Questions to Ask a Financial Advisor

Yes, we are fiduciaries. Yes we put that in writing.

We charge a percent fee based off assets under management. Meaning the only people we work for are our clients. We DO NOT get paid from any other sources.

We currently have a strategic partnership with Buckingham Strategic Wealth Partners. Buckingham is the 16th largest RIA in the U.S. Additionally they share a similar investment philosophy with us.

Adaptive Wealth Engineering utilizes Nobel prize winning investment strategies that have been building for over 50 years. Through the evaluation of various statistics and probabilities, studies have found sources of higher expected return in certain parts of the equities market. When building investment portfolios, we focus on these sources of higher expected return. Please click here to read more about our investment strategy.

The basic framework for our investment strategy has not changed over time. We are still pursuing statistically significant sources of higher expected returns. However, we continually adapt to new academic studies that have merit, survive transaction costs and increase our expected return profile. The most recent instance of this is when we implemented evaluating Value companies after the removal of Goodwill on the balance sheet. If you would like to learn more about how this can effect your portfolio’s overall return, book a meeting with us here.

For equities the main drivers of return are beta, size of company, relative price paid for a company and how profitable a company is. For fixed income the main drivers of return are length of time until maturity and credit quality.

Controlling risk is ultimately about understanding a client’s time horizon. Since we are aware of the various historical drawdown periods associated with our portfolios, we can guide our clients to de-risk or take on more risk depending on when they will ultimately need to begin taking withdraws from their portfolio.

Our goal at Adaptive Wealth Engineering is to help our clients achieve tax alpha. Tax alpha is known as the value a skilled wealth manager can add to an investment portfolio by employing tax-efficient strategies. A few solutions we implement are asset location, tax loss harvesting and capital gains deferment or timing. If you’d like to read more about how we limit tax impact check out our tax minimization page.

Yes, our tax planning services involve current and multi-year tax planning strategies for our clients. We evaluate client portfolios for income tax planning, estate tax planning and gift tax planning. An impactful tax planning strategy we implement for clients is Roth conversion evaluation. We’ve been able to save client’s hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxes through implementing multi-year Roth conversion strategies. Click here to read a case study where we implemented this for a client.

Every client has unique financial planning needs. There is no one size fits all when it comes to financial planning. The best way to create the most cohesive plan is to know as much as possible about our clients. During our onboarding process we have a meeting dedicated to the discovery of our client’s values, goals, relationships, assets, advisors, process and interests. By asking calculated questions, we’re able to create a plan that addresses all the needs and worries a client may have.