The fee is a percentage of your portfolio assets and works on a sliding scale. We aggregate all of your family's accounts to determine your fees, enabling more favorable rates for all. The fee is typically between 1-2% per year and is deducted from your account on a quarterly basis. Under a percentage of assets arrangement, when your account value goes up, our revenue increases, and when your account value goes down, our revenue decreases. For you, that means when we make changes to your investments, it is not because we want to generate commissions, but because we believe the change should benefit you by offering the potential for less risk and/or more return. This arrangement puts us on the same side of the table as our clients and eliminates any potential conflicts of interest.

SureVest does not actually take custody of any of our client’s funds and are prohibited from doing so. Our preferred custodian for our client’s assets is TD Ameritrade Institutional. TD Ameritrade provides our clients with low transactions costs, no annual account fees, and gives us access to a variety of institutional class investments that are not available to retail investors.

Yes. The minimum varies depending on the type of service. Our lowest account minimum is $100,000. However, most portfolio models have a $250,000 minimum and one model has a $500,000 minimum. Customized solutions can also be created for households with over 3 million in assets.

Crown Capital is our broker dealer. They are a well known and respected broker dealer with representatives nationwide. They ensure compliance with all securities regulations, licensing, and continuing education requirements. In addition, they provide back office support and access to some of the best tools and research in the industry.

Yes. All of our client relationships begin with at least one complimentary consultation that usually lasts one to two hours. At this meeting you will have the opportunity to ask questions and learn more about how we work with clients. We will both be able to determine if we think we are a good fit for each other. If the first meeting goes well, then we typically set up a second complimentary meeting to address more detailed questions and provide you a detailed analysis of your current investment portfolio along with recommendations on how to improve your financial situation.

Although tax and legal considerations are addressed in all of our analysis, we do not directly prepare tax returns or legal documents. However, we routinely coordinate implementation of our recommendations with our client's CPA and attorney. If you do not have a good CPA or attorney, we work with several of the best and would be happy to make an introduction.

Once you decide to hire us, we prepare an Investment Policy Statement that tells you what services we provide, how your account will be managed and how we charge. We prefer to keep clients by providing outstanding service, rather than binding contracts. Therefore, clients are free to terminate our services at any time.

You will receive a statement every month as well as a quarterly performance report. Other reports (asset allocation, tax reports, etc.) can be provided any time by request.

Yes. 24x7.

Most investors and mutual funds tend to compare their investment performance to S&P 500 or some mix of the S&P and a bond index. However, those benchmarks have little correlation with a client’s ability to achieve their financial goals. Expenses such as food, medical care, vacations, etc. don’t rise or fall based on market performance. These costs tend to increase each year even when stocks and/or bonds decline in value.

Our portfolios are designed to meet lifestyle goals and maintain their purchasing power throughout our client’s lives. Therefore, each client’s portfolio has a target rate of return equal to inflation plus 2-6% (based on their personal needs). As inflation increases, our target returns also increase. In the 1980’s, the Consumer Price Index rose to over 13% per year and interest rates on ten year government bonds topped 15%. In that environment a 10% rate of return would have been disappointing as it would have meant that the investor was losing purchasing power. Today yields are closer to 2% with inflation at 2.5 to 3%. In today’s environment, 10% would be great. In other words, targeting a static rate of return or comparing your return to a stock market index misses the mark.