FAQS

My consultative approach means that all investments would be held in your accounts in your name at at Charles Schwab and Company (which has over $7 Trillion under management). I can only be given authority to select investments within your account, and to deduct my fee (typically less than 0.22% per quarter), billed at the end of each quarter. It's also worth pointing out that this permission can be revoked by you at any time with a single phone call to Charles Schwab and Company. Obviously I would hope to keep you happy, but my clients are not locked into anything and retain total visibility into and control over their accounts at all times.

Legally, if an advisor sells annuities or other commission-based products, they can not serve as a fiduciary, which is a legal term meaning the advisor is legally bound to act in the client's best interests. This is because if an advisor is giving investment advice to a client and the amount of money they will earn from an annuity or other product is materially larger than the amount they would earn otherwise, the conflict of interest makes it difficult for them to provide unbiased, objective advice. Fiduciaries can serve in legal capacities that non-fiduciaries can't, because certain positions of trust require that the designated advisor must act in the client's best interests.

Absolutely. While its' value varies by individual and situation, for many clients financial planning provides more direct value than investment management, and can provide meaningful returns with limited associated costs or risk. It is not atypical to increase projected terminal net worth by 100% or more over a multi-year period, simply by optimizing certain elements of tax planning, withdrawal strategies, expense ratios, Social Security start dates, and other factors. Obviously these are only projections and the plan has to be followed once it is created for any actual value to be realized, but there is little risk associated with planning and (projected) returns can be extremely high. There are also numerous intangible benefits associated with thinking through and working towards meaningful goals, obtaining clarity about what you really want to accomplish, etc.

While some clients prefer in person meetings and I enjoy them myself, the industry moved heavily towards online meetings during Covid and has remained there since. The primary advantages of an online model are the elimination of client travel time, lower costs for everyone (I have fairly limited overhead and can charge lower fees as a result), ease of the presentation of material on a dedicated screen, and a more time-efficient process overall. Wilco's all-digital meetings (and forms) allow clients to get started faster, hold meaningful meetings with less invested time and energy, and allow for the full-range of potential benefits to be delivered quickly.

One unique aspect of working with Wilco is that you will not be discouraged from managing your own investments, if you believe you have the time, energy, and ability to do so. I do have access to tools and experience that may help you to better understand how to best position or exploit certain investments and can provide a second set of eyes for specific investments or the portfolio as a whole, if that would be helpful (including real estate and small business acquisitions). You would have the flexibility to manage any portion of the investments yourself and allow me to manage another portion if you see fit - whatever makes you most comfortable that risks are being managed appropriately and fees are appropriate for the value being provided. It is your money, after all.

As with stocks, bonds sometimes sell at a discount to their intrinsic value, resulting in a higher average rate of interest being earned than should be available for their risk profile. This is sometimes due to market forces disproportionately impacting a particular bond, but can also be caused by the need for a seller to unload an "odd-lot" of bonds for which buyers are more scarce than normal. An additional advantage to individual bonds in general is that there is no expense ratio associated with holding an individual bond, as there is with bond funds (this factor also applies and is a benefit for individual stock positions when compared to mutual funds). The primary benefit of a bond fund is it's diversification of exposure and automatic reinvestment of proceeds upon the maturity of bonds within the fund, but this can be achieved by purchasing a widely diversified portfolio of bonds and manually reinvesting upon expiration, without needing to pay the expenses of a fund.

Compared to most stocks, high-dividend paying stocks have materially lower volatility (risk), and compared to bonds, high-dividend paying stocks have less inflation risk, as both stock values and the dividends tend to rise along with inflation. So high-dividend paying stocks can be a great source of income that increases over time, has built in inflation protection, provides lower volatility (risk) than the stock market as a whole, and also can provide the benefit of an additional layer of diversification for a portfolio. Their primary disadvantage is that high-dividend stocks do not typically increase in value as quickly as stocks which pay low or no dividends, and can decrease in value more than bonds during periods of market stress.

Yes and no. I accept and apply the obvious point that diversification of investments across multiple asset classes will normally increase risk-adjusted returns, and I offer a wider variety of investment classes and methods of execution than is typical in the industry for that reason. However, I do not believe that markets are perfectly efficient, in part because I spent many years working for two hedge funds that routinely identified unique and highly profitable investment opportunities, which should have not existed if markets were perfectly efficient. That said, I think most individual investors would actually do better (and sleep better) if they behaved as though markets were efficient and stuck with low-cost index investing, as there are hard, mathematical reasons that the majority of investors will do best with buy and hold index investing.