Families need an objective financial planning process. In addition, they need to be in control — whether or not they have a family financial planning consultant. With a well-designed and personal financial plan, you can optimize your financial affairs over your lifetime. You can greatly reduce the waste of your money and your time. I recommend the 10 steps below for personal financial planning and personal investment management.

To find an in depth article for each step, just click on the Sitemap link at the top of this page and look for the articles numbered from 1 to 10. You can reach us by using the contact form below. Please enjoy reading this article. Thank you!

1 – Personal Financial Planning

Because you must live with the results, you need to take full responsibility for your financial and investment success or failure. Delegating financial planning and investment decisions to advisers largely on faith can be very dangerous. Naive hope without adequate personal financial knowledge, attention, and control can be very risky to your personal and family welfare. The only practical solution is for you to increase your personal financial planning and investment knowledge and skills.

Educating clients about scientific investment and financial planning is extremely important to me. As such, I have written many educational materials that are of interest to my clients and the general public. My objective financial publications on The Skilled Investor website and blog are often the reason that people learn about my fee only independent financial planner and investment advisor services.

Your questions are important to me, and you should expect there to be a factual basis for any strategies and recommendations that I make. Please ask any and all of your questions, as we work together. During the course of developing a comprehensive, personalized plan for you, if you are interested, I can provide copies of educational materials that I have written and copies of original scientific finance papers that are particularly applicable to your situation.

2 – Financial Planning Tools

The single most significant financial lever that individuals control directly is their management of personal expenditures. The second is their lifetime effort to obtain sufficient income. Most people simply do not save enough of their current income to fund adequately their future needs.

To analyze your financial affairs in detail, we will use VeriPlan. VeriPlan is a very sophisticated and customizable computer planning model that I have developed. VeriPlan enables you to view graphical projections of your family’s income, expenses, assets, and debts across your lifetime. Data inputs reflect your particular situation and include all your assets, including cash, bonds, equities, property, real estate, private equities, and business interests.

Step 2 is a very important step, because this is where we construct your baseline financial plan and measure your current financial circumstances and goals and intentions for the future. To develop your customized lifecycle model, we will work together to gather information, adjust assumptions, and evaluate the effects of different financial decisions across your lifecycle. For more information about VeriPlan, see: Personal Finance Software for Your Lifetime.

VeriPlan can vary future expected investment returns by asset class, and it automatically analyzes the details of your taxes and investment expenses. Any and all assumptions can be changed for instant “what-if” testing. The model’s risk analysis capabilities evaluate how well your future assets would cover normal and extraordinary expenses, if market or personal circumstances were to disrupt your plans.

Excessive and unnecessary investment costs can substantially undermine your lifetime investment returns. VeriPlan automatically projects the returns you will waste with such fees, if you do not choose more cost-efficient investments.

3 – Investment Risk Tolerance

Investors with different levels of risk tolerance are more satisfied investment strategies that are better aligned with their risk preferences. Differences in risk tolerances mean that more risk-averse investors are personally more satisfied with a lower risk portfolio despite its lower expected returns. Less risk-averse investors are more satisfied with portfolios characterized by higher risk and higher expected returns.

While there are a variety of approaches to the measuring relative investment return and risk preferences, we do not believe that a simple “check-a-few-boxes” survey is sufficient. Therefore, you can expect that we will discuss your feelings about risks and rewards. We will assess together your likely behavior in the face of financial risks that might actually materialize.

We will also discuss the implications of adopting a particular investment risk profile relative to that of the average investor. Furthermore, we will test the financial projection implications of your risk preferences using VeriPlan. With VeriPlan modeling your particular financial situation, you can better appreciate the projected outcomes of different investment allocations associated with your risk preferences.

4 – Investment Diversification Strategy

Diversification is genuinely a financial planning and investment “free lunch.” A fully diversified portfolio is a key contributor to improved investment risk management. Diversification has become an axiom of personal investing, because the specific risks of businesses and other investment entities can be reduced or eliminated from a portfolio without reducing expected returns. As such, our investment recommendations will usually focus on very low cost mutual funds and very low cost exchange-traded fund (ETF) investments.

A significant portion of a portfolio may sometimes become concentrated in a single investment entity, which increases the overall risk of the portfolio. While undesirable, there sometimes are good or unavoidable reasons for investment concentration. In such circumstances, we will provide recommendations on possible ways to ameliorate the associated risk. If there are not good reasons to maintain the current level of concentration, then we will discuss how to reduce this concentration.

5 – Investment Asset Allocation

Your risk preference relative to the average investor with the average portfolio will influence your asset allocation. Appropriately setting your personal asset allocation in line with your personal risk tolerance is a critical decision for every investor. Because the average risk-averse investor holds the average portfolio asset allocation, this becomes the starting point in determining how a specific individual’s portfolio might diverge from that average allocation.

VeriPlan supports several mechanisms for allocating assets permitting a comparison of projections based upon different asset allocations. Anticipating allocation adjustments that may be needed in the coming year, we will also discuss how near-term net income might be invested to reduce the need to reallocate some of your portfolio in the future. If asset withdrawals are required to cover anticipated retirement expenses or other living expenses, we will recommend how to do this most cost and tax efficiently. Our goals will be to establish a durable approach to asset allocation and to minimize costs and taxes.

See Part 2 — Pasadena California Financial Planning >>>

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

MBA – Stanford University, MA – Brandeis University, and BS – M.I.T.

Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103

(626) 399-9579

A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101

KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — DILIGENCE — SATISFACTION

A truly independent financial planner and fee only investment advisor

(Regarding how I am compensated, I work only on a hourly fee or fixed fee for service basis, and only under a contract agreed upon with you. You will not have to pay any asset fees. Furthermore, to avoid all conflicts-of-interest, I do not accept compensation or commissions of any type from the financial industry.)

Start a conversation today — Send a message using this contact form

Financial Planning Consultants in Pasadena California

Find the best personal financial planning consultant for those who need financial planning help in the Pasadena area including residents of Altadena, Arcadia, Baldwin Hills, Baldwin Park, Burbank, Eagle Rock, Glendale, La Canada Flintridge, La Crescenta, Monrovia, and Pasadena.

To find an in depth article for each step, just click on the “Pasadena Financial Planners Sitemap” link at the top of this page and look for the articles numbered from 6 to 10. Note that you can reach us by using the contact form below. Please enjoy reading this article. Thank you!

6 – Personal Investment Strategy

Given the extremely large number and variety of available securities, investors need a rational basis to select among them. Without rational selection criteria and a good understanding of which factors are more or less likely to increase risk-adjusted returns, investors will make poor decisions based on false assumptions.

We will begin with the presumption that portfolio investment strategy would focus on broad-based, market oriented financial investments that can be acquired economically and held inexpensively in your portfolio for an extended period. We will provide a set of recommended investment vehicles and percentage allocations including a recommended minimum number of investment positions within each particular area. Consideration will be given to domestic versus international, value versus growth, small versus large capitalization, and other investment vehicles that may move the portfolio away from a broad market orientation. Of course, investment cost and tax implications will heavily influence these recommendations.

Consideration will be given to your existing investment portfolio to determine what parts should remain and what should change. We will discuss a transitional plan for those parts that we recommend to change, and our recommendations will consider the cost and tax implications of making such changes. When appropriate, recommendations will also address adjustments that counterbalance any financial concentration that you may have elsewhere in your portfolio.

7 – Investment Management Fees

Even with optimal investment strategies, there is still substantial room to improve upon net investment performance through continued and vigilant focus on controlling investment costs and tax realization. The investment fees extracted by the financial securities industry are grossly excessive. Excessive costs imposed on “retail investors” have increased substantially during the past several decades on both a total cost and a percentage of returns basis.

At the same time industry deregulation, market innovation, and increased competition have provided many new and useful mechanisms for investors to manage their assets in a much more cost- and tax-efficient manner. It is not hard to cut your investment costs, but you have to be conscientious and vigilant. I will help you to become an extremely cost-conscious investor, and I will help you to remove all those hands that may currently be in your family’s financial wallet.

For your current asset holdings and for new investments we will model details of taxation and investment expenses in the projections. Recommendations will be provided which are designed to reduce investment costs, to reduce and defer tax recognition, and to shift tax realization toward lower tax rates.

Recommendations for new investment will focus on very low cost, passively managed investment vehicles. A very wide variety of very low cost cash, fixed income, and equity investments are available through low cost channels, and there is no reason to purchase more expensive vehicles that are not expected to provide any better return or risk reduction.

8 – Insurance Risk Management

The world is fraught with numerous potential risks – financial and otherwise. Insurance can be purchased for a wide variety of situations, but the issue is always value and affordability. Many people could spend all their investable capital on insurance and have nothing left to invest and build a financial cushion for the future. Therefore, we can discuss a budget for insurance expenses and your preferences for risks you are willing to bear and risks you wish to ensure.

