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frequently asked questions
about Beyond Your Hammock
We meet with clients virtually via Zoom. In our first year together, we’ll meet 4 times to build out your baseline plan. Our first 3 meetings run for 90 minutes over a period of 3 to 4 months. Our fourth meeting will take place about 6 months later.
On an ongoing basis, we schedule 2 full, comprehensive financial planning meetings per year. Our goal is to provide continual guidance so that you are able to take advantage of opportunities, properly handle challenges, and feel confident knowing that your decisions are grounded in sound financial reasoning. The proactive nature of our process allows you to plan ahead and consistently make progress toward your goals.
We also offer 15-minute ad-hoc phone conversations for urgent matters, provide full email support and analysis as needed, and proactively check in between meetings to offer support and ensure you stay on track.
In addition to our scheduled semi-annual meetings, we also offer clients the following on an ongoing basis:
- Advisor-generated meeting summaries to capture key initiatives and advice
- Real-time maintenance of your most important action items, so you know where to focus next
- Completion of BYH to-dos, analyses, and any other tasks to make progress
- 15-minute phone calls for urgent planning needs that can’t be supported via email
- Annual tax analysis to promote proactive tax planning (and potentially significant tax savings, especially around equity compensation)
- Education to improve your understanding of the economy and financial markets, current events and long-term expectations via webinars, research and other resources
Our advice and guidance cover a wide range of topics. Some of the most frequent that we discuss with clients include:
- Goals, values, and priorities
- Net worth growth
- Cash flow analysis
- Savings and spending strategies (including college savings)
- Equity compensation analysis and management
- Housing affordability analysis
- Employee benefits
- Insurance (including health, disability, life, umbrella, and P&C)
- Investment management, portfolio construction, and asset allocation
- Scenario planning and long-term projections for financial freedom or traditional retirement
- Tax planning
- Estate planning discussions
Of course! We welcome clients to reach out anytime they have questions, concerns, or changes. Outside of regularly scheduled meetings, we provide phone and email support.
We ask that clients reach out to us via email to initiate any in-between meeting conversations. Doing so allows us to respond as a team, and ensure you’re connected with the best person to help address the specific question, thought, or concern. From there, we’ll work with you to:
- Provide a complete response via email (we strive to do this within 48 hours of receiving all emails). If analysis is needed to provide an answer, we’ll get clear on any deadlines and set a date by when you can expect a full response.
- Set up a time to talk via phone to resolve the issue, if it is time-sensitive and urgent, and cannot be taken care of over email.
- Place your topic on the agenda of an upcoming meeting so that we can have a deeper conversation about the topic in the context of your full financial plan.
We believe that a financial plan is not a one-time event; it’s an ongoing process. We continually make adjustments that reflect your life as it unfolds. Highly detailed, accurate work are integral to our approach, so we also work with an aggregation system that uses real-time numbers.
We develop plans and systems that allow you to achieve the goal of living well today while still planning responsibly for tomorrow. BYH is a different kind of wealth management for motivated, self-made professionals who want their money working as hard for them as they worked to earn it.
We design globally-diversified portfolios to minimize costs and deliver appropriate risk-adjusted returns. Our investing strategy is based in a globally diversified core portfolio of publicly traded stocks and bonds. We then target dimensions of higher expected returns using decades of empirical evidence and research to power every decision.
Our team of CFAs performs in depth periodic research on global asset classes to ensure that we're choosing the appropriate exposure to each through the right investment vehicle inside your portfolio. As your accounts grow, we discuss alternative investments outside of the publicly traded stock market, opening the door to private equity, private credit and private real estate investments should we decide together that these strategies work for your plan.
We maintain a passive investment philosophy and target dimensions of expected returns. We are not active traders or stock-pickers, nor do we default to an indexing strategy that you simply “set and forget.”
Our approach is to develop strategies for each client, aligning portfolios to your goals and risk preferences. We dig deeper into the asset class and investment vehicle decisions to ensure that we are optimizing your exposure to areas we believe will perform best over the long-term.
We do not have minimums for our Wealth Management program. We do offer a standalone investment management program for select clients; that requires a minimum of $250,000 in investable assets in order to participate.
We include investment management as part of our service in order to ensure our program runs as an integrated, optimized system. We recommend a number of strategies, actions, and portfolio techniques that require timely and precise execution. Failing to execute could add friction to your plan at best - and, at worst, fail to meet your important goals.
For this reason, we recommend taking full advantage of the Wealth Management program, which includes investment management, to receive the best possible advice and the best possible results. All of this being said, we do not require clients invest with us to access the program.
No. We are an independent, fee-only financial planning firm. We are only compensated through the fee that we charge client directly for the delivery of our service, which is fiduciary financial advice and investment management. You can learn more about our firm here.