Positioned for the job it now has
Your portfolio was built to grow. It has a new job now.
A portfolio designed for accumulation is rarely the right one for distribution. Nothing about it was wrong. The objective changed, and almost nobody re-examines the portfolio when it does.
- Discipline
- Investment
- PILOT layers
- Portfolio Positioning · Longevity & Life Event Stress Testing
- Starts with
- A Clarity Map Session
What you probably arrived with
The questions this answers.
If none of these is your question, this is likely the wrong page, and one of the other five is probably the right one.
Is this portfolio still right for us now that we are drawing from it?
What if the market drops 30% next year?
How much do I need liquid, and where should it sit?
Am I paying for performance I am not getting?
The thing almost everyone believes
What is assumed
“Investment management means trying to beat the market.”
What is actually true
Nobody here will promise to. The variables actually within anyone’s control are allocation, cost, tax treatment, liquidity and behavior under stress, and improving those has a larger and far more reliable effect on what a retiree keeps than security selection does.
What we actually do
Four pieces of work, in this order.
Mechanisms rather than benefits. Each of these is a thing somebody sits down and does, and you can tell whether it has been done.
Test the allocation against the current objective
We evaluate alignment to what the money now has to do (produce income, survive a bad sequence, stay liquid where liquidity is needed) rather than against past performance, which answers a question you have stopped asking.
Measure the real risk exposure
Risk tolerance changes when the paycheck stops, and most portfolios do not. The relevant question is not what you could stomach at fifty-five, it is what a bad decade would do to a plan you are drawing from.
Map liquidity against the next five years
Known expenses in the near term should not be exposed to market timing. That is a structural decision about which money sits where, not a forecast.
Integrate with tax, estate and protection
Which account holds which asset, how each is titled, and what the estate plan expects to find: all of it is decided alongside the allocation rather than after it.
Decided alongside this one
These three change the answer here.
Which is the entire argument for a family office: none of the six can be settled properly on its own.
Plain answers
What people ask about investment management.
Will you try to beat the market?
No, and you should be sceptical of anyone who says they will. The controllable variables are allocation, cost, tax treatment, liquidity and how the plan behaves in a bad year. Those are where the work goes, because those are where the reliable gains are.
Do I have to move my accounts to work with you?
Not to be reviewed. A Clarity Map Session looks at what you have where it is. If a change makes sense afterward it is a separate decision, made with the fee arrangement stated in advance.
What happens in a bad year?
The plan should already know. Stress testing the strategy against a market drop, an inflation run and a health event is a formal step in the process (Longevity and Life Event Stress Testing) precisely so that the answer exists before it is needed rather than being improvised in the middle of it.
Start here
This is one of six services, and they are decided together.
Which is why the first step is the same whichever page brought you here: a Clarity Map Session, showing where your income, your future tax bill and your estate documents actually stand. Free, no obligation.
30 minutes · No cost · No obligation