Investment Management Begins with Planning
Retirement financial planning and investment management are not standalone activities. Planning without investments that support your goals can fail. Investing without a clear plan is reckless. At Deane Retirement Strategies we integrate both disciplines to achieve optimum results.
Our Balanced Portfolio Strategy uses an actively managed mix of individual stocks and exchange traded funds (ETFs) across equities, bonds, precious metals, and select alternative investments. That mix is intended to deliver reliable growth, protect principal, and generate sustainable income while controlling risk and volatility. All investing takes place in house, managed by an experienced Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA). No mutual funds, annuities, or packaged insurance products ever.
Our Six Investment Management Principles
1. Protect Your Principal
We design portfolios to avoid deep losses. That means managing exposure carefully, diversifying across sectors, and sizing positions so that no single holding can create unnecessary risk.
2. Growth to Hedge Inflation
We invest for long-term compounding. Quality individual stocks and equity ETFs are the engines of our investment strategy and provide purchasing power protection to help your portfolio keep up with the rising cost of living.
3. Control Risk
We never speculate. Our portfolios are built to withstand market stress through thoughtful allocation, quality holdings, and strict risk controls.
4. Control Volatility
Volatility is part of investing, but it doesn’t have to be disruptive. With controlled exposure, we actively monitor and adjust your mix of assets to help reduce large swings.
5. Generate Sustainable Income (When Ready)
When you need income from your portfolio, we design a tax-aware withdrawal strategy using dividends, interest, and capital gains that supports your lifestyle and works in line with your plan.
6. You Sleep At Night
A good portfolio doesn’t keep you awake. Our strategy is built to give you peace of mind, knowing that your investments are being watched, managed, and aligned with your goals.
Why Balance Matters for All Investors
While conventional wisdom often suggests younger investors should be aggressive and older investors should be overly conservative, we believe both extremes carry risks. Aggressive portfolios can suffer deep losses that take years to recover, while overly conservative portfolios may fail to keep up with inflation. Our balanced approach aims to provide growth, stability, and income; helping clients of all ages meet their goals without taking unnecessary chances.
Fee-Only Fiduciaries with Transparent Costs
At Deane Retirement Strategies, we are fee-only fiduciaries. That means we are legally and ethically obligated to act in your best interest at all times, with no hidden incentives, sales commissions, or third-party compensation. We do not sell annuities, mutual funds, insurance products, or anything else that generates commissions. Our only compensation comes directly from the clients we serve.
Our fees are simple, transparent, and easy to understand. You will always know exactly what you are paying, down to the penny.
Our annual fee starts at 1.25% of assets under management and declines to below 1% as your portfolio grows. This single fee covers everything we do: retirement financial planning, in-house investment management, income planning, tax coordination, estate planning coordination and regular meetings to address the issues that matter most to you.
There are no layered fund fees, sales charges, or hidden expenses. We believe clients deserve total clarity and full trust in their advisory relationship.
Why We Never Use Mutual Funds
We do not use mutual funds because of high hidden costs and lack of transparency. Mutual funds carry expense ratios often well above 1% annually and disclose holdings only quarterly, creating risk from overlapping securities and unseen volatility. By using individual securities and ETFs with full visibility we optimize clarity, control, and performance.
Assets Held Safely at Charles Schwab & Co. Inc.
We custody no assets ourselves. All accounts are held entirely at Charles Schwab & Co. Inc., who also facilitates trading, tax reporting and monthly statement generation. Clients can view their accounts at any time through Schwab’s secure online platform, providing complete visibility and peace of mind.
Our Expertise is Balanced Portfolio Management
Our performance track record reflects our four principles for managing our Balanced Portfolio Strategy.
Our Four Investment Management Principles
To achieve all four of our investment management principles, at Deane Retirement Strategies we avoid investment extremes. We avoid chasing stocks that provide high returns, but come with extreme price volatility. These type of investments jeopardize principal protection and your sleeping at night. We equally avoid investments with extremely low price volatility that inevitably produce extremely low returns. These type of investments threaten your receiving sustainable income and also hedging inflation…which could result in a reduced lifestyle in the future.
To achieve our portfolio investment management goals, we use a Balanced Portfolio Strategy that blends high-quality stocks with high-quality bonds and cash. Using multiple asset classes allows us to make appropriate asset allocation shifts to potentially avoid excessive portfolio volatility and to reduce risks. We use a Balanced Portfolio Strategy exclusively; we do not manage portfolios consisting of only stocks or only bonds.
Our expertise is Balanced Style Portfolio Investment Management. We are an excellent fit for you if you appreciate the value of working with professionals who blend the long-term growth of quality stocks with the stability of principal and income provided by quality bonds. Our ultimate investment management goal is that “You Sleep At Night.”
Why A Balanced Portfolio For Everyone?
How can only one investment portfolio style, our “Balanced Style”, be appropriate for all of our clients, regardless of their age or stage of working life?
Myth says that younger investors should be very aggressive, because they have years to make up their portfolio losses. While they will earn more when stocks do well, they will also lose more when stocks decline. If an investor loses 50% in a bear market, they will have to earn 100% on the remaining assets to erase the loss, provided they haven’t bailed out of their aggressive strategy prior to the market rebounding. By comparison, if losses can be contained to 10%, only a subsequent 11% gain is needed to erase the loss. Uncontrolled, aggressive investing potentially becomes the “wrecking ball” of their portfolio’s value.
A very aggressive investing strategy is also frequently, but disastrously, used by near retirees who have failed to save adequate retirement money. In an effort to play “catch-up,” they panic and adopt a gambler’s “all or nothing” philosophy, hoping to earn maximum returns quickly. This reckless, aggressive investing strategy almost always ends with further diminished investment returns.
