Palmerston Group

Yes. Palmerston’s “Team of Experts“ Financial Planning and Wealth Management creates customized virtual teams of independent experts based on the unique needs of the client. These experts are everywhere, and a virtual process creates a unified team. We can and do work on a remote basis with clients as well.

Clients deserve an advisor who provides conflict-free advice. Fiduciaries always are legally obliged to act in the best interest of the client. Registered Investment Advisors or RIAs are fiduciaries. Palmerston is an RIA and a fiduciary.

We do. Please visit www.palmerstongroup.com for more information.

Gratitude! If a client is someone who is committed to doing more for others and to giving back, that's the best boss an advisor can have. If you don't have a sense that your advisor is grateful for the opportunity to serve you, run away as fast as you can. You deserve an advisor who is thrilled to have you as a client.

We believe that leveraging expert teams is the best tool to help a business owner liberate time for what is most important. Palmerston Group seeks out knowledge leverage. We spend a lot of our time learning about and working with experts who have new ideas and old ideas that can add value to our clients. An advisor who can leverage the knowledge of top experts can accelerate decision-making for a business owner. That can help eliminate a succession of time commitments which might otherwise burden the owner. Better and more efficient decisions can mean more time for what’s most important in life.

The possibilities of living to 100 is increasing with each passing year. The years working and the years of retirement are trending longer. On the one hand, that presents enormous challenges for clients trying to ensure their wealth lasts a lifetime. Supposedly conservative approaches to portfolio asset allocation might in fact undermine retirement security by restricting the rate of capital appreciation. On the other hand, it offers enormous opportunities for creative planning solutions. A client deserves an advisor who can create and help implement an effective strategy for dealing with the financial implications of living longer. Keeping more money and leaving more money, having a maximum positive impact on the lives of others; all of these goals can be enhanced by taking account of our demographic revolution.

Research has taught us about how and why we make emotionally-driven investing mistakes. survival instincts create shortcuts, but these shortcuts can lead us in the wrong direction. Improved understanding of these biases should make them unnecessary mistakes. But these risks exist. If left unmanaged, they can harm wealth. Recency bias is an example of a brain shortcut which can cause costly errors. Recency bias means that people assume that what has happened recently will keep happening. For example, Bloomberg surveys of market strategists showed the highest proposed stock allocations occurred in early 2001, when markets were at a high point. The same survey during the crisis in 2008-2009 advised reducing stock holdings. Top advisors telling clients to buy high and sell low: recency bias in action. We use disciplined investing to help clients avoid these biases.  As Warren Buffett once said, “Don’t just do something, stand there!” Better to look decades ahead, and try to use calm

It’s important understand the client in a full, personal way. It also is rare when a CPA or a financial advisor has the information they need to connect a family’s or a business owners’ aspirations with the planning strategies they need to achieve them. That’s a really big gap.  And no tax software package, robo-advisor algorithm, asset allocation template, or pre-existing model for risk tolerance is going to spit out a customized solution. To overcome this gap, we do a "deep dive" with the client into both personal and business/professional aspirations. This improved understanding can unleash the power of other specialists – ideally, a virtual all-star team of experts tailored to the client’s needs. This improves the odds that high-value planning opportunities will get identified. As client lives and circumstances change, new virtual teams of experts are created.

When the wealth of a successful business owner reaches a certain point, preventing its erosion by heavy taxation is the big issue. It often gets less attention than it should because it’s harder, more complex work that lies outside the comfort zone of many financial advisors and CPAs. On the one hand, investment advisors typically are not tax experts and tend to emphasize growing money through portfolio management rather than keeping money through tax planning. In contrast, CPAs, who really should take the lead on tax planning, frequently are too busy to be proactive on behalf of their top clients. Even top CPAs often work very long hours doing all the necessary tax filings and financial reports for all their clients. Often, they lack the time to all the forward-looking research and planning which their top clients need. We believe a team-based approach, one that includes CPAs who know how to be proactive, can help ensure that business owners do better on the “keeping money” goal.