What we do
You have unique financial needs. You need a financial advisor with the experience and qualifications to provide sound advice.
Wealth Management
If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free. If our wealth commands us, we are poor indeed.
--Edmund Burke
If you have managed to save a tidy nest egg, sold a house or business for a profit, or inherited money, the wealth management services we provide may serve you well.
How Do We Approach Wealth Management?
You’ll find there are many benefits to having us as
your wealth advisor.
Prepare a plan
We will work with you to clarify your financial goals and create a road map for how to get there. Once you’ve made a plan, we’ll help you implement it and meet with you on a regular basis to make sure that it remains on track. We can also help align your financial plan with your values.
Manage your portfolio
Our investment recommendations are based on evidence, not hope, hype, or opinion. We understand the challenges of high-net-worth investors. We understand challenges of high-net-worth investing. We can provide investment advice on risk assessment, asset allocation, tax management and diversification.
Put your interests first
We have a legally binding fiduciary duty to put your interests first. Our fees are paid solely by our clients. We accept no commissions. We avoid the conflicts that would arise if we received compensation from the mutual fund families we recommend.
Tax Planning
The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.
--Albert Einstein
Managing your tax burden while working and in retirement can make it more likely the funds you’ll need to cover unexpected medical expenses, pay for tuitions, or travel will be available.
Our approach to tax planning at Vistica Wealth moves away from simply trying to pay the least amount of tax in any given year to strategies to help reduce the amount of wealth lost to tax during your lifetime and across generations.
As part of our tax planning process, we collaborate with your tax professional to ensure we tackle your tax planning holistically.
How Do We Approach Tax Planning?
Tax planning begins with understanding your current situation. We work with your tax professional to gain an understanding of what expenses and investments are deductible from your net income. We structure your investments to minimize, defer and, when possible, avoid taxes.
We work with your tax professional to determine whether you should use the standard deduction or itemize your deductions.
We consider tax savvy strategies to manage your tax burden. These include:
Holding capital assets (like stock, businesses, real estate) for more than a year so profits will be taxed at the lower long term capital gains rate (0%-20%) rather than the higher short-term rate (up to 37%).
Delaying the sale of capital assets, if possible, to a year when you and your spouse, filing jointly, are earning less than $80,800 (including your capital gains profits). Doing so can reduce your capital gains tax to 0%.
Developing a tax-smart estate and legacy plan.
Making the most of charitable and non-charitable gifting strategies over your lifetime.
Benefitting from the tax rules for sale of your primary residence. If you have lived in your primary residence for two of the five years before the sale, and are filing jointly, $500,000 of your gain on the sale of your home ($250,000 for single filers) is tax-free.
Using retirement plans to reduce taxable income. Money you contribute to a 401(k) plan is not included in your taxable income.
Investing in a Roth IRA. Contributions to a Roth IRA are made with after-tax dollars. Qualified withdrawals are not subject to taxation.
Opening a flexible spending account. You don’t pay taxes on this money. You can spend FSA contributions for certain medical and dental expenses for you, your spouse, if you’re married, and your dependents.
Opening a health savings account. If you qualify, you can use funds in this account to pay uncovered medical expenses. Unused funds rollover every year. Contributions to a health savings account are tax deductible.
Retirement Planning
Retirement is wonderful if you have two things– much to live on and much to live for.
Planning for retirement presents many challenges. When markets tank and inflation soars, retirement planning is even more difficult, especially for those retiring in the near term.
How Do We Approach Retirement Planning?
Here’s what guides our investment recommendations:
Sequence of returns risk
This risk refers to the order in which your investment returns occur. If the market declines in the early years of your retirement, the number of years your funds will last before you run out of money could be significantly diminished. Your situation will worsen if you add high inflation and withdrawals to the mix.
We calculate how much you can safely spend in retirement.
We may recommend “spending flexibly” by reducing spending when your portfolio declines in value.
We may consider reducing the volatility of your portfolio.
We may encourage you to have assets available outside of your investment portfolio.
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Longevity risk
“Longevity risk” refers to the possibility you will outlive your retirement savings.
Delaying your retirement
Deferring Social Security
Purchasing an annuity
Health care costs
Health care costs have almost doubled in the past 20 years and there’s every indication they will continue to increase. By some estimates a 65-year old couple retiring today will need an average of $315,000 for medical expenses.
Reviewing life insurance policies to see if they include long-term care benefits
Assessing the viability of selling life insurance policies to third parties
Assessing the viability of a reverse mortgage.
Long term care insurance
The availability of Veteran’s benefits
Inflation risk
Inflation risk is the risk that the returns on your investments will not be sufficient to cover the decline in purchasing power caused by inflation.
Inflation hedges in your portfolio, like Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities.
Where appropriate, we reduce exposure to long-term bonds.
We may recommend investing in real estate and other alternative asset classes that may help address inflation risks.
We consider an asset allocation (the division of your portfolio between stocks and bonds) that’s consistent with your need and tolerance for risk and also likely to at least keep pace with inflation over time.
Unexpected events
National disasters, divorce, chronic illness and death can occur at any time, throwing your basic assumptions for retirement out the window. It’s not uncommon for children to have to support their parents as they age.
We make insurance recommendations so you will have long-term care, disability and life insurance coverage.
We also consider insurance to be sure your home is covered for natural disasters and personal liabilities.
We may recommend a prenuptial or postnuptial agreement before or after a first or subsequent marriage.
We may advise increasing the amount of your emergency fund.
We will review your parents’ financial situation, especially their long term care, Medicare, Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement coverage.
We will review a medical power of attorney, financial power of attorney and related documents for your parents.