While value, affordability, risk exposure, and risk tolerance should affect insurance purchase decisions, insurance is often sold and purchased emotionally. The issue is where to set a rational rather than emotional balance between expected risk and return.

9 – Efficiency of Personal Investing Strategies

Time in life is the most precious and perishable asset that a person has. It should be spent enjoyably and efficiently. Scientific investment strategies that rely on relatively efficient financial markets allow people to minimize their time commitment to personal financial planning and personal investment management. Yet, on average, you can still expect to obtain optimal risk-adjusted portfolio returns that are near the market’s return

We recommend an annual review of your personal finance and investment plan on approximately the anniversary of your initial plan. At that time we will update your personal financial planning model and recommend any appropriate changes. In the interim, we can work together to implement recommendations that you accept and to perform other financial planning services that you want.

10 – Independent Investment Counselors and Financial Advisors

Pick financial planning and registered investment advisors solely to obtain objective and high quality advice. Specific investment advice is potentially of high quality, if it is carefully customized to your particular needs and is given by an adviser who is very knowledgeable, highly competent, and completely independent. If you agree with the advice being given, then buy the recommended financial products through the most inexpensive channel possible.

We do comprehensive personal financial planning exclusively. We do not sell securities and do not hold assets in custody. We do not sell insurance, nor do we provide accounting services or legal advice. However, as part of our business development and networking efforts we make efforts to become acquainted with high quality professionals who can provide specialized assistance. In developing a plan for you, part of our focus will be on providing you with recommendations on how to acquire appropriate professional services both easily and economically.

See: Personal Financial Planning Pasadena CA >>>

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

MBA – Stanford University, MA – Brandeis University, and BS – M.I.T.

Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103

(626) 399-9579

A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101

KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — DILIGENCE — SATISFACTION

A truly independent financial planner and fee only investment advisor

(Concerning my compensation, I perform services solely on a hourly fee or fixed fee for services basis, and only under a contract agreed upon with you. You do not have to pay any form of asset fee. Furthermore, to avoid all conflicts-of-interest, I do not accept compensation or commissions of any kind from the financial industry.)

Start a conversation today — Send a message using this contact form

Pasadena Financial Planning

Benefit from the best fee only investment advisor helping for those in the West Los Angeles area, including Altadena, Arcadia, Baldwin Park, Burbank, Eagle Rock, Glendale, Glendora, Hollywood, Irwindale, La Canada Flintridge, and Pasadena.

Pick financial advisers and investment advisers solely to obtain objective and high quality financial advice. Specific financial counsel and investment counsel is potentially of high quality, only if it is carefully customized to your particular needs and only if it is given by an adviser who is independent, knowledgeable, and competent. If you agree with the advice being given, then buy the recommended securities and other financial products through the most inexpensive channels possible.

This is one of the “10 Steps in the Right Direction” that make up The Pasadena Financial Planner’s personal financial planning and personal investment management process. For a summary of these ten steps, see Family Financial Planning. To find an in-depth article for each step, just click the Sitemap link at the top of this page. Also, you can reach us by using the contact form below, and you can subscribe to Financial Planning Software. Please enjoy reading this article. Thank you!

The only reliable way to ensure the potential objectivity of any financial planning advisor or investment counselor is to pay directly for the adviser’s services, after investigating the adviser’s background, competence, and work ethic.

There are no shortcuts. “Free” advice is NEVER free. In fact, free advice is usually far more expensive than the advice that you receive from an advisor whom you pay directly. When you choose to obtain “free” advice, in lieu of paying fixed hourly services or a fixed fee for a planning project, the long term costs to you can be horrendously high. However, these huge costs are largely hidden and that is why this industry game of “free” financial advice keeps going on.

Advice that is contingent on any expectation that you will purchase products through your financial counselor or adviser is subject to a major conflict of interest. Financial advisers, who are not paid directly by you, must instead derive their compensation from commissions and other fees paid by the financial services industry. By following “free” financial recommendations, you are much more likely to pay a significantly higher price over the long term.

“Free” investment and other financial advice can become incredibly expensive advice – not just because of the high commissions and high visible and hidden costs. In addition, you may end up buying inferior financial products, because the free recommendations lead you to buy financial products that were not the best for your needs and that are not the best products available.

If you take the “free” advice of financial advisors and investment counselors who are paid by the financial services industry, you are more likely to achieve inferior long term investment returns.

For example, many people pay investment front end sales loads for advice that seems free. Industry representatives willingly tell you that their advice is both free and good. Advice paid by the financial services industry is neither free nor necessarily good. You just end up paying a financial sales rep to sell to you and in the process perhaps to confuse or mislead you about the facts.

The industry argument is that the advice is free and that you only have to pay, if you do follow the good advice that is given so freely. Well, sales loads and good financial advice are a contradiction in terms. For example, industry-paid financial advisors do not get paid to push better investment index mutual funds with the lowest costs and the best future prospects.

Much better advice can be found, when you look of it. If you buy and hold very low cost, low turnover, and broadly diversified passive index mutual funds, you are more likely to get better net long term total returns after taxes, fees, and other costs are taken into consideration. (See this article on our sister website, Best No Load Mutual Funds. It is entitled: “Best Noload Mutual Funds.”)

Unfortunately, when you follow this kind of “free” investment advice, it often leads you to pay a sales load, which compensates your adviser and his firm. When you pay a front end sales load, your initial assets are lower, which obscures the huge long term cost of the load itself. In addition, the mutual funds that are recommended tend to carry more expensive management expense ratios and higher hidden investment portfolio trading costs.

Furthermore, a 12b1 fee gets tacked on every year. With a 12b-1 fee, the same investment counselor who gave you the “free” advice will get paid over time to stick around and sell you more of the same. (See this article on our sister website, The Skilled Investor. It is entitled: “Investment Sales Loads” and “Returns lost to investment sales loads.”)

Financial sales loads, excessive asset fees, high cost active investment strategies, and a myriad of other suboptimal financial industry strategies and products typically bleed 1/4 to 1/3 of the typical individual investor’s portfolio annually. This waste compounds year after year after year, until individuals and their families get smart and realize that “free” is not really free and that “just of percent or two” has a huge cumulative negative impact on their financial welfare. (See this article and another dozen Investment Performance Improvement on our sister website, The Skilled Investor. It is entitled: “Excessive Investment Costs.”)

A financial advisor or investment counselor who has a conflict of interest can be very dangerous to your long term personal finance interests.

Many industry-paid advisers are ethical and helpful. However, the reputations of ethical advisers are tainted by others who are just salespeople who masquerade as advisers. Furthermore, even industry paid advisors face a career-long struggle to be independent of financial industry influences. They must spend their careers balancing the best interests of their clients against the interests of the financial companies that employ them. They must weight continuously the best interests of their clients against their own personal financial interests, paychecks, and bonuses.

Think about the continuing dilemma that an ethical person faces, when they are paid by the financial services industry and not their clients. Training programs for industry compensated financial advisors and investment advisors focus on selling, selling, and more selling. These people are classified as “producers” by the industry, because that is what they do. They produce revenue and profits for their companies. These revenues and profits come from you. (See this article on our sister blog, The Skilled Investor’s Personal Finance Blog. It is entitled: “The Financial Services Industry is Still the Largest S&P 500 Sector – Even after the Collapse of its Stock Values.”)

When a financial advisor is not independent of the financial services industry, you can never be certain whether you are getting the best advice or just falling for the latest financial sales pitch.

Once an ethical and newly minted financial counselor emerges from a financial industry training program and starts a financial sales career, the pressure to produce is constant. His compensation program will provide incentives to take more and more from his clients and will pressure him to pull in more and more assets to manage.

His company will constantly pressure him to perform and produce more revenue. If you have any doubt about this, you should investigate the financial incentives that are offered to retail financial advisors and investment counselors. The financial sales and marketing programs are designed to drive higher revenues and higher profits. Again, you are the source of these higher revenues and profits. (See this article on our sister website, The Skilled Investor, entitled: The Securities Industry Calls Marketing and Selling – “Advising”)

Now, think about the not-so-ethical financial advisor who is paid by the industry and thinks first about his or her paycheck and bonus, before taking care of your personal financial interests. You do not stand a chance. In the name of supposed “innovation” the financial industry has introduced so many new products and services that they greatly confuse the personal financial planning and management process. In and of itself, financial product innovation can be a good thing. However, large problems arise when this flood of new and expense financial products combines with not-so-ethical advisors and the marketing and sales culture of the financial services industry.

