How to Choose a Wealth Manager: Your Step-by-Step Guide

At this point, you’re probably wondering,“what is considered high net worth?” Simply put, a high net worth individual is anyone with more than $1 million in liquid assets and an ultra-high net worth individual is anyone with more than $25 million in liquid assets. If you are a high net worth or ultra-high net worth individual, with $5 million to $500 million in liquid assets, Pillar Wealth Management can help you out.We can protect and grow your wealth at the same time. Head over to our website and schedule a free chat with us today.

Now that you know all about high net worth individuals, let’s discuss who financial advisors are and how to choose a wealth manager that’s best for you.

Table of Contents
What Are Wealth Managers? Why You Should Use a Financial Advisor or Wealth Manager How to Choose a Wealth Manager – Things to Look Out For Who is The Best Wealth Management Company?

What Are Wealth Managers?

Wealth management professionals are Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) who provide a massive range of investment management and financial advisory services. The wealth managers at Pillar help you grow, preserve, or manage your assets and money according to your life goals. Our professionals use their 60+ years of combined experience to also completely manage your portfolio and optimize it to meet your needs. Want to discuss your life goals? Schedule a free chat with us on our website.

If you’re a high net worth or ultra-high net worth individual with $5 million to $500 million in liquid assets, here is how our wealth managers can help you. They can:

• Assess your current financial circumstance and portfolio.
• Establish your life and financial goals with a comprehensive line of questioning.
• Create a roadmap that allows you to strategically attain all life and financial goals.
• Improve your financial position by optimizing your investment portfolio performance. If you want to learn more about how we improve portfolio performance, check out our guide here.
• Protect your portfolio from losses and market volatility.
• Carry out asset allocation analysis to derive the best strategy.
• Assist you in retirement planning by selecting the best financial vehicles like insurance policies, etc.

Why You Should Use a Financial Advisor or Wealth Manager

Simply put, wealth managers do two things:

• Give you a life of financial serenity so that you don’t have to worry about losing your liquid assets.
• Help you achieve your life goals by maintaining and increasing the wealth you have.

But you might be wondering why you should use a financial advisor rather than managing your asset portfolio yourself or visiting a large, well-known investment broker since that is what most people do.

While we can’t speak for anyone else, we can tell you why choosing the wealth managers at Pillar Wealth Management can be better for you if you’re a high net worth or ultra-high net worth individual with $5 million to $500 million in liquid assets.

Firstly, robo-advisors that use computer algorithms to manage investments will apply the same tactic for your portfolio as they do for thousands of others. Though it can work well for some, this usually doesn’t work well for high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals. There also isn’t much human interaction, and the programs don’t understand your life goals like a person would.

When it comes to other investment services, most of them are active money managers. This means that they actively invest your money to try and beat the market and make aggressive returns. While this may work sometimes, it is also a very risky tactic. The costs and losses here can be very high for ultra-high net worth individuals.If you’re an ultra-high net worth individual with $25 million to $500 million in liquid assets who wants to learn about protecting their wealth, our book on “The Art of Protecting Ultra-High Net Worth Portfolios and Estates – Strategies For Families Worth $25 Million To $500 Million” can help.

Fiduciary Duty

We wanted to specifically mention fiduciary duty because of how important it is to achieving your goals and protecting your assets.

All the wealth managers at Pillar Wealth Management are RIA and have a fiduciary duty to our clients. What does this mean? It means that we only focus over two things: realizing your goals and improving your investments. Our wealth managers are registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and have thus agreed to the Advisors Act of 1940, which obliges them to always act in your best interests.They must also always make full disclosures about any material conflicts of interest.

Having a fiduciary advisory is even more important when you’re a high net worth or ultra-high net worth individual because the difference can sometimes add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars! Want to learn more about how our wealth managers can work for you? Schedule a free consultation with us.

We aren’t saying that non-fiduciary advisors won’t try to do what’s best for their clients – because they will try to do everything they can. However, they also have to manage their own interests and the interests of the company they work for. There often are conflicts of interest occurring. This can work fine when things are going well, but the eventual circumstance will leave them with a hefty choice to make – and no one can guarantee that it will be in your best interest.

As a high net worth or ultra-high net worth individual, you’ve worked hard to earn the money you have and to get where you are. You deserve the utmost attention from your wealth managers. Our easy guide can help you spot the warning signs of an unsuitable financial advisor.

