Our Principles
Merrill Financial Associates is an independent investment firm with decades of experience in fiduciary and fee-only advisement. As such, we understand how complex and frightening the world of investing can be for people. Our purpose is to help our clients feel confident about their financial future.
Our firm’s guiding investment principles can be simplified into four pillars:
Liquidity
Safety & Growth
Tax Minimization
Ease
Liquidity
Liquidity means that you can readily convert your investments into cash at any time. What good are your investments if you can’t access them easily? For this reason, we normally shy away from non-liquid assets such as annuities, insurance, non-traded REITs, or private placements.
Our premise is simple: 100% liquidity, 100% of the time.
Safety & Growth
Experience has shown us that clients are as concerned with the safety of their investments as they are with long-term growth. So how does one balance the two?
We believe that a well-designed global asset allocation program, which allocates money to the world’s finest money managers—each specializing in their own particular region or sector of the world’s economy—both maximizes the potential for growth and minimizes risk.
We also believe that clients can minimize risk by investing in multiple portfolios of varying degrees of risk and growth.
Tax Minimization
While taxes cannot be totally avoided, they can be minimized. Tax-sheltering strategies using long-term capital gains, IRAs, Roth IRAs, SEPPs, 401(k), annuities, and cash-value life insurance, can minimize the impact of taxes on a client’s portfolio.
Ease
Most of our clients are business owners and working professionals who simply do not have the time nor expertise to effectively manage their own investment portfolios. They already have a job and are not looking for another one. Our decades of experience allow us to manage the complex world of personal investing for them so they can focus more on what they love.
Schedule an appointment today
Send a message
Call our office