US financial services industry regulation is minimal at best. When a loose regulatory environment is combined with not-so-ethical financial advisors and investment counselors, almost anything goes. Most financial consumers are confused and outgunned. If industry sales reps can push expensive, high compensation products into the “retail” financial consumer channel, they will. There is little to stop them from emptying the wallets of naive retail financial consumers and individual investors.

You have to seek out and find independent financial advisors and independent financial counselors proactively. Most of the financial counselors who will actively approach you are industry paid “financial consultants.” They just want to add your financial assets to their “book of business.”

When control of your assets is the primary objective, where will your best interests fit into the picture? You should never have to waste your time and emotion second-guessing your advisor’s motivations. Often, self-interested advisors are well trained, and their sales presentations are sophisticated and polished. It may be a challenge to tell whether the advice given is in your best interests or whether it serves the financial interests of your adviser and the company he represents.

If you become more knowledgeable about how the personal finance advisory industry works, you can better assess the quality of the financial and investment advice that you receive.

The links below will lead you to over 30 personal financial planning articles related to finding, selecting, and working with a financial advisor or investment counselor. These financial advisor and investment counselor articles can also help you to avoid the many problems associated with financial and investment frauds and scams.

• Preparing to interview a financial planner or investment advisor
• Does it matter how financial planners and investment advisors are paid?
• Regulation of financial planners and investment advisors – Introduction
• Avoiding financial planning and investment advisor frauds and scams – Overview
• Are Your Best Interests the Same as the Financial Services Industry?

Note that these objective personal finance articles about finding a financial adviser or investment counselor are published on our sister website, The Skilled Investor. All articles on The Skilled Investor are written by the same author who researches and writes the articles for The Pasadena Financial Planner. (See: About The Skilled Investor.)

All materials on The Pasadena Financial Planner website and on The Skilled Investor website have been researched, written, and published independently. To ensure objectivity, no compensation of any kind has been paid by any third party to influence the editorial content of either The Pasadena Financial Planner website or The Skilled Investor website.

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See: Fee Only Financial Planner Pasadena CA >>>

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

MBA – Stanford University, MA – Brandeis University, and BS – M.I.T.

Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103

(626) 399-9579

A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101

KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — DILIGENCE — SATISFACTION

A truly independent financial planner and fee only investment advisor

(Concerning my compensation, I provide financial planning services only on a hourly fee or fixed fee for service basis, and only under a contract that we would agree upon. You do not have to pay any form of asset fee. In addition, to avoid any conflict-of-interest, I never accept commissions or compensation of any type from the financial services industry.)

Start a conversation today — Send a message using this contact form

Pasadena Investment Advisors

Use the services of the best independent investment counselor for people who live in and around the Pasadena, West Los Angeles and San Gabriel Valley area, including the cities of Altadena, Alhambra, Altadena, Arcadia, Burbank, Eagle Rock, Glendale, Glendora, La Canada Flintridge, La Crescenta, Monrovia, Montrose, South Pasadena, Sunland, Temple City, Tujunga, Toluca Lake, and Walnut.

This is one of the “10 Steps in the Right Direction” that make up The Pasadena Financial Planner’s personal financial planning and personal investment management process. For a summary of these ten steps, see “Your Family Financial Planning.” To find an in-depth article for each step, just click the Sitemap link at the top of this page. Also, you can reach us by using the contact form below. Please enjoy reading this article. Thank you!

Without a rational personal investment system based on scientifically verified investment management strategies, individual investors will make inferior decisions based on false assumptions.

Given the extremely large number and variety of available securities, investors need a rational basis to select among them. Thousands of brokerage firms and investment management companies compete for the investment assets of individual investors and their families. Unfortunately you cannot rely upon securities industry personnel to tell you what is the best investment strategy for you. You can be much more assured that they will tell you to do what benefits them and the profits of their investment management companies. Unfortunately, many financial services industry personnel will say or suggest practically anything, if they think it will help to close the sale more quickly.

There are many investment advisors and investment counselors who provide good advice. Unfortunately, it is often very difficult to tell good advice from not-so-good advice. Most securities industry personnel are trained to sell and are not trained to make the best investment decisions on your behalf. They are trained to inspire trust and develop a rapport with you. Many simply do not know how to provide advice that is in the best interests of their clientele. If they are just trained to sell to you, why should they know what is in your best interests?

In addition, there is also an incredible amount of historical performance chasing and unnecessary investment risk taking that goes with individuals’ investment money. Unwittingly or otherwise, many investment counselors and individual investors pursue highly inferior personal investment management strategies.

There is not reason to guess or to wing it, when your investment money and future retirement is at stake. There is a very large body of statistical investment research that can instruct any interested person about what tends to work and what tends not to work with personal investment strategies.

If you can not find scientific evidence to verify a personal investment management strategy, then just do not do it. Do your research and find out what works and what does not. For more information about scientifically based personal investment strategies, see these articles on “Personal Investment Management.” These articles are published on our sister website, The Skilled Investor.

The best investment strategy for lifetime personal finance and retirement planning

To cut to the chase about what tends to work best with investment strategy and retirement planning, The Pasadena Financial Planner has concluded that all forms of active management that cannot be cost justified should be driven out of personal investment strategies. Individual investors need to choose a comfortable, very low cost, low tax, risk-adjusted market investment strategy and let it run over time. Maintenance should be minimal and low cost, and the urge to chase “beat the market” mirages should be heavily restrained. Investors’ strategies should focus on broad-based, market-oriented investment funds securities (mutual funds and ETFs) that can be acquired economically and held inexpensively for an extended period.

Buy the cheapest, most broad based investment mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs). Buy and hold them. Otherwise get on with your real life. For more information about scientifically based personal investment strategies, see these articles on “7 Ways to Pick the Best Noload Mutual Funds and ETFs.” These articles are published on our sister website, Best No Load Mutual Funds.

Three key concepts are important to consider when deciding on the best investment strategy for your personal investment portfolio.

First, the current price of a security represents the market’s consensus about its potential future value, given the various advantages and disadvantages that all investors see in holding or selling that security. As such, the current security price is a weighted average valuation forecast of events that might or might not occur. Market prices are the best available assessment of forward-looking, risk-adjusted fair market value.

Through securities market prices, a wide array of investors with differing predictions and varying concerns essentially “vote” on the expected or likely future value of a security through its current price. Investors’ evaluations of the value of securities may vary widely. What one person might see as a great bargain, another might consider grossly overpriced. Without this divergence of opinion over current securities values, there would be no trading of securities. Given the immense volume of securities trading that occurs daily across the world’s securities exchanges, it is clear that there is no shortage of significant differences of opinion about current market values.

Second, securities prices represent the current valuation consensus on a risk-adjusted basis. Risk refers to the expected size and likelihood of future up or down price variations or volatility. As such, not only do prices reflect expected returns, they also reflect the panoply of concerns, optimism, risks, and euphoria about how a wide range of factors might affect the price in the future.

Third, given this highly speculative, future-oriented, and risk-adjusted valuation process, there are bound to be very significant price fluctuations as time goes on. This variability is the natural side effect of the market’s communal, self-interested valuation process and is neither good nor bad. It seemly means that speculation about future investment value has been, is, and will always be subject to risk and uncertainty.

The problem with trying to predict future securities market values is that the future is fundamentally unknowable, until it arrives.

While history can be instructive about what might be more or less likely in the future, history tends not to be predictive. Securities prices exhibit only a very tiny level of predictability within a very large range of random fluctuations. The blending of expectations about future returns and risks into current securities prices means that the situation is subject to a wide range of either insightful to specious predictions. Unfortunately, you can only guess which predictions are insightful or specious, until after the fact.

The volatility of prices across time provides an opportunity for just about anyone to develop a supposedly predictive theory on how the markets actually work and to offer selected data to support their arguments. The only reliable way to sort through what is true or false is to rely upon the investment research studies of highly disciplined academics who carefully test these theories against market price data that is unbiased.

Individual investors are usually better off, when they ignore concerns about whether the securities markets fairly value investment securities.

If there is a reasonably large and liquid market where investors interact through “arms length” transactions, then individual investors should simply accept current market prices and avoid the usually futile temptation to second-guess current values and try to beat the market. While some securities prices will eventually be shown to have been either too high or too low relative to their subsequent prices, the reasons almost always have nothing to do with current market pricing mistakes by the securities markets.

Current securities market prices do a pretty good job of reflecting information that is already know. Statistical studies demonstrate that errors tend to cancel each other leaving little opportunity of investors – especially amateur individual investors – to identify, trade, and profit on these current pricing errors. In effect, especially among individual investors, those who appear to have done better than the market were largely lucky and those who did more poorly were simply unlucky.