How to Choose a Wealth Manager – Things to Look Out For

Now that you’ve learned somewhat about why wealth managers can be important for high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals, let’s finally answer the question of how to choose a wealth manager. Here are the most important questions to consider when searching for a financial advisor.

1. How Can They Help You Achieve Your Goals?

As a high net worth or ultra-high net worth investor, you’ve worked all your life to be where you are and to make sure you can live the life you want. A wealth manager’s focus should never be solely on making aggressive investments to reach an arbitrary return goal. Not only is that extremely risky, but it also might not be what you need at this point in your life.

You need to ensure that the wealth managers you work with have experience in working with wealth of your size and people of your caliber. These advisors will understand that success for you isn’t about earning 10% or some other return per annum, but rather about achieving all your life goals.

At Pillar Wealth Management, we go in-depth into every detail of your life to help you establish your goals. Once that’s done, our experts use their 60+ years of combined experience to draft a cohesive financial plan about how to achieve them.

2. How Will They Reduce Your Expenses and Taxes?

The next most crucial aspect of determining how to choose a wealth manager is asking your advisor how they can reduce your expenses.

Costs and expenses are everything for high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals who have more than $5 million in liquid assets. The smallest of costs can add up to thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars when dealing with numbers of these sizes.

Plus, earning a 12% annual return isn’t going to mean much if you’re paying extra active management fees, commissions, a 37% income tax rather than 20% in capital gains, and many other avoidable costs.

Most taxes and expenses can be avoided with just smarter management of money. For example, you can avoid paying a 37% income tax on your investments if you avoid actively managing them. Any investments that aren’t moved around in over a year qualify for the lower 20% capital gains bracket. Think of how much money you can save!

At Pillar Wealth Management, we work tirelessly to save every single cent wherever we can. We realize that the secret to making money last is making sure you don’t lose it in the first place. This strategy is especially essential for helping investors with more than $10 million in liquid assets because they have more to lose. If you have more than $10 million in liquid assets and want to learn how to protect them, check out our easy guide.

3. How Do They Do Asset Allocation?

Their asset allocation strategy will play a big role in both your portfolio performance and controlling your overall investment risk. When you’re thinking about how to choose a wealth manager, their asset allocation strategies will be a very important consideration.

For example, Pillar Wealth Management uses an Efficient Frontier to balance your returns and risks in a way that your portfolio can deliver the right returns (according to your goals) without taking on any excessive risk.

We also conduct regular portfolio stress tests that measure how your portfolio will perform against 1,000 different scenarios, which include the worst possible cases, too. We ensure that your portfolio remains in the 75% to 90% confidence level, where it exceeds your goals in at least 75% to 90% of circumstances. This kind of shift in perception is needed to maximize portfolio returns. You can learn more about this by reading our easy guide on shifts for maximizing portfolio growth strategies.

4. How Do They Get Paid?

Looking at the financial advisor’s costs and fees will help you understand what’s right for you and spot any major red flags that signal high risk services. So, how do most financial advisors get paid?

Almost every financial advisor will charge an annual percentage fee on the total value of your assets that they’re managing. This is usually around 1%.

If you have an active money manager, the fees are going to be higher. This is because they actively manage your investments to try and beat the market. Though this strategy’s effectiveness is sometimes shaky, the point is that these managers will charge anywhere from 1% to above 2% for their extra efforts.

Now, these are the fees that are normally incurred. However, there are some additional unnecessary costs other than this that we recommend you avoid.

Costs from the following are all avoidable:

• Taxes on short term capital gains
• Bond sale spreads
• Commissions
• Tax loss cultivation

These little costs can add up to a lot for high net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals. Not to mention that someone earning money on commissions and bond sale spreads can often have conflicts of interest.

That’s why it’s so important to have a financial advisor who will work tirelessly to reduce your costs. Pillar Wealth Management experts focus on saving every possible dollar and cent possible for you, and that’s how it should be.

Who is The Best Wealth Management Company?

Now that you know how to choose a wealth manager, you might be wondering, “who is the best wealth management company?”Honestly, the answer depends on your main priorities and what you need.

If you’re a high net worth or ultra-high net worth individual with $5 million to $500 million in liquid assets, Pillar Wealth Management will work tirelessly to provide fiduciary services that help you achieve your life goals. To know more, sign up for a completely free consultation with our wealth managers.

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