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.

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.

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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.