Instead, prices tend to change over time due to unpredictable future events which occur and cause the securities markets to revalue securities. New information continually changes forward-looking expectations about expected future investment values. Since this new information becomes known only if and when it happens, there is no way to have reliably predicted it. Speculation about a range of possible future events will influence current prices, but only time will tell what actually will happen.

Some full-time professional investment managers and professional securities analysts might be able to discern when a security is more likely to be under-valued or over-valued. On average, before their added costs and taxes are considered, active professional mutual fund managers have been shown to deliver performance that is modestly better than passive index benchmarks. However, across all professional investors there is no evidence that they can consistently beat the markets, after their added costs and higher taxes are taken into consideration.

Unfortunately, the average professional investment fund manager charges several times his added-value through increased investment fees, costs, and taxes.

For the individual investor trying to identify and hire only “superior investment managers,” this effort is highly uncertain, usually futile, and subject to a great deal of error and dumb luck. Except for cost reduction, there are no reliable metrics to predict superior investment fund performance and to identify superior money managers before the fact.

So, where are all the perennially superior traditional money managers who can be hired economically to manage your money and that of thousands of others for a superior return? They are not to be found. Individual investors spend an excessive amount of time and money looking for investment mutual fund managers who will almost all turn out not to be the next Warren Buffett in the long run.

The lowest cost investments will always mean adopting a passive index benchmark investment strategy. The logical decision of individual investors is to avoid all costly activism and not to pay a substantially more for a very poor chance of winning versus a much larger chance of losing. Instead of trying to beat the market or trying to find a mutual fund manager who will beat the market net of his substantial added costs, individual investors should focus their efforts on:

• becoming better educated about investing rather than just relying naively upon advisors to do the right thing for them
• earning income and saving adequately to fund their investment program
• understanding their relative investment risk tolerance and choosing an investment asset allocation that is appropriate for their personal risk profile
• using rational selection methods to acquire a low cost, low tax, broadly diversified, passive market-based portfolio
• applying time and energy to investment activities that tend to increase personal financial welfare, while eliminating time spent on activities that undermine it.

Invest passively in very low cost, very broadly diversified index funds across the world. Save more to build your assets. Do something else that you actually enjoy, instead of wasting your time and money playing amateur individual investor.

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See: Registered Investment Advisor Pasadena >>>

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

MBA – Stanford University, MA – Brandeis University, and BS – M.I.T.

Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103

(626) 399-9579

A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101

KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — DILIGENCE — SATISFACTION

A truly independent financial planner and fee only investment advisor

(Regarding how I am compensated, I provide financial planning services only on a hourly fee or fixed fee for service basis, and only under a contract that we agree upon. You will not have to pay any asset fees. Furthermore, to avoid all conflicts-of-interest, I do not accept compensation or commissions of any kind from the industry.)

Start a conversation today — Send a message using this contact form

Registered Investment Advisor Pasadena

Use the services of the top independent investment advisor in SoCal — I will help client locally and remotely including those in and around Glendale, La Tuna Canyon, Los Feliz, North Hollywood, San Gabriel, South Pasadena, La Canada Flintridge, La Crescenta, Monrovia, Rosemead, and San Dimas.

This is one of the “10 Steps in the Right Direction” that make up The Pasadena Financial Planner’s personal financial planning and personal investment management process. For a summary of these ten steps, see Your Family Financial Planning. To find an in depth article for each step, just click the Sitemap link at the top of this page. Also, you can reach us by using the contact form below, and you can subscribe to our Objective Family Financial Planning Blogs by clicking the orange RSS icon to the left. Please enjoy reading this article. Thank you!

Setting your personal investment asset allocation is a critical decision for every individual investor.

Asset allocation can be viewed as an extension of the Global Investment Diversification strategy principle to multiple types of assets, such as equities versus fixed income securities. Asset allocation is also how you blend your personal investment risk preference into your investment asset portfolio.

Appropriately setting your personal asset allocation in line with your personal risk tolerance is a critical decision for every investor. The percentages that are allocated to various asset classes tend to change slowly over time, so it is important to get it right at the outset.

Investing and asset allocation is all about risk-adjusted investment returns related to your overall investment asset portfolio. Because the risk and return characteristics of various asset classes are not completely correlated, changes in their market prices sometimes off-set each other. Therefore, you normally can assemble an investment portfolio with lower overall investment risk, when compared to the risk of each of the individual asset classes that make up your portfolio. In effect, the various asset classes provide additional diversification benefits that go beyond the investment risk reduction benefits that can be achieved through full diversification within each individual asset class.

What is an investment asset class?

At the outset, a word of caution about the proliferation of “asset classes” promoted to individual investors is useful. Whether you invest through broadly diversified index mutual funds or diversified exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the largest and most established investment asset classes are stocks/equities, bonds/fixed income, and cash/cash equivalents. Stocks, bonds, and cash are sometimes referred to as financial assets, and most often these financial assets are priced and traded on real-time securities markets.

Real estate property is an additional asset class, which creates some complications related to portfolio diversification. The great majority of individual investors with some financial assets also tend to be real estate property owners. For many, their real estate assets – usually their personal residence – can grow in value over their lives to become a very substantial and even majority part of their personal investment asset portfolios. Since this real estate equity is in a homes, which also provides shelter, then these real estate assets really function as a financial asset reserve of last resort after equity, bond, and cash financial assets are exhausted, usually during retirement.

Common stocks, which are one of the largest and most well established investment asset classes in the world, have been sliced and diced into a myriad of confusing segments.

The financial services industry is ingenious in its invention of new asset classes and its balkanization within even traditional investment asset classes. You may already be aware, for example, that the stocks or equities asset class already offers a large boatload of investor confusion. Even if you decide to invest only in mutual funds and/or ETFs for diversification and you intentionally avoid the daunting task of picking individual stocks, you still are confronted with extraordinary complexity. Stock investment fund choices include: small-cap, mid-cap, large capitalization, domestic, international, global, value, growth, core, sector, industry, hybrid, long-short, socially conscious, green, active, passive, index, Class A shares, Class B shares, Class C shares, and on and on and on.

Armies of securities industry sales and advisory personal compete for your attention and advocate that you assemble your personal portfolio according to differing and supposedly superior portfolio optimization techniques. Often, it is unclear whether these asset class segment inventions truly are beneficial to investors. Of course, the associated fees seem to guarantee that this segment proliferation will always be beneficial to the securities and financial services industry. The more complex things get, the more you seem to need someone to help you to fiddle with and to rebalance your portfolio. That, of course, costs more, too. Plus, you get to pay more repeatedly, because the fiddling never stops in this noble pursuit of more optimal risk-adjusted portfolio returns. Unfortunately, the additional costs most often outweigh the additional benefits.

Non-traditional investment asset class concerns

Beyond stocks, bonds, cash, and personal real estate holdings, there are numerous other perhaps real, but very often fanciful or false asset classes that are promoted to individual investors. A few of the alternative asset classes and associated investment products that are pitched to individual investors include: commodities generally, gold, foreign exchange, hedge funds in 57 varieties, infrastructure, managed futures, private equity, limited partnerships, variable annuities, etc. Once you stray beyond stocks, bonds, cash, and real estate, the proliferation of additional asset classes and investment vehicles seems virtually unlimited.

Unfortunately, many of these alternative asset classes and investment products are fraught with problems for less sophisticated (and even for more sophisticated) individual investors. Here is the rub. How can you tell whether an alternative asset class might genuinely be beneficial to add to your portfolio? Which of them should you hold?

Generally, the alternative investment asset class sales argument goes as follows:

“A) This special ‘new asset class’ has had very high returns. While this asset class also has had very high risk, if you had put this new investment asset class into your portfolio in the past, the risk would have been moderated. That is because values in this new asset class historically has zigged, when values of the other investment asset classes have zagged.

“B) Therefore, this new investment asset class might increase your future returns and could even reduce your portfolio’s overall risk. This is a great opportunity for you. You should put 5%, 10%, or x% of your total assets into this asset class. We have introduced some swell new investment products that address this asset class. It is too bad that you did not buy these investments years ago, before the run up in values. Unfortunately, we did not offer these investment products back then, because we have only introduced them recently in response to the loud clamor of investor demand. Of course, none of this loud investor demand has anything to do with us in the financial services industry loudly promoting these great future investment opportunities based on our back-fitted, data mining discoveries of selective “coulda-shoulda-woulda” superior historical investments.

“C) Pay no attention to the high fees and high costs of buying into this asset class with these new investment products. These extra costs are small in comparison to the potential payoff to you. Pay no attention to those naysayers behind the curtain, who may argue that historical performance is not predictive. Ignore their suggestions that this asset class was just cherry picked from the historical investment returns records, because of its past performance. Pay no attention to the ‘Nerds on Wall Street‘ behind the curtains.

