Are you investing my money or spending my money?

Fred Schwed’s, Where are all the Customers’ Yachts? is the quintessential tale of “a visitor to New York who admired the yachts of the bankers and brokers. Naively, he asked where all the customers' yachts were? Of course, none of the customers could afford yachts, even though they dutifully followed the advice of their bankers and brokers.”

Wealth Management has changed quite a bit since this book was first written in 1955. Thanks to technology, competition, and regulation, comprehensive financial service has become more widely available to families, and fees across the industry have come down quite a bit.

Although cost is often one of the biggest drivers of people’s buying decisions, we at Members’ Wealth strongly believe that cost should not always be the sole factor in all of these decisions. Arguably, when deciding where to buy gas for your car, the lower cost choice is likely the right choice. However, when it comes to deciding where to place your trust with the oversight of your financial matters, cheaper isn’t always better. The analysis of fees without the commensurate analysis of value provided is like only seeing one side of the coin. The fee is what you pay, the value is what you get. Afterall, quality does have its price.

In today’s world, investors can get access to seemingly unlimited “free advice.” But getting free advice does not always mean you’re getting good advice. Good advice does come with a cost but can prove to be priceless in the end.

To run a wealth management firm successfully, you must charge a fee to cover the cost of quality services, comprehensive planning, and experienced professionals as well as to profit the business itself so that it can continue to thrive. We believe it is important to invest in professional talent, technology, compliance oversight, and additional services that will ultimately benefit our clients over time. Thus, we believe in competing by becoming better, not less expensive in the absolute sense. However, as we can continue to deliver more for the same absolute price over time, there will be deflation in our price to value ratio and who couldn’t use a little deflation currently?

In summary, at Members’ Wealth, our goal is to give solid custom advice, exceptional service, while charging a fair and reasonable fee in line with the industry. We base our success in this goal on our client retention rate. If our clients are happy and successful, the firm is successful, and while the members of our firm may have to forgo yacht shopping, they will be enthusiastic about where they work which creates a feedback loop to more extraordinary service.

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Advisory services are offered through CS Planning Corp., an SEC registered investment advisor.