Principle III.
Draw from a broad investing landscape.
The investment world is wider than most advisors use.
Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, direct indexing, custom stock sleeves, dividend strategies, bond yields, structured products, annuities, cash-value insurance, buffered strategies, deferred compensation vehicles — each one has the potential to solve a problem for a particular client.
The question is what fits.
Drawing from a broad investing landscape means starting with your situation and asking what set of tools will actually serve it—not starting with a preferred product and working backward to justify it. Some firms lead with annuities, some with managed portfolios, some with passive products. We lead with the plan.
In practice, this means a few things:
- Open architecture — we're not limited to proprietary products manufactured by our own firm.
- Flexibility — we'll explore direct indexing, individual stock sleeves, dividend-focused allocations, or structured income solutions when the plan calls for them.
- Restraint — we don't use every tool in every engagement, and we'll tell you when a simpler approach is the better one.
The goal is fit, not novelty. A plan that draws from the full landscape isn't more complicated for its own sake. It's more precisely matched to what you need.
Our approach in action
Working Within the Walls
A senior director at a Big 4 accounting firm was losing roughly 40 percent of his annual bonus to taxes, and the investment restrictions that came with his position ruled out the standard responses.
We designed a multi-part strategy drawing on deferred compensation elections, a compliant brokerage portfolio, a cash-value life insurance policy, and a predetermined Roth conversion timeline — each piece addressing a different part of the problem, sequenced to work together.
A scenario closely informed by our work with clients
Four Principles
I
II
III
IV