“D) Do not listen to anyone who says that you could be paying a very high price to put a lot more risk into your portfolio with no assurance of a superior payoff in the future or reduced risks. What is that you say? You want a guarantee. Oh my, I am sorry, but there simply are not guarantees in investing. However, do not worry now. You can just trust me. We have done our research. See this 4-color brochure on the product? This is a nice silk tie I have isn’t it? Let me tell you about the swell tropical place I stayed, when I was on vacation. Oh, just sign here, while we chat.”

Heard this one before? Did you put in your money? How did it work out? How did you sleep?

An individual’s risk preference relative to that of the average investor influences the asset allocation that would tend to be most beneficial from a risk-adjusted portfolio performance point-of-view.

Your personal investment risk tolerance should determine your investment asset allocation. Investment always involves risk. If your personal capital is not at risk, you simply are not holding an investment. All investors — small or large – skilled or unskilled — irrational or rational — sophisticated or unsophisticated – must navigate the same uncertain securities market and economic waters to get to their financial goals. While investing involves significant complexity, much of which is unnecessary, an investor’s ability to tolerate risk or the occasional, inevitable, and unpredictable stormy waters will dictate whether they can stay in the markets in the bad times, as well as the good times.

By analogy, those who cannot tolerate rough waters, should sail in a bigger, safer, and slower boat (more cash and bonds and less stocks). Those who can better stomach the storm can sail in smaller, faster boats (more stocks and less cash and bonds) and perhaps go faster while exposing themselves to greater risk. On average historically, greater risk has yielded greater rewards, but investors need to be aware of their limitations and choose the appropriate investment boat, given their risk tolerance and fortitude. If the average investor sails in the average investment boat, then the more risk averse investor should choose a larger, slower boat, while the more risk tolerant investor should choose the smaller faster boat. Risk tolerant investors tend to be frustrated by the lower performance of slow boats, while risk averse investors in small fast boats may experience fears and losses (however temporary) that they simply cannot tolerate.

Virtually all investors are risk averse to some degree. Therefore, securities markets are expected to pay a positive, albeit uncertain, future return or risk premium. Otherwise, no investor with greater or lesser risk aversion would be willing to put their capital at risk versus storing their money in a more certain asset with lower risk. Those few who crave risk have casinos or day trading or Forex or commodities or some other  ”zero-sum-plus-costs” game, where they can give their money away to the “house” slowly or quickly — and hopefully they enjoy themselves during that foolish process.

Because the average risk-averse investor holds the average portfolio asset allocation, this becomes a reference point in determining how a specific individual’s investment portfolio asset allocation might diverge from that of the average investor’s asset allocation. The question becomes: “What is the average asset allocation of the average investor?” The aggregate values and relative proportions of the financial markets will define this average asset allocation.

Defining the average asset allocation of the average individual investor

For the rest of this discussion, we will focus on getting rough estimates of the primary financial asset classes — cash, bonds, and stocks — to develop a point of reference for the “average investor.” Of course, there are other asset classes that some individual investors hold, such as real estate and private business interests. These other classes need to be taken into account when developing a comprehensive family financial plan. Nevertheless, cash, bond, and stock financial asset interests tend to be the most easily changeable in their composition. Each of these financial asset classes can be readily converted into the other through modern real-time securities markets, and thus an asset allocation plan with infrequent rebalancing is prudent.

Measuring the average asset allocation of the average investor is therefore the goal. This should be pretty simple, correct? Just measure all financial assets held directly or indirectly for the benefit of individuals (in our case US residents) and figure out the proportions of cash, bonds, and stocks. These asset class proportions then become the average asset allocation reference point for the average investor. A more risk averse investor would then hold a portfolio the skews toward less investment risk, and the converse would be the case for a more risk tolerant investor.

However, this is only half of the puzzle, because the average asset allocation is not always stable over time. Economic cycles and securities market cycles exist, and their movements are correlated. The economy grows more quickly at some times and goes into a reversal during recessions and depressions. Securities market cycles tend to anticipate business cycles, but without any reliable assurance that the direction and strenght of current securities market anticipation is accurate. The prescience of securities markets can only be measured in hindsight, after changes in the economy have become clear and the future that was anticipated by securities markets becomes the past or history.

Since the turn of the century and the millennium, the US and the world has experienced extraordinary financial times. Two decades of expansion in the 1980s and 1990s peaked in a technology/communications/financial bubble that collapsed in 2001 and was followed by an anemic recovery and growth cycle from about 2003 to 2007. Without strong US job growth in this growth cycle and driven by rising US consumer debt obligations and a US housing value bubble, the US then lead the world into another financial or “credit crunch” crisis that was far worse than the dot com crash.

In the fall of 2008, the world stared into the abyss of global financial crisis, akin to Calypso’s maelstrom in “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” It did not matter whether you were in a big slow investment boat or a small, speedy investment boat. Without the real world “special effects” of massive global government intervention in the securities markets, we would have found the end of this unfolding securities horror movie would have been to find most large boats and all small boats in Davy Jones locker at the bottom of the economic ocean.

In panic, those who could not stomach this maelstrom fled to the “dry land” of government guaranteed cash investments, and away from stocks and even bonds. The remainder of this article provides a few numbers that tell this disturbing financial tale. For purposes of setting an asset allocation strategy, one needs to decide whether to pay attention to the average asset allocation “normal” of the last several decades or to decide that what we just have collectively endured is the “new normal,” which it likely is not.

Average Asset Allocation Percentage Data for 2004

To understand the overall asset allocation percentages of the major financial asset classes, in mid-2004 I performed a detailed analysis of all US personal financial asset ownership held directly by individuals and indirectly by institutions for the benefit of individuals. Concerning the average portfolio of the average investor, I reviewed detailed data from the US Federal Reserve Bank which tracks total personal assets across all kinds of personal accounts including brokerage, tax deferred, pension, insurance, trust, and other accounts. The Fed’s June 2004 Z.1 report indicates that total U.S. personal financial assets were approximately $26.9 trillion dollars. In total in mid-2004, the percentage allocation across the major financial asset classes was 26.9% in cash and equivalents, 18.9% in fixed income, and 54.2% in equities.¹

For purposes of comparison, the Investment Company of America’s (ICI) end of 2004 estimate of total US domiciled mutual fund assets, which is a subset of the personal assets that the Fed tracks, totaled $7.5 trillion dollars.² The percentage allocation was 27.7% in cash and equivalents, 19.7% in fixed income, and 52.6% in equities. The mid-2004 Federal Reserve and the end of 2004 ICI numbers are remarkably similar. This gives confidence that these figures represent approximately the average asset allocation of the average personal portfolio. Analyzing the Federal Reserve data takes quite a bit of time, whereas the ICI data can be analyzed and understood much more quickly.

The average asset allocation at the mid-point of economic and securities market cycle can serve as a baseline for the asset allocation of the average risk-averse investor.

Therefore, if we summarize the Federal Reserve Z.1 assets data and the ICI mutual fund assets data for 2004, about 27% of assets were in cash and equivalents, 19% were in bonds and fixed income assets, and 54% were in stock and equity assets. With the benefit of several years of subsequent hindsight, the end of 2004 was roughly the middle of the last combined business and securities market cycle.

For an asset allocation comparison taken near the tail end of the market cycle prior to the credit crunch debacle of 2008/2009, I also looked updated ICI data for total U.S. domiciled mutual fund assets in November 2007. (U.S. domiciled mutual funds would include both domestic and international stock, bond, and cash investment assets.) The ICI reported that, at the end of November 2007, U.S. domiciled mutual fund assets totaled $12.1 trillion, which is about a 60% increase over total assets in mid-2004.³

Even with this huge, $4.6 trillion increase in total mutual fund value, the late 2007 percentage allocation was 25.7% in cash and equivalents, 17.0% in fixed income, and 57.7% in equities – again reasonably similar to mid-2004 with a moderate shift of value toward equities. The proportion of asset value in the equities asset class rose about 5 percentage points, as the business/economic cycle and securities market cycle advanced and matured.

Meanwhile the proportion of asset value in both cash and debt securities declined modestly. Cash has been redeployed somewhat, and bond asset values have declined as debt instruments have came under pressure in the credit crisis of the second half of 2007. Nevertheless, the change in percentages has not been dramatic. These figures demonstrate that, overall, about 55% of total asset value is held in equities, about 25% in cash, and somewhat shy of 20% in bonds.

These 2004 to 2007 proportions represent the average holdings of the “average” investor across all personal financial assets held in U.S. personal accounts, either directly or indirectly through institutional holdings on their behalf. Depending upon your relative tolerance for investment risk compared to the “average investor,” these average percentages are instructive concerning what an average individual investor’s asset allocation would be.

