Why Focused Wealth?

Our Specialty

We specialize in working with people near or in retirement for whom capital preservation is a priority. They realize they can’t just sit in bonds and CD’s. They want a different approach to investing that helps protect them from large losses and that keeps them invested when the long term trend for stocks is up.

Purchasing Power

We focus on helping our clients maintain their purchasing power. Active risk management helps us allocate more to equities while allowing our clients to sleep at night. Allocating more to equities helps their investments keep up with inflation which enables clients to safely withdraw more in retirement. This can make a real difference in their retirement lifestyle.

Retirement Bucket Analysis

This integrates your goals and time horizon with the risk we take in your portfolio and helps us avoid taking too much or too little risk. We are conservative with money you need over the next 5 years, assume moderate risk with money you need in 5 to 10 years, and assume higher risk (if necessary) by investing in faster growing investments with money you don’t need for ten years or more.

Boutique Firm

We are a small "boutique" firm and want to keep it that way. Active risk management is too time consuming to have 100 or 200 clients, like many investment advisors do. We spend a lot of time educating our clients and working closely with them to help them stick with a disciplined investment, saving, and spending plan.

Staying disciplined is important and is a lot harder than it seems. It is tough to not panic about not being more invested when there is a strong bear market rally and to not jump in right before the market plunges back down. Fear and “Fear of missing out” cause most investment mistakes. We work hard to try and help you avoid them.

Tax Planning

Lisa is a CPA with a Masters of Science degree in Taxation. Tax is very important, but you can’t let the “tax tail to wag the dog”. Protecting your capital comes first. We help client cash flows by emphasizing tax efficient investing and retirement withdrawals.

Retirement Income Planning

We specialize in retirement income planning and help clients decide how much they can safely withdraw from their portfolios each year and which investments and accounts this money should be withdrawn from. During periods when stocks are cheap, using the standard “4% safe withdrawal rule” can cause you to spend too little while you are young and have a large portfolio left when you die so we use a more flexible withdrawal strategy.

However, if your portfolio doesn’t keep up with inflation, using the 4% safe withdrawal rule can cause you to withdraw too much too soon and outlive your money, especially if you retire early or at a time when stocks are very expensive.

Our Fees

Our fees are less than what many investment advisors charge for buy and hold investing.

Social Security Planning

We believe that Social Security planning is very important in maximizing retirement cash flows. We do a number of "what if" calculations to help our clients decide what Social Security planning scenario presents the right trade off between living life for today and tomorrow.

Retirement Planning

We “stress test” retirement plans to help us determine whether any retirement goals are at risk. We use historical returns and inflation from periods in history when there were large losses or high inflation soon before or after retirement. We help our clients find creative ways to “rightsize” their retirement to help them avoid giving up dreams and goals that are important to them. We look for ways to control expenses like taxes, interest, and insurance to help pay for more of the things they really care about in life.

Fee-Only

We are independent fee-only financial advisors and fiduciaries. We are required to put your best interests first, not our broker/dealer’s. We sell no products and earn no commissions or referral fees. We do not take custody of any client money.