Your World
Happy springtime – it’s wildflower season in Texas, lifting hearts and spirits at nature’s dazzling display of annual renewal (these photos were taken of course at my ranch).
I was privileged the other day to attend a breakfast in Houston by the Alzheimer’s Association – my brother Jeff is on the board and was one of the co-chairs of the event and he did a great job. Both of my paternal grandparents were afflicted – simultaneously - with Alzheimer’s, a journey that was enormously challenging in our family’s life. As an advisor, I am focused on the likely tripling of Alzheimer’s cases in the years ahead, and its effects on finances and families, and I am making sure that we take steps to be able to assist clients in this area.
At the breakfast, I decided to make a perpetual annual gift issued automatically from Hannah and my Fidelity Charitable gift fund. Our representative at Fidelity Charitable has told me that New Capital is the most active advisory firm that he knows of in encouraging and assisting clients to establish charitable accounts. The reason we do this is simple: I take the time to ask, understand, and facilitate your charitable intent, and then implement your wishes in a tax efficient manner using the powerful Fidelity Charitable platform (charitable donations are one of the last remaining Schedule A deductions). Literally every client we have opened an account for has found them to be a superior way to lead a charitable life.
Our job at New Capital is not just to manage money. As a holistic financial practice, we are interested in all aspects of your financial life, and your life as well. Whether the issue is your health or that of a loved one, or your charitable plans, or both at once as when you choose to give to an organization which touches you personally, we recognize that we may well have a role to play in advising, facilitating, managing, or administering.
To reflect this reality New Capital has undertaken to do something most advisory firms would not dream of: create a database system that allows us to track all manner of your financial life including your accounts, your reaction to past bear markets, your risk profile, beneficiaries, budget, career history, self-reported financial health, educational history, cybersecurity profile, organizational entities (companies, partnerships, etc.), eldercare preferences, health and medical history, investments, insurance, interests, legal matters, liabilities, family and other relationships, professionals and agents, financial planning elements, real estate holdings, outstanding tasks, tax returns, trusts, travel history and bucket list, and vehicles. And we keep coming up with more every week. We already have much of this information about you because I made sure to ask about many of these things in our initial work together. Our plan is to eventually open this platform to you as well so that you have access to your own profile, and can even help us keep it current. The goal is to enhance your personal organization and to make sure that we understand all aspects of your financial life so that we can help you even better and even more.
Our 2018 Client Satisfaction Survey is now complete and I am delighted to report that our usual ultra-high scores have repeated. It is gratifying to receive this feedback and I deeply appreciate those clients who took the time to complete this important tool. We made a $20 donation for each household survey to selected charities ($720 in total) in return for your time. As always, Catherine Bahr did a fantastic job assembling, distributing, tabulating, reporting, and donating to ensure that we hear from you. We will not just accept the high scores and move on, but will pay particularly close attention to comments and suggestions about how we can do better.
I also want to announce our new ultra low cost Passive Pure model portfolios, which we will discuss in our upcoming webinar.
All of these efforts, plans, and actions are intended to bring value and peace of mind to you, your family, loved ones, and anyone or anything else that you care about. We want to make sure we understand your world as fully as we can, so that we can help you get the most out of that world. When your world functions better, the entire world does too. And when you are happy, the world is too.
Leonard Golub, CFA
Fiduciary Financial Advisor