What happened to the average asset allocation during the recent credit crisis of 2008 and 2009?

While we can only hope the the credit crunch, financial markets crash, recession, and near depression of 2008 and 2009, is an aberation and not the new normal, it is instructive to look at a few data points to see what happened to the apparent asset allocation percentages at certain points during this crisis. Here I will use ICI mutual fund data.

Following a grinding decline in stock market values beginning in late 2007 and culminating in the free fall collapse of equity values near the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, the stock markets bottomed out in March of 2009. The the equity markets began a recovery that was surprising to many if not most investors. (Note that this is being written in October of 2009 and thus I cannot predict (nor can anyone else) what will happen going forward.)

Measured at the end of the first quarter 2009, the ICI reported total US domiciled mutual fund assets of $9.2 trillion dollars or very close to 50% of the $18.2 trillion dollars in mutual fund assets held by investors across the globe. ⁴ For US mutual funds, 41% of total assets were held in cash equivalent money market mutual funds, 20% of assets were held in bond funds, and 39% of assets were held in stock or equity mutual funds.

In effect, when compared to the 2004 and 2007 figures above, there was roughly a 15 percentage point shift from stock funds to money market funds.(In aggregate the total value of US mutual fund asset almost $3 trillion lower than the total value near the end of 2007.) While only a small part of this shift in percentages can be was due to actual net redemption cash flows out of stock funds, the real explanation was that the collapse of stock market values accounted for the vast majority of the shift in overall percentages. Assets did not have to move. Equity values had just collapsed, as expectations about the future economy contemplated a severe depression.

And then the recovery of 2009 reversed trends in aggregate asset allocation percentages

Now, let’s take a look at the latest available figures at the time of this writing, which were for the end of  September, 2009. ⁵ The ICI reported total US domiciled mutual fund assets of $10.6 trillion dollars representing an increase in total mutual fund asset values for about $1.4 trillion in that six month period. For these US domiciled mutual funds, 34% of total assets were held in cash equivalent money market mutual funds, 21% of assets were held in bond funds, and 45% of assets were held in stock or equity mutual funds. In effect, when compared to the end of March 2009 figures above, there was roughly a 6 percentage point total value shift in favor of stock funds and a 1 percentage point shift in favor of bond funds — all away from money market funds. Again only a  small part of this shift in percentages can be accounted for from actual net cash in-flows into stock funds.

The vast majority of the last six months of equity market appreciation was due simply to a recovery of equity market values and not due to cash in-flows. Those who were in the market benefited with paper gains, just as the vast majority of them had paper losses as the markets collapsed in 2008 and early 2009. The real question is whether current aggregate asset allocation percentages are the new normal, or just a transition from a severe securities market crisis back toward the historical norm. This is a critical asset allocation decision for investors.

If you were an average investor and held the average asset allocation of 2004 to 2007 and had an investment policy to retain that asset allocation through periodic re-balancing, then you would have been a net buyer of equity assets as securities market values collapsed in 2008 and early 2009. While perhaps emotionally challenging to anyone, this “buy equities into a crisis” (and “sell them into a growth cycle”) strategy would have positioned you for the recovery that occurred in 2009. Most who flew to cash did so after most of the collapse in equity values had already occurred (buy high and sell low), and they were sitting in cash on the sidelines in surprise as equity market values recovered. The investment research literature has repeatedly shown that market timing is an inferior strategy. In the next few years, we will undoubtedly seem more studies that repeat this finding. Even if another maelstrom reoccurs, this will be yet another opportunity for investors to achieve dramatically inferior portfolio performance, when they do not have a well-defined long-term asset allocation and re-balancing strategy in place and when they do not have the will to implement it consistently over time.

Professional advice about your personal investment portfolio asset allocation

If you are confused by asset allocation and all these investment product choices, hire a genuinely competent, knowledgeable, and objective financial advisor to help you. However, if your financial advisor or investment counselor is the one promoting alternative investment classes, perhaps you might want to run the other way.

In particular, you might want to run away, if your stock broker, investment counselor or financial adviser will get paid to sell these alternative asset class investments to you. Furthermore, if you answer just a short investment risk questionnaire and your investment advisor quickly classifies you as a conservative, average, or aggressive investor, be wary. If your advisor quickly starts selling, this might be a very good time to head for the door. An advisor with wrong strategy on commission can be a very large part of the problem rather than the solution.

For more information about personal investment portfolio asset allocation, see these articles on “Asset Allocation and Personal Investment Risk Tolerance.” These articles are published on our sister website, The Skilled Investor. Again, you can subscribe to our Objective Family Financial Planning Blogs by clicking the orange RSS icon to the upper left.

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

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Footnotes:

1) Federal Reserve Bank, Federal Reserve Z.1 Report. June 10, 2004. http://www.federalreserve.gov
2) Investment Company Institute. “2004 Mutual Fund Fact Book.” Note that while the balanced or mixed mutual fund category is relatively small and usually constitutes about 5% of total mutual fund assets, this category consists mainly of bonds and stocks. For purposes of analysis, I assumed that the proportion of assets in the balanced or mixed category was 50% bonds and 50% stocks and I allocated these dollar amounts to the primary bond and stock asset categories to eliminated the mixed category.
3) Investment Company Institute. “Trends in Mutual Fund Investing, November 2007″ (The same procedure for balanced or mixed mutual fund assets as decribed in the note above was applied.)
4) Investment Company Institute. “Worldwide Mutual Fund Assets and Flows, First Quarter 2009″ Supplementary Table S4 (The same procedure for balanced or mixed mutual fund assets as decribed in the note above was applied.)
5) Investment Company Institute. “Trends in Mutual Fund Investing, August 2009″ (The same procedure for balanced or mixed mutual fund assets as decribed in the note above was applied.)

This is one of the “10 Steps in the Right Direction” that make up The Pasadena Financial Planner’s personal financial planning and personal investment management process. For a summary of these ten steps, see Your Family Financial Planning. To find an in depth article for each step, just click on the Sitemap link at the top of this page. You can reach us by using the contact form below. Please enjoy reading this article. Thank you!

You need to develop your own personal financial management skills, because you must live with the results of your financial planning and investment management decisions.

People face formidable challenges to lifetime financial success and their ability to retire with financial security. Throughout your life, you must decide for yourself whether any particular personal financial planning or investment management concept is fact or fiction. One thing can be guaranteed: there will be no shortage of ideas proposed to you by others about what you should do with your money.

Post-Financial Crisis Update About:

Personal Financial Planning

NOTE: The best individual investment and financial planning rules persist and wouldn’t vary due to market cycles or financial crisis. The article that follows was written years ago and requires no changes. Given the subsequent financial market crisis, the update comments in this box were written more recently to emphasize the enduring wisdom contained in the detailed original article below.

The financial crisis has demonstrated clearly that there really are no “smart money” managers — at least none that you can hire to work in your interests after all of their costs are considered. Furthermore, when the financial tide went out, so much fraud and malfeasance was uncovered that only the most gullible of people still believe that wide swaths of the financial services industry actual operate in their best interests. Individuals or “retail clients” are a huge industry profit center. The profits are immense, the fees are ever-present, and the bite out of your wallet is huge over the course of your lifetime.

The original point of this article was that people need to do their homework and to develop some sophistication in dealing with their own finances and with the industry. Only you and your family will have to live with the results of your financial decision-making throughout your life. The industry will extract its exorbitant costs up front and along the way. Pay less to the industry and you will have more assets for longer. If you don’t have any assets, you won’t get the time of day from the financial industry.

You need to get educated, and you need to be skeptical. While the industry has very polished song and dance routines in a vast rainbow of flavors, most of what you are told to do is not good for you. The vast majority of the supposed “financial innovation” that you encounter is designed to lighten your wallet. Only a minority of the investment, mutual fund, ETF, insurance, annuity, education, retirement, and other specialized financial products that you encounter have any long-term validity demonstrated in the objective financial research literature. Your best interests come after the best interests of the financial services industry. It is a simple as that.

And, by the way, all that wool, silk, brass, and mahogany looks impressive, but who is paying for it? (Hint: find a mirror.) The pay scales and bonuses of the financial services industry are astonishing compared to any other industry. This is even more bizarre, because from what I can tell, the average value-added of this service industry to the average person is negative! Start being skeptical and stop deferring to the supposed wisdom of the latest slick financial industry sales pitch.

Article continues:

Even when you delegate decisions to an investment counselor or financial advisor, you and your family still must live with the consequences. You must learn about investing.

You must make intelligent and informed decisions about whether the financial planning strategies and tactics recommended to you in the financial media and by financial advisers are personally valid for you and your family. The vast majority of financial ideas proposed to you during your lifetime will be suboptimal, self-interested (not yours), simply wrong, and/or just plain rubbish.

