Wealth Management Tallahassee: How to Pick the Best From the Rest

If you’re familiar with Greek mythology, you may also be familiar with the story of Sisyphus. Sisyphus was a king who had managed to cheat death and, as a result, was condemned by Hades to roll a large boulder, while meandering his way to the peak of a steep hill. However, every time he managed to defeat the hill, the boulder would roll back down, forcing the king to start all over again.

For high-net worth and ultra high-net worth families, the myth of Sisyphus’ punishment is a good metaphor for their financial troubles. You see, big-name financial advisors stash financial assets you entrust them with in aggressive and risky investments. It may be an understatement to say that you trusted them with your money and their emotional and greedy investment strategies only resulted in your portfolio experiencing massive losses.

Book a free consultation with us and we promise unbiased, non-cookie-cutter and non-commission-based services, while also keeping your best interests at heart before everything else.

Experienced wealth managers, on the other hand, know not only how to maximize your market gains but also are mindful of how to minimize your losses when external factors tend to cause financial disasters.

Before you entrust any more of your financial assets to large money management firms and Wall Street veterans, we encourage you to browse through our tips for choosing a wealth manager.

If this article sparks your interest, you can also read our more detailed book about The Art of Protecting Ultra-High Net Worth Portfolios and Estates: Strategies for Families Worth $25 Million to $500 Million

Table of Contents
What Am I Missing? What to Look Out For With the Most Personalized Wealth Management Tallahassee Has to Offer, You Can Finally Experience Financial Serenity 5 Non-Negotiable Tips for Choosing a Wealth Manager Final Thoughts

What Am I Missing?

If you’re seeking an effective financial advisor who can manage a substantial portfolio and everything you have worked so hard for, there are so many things that could go wrong. For this reason, your choice of financial advisor must be able to help you with:

A retirement plan that actually lasts.

Investing large windfalls from real estate or business sales.

Dealing with your finances when a family member passes away or during marriage or divorce.

Growing and protecting your investment portfolio through the thick and thin of the economy (even during inevitable economic disasters).

Handling relocation.

Setting aside a plan for inevitable acts of terrorism, bear markets, war and recession.

Searching for the best wealth management Tallahassee has to offer, one that abides by all of the above, can be mentally taxing and oftentimes, even paralyzing. This is especially the case when high-net worth families and ultra high-net worth families have recently experienced a financial disaster.

Some of our past clients have even been brought down from, say, $32 million to $5 million, mostly because their financial advisors lacked the experience and just bundled their wealthy clients’ money into ‘cookie-cutter’ or pre-determined portfolios. You can read their story in our book “The Ultimate Guide to Choosing the Best Financial Advisor for Investors With $5 Million to $500 Million in Liquid Assets”.

Needless to say, these clients had left their ‘big Wall Street firm’ financial advisors before entrusting their remaining wealth to us. This brings us to our next topic of discussion: why you shouldn’t trust big banks, discount brokers and investment firms with your money:

What to Look Out For

1. Expertise Was Not As Good As Promised

Since there is always a balance between good and bad in this world, you probably relied on your previous traditional or online financial planning services Tallahassee because you heard about their expertise. Of course, these large firms are also where inexperienced new entrants in the market get their first job.

Even though these young financial advisors are closely watched over by their supervisors, they still only adhere to their training and whatever works best for their company. For this reason, it is safe to assume that whatever advice you received, was not from their real-world experience.

On the flip side, even if you challenge the system and manage to hire an experienced wealth manager, you should know that these individuals are not fiduciary registered investment advisors (RIA). Instead, these people are mere investment dealers and brokers and their priority is to make a commission and an income from bond spreads.

Even if you were offered fancy-sounding services such as tax advice, CPA accountants and estate planning attorneys, you shouldn’t be easily impressed. You see, these services are outsourced and are marketed to you to deceive you into believing that the experts you’re working with have hooks in every industry.

In reality, the only hooks they have are on your wealth.

2. ServicesAren’t Personalize-able (Cookie-Cutter Services)

Since most of these ‘McDonald-ized’ firms have huge customer bases, they seldom ever customize their financial services for you. Instead, they are trained to funnel your hard earned money into the same S.O.Ps as every other client.

Most Wall Street firms have a predetermined bundle of investments waiting for you even before you sign up for their services. Perhaps this is why robo-advisors and most of the online financial planning services Tallahassee make use of the same boilerplate software for high-net worth and ultra high-net worth portfolios.

Simply put, they never, specifically, have your best interest in mind and offer the same cookie-cutter services to spread their risks.

On the other hand, at Pillar Wealth Management, we combine asset and investment planning with insurance planning, tax planning, estate planning and financial planning, to offer 360-degree wealth advisory and management services – all in one place.

3. A Conflict of Interest

As every employee looking out for their job would, these financial advisors simply do what they have been trained for, which is not, necessarily, what’s best for your portfolio. Ask yourself the following questions:

Are they considering factors like the taxes that you may have to deal with because of short term gains? (The top 1% in America account for 25% of annual tax payments according to a report published by the Congressional Budget Office.)

Would they be able to improvise your investment strategy if your goals changed?