Estate Planning
There are significant tax issues that can impact the amount passing to your heirs. These include estate tax, gift tax and generation-skipping transfer tax .
As part of our estate planning process, we work with your trusts and estates attorney. Together, we advise on ways to minimize or eliminate taxes on your estate, including gifting to family members, setting up an irrevocable life insurance trust, making charitable donations, establishing a family limited partnership and funding a qualified personal residence trust.
How Do We Approach Estate Planning?
We have seen many costly mistakes with estate planning.
Here are some of them, which we help you avoid.
How Do We Approach Estate Planning?
We have seen many costly mistakes with estate planning.
Here are some of them, which we help you avoid.
A Letter of Wishes is an informal document that sets forth guidance apart from the terms of a will or trust. It can usually be kept confidential and not disclosed to beneficiaries.
A Letter of Wishes not legally binding, unlike the provisions incorporated in the will or trust.
We work with your trusts and estates attorney to be sure any amendments to your will are set forth in a formal codicil.
You should name a primary and contingent beneficiary for your assets to deal with the possibility that your primary beneficiary predeceases you.
We advise our clients to ensure their digital assets (online banking, e-mail, social media accounts) can be accessed by their executor upon their death.
Each state has a list of formalities that must be observed for estate planning documents to be given legal effect.
In some states, “holographic wills” are legal. A holographic will is one written in your own handwriting. Depending on the laws of your state, these wills may still have to be witnessed and follow other formalities.
We discourage the use of holographic wills, except in extraordinary circumstances. They are more likely to be challenged than a will prepared by a trusts and estates attorney.
We also discourage the preparation of estate planning documents by anyone other than a qualified attorney.
We think about estate planning as dealing with our assets after our death. However, it’s just as important to anticipate mental or physical incapacity prior to death. We advise you to have a Power of Attorney and a Healthcare Proxy in place.
Investment Management
Investing is simple but not easy.
At Vistica Wealth, we are “evidence-based” financial advisors. We take a systematic approach to investing, applied consistently across all strategies.
We rely on factors you can control (your asset allocation, global diversification, low costs and fees) and ignore those you can’t (timing the market, trying to pick stock “winners” or attempting to identify outperforming actively managed mutual funds).
We rely on logic and data. We are not influenced by emotions. We don’t try to predict the future.
How Do We Approach Investment Management?
Here’s what guides our investment recommendations:
Your purchasing power erodes over time. We take inflation into account when structuring your portfolio.
“Compounding” is the returns earned from interest on an existing principal amount, as well as on interest already paid. We take advantage of the benefits of compounding, especially over the long-term.
The United States represented 60% of the world’s market capitalization as of December 31, 2021. We don’t limit our recommendations to US based companies.
No one has the expertise to reliably predict the future. We ignore predictions.
We rely on facts, not emotions. We don’t act on impulse, tips and hunches. We encourage our clients to do the same.
Much of the financial media stokes fear and anxiety by presenting information designed to encourage trading based on emotion. We advise our clients not to be influenced by the media.
We believe the price of stocks and bonds is set by the millions of investors trading every day. Those prices are likely to be accurate. We don’t try to identify stocks that are “mispriced.”
We focus on keeping costs and fees low. We understand the risk our clients are taking with the investments we recommend.
We gain insight from peer-reviewed academic research. This research has identified dimensions that explain differences in expected returns. Our recommended portfolios emphasize asset classes that have the potential for higher expected returns.
Here’s what we don’t do
Why ?
Because we can’t find evidence that anyone has the expertise to engage in these activities with reliable results, especially over the long-term and after accounting for fees and taxes.
Instead, we focus on factors we can control:
We implement our recommendations by primarily using passive funds managed by Dimensional Fund Advisors and index funds from Vanguard.
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Our Services
Retirement planning
We help you explore retirement savings tools available, including retirement plans, Roth and Traditional IRAs, Health Savings Accounts and Flexible Savings Accounts.
When you retire, we provide advice about your Required Minimum Distributions and determine the optimal time to begin taking Social Security payments and ensure that timing considers any income tax, Medicare premium surcharges or other planning implications.
Funding education
We advise how to save for college education or private school for your children. Among the options we review are 529 college savings plans, trusts, and wealth transfers using Uniform Gift to Minors Accounts or Uniform Transfer to Minor Accounts.
We can also help evaluate available scholarship, loan and assistance programs.
Insurance planning
We work with your insurance professional to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of your health, life, disability, long-term care and annuity policies.
Tax planning
We work with your tax professional to maximize tax savings using tax-sheltered retirement and health accounts, tax-loss harvesting, proper asset location within your investment portfolio to help improve your after-tax investment returns, charitable gifting and tax-sheltered bonds.
Our focus: help you move away from simply trying to pay the least amount of taxes in any single year to developing a strategic plan that minimizes the amount of wealth lost to taxes over your lifetime and across generations.
Estate planning
We work with your estate planning lawyers to integrate your estate planning with your overall financial plan. We can help position your assets to take advantage of the step-up basis, Unified Gift and Estate Tax Credit, and evaluate probate avoidance.
We also examine the pros and cons of various kinds of trusts, including generation-skipping, property, special needs trusts, living, bypass, revocable and irrevocable trusts.
Succession planning
We can help entrepreneurs and other business owners negotiate the sale of a business, and make recommendations for investing the proceeds.
Charitable Giving
We can review the benefits of charitable giving during your lifetime and through your estate. Available strategies include gifting of appreciated assets, donor-advised funds, charitable trusts and private foundations.
If opportunity doesn’t
knock, build a door.