Many people have inadequate knowledge and skills about personal financial planning and personal investing.

Some of the saddest financial stories concern naive older people who get robbed of their lifetime savings by some smooth-talking slime bag financial scam artist. These fraud victims have no way to recover the lost lifetime assets. Before the fact, they needed to know better to avoid being duped. However, they lacked the knowledge, skills, and judgment to know better.

Only through a lifetime of taking personal responsibility and intentionally educating yourself will you learn how to manage your money. Only by taking personal responsibility will you learn to navigate around the amazing number of potential pitfalls associated with personal financial planning and personal investment management.

Is it reasonable to expect that you would have such expertise? You may be an expert in your profession or trade, and you may earn substantially more than you need to meet your current expenses. However the dilemma is whether and how you will also learn to manage, grow, and protect your financial assets. As you develop your financial expertise, you will increase the chances that your assets will grow sufficiently to fund your family’s future financial needs, while you become less dependent on your earned income.

Personal financial planning and investment management requires knowledge that is different from professional and career skills.

This situation makes self-direction of your finances problematic. Furthermore, this situation creates a great temptation simply to trust someone else to manage your financial affairs and investment strategy — hopefully in your best interests. (Remember to cross your fingers and keep them crossed!)

The Pasadena Financial Planner believes that people who are successful in their careers and have the ability to generate substantial investable income must also become more successful concerning the management of their money during their lifetimes. You must develop both career professional skills and personal financial planning skills to increase the probability of achieving lifelong financial success. In financial affairs, trust is often given, but not always reciprocated. Many people are just too naive and trusting, when others have an eye on their pocketbook.

Many people need help from financial planners and investment counselors. However, they base their advisor selection decisions on “trust” and the recommendations of friends and colleagues. Frustrated with complexity of personal finance and investing, they want to find someone they can “trust.” Then, they want to hand over the keys and let someone else drive.

Unfortunately, the entire financial services industry uses a “we are worthy of your trust” marketing message. Yet, it is difficult to find another service industry where so much is paid for so little genuine value in return. Much of the trust that individuals have if mis-placed and ill-founded.

Personal financial planning and asset class investment management advice from the financial services industry is often shallow and inappropriate.

While advice might seem plausible, many financial industry proposals are simply not good for you. The financial services industry writes its marketing material to sound reasonable to individuals. Some financial ideas reasonable, but many are not. Most recommendations involve the purchase of financial and investment products that are simply far too costly and far too risky.

The vast majority of personnel in the financial services industry are taught how to sell the most profitable financial products. Relatively few genuinely understand finance and investments from the perspective of what is really best for their clients. Even fewer have an incentive to act in the best interests of their clients.

Most often, the interests of the industry and the client are in conflict. Most often, the financial services industry will win, as it delivers excessively expensive and overly risky financial and investment products to its overly trusting clientele.

Without adequate personal financial knowledge and oversight, delegating personal finance and investment decisions to industry financial advisers can be very risky to your personal and family financial welfare. You will have to live with the consequences of poor or bad decisions long after your advisors have perhaps passed from the scene and even retired on their fees.

Naive trust, faith and hope are not a reliable path to financial success, when you are dealing with the financial services industry. There are simply too many potholes, conflicts of interest, and hands in your wallet. The only practical solution is for you to increase your personal investment knowledge and skills.

Information from the financial services industry furthers its interests, as brokers and financial counselors sell risky and expensive investment products and financial services to you.

For example, when hundreds of broadly diversified mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) are available at extremely low costs, there is ABSOLUTELY NO GOOD REASON for individuals to do so much buying and selling of individual securities. Yet, millions frantically buy and sell equity securities in efforts to beat the market.

Egged on by the financial media and the brokerage industry, millions of people waste huge amounts of their valuable personal time in these pursuits. Most will fail miserably in their efforts and will suffer substantially increased risks, costs, and taxes in the process. Most will obtain substantially inferior performance results relative to the performance of broad securities market indexes.

Yet, the vast majority will never bother to check their net performance against passive benchmarks. They will just keep trusting and never really know how very badly they have done compared to a passive investment program that would have required far less time, less risk, lower taxes, and much lower industry fees.

Individual investors need to do a much better job of distinguishing personal finance and investment planning fact from fiction.

They need to base their decisions on financial strategies and tactics that have been validated scientifically. Individuals must become better informed. Otherwise, they must rely naively upon the supposed goodwill of investment counselors and financial advisors who have very strong incentives to sell expensive financial products to them.

When you deal with a broker, investment counselor, or financial advisor, the financial products they recommend will almost always far more expensive than necessary. You will be sold the dream of better results, while most often the reality in the future will be the opposite. In this very costly environment of “advised” personal finance and investing, depending upon the goodwill of industry representatives can be a very risky strategy.

Significant danger exists in not understanding certain fundamental truths about the financial services industry itself. The structure of the financial services industry creates costly conflicts between the financial interests of individuals and the profit motives of companies in the industry and the self-interest of its sales agents. These financial conflicts of interest are a much greater threat to the welfare of individuals and their families, than is the potential for outright financial fraud that rightly concerns so many people.

The securities industry sells investment products that add substantial and unnecessary costs that are not in the interests of their clients.

Individual investors, sometime referred to as “retail investors,” will never find “free” risk-adjusted investment money lying around. Interactions with the financial markets are a “zero-sum game” before costs and taxes. With all costs and taxes, dealing with that financial industry is a “negative sum game.”

In the short-term, the size of the securities market pie is fixed. When one party gets more, another gets less. In and of themselves the securities markets do not create value, but the industry can siphon away a significant portion of an individual investors’ potential returns through visible fees and hidden costs.

Of course, the capital markets provide an extremely valuable economic contribution to our world through the generally efficient allocation of capital. However, this role does not necessarily mean that investment profits will be shared equitably between individual investors and the financial services industry. Retail investors and the financial industry are in competition with each other over how to split this fixed short-term pie. Investors who understand this conflict can better ensure that they get a more reasonable deal.

The good news is that modern financial markets are competitive and relatively efficient asset price setting mechanisms. This means individual investors cannot consistently “beat the market” on a risk-adjusted basis. While this might disappoint some investors who believe they are smarter than others, in reality this is very good news. On the opposite side, the good news is that competitive and efficient markets mean that individuals need not be beaten badly by the market either. Investor returns can track a market return quite closely at very low cost.

While beating the market is not a reliable strategy, individual investors can still make better decisions by choosing lower cost investment strategies.

Passive strategies targeting the market return do not provide an entirely free ride, because there is always a minimum cost. However, optimal investment practices do amount to a highly discounted ticket, which can get individuals to their financial goals quicker and/or richer.

Without optimal strategies, the risk-adjusted asset class returns of the average investor will lag the market return by a much wider margin. This lag will be due to the inferior gross returns of their sub-optimal investment strategies, which are primarily attributable to their unnecessarily high investment costs and taxes.

Therefore, at the outset, the crux of the matter is to learn what does and does not work in personal financial planning and investing. Accepting what you hear or read about personal financial strategies without demanding proof, is almost certainly the road to a much lighter wallet in the future.

Please click the Sitemap link at the top of this page to find and read about the other steps in this 10 step Family Financial Planning Process.

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See: Financial Advisors in Pasadena CA >>>

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

MBA – Stanford University, MA – Brandeis University, and BS – M.I.T.

Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103

(626) 399-9579

A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101

KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — DILIGENCE — SATISFACTION

A truly independent financial planner and fee only investment advisor

(Concerning how I am compensated, I charge solely on a fixed fee or hourly fee for service basis, under a contract agreed upon with you. You do not have to pay any form of asset fee. Furthermore, in the interest of avoiding all conflicts-of-interest, I do not accept compensation or commissions of any kind from the financial services industry.)

Start a conversation today — Send a message using this contact form

Pasadena Financial Planner

An objective and independent financial advisor for clients in the West Los Angeles area including, for example, financial planning clients in Altadena, Monrovia, Montrose, Pasadena, San Gabriel, South Pasadena, Sunland, Temple City, and Toluca Lake.

(Note that you can reach us by using the contact form below.)

Using hundreds of thousands of what the securities industry calls “producer” employees, the brokerage industry sells investment products and services to clients for transactional fees, asset holding charges, and many other more or less visible investment costs. Governed by the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, the legal standard of client care by these brokers is the “suitability” of an investment to a client. However, there is huge latitude in what a suitable investment is and how much it can cost a client.

From the brokerage industry’s perspective, the wealthier the client is the better. Greater assets yield more revenue and higher profit per hour spent with clients. For example, Morgan Stanley’s 2007 compensation plan for their personnel serving retail clients eliminated all compensation for household accounts below $50,000, and it reduced compensation on household accounts under $75,000, unless these client accounts were being charged a percent of assets fee. Clearly, the message to Morgan Stanley sales personnel was and is to chase wealthier fish. Similar messages are given to broker producer employees in all brokerage firms across the industry.