Are they making groundless assumptions about 8% annual gains and making investment decisions accordingly?

If your answers to these questions are no, no and yes respectively, then your financial advisors wouldn’t qualify as fiduciary advisors.

The divorce between your interests and the interests of your financial advisor and their company could, at times, lead to a conflict of interest. This is, perhaps, a loose definition of a non-fiduciary.

You see, these financial advisors are known as ‘broker-dealers’ in the industry and they are a very different class of advisors. Non-fiduciary financial advisors are only hired to provide suitable investment options, as opposed to which financial decisions are holistically best for you.

Non-fiduciaries have a very unique set of standards and aren’t suitable for what you may be looking for. Most of these big companies and their employees have a ‘bottom line’ to meet while trying to improve your financial outcomes. Naturally, conflicts of interest tend to arise throughout their period of service.

In order to better understand how non-fiduciary financial advisory firms work, here is an example of how they hire employees. Their KPIs for the HR department may include:

Hire 30 fresh advisors who were certified recently.

Hand them all a quota to partner with new clients until a specific date.

The advisors who fail in this task are shortlisted from the hiring process.

Whichever advisor managed to partner with clients (especially those with huge net worth) are hired on their payroll.

If this doesn’t sound like a conflict of interest, perhaps the fact that new quotas are placed on these advisors after every few months should make sense. You see, the higher their quota, the less likely they are to focus on your unique goals.

This is why, at Pillar Management, we only choose to work with very few clients who have a net worth that stands between $5 million and $500 million in liquid assets.

4. They Reek of Wall Street Beliefs and Methodologies

Since most of these financial advisors learn their core principles from Wall Street professionals, their decisions are governed by these principles. These principles are reinforced in their minds on a daily basis and for this reason, this is the extent of their financial creativity and productivity.

We are referring to Wall Street principles as a bad thing here because their investment plans never take your personal goals seriously. They hardly ever consider long term futility, unexpected life events, personalization and possible costs.

The only metric for success they believe in is performance. A truly personalized wealth management plan is meant to fuse your financial strategies with your goals. In doing so, you will be able to safeguard your wealth, lifestyle and everything else you were looking forward to.

5. They Badger You for Commissions

Earlier in this article, we referred to large investment and wealth management Tallahassee firms as ‘McDonald-ized’. What this means is that these firms have typical pre-set investment products and packages like the McDonald’s menu. It’s the same wherever you go.

You are bound to come across terms like corporate responsibility plans, earth-friendly plans, foreign stock plans, large-cap plans, tech-focused plans and annuities. However, if you asked them how these products can continue to be profitable for you as you progress in life, they will only just rephrase all the ingredients and how people benefited from them in the past.

Also, if you really think about it, your financial advisors only badger you for these packages and products because they might earn a commission in the process. Whether they mentioned their profit beforehand or not, this is still a huge conflict of interest.

With the Most Personalized Wealth Management Tallahassee Has to Offer, You Can Finally Experience Financial Serenity

To experience the fabled financial serenity your previous advisors promised you, you need to know 2 things:

1. How a fiduciary financial advisor could help you grow AND preserve your hard earned wealth, so you can preserve your finances and live the way you always dreamed.

Note: Since we aren’t going to answer this particular question in this post, you can refer to our book, 5 Critical Shifts For Maximizing Portfolio Growth Strategies.

2. How to look for the most effective wealth management Tallahassee has to offer, possibly with a time-tested and proven track record of unlocking financial peace and security.

In our numerous years of experience, we have hardly come across clients who believe they have a firm grasp of both of these factors. Still, since you invested your time in this article, we aren’t going to leave you without 5 Non-Negotiable Tips for Choosing a Wealth Manager.

5 Non-Negotiable Tips for Choosing a Wealth Manager

#1

Look for wealth management and financial advisors who have a proven track record of successfully harnessing growth in the market to maximize your ROI while also accounting for and minimizing possible losses from unexpected market collapses.

#2

Look for experienced professionals who measure how your goals stand up to their quarterly stress tests throughout your partnership with them.

#3

They make sure your expenses and taxes are kept as low as possible, by conducting year-over-year analyses.

#4

They consider portfolio performance only one factor of a multifaceted service that is meant to help you lay down a comfortable retirement plan while achieving your short term goals along the way.

#5

Most importantly – they are independent and fiduciary.

Final Thoughts

Pillar Wealth Management, LLC, is your one-stop-shop solution for wealth management Tallahassee. We are a private, fiduciary, fee-only and independent firm and we focus on providing highly personalize-able wealth management services to only a couple of high-net worth or ultra-high net worth families, individuals and even private company owners.

We offer wealth management services that will help you plan for retirement, ensure the security of your personal and business assets, and secure you and your family’s future. Click here to start a conversation with one of our wealth advisors.

Related Post

1. Wealth Management Hawaii – What sets high net worth and ultra-high net worth investors apart…
2. Wealth Management Michigan – High net worth and ultra-high net worth individuals require a wide range of financial services…
3. Wealth Management Missouri – If you’re searching for the best wealth management Missouri has to offer, chances are that they…
4. Wealth Management Naperville – Do you know what the biggest concern is for wealthy individuals like you having more than $10 million…