business practices

Aligning Principles and Economics

Clients, we recently wrote about our quest to align our pricing with our values. The advisors of Leibman Financial Services service $50 million in advisory assets through LPL Financial. The fees charged could better reflect your contribution to investment results through effective investing attitudes and behavior. We are going forward with changes by year-end.

We believe that people can learn to frame things more effectively, to see the long term, to find out a temporary drop is NOT a loss. New clients usually require more intensive communication (and hand-holding, in some cases). It makes sense to charge them a little more, and reduce costs for you longer term clients.

For the vast majority of you, “heads you win, tails you don’t lose.” Generally, if the new schedule indicates a fee reduction, that will go into effect as soon as possible. If it shows an increase, we will leave the pricing the same. Current pricing is a hash, depending on when accounts were originally opened. So we will be communicating with each of you.

The new table rewards your persistence three ways.

1. A fee reduction after two years, shown in the table below.

2. Additional reductions after eight and sixteen years, about 3% to 6% depending on household account value.

3. The potential for assets to grow over time tends to put longer-term clients into higher value brackets, with lower fees.

pricing

In a few cases (particularly for newer clients), the table may indicate a higher fee than what we currently charge. Please do not be alarmed—we are not going to try to jack up our rates on anyone we are doing business with. Consider yourself grandfathered in.

Clients, with this project we have attempted to align our economics more closely with our values. We will be in touch about your specific situation. If you would like to discuss this or any other issue at greater length, please write or call.

Additional reading:

About learning to live with volatility: They Say You Can’t Handle the Truth

About discretion to act on your behalf: Freedom to Decide vs. Freedom to Debate

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance referenced is historical and is no guarantee of future results.

All investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.

The Things We Do Together

things we do

We figured out a long time ago that three things we do matter the most.

Clients, talking with you is at the top. We connect to understand your situation and collaborate with you on your plans and planning. You are the most important part of our business. Otherwise we have no one for whom to research investments or manage portfolios through LPL Financial.

Research and portfolio management are the other two core activities. Our principles drive both of these: avoid stampedes in the market, seek the best bargains, ‘own the orchard for the fruit crop.’ And both are informed by our connection and collaboration with you.

Although each member of the team serves you in multiple ways, we think of our support infrastructure as the trade desk, the research desk, and the logistics desk. (By logistics, we mean taking care of the details of doing business with you.) These functions connect our main activities.

A funny thing happened when we concentrated on the three activities that are most valuable to you. Less pleasant things that dominate the schedules of most financial types simply disappeared: selling, searching for prospects, marketing to strangers. Ever since, we’ve been able to spend a much higher fraction of our time talking with you and striving to grow your buckets.

If your buckets grow, you like it and our revenues grow. Why waste time and energy on strangers when we can invest it in our friends? It sure raises the enjoyment factor for us.

Clients, we do not know if this is of any interest to you. Writing it helped clarify our thoughts about what we are doing and why. If you would like to discuss this or any other pertinent topic, please email us or call.

The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

All investing involves risk including loss of principal. No strategy assures success or protects against loss.