Most registered investment advisor compensation is proportional to client assets — the more assets you have the better for your financial adviser

Another large segment of the financial services industry that serves the public consists of about 100,000 independent investment advisor consultants, who are regulated at the federal and/or state levels. Governed by the Investment Advisers Act of 1940, as amended, and by state laws, these advisors have a seemingly more stringent standard of client care. However, again there is huge latitude in what constitutes minimally acceptable advisor service quality and how much advisory services will cost a client.

Most registered investment advisors deliver services that are charged as a percent of client assets under management. However, often many of these same advisors obtain additional revenues from the securities and insurance industry, when they sell commissioned financial products to their clients.

The wealthier the registered investment advisor’s client is, the better it is for the advisory practice. The greater the client assets under management, the more total revenue for the advisory firm and the higher the client service profit per hour will be.

The economics of the financial consulting industry create a mad dash to catch the wealthy

Whether served by a broker or by an independent financial advisor, if an individual wants personal professional attention, that individual must already have substantial assets that can generate revenue to compensate the advisor. If clients are to be given personalized attention and the valuable time of the advisor, each client must generate several thousand dollars in fees annually one way or another.

The math is simple. For example, if average client servicing requires 20 hours of attention yearly and a profitable hourly rate is $150 per hour, then the required average revenue per client is $3,000 per year. If $3,000/per year is the client revenue minimum for a practice, then the client needs to have $300,000, if the fee is 1% of assets per year. The lower the assets, then the higher the percentage necessarily must be.

Since clients usually balk at much higher percentage fees, the revenue requirements of advisory practices mean that people with less assets will not get personalized services. Clearly, the vast majority of Americans do not fit the industry’s economic profile of a profitable advisory client.

This is why there is so much effort to obscure and hide the true financial and investment costs that clients actually pay. The more the true cost can be hidden and the services promoted as supposedly “free,” then the easier it is to profit from the client, while probably not serving his best interests.

The Pasadena Financial Planner breaks out of this chase-the-rich compensation model

My financial and retirement planning services will be valuable and cost-effective to you. My financial consultant fees will be reasonable, clearly understood, and determined in advance. I can provide you with comprehensive, reasonably priced financial, investment, and retirement planning services on an hourly, fixed fee, or retainer basis. I never charge any fees in relationship to your assets.

For a better understanding of how I operate see: Financial Planning in Pasadena

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See: Independent Pasadena Financial Advisor >>>

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

MBA – Stanford University, MA – Brandeis University, and BS – M.I.T.

Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103

(626) 399-9579

A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101

KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — DILIGENCE — SATISFACTION

A truly independent financial planner and fee only investment advisor

(Regarding how I am compensated, I perform services only on a hourly fee or fixed fee for services basis, and only under a contract that we agree upon. You do not have to pay any asset fees. In addition, to avoid any conflict-of-interest, I never accept compensation or commissions of any type from the industry.)

Start a conversation today — Send a message using this contact form

Pasadena Financial Advisors

Find the best independent financial planner for those living in the San Gabriel Valley, including Arcadia, Baldwin Park, Burbank, Covina, Diamond Bar, Glendale, Duarte, La Canada Flintridge, West Los Angeles, and Pasadena.

(Note that you can reach me by using the contact form below.)

During my 20+ year Silicon Valley business management career, I had saved and invested according to the financial principles that I had learned at the Stanford Business School in the early 1980s. (See: Pasadena Financial Planner) Retiring in 2001, I began a systematic reading of the academic literature about personal financial planning and personal family investing.

As I searched the web, university libraries, and on-line scholarly paper repositories, I was impressed by how much very useful personal financial planning information was scattered around the academic world. It seemed to me that many individuals and families were starved for just this kind of objective financial and investment information. At the same time, people were drowning in a sea of self-interested securities and financial services industry sales pitches that pushed overly expensive and unnecessarily risky investment products, with expected returns that were much more likely to be inferior due to these high investment costs.

Information from the financial media and financial services industry is superficial and biased.

The financial media and the securities industry generate a deluge of information, but leave individuals with very little systematic or durable understanding of which are the best financial planner practices, and which practices are likely to be inferior. Faced with all this finance and investment “noise,” individuals are hard pressed to understand what is true and what financial and investment claims have or have not been verified. Without valid guideposts to screen out all the noise and self-interested hype, individuals cannot reasonably be expected to plan a proper course for their lifetime financial affairs.

Scientific financial planning information is very useful to individuals for personal financial planning and investing.

As I returned to my academic and research roots, I began to read finance and investment journals, to visit finance professors’ websites, and to search the Internet for publications and working papers. After my first year of almost full-time reading, clarity began to emerge. By the middle of 2003, I was convinced that I understood more efficient and scientifically verifiable pathways for individuals to optimize their financial planning and investment strategies.

Since then, I have collected and organized over 25,000 electronic documents related to personal finance and investing. I have read thousands of research paper abstracts and over 1,000 seminal financial and investment papers in their excruciating economic and statistical details.

Nevertheless, academic research papers are not written for individuals, but rather for other academics and for highly trained financial industry research professionals. Furthermore, useful information is dispersed in a sea of less useful research information not focused on personal financial planning. Moreover, these research papers contain the obscure vocabulary of economic and statistical research — not breezy reading at all! To make some of this information more accessible, I have written hundreds of articles and published them for free on various financial websites.

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See: Financial Planner Pasadena CA >>>

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

MBA – Stanford University, MA – Brandeis University, and BS – M.I.T.

Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103

(626) 399-9579

A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101

KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — DILIGENCE — SATISFACTION

A truly independent financial planner and fee only investment advisor

(Regarding compensation, I provide financial planning services solely on a fixed fee or hourly fee for services basis, and only under a contract that we agree upon. You do not have to pay any asset fees. In addition, in the interest of avoiding any conflict-of-interest, I do not accept compensation or commissions of any type from the financial industry.)

Start a conversation today — Send a message using this contact form

Pasadena Financial Advisors

Find the best independent investment advisor for money conscious people in Pasadena, Altadena, Arcadia, Baldwin Park, Burbank, Eagle Rock, Glendale, La Canada Flintridge, La Crescenta, and other surrounding cities.

• Take the time necessary to understand your family’s personal financial and retirement planning situation in comprehensive detail
• Provide thorough, personalized, and specific financial action plans
• Put you at the center of decisions using a sophisticated and fully automated personal financial planning tool that projects across your lifetime the potential impacts of financial decisions you might wish to make.

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My knowledge of personal financial planning and investing has been developed through:

• education at Stanford University (MBA), Brandeis University (MA), and M.I.T. (BS)
• twenty-five years of corporate and start-up management experience in the business development, financial planning, corporate development, and investment functions
• studying the scientific finance research literature in depth to find evidence about which investment and financial planning strategies work and which do not
• design and engineering of sophisticated lifecycle personal financial planning software to support the development of highly personalized lifetime family financial plans

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Do you want reasonably priced, comprehensive financial planning services from a responsive fee only investment advisor and personal financial planner?

My financial and retirement planning services will be valuable and cost-effective to you. My financial consultant fees will be reasonable, clearly understood, and determined in advance. I can provide you with comprehensive, reasonably priced financial, investment, and retirement planning services on an hourly, fixed fee, or retainer basis.

When delivering my financial planning and investment advisory services, I will never tolerate any conflict of interest. No financial industry incentives will ever interfere with my development of an optimal long-term financial plan for you. My recommendations will focus exclusively on your family’s financial interests.

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See: Pasadena California Financial Planner >>>

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.

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Larry Russell, Managing Director

MBA – Stanford University, MA – Brandeis University, and BS – M.I.T.

Lawrence Russell and Company Pasadena, California 91103

(626) 399-9579

A California Registered Investment Adviser — Certificate 133101

KNOWLEDGE — OBJECTIVITY — HONESTY — DILIGENCE — SATISFACTION

.

A truly independent financial planner and fee only investment advisor

(Regarding compensation, I perform services solely on a fixed fee or hourly fee for service basis, and only under a contract that we agree upon. You will not have to pay any asset fees. Furthermore, in the interest of avoiding any conflict-of-interest, I never accept compensation or commissions of any type from the industry.)

Start a conversation today — Send a message using this contact form

Financial Planner in Pasadena CA

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Serving clients throughout the greater Pasadena, California area including these cities: Altadena, Glendale, La Canada Flintridge, Montrose, Pasadena, Rosemead, San Dimas, San Gabriel, San Marino, Silver Lake, South El Monte, and South Pasadena.

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