Good advice is not hard to find. Getting it to fit everything else you are doing is.
As a Financial Advisor at Finivi, I work with high-net-worth individuals, families, entrepreneurs, and corporate executives whose financial lives have more moving parts than any single conversation can cover: a concentrated position, a business that will change hands, an estate that has to work across generations, retirement income that has to hold up for thirty years.
I joined Finivi in 2001, the year the firm was founded, and serve on its executive and investment committees. My work is largely coordination: making certain the investment strategy, the tax picture, and the estate structure answer the same question rather than three different ones.
My Story
I am an accountant by training. Bentley, associate in Accounting, then a bachelor’s in Economics and Finance, and I still think in that language after thirty years. A figure has a source. Every source can be checked. The work reconciles, or it doesn’t; if it doesn’t, there is a reason, and you keep looking until you find it. That habit is useful in a profession where the details matter, and no one else is going to catch them for you.
But the habit gets you about halfway. The other half of this work starts the first time a family uses the word fair in front of you. Fair is not arithmetic. Fair is one child running the business and two who are not. It is a second marriage layered over a first. It is a parent who is trying to hold the family together with a document. Every one of those situations has numbers inside it, and every one of them is decided by something else.
That is the part of the profession that held me long enough to build a career in it. I earned the Chartered Financial Consultant designation from The American College and later spent years teaching the College’s Estate and Business courses to other advisors. Teaching does something studying cannot. You do not fully understand a subject until you have had to explain it to a room of people who are going to walk out and use it.
Professional Background
I have worked in financial planning and wealth management for close to three decades.
Since joining Finivi in 2001, I have served on the firm’s executive and investment committees, contributing to our investment philosophy, portfolio allocations, and securities selection and monitoring. I coordinate investment research and conduct ongoing portfolio reviews, and I helped build the firm’s virtual fee-based financial and retirement planning programs.
We review portfolios continuously, and we judge them against two questions rather than one. What do current market conditions and economic trends warrant? And is this portfolio still tracking toward the life the client is aiming at? The second question is the one that tends to get skipped.
I hold a BA in Economics and Finance and an AS in Accounting from Bentley University, and the Chartered Financial Consultant designation (ChFC®) from The American College.
I speak regularly on business succession, estate planning, estate planning for blended families, investment management, and retirement planning, for public audiences, closely held corporations, industry groups, and membership organizations.
Personal Pursuits
I have spent a great many seasons on a sideline. I coached in the Boston Area Youth Soccer League and coached youth soccer, softball, and basketball besides. Coaching is teaching with a scoreboard attached, and it taught me more about patience than any classroom did.