Are you a "do-it-yourselfer"? Research shows that you are better at home improvements than investing. There are significant differences in retirement outcomes for investors who are do-it-yourselfers (DIYs) versus investors who hire a professional account manager. Morningstar, a leading retirement research provider, studied nearly 21,000 retirement plan participants who had access to managed account options or could DIY their own retirement portfolio. Why you ask? To start, managed account participants save 1.9% more per year on average than DIY participants. Having a manager helps participants focus on saving not investing. It’s a serious partnership between a money manager and a retiremen

We constantly meet with prospective clients whose current advisers, in our opinion, are not providing them what they need to be financially successful. Here are some red flags that suggest it's time for a change. Guessing risk tolerance. Subjective questionnaires used by most of our industry to determine risk tolerance usually miss the mark. When we analyze prospective clients' current investments, 4 out of 5 have portfolios where actual risk and tolerance are not aligned. If your adviser is not using more sophisticated tools and technology to determine your comfort with risk, it's a red flag. Lack of planning. Frequently, we meet with prospective clients whose adviser has never prepared (

When determining how much money you are going to have in the future, your savings rate is far more important than your rate of return. However, many investors are more likely to obsess over squeaking out a bit more performance out of their investments or tweaking their asset allocation to increase returns rather than thinking about ways to save more. Good planning starts with getting your financial house in order and making sure that a good savings plan is in place with the proceeds invested into a solid, diversified portfolio.

Many investors look at investment advisors the same way. They are not. Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs) and brokers are held to very different standards. RIAs like TruNorth operate under a fiduciary oath and must always act in our clients’ best interests, while brokers are required to suggest suitable investments, they are not fiduciaries. Brokers sell investments and products. Anyone can call themselves an advisor, but not everyone is bound by a fiduciary standard. What does this mean? It means that TruNorth must always always act in our client's best interests, even if their best interests conflict with our own. We have a "duty of loyalty" to every client we serve. Having said that,

Warren Buffett says “Investing is simple, but not easy.” What’s simple is that staying the course and continuing to invest into market downturns, which has generated superior returns. What is very hard to do is for investors to keep fear and emotion in check, to not let bear markets destroy your game plan and transfer your potential winnings to another investor who stays the course. Every client of our firm has an investment policy statement, derived from quantitative analysis of their risk profile, and set to help them financially achieve goals and objectives with a better mix of risk and reward that is unique to all of them. It’s key to not have more risk than you can handle or need to ta