About the firm
Fee-only. Fiduciary. Two advisors, forty families.
We started in 2019 with one rule: the client is the only person who pays us. Seven years later it is still the only rule that matters.
The story
We left a bigger firm because of one spreadsheet.
Grace and Daniel worked together at a national wealth manager in San Jose. In 2018 Daniel built a spreadsheet to show a client what her 1.1% fee would cost her over the twenty years she planned to be retired. The number was a little over a million dollars. The firm asked him not to show it to anyone else.
He showed Grace. In March 2019 they signed a lease for Suite 300 above the bakery on North Santa Cruz Avenue, registered with the state as an investment adviser, and wrote the fee schedule on the first page of the website. It has moved twice since, both times to make it bigger and easier to find.
Forty families work with us today. We will stop at fifty. Two advisors can know fifty families well. They cannot know two hundred, and we have watched what happens when a firm pretends otherwise.
Plain words
What fee-only means, and what it does not.
Three words get used as if they were the same thing. They are not.
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Fee-only
You pay us a fee. Nobody else does. No fund pays us to recommend it, no insurer pays us to place a policy, no custodian pays us for the referral. This is us.
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Fee-based
Sounds the same. Is not. A fee-based advisor charges you a fee and can also earn commissions on products. The word was invented to be confused with the one on the left.
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Fiduciary
A legal duty to put your interest first, all the time, in writing. Registered investment advisers owe it. Brokers owe a weaker standard. We owe it on every recommendation, and our disclosures say so.
How we think
Boring on purpose.
We do not pick stocks. We do not time markets. We do not have a view on where rates are going next quarter, and if we did, we would not bet your retirement on it. Portfolios are built from low cost index funds, rebalanced on written rules, and left alone.
The interesting work is everything around the portfolio: when to take Social Security, which account to draw first, how many shares to sell in which year, whether a Roth conversion makes sense between the day you retire and the day required distributions start. That is where a plan earns its fee, and that is where we spend our hours.
Every recommendation comes with the reason and the trade off. If you ask what we would do with our own money, we tell you, and it is usually the same thing.
The office
Upstairs, above the bakery.
- Address
- 15 N Santa Cruz Ave, Suite 300, Los Gatos, CA 95030
- Hours
- Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm. Saturdays by appointment.
- Parking
- The town lot behind the building, free for two hours. We validate past that.
- Access
- Elevator at the rear entrance, step free from the lot.
- Who we serve
- Households within about twenty minutes: Los Gatos, Saratoga, Campbell, Cupertino and west San Jose.
- Registration
- Registered investment adviser with the State of California. Fictional registration, see disclosures.