Our principles

1. Protect your wealth. It’s even harder than acquiring it in the first place. Some people accumulate wealth because they are lucky, often combined with considerable gumption. Others create wealth using skills that have nothing to do with keeping it. For most people, protecting wealth once you’ve got it requires new information, skills and discipline.

2. Think strategically. Develop a wealth strategy. Real challenges create real energy. For maximum impact a wealth strategy must focus on a collective that might have previously been thought impossible. Leadership is necessary to grow your financial interests. You must become educated about wealth management, work to establish a strategy for your wealth, and oversee its implementation, regardless of whether you want to manage simply and conservatively or with complexity and risk.

3. Begin with values. Money, family, and community are invariably bound together. Using values as their guide, successful Wealth Strategists balance hard work, saving, spending, family commitments, supporting philanthropic causes and transferring wealth to their heirs.

4. Apply discipline and measure results. It’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of investing, and lose sight of the key strategic issues that really make a difference. Apply the discipline of running a successful business to managing your wealth. Be informed, focus on what you’re good at, have a strategy, hire the right people and hold them accountable, control your finances, plan for succession, and above all, communicate effectively. That’s what builds a lasting legacy.

5. Use the right financial products. “Hope” is not a method for investing. Active management is really complicated, expensive, and is best left to a few highly skilled professionals. Most people and financial firms get better pre-tax results from low cost indexing than through active management. Indexing has the added bonus of greater tax efficiency.

6. Reap what you’ve sown. Accumulating wealth just to have it managed irresponsibly after you die is an abrogation of responsibility and a waste of assets. If you transfer wealth to the next generation without preparing them, it’s bad for them and it gnaws at the fabric of a vibrant and productive society. On the flip side, even though nurturing strong family relationships is really hard work, there is nothing more rewarding than passing significant assets with the skills and values to use them wisely.

7. Focus on defense. Encourage your children to focus on offense. Having adequate finances and a solid support structure in your later years relieves your children of a huge potential burden. If you have extra resources, direct them towards your children’s and grandchildren’s education, healthcare and retirement assets first. In this way, you empower them with more choice and greater freedom to take risk in their own careers.

8. Encourage entrepreneurial stewardship. Each generation must work hard and take risks to create enough additional wealth just to stay even. Treat wealth management like an entrepreneurial enterprise and strike the right balance of risk taking, capital preservation, and vision to successfully build wealth across generations.

Securities and Investment Advisory Services offered through Capital Analysts Incorporated, Member FINRA/SIPC