“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

Planning and investment management are separate by design. You choose what you need, when you need it — without bundled fees, required asset levels, or commitments that don’t fit your life today.

* Address to the Harvard Alumni Association to the Class of '61, in Speeches (1913), p. 96.

“Outer order contributes to inner calm.” – Gretchen Rubin

With your very busy life, it can be hard to stay on top of your personal finances. Your client portal aggregates income and spending across accounts, automatically categorizes transactions, and lets you create budgets that update in real-time, so you always know where you stand. The portal is ad‑free and private to you: you won’t be pushed financial products while organizing your finances, and your transaction and budget details will remain private. The portal also includes a secure document vault for storing important financial records and other documents.

“A penny saved is 2 pence clear” – Benjamin Franklin

Franklin makes an important point about paying close attention to taxes, since saving $1 can be nearly as valuable as earning $2 after taxes. Your plan includes full Form 1040 tax projections, including self-employment taxes and all qualifying deductions. In addition, income and capital gains are estimated for each asset class.

“There is no better teacher than history in determining the future.” – Charlie Munger

The growth rates applied to your investments are among the most critical assumptions in your financial plan. Even a 1% difference in annual return, compounded over decades, can meaningfully affect your plan’s success.

1. Length of historical data. Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman observed that “the single most important question (when forecasting) is ‘what is the baseline?’.” In financial planning, that baseline is the historical data used to estimate future returns. The starting point for developing all of your asset class estimates is 93 years of data (1929–2022).

2. Sub‑asset class detail. In addition to primary asset classes, I estimate return and volatility for 14 specific sub‑asset classes — such as growth and value stocks, long‑ and short‑term bonds, and real estate investment trusts. These figures draw on 56 years of historical data (1966–2022).

3. Consistent baseline data. Each baseline has the same starting and ending date, creating an “apples‑to‑apples” foundation. This alignment makes comparisons more reliable and ensures that long‑term projections rest on a clear and even footing.

4. Real versus nominal growth rates. What matters most in the long run is not the size of your portfolio in nominal dollars, but the purchasing power it represents in today’s terms. Real, inflation‑adjusted growth rates are used when building your financial plan.

5. Unbiased by interest rate changes. Stock returns are not strongly correlated to interest rates, but fixed income returns are. Estimates based only on periods of rising or falling rates can be skewed too high or too low. Your estimates are built with baselines that begin and end with very similar interest rates.

6. Not influenced by near‑term noise. Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist Richard Thaler emphasizes the importance of the “outside view,” which relies on long‑term historical trends rather than short‑term predictions. Your estimates follow this principle. They are not adjusted based on recent market swings, economic headlines, or forecasts about the next year or two. Short‑term conditions can change quickly and often unpredictably, but long‑term historical patterns tend to be far more stable. By grounding your plan in those long‑term patterns, your projections avoid the noise and stay focused on what actually matters for a decades‑long planning horizon.

“The market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.’” – Security Analysis

As Daniel Kahneman explains, decision‑making heuristics are most used when people are “faced with a difficult question.” Forecasting the return of an individual stock or bond months or years ahead is exactly that kind of difficult question. Industries, companies, and products change, but the average investor’s decision process does not. This conclusion follows from more than two decades of observing how professional and amateur investors make choices, combined with my own and others’ research.

While I offer six traditional, ultra‑low‑cost, market‑cap weighted ETF portfolios across a range of risk profiles, designed to match popular stock and bond benchmarks. I also offer three Behavioral‑Factor‑Weighted (BFW) portfolios that pursue a different risk/return profile than those benchmarks. Unlike industry‑standard market‑capitalization weighting, these BFW portfolios are weighted primarily by behavioral factors.

To understand the behavioral factors, it helps to think about two broad types of investors who try to beat the market: bargain‑hunters and trend‑followers. Bargain‑hunters are drawn to stocks that have fallen sharply in the hope they will rebound, a pattern influenced by anchoring and the gambler’s fallacy. Trend‑followers chase recent winners on the expectation that momentum will continue, driven by recency bias, the bandwagon effect, and the endowment effect.

A third group of companies receives little attention from either bargain‑hunters or trend‑followers: stable, lower‑visibility businesses that aren’t obvious bargains and whose recent charts aren’t attention‑grabbing. Empirical evidence shows these companies often produce competitive risk‑adjusted returns and tend to suffer smaller declines during broad market sell‑offs.

Behavioral‑Factor‑Weighted portfolios translate predictable investor biases into disciplined, rules‑based weightings that seek a differentiated risk/return profile versus simple market‑cap benchmarks.

All investments involve risk, including loss of principal.