current budget, investments and basic financial decisions. This way, they’ll be better prepared for life’s transitions and retirement.
In our experience, however, providing real value in a financial planning and investment management relationship calls for a much more personal approach, not an “advisor” interpreting the results of a software program and recommending a model portfolio that is “suitable” for someone near the same age, with similar income, assets and tolerance for the ups and downs of investment markets.
Good financial advisors also add value for their clients by being available as often as is necessary to help them through the issues that they face—an important life transition or a question about financial options that they have.
The impact of a relationship with a qualified advisor, personally looking after your finances and how they relate to your goals, is worth far more than $40 a month. This is especially clear when considering that at a minimum, we expect to spend at least 20 hours per year on even the most simple relationship with a client.
~ Brooks, Hughes & Jones, Partners in Wealth Management — Gary Brooks, CFP®, Allyn Hughes, CFP®, CLU, ChFC, Nancy Jones, CFP®
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Posted in Commentary, Financial planning
Tagged advisor, Allyn Hughes, Brooks, CFP®, ChFC, CLU, financial advisors, financial plan, financial planning, Hughes, Jones, Nancy Jones, relationship, service, veritat, wealth management