The flip side of the coin is the retiree or near retiree who believes in the myth that older investors should only invest in ultra conservative investments. While their goal is to eliminate the possibilities of near-term losses, they negatively subject their portfolio to the long-range, debilitating effects of inflation that will reduce their standard of living over time. Our Balanced Style portfolio provides capital gains and dividends from quality stocks, along with interest payments from bonds. These three sources collectively provide you with sustainable retirement income, along with portfolio growth to hedge against inflation.
Our Balanced Portfolio Investment Management Strategy appeals to investors of all ages who are seeking reliable growth, reduced volatility, protection of principal, sustainable income when ready, and peaceful nights’ sleep. Deane Retirement Strategies’ investment management principles are reflected in our Balanced Style’s investment return track record that speaks for itself.
We Do Not Use Mutual Funds – Why Not?
Deane Retirement Strategies does not use mutual funds in their clients’ portfolios, thus avoiding your being charged with each mutual fund’s annual 0.50% – 2.00% average internal fund expenses, such as trading costs, management fees, advertising expenses, broker/advisor compensation, etc. Mutual funds’ internal expenses are annually reoccurring and are passed along to you “behind the scenes.” This is called their “expense ratio.” Even no-load and institutional funds pass along their fund’s expenses to you. So, for example, if you’re paying another financial advisor 1.00% and own a portfolio of mutual funds with an average 1.00% expense ratio, adding together the two fees, your effective total annual portfolio fee is 2.00%. These fees are over and above any additional cost to purchase or sell a mutual fund. Please note that while we do not use mutual funds in our portfolios, we do use ETFs that also have internal fees. However, ETF internal fees are generally substantially less than mutual fund internal fees.
Additionally, we do not use mutual funds in our clients’ portfolios because we are prevented from performing thorough due diligence on funds’ portfolio holdings. Mutual funds only disclose their investment holdings quarterly, rendering them blind investment pools for months at a time. This lack of transparency often encourages fund managers to purchase investments in the fund that are inappropriate, presumably in an attempt to enhance performance results, only to return the portfolio to a more marketable, “window dressing” status, just prior to disclosing their quarterly holdings. Lack of holdings’ transparency also exposes your portfolio of funds to the probable, but undetectable, overlapping of individual securities among the various funds; this dilutes portfolio diversification that can lead to unnecessary volatility and under-performance of your portfolio. Using fund overlap software provides analysis that is only valid four days a year, the exact days on which funds’ holdings are reported.
We do not use mutual funds in our clients’ portfolios, thus avoiding additional client costs over and above our advisory fee. Avoiding mutual funds in our investment strategy also eliminates the issues of due diligence and duplication that compromise volatility, risk, and performance.
You Enjoy Sustainable Retirement Income
Our retirement income planning and management strategies are an integral part of our overall investment portfolio management. The fluctuating economy, erratic financial markets, and cost-of-living escalations all require a hands-on, individualized approach to managing your portfolio’s cash flow generation and distributions. Our goal is to provide you with predictable, sustainable income, when you are ready for it, while still preserving and growing your portfolio so you won’t out-live your money.
We differ from most other retirement financial advisors who, rather than actively managing your portfolio’s cash flow, rely upon mutual funds or annuities as a passive income provider or in the worst case, provide no income management at all. For example, mutual funds simply liquidate enough of your fund shares at the current market price to fulfill your monthly cash flow request. This is called a passive, “systematic investment liquidation”; not to be confused with our active retirement income planning and management.
How We Actively Manage Your Income Needs:
- Our income management strategies provide you with sustainable, monthly cash flow regardless of when the investment income is received in your portfolio.
- We strategically harvest your portfolio’s capital gains and incorporate some of them into your monthly cash flow, while reinvesting the rest for additional portfolio growth and a hedge against inflation.
- During periods of negative stock market performance, our long range income-stabilization strategies have historically allowed monthly cash flow distributions to remain unchanged.
- You may withdraw principal from your portfolio to meet unanticipated capital needs. We will strategically liquidate assets to minimize the impact on your portfolio.
At Deane Retirement Strategies, we vigilantly monitor and align your investment portfolio to accommodate your changing retirement income needs, always mindful of both inflation and the preservation and growth of your investment. As Retirement Financial Advisors, we actively manage your retirement income.
We Are Fee-Only Retirement Advisors
Our sole basis of client compensation, as a fee only financial planner, is advisory fees. Our “Fee-Only” (commission free) approach to retirement financial planning and investment management allows us to avoid advisor/client conflicts of interest and always place your best interest first.
Our Advisory Fees are All Inclusive
- Retirement & Wealth Accumulation Planning
- Investment Management
- Retirement Income Management
- Portfolio Performance Reports
- Client Review Meetings
- Concierge Client Services
Standard Platform Fee Schedule
Our Standard Platform Fee Schedule applies to clients with a portfolio over $1 million. The annual percentage cost for portfolios valued between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000 begins at 1.25% and declines incrementally to 1%, declining further for larger portfolios. Portfolios under $1,000,000 are subject to a minimum quarterly fee. Your cost is determined by the aggregate value of your assets under our management (401k, IRA, Personal). As your account value increases, your annual cost percentage incrementally decreases.
As fee-only financial planners and investment managers, our fee schedule is all inclusive… planning and investment management.
Watch & Learn in a Nutshell…
Your Advantage Working with a Fiduciary, Fee-only Advisor
Deane Retirement Strategies has selected Charles Schwab & Co. as primary custodian for our clients’ accounts
Charles Schwab & Co. is a respected, full-service, national financial firm, providing you with the following custodial services:
- Executes trades in your account, per our instructions
- Provides you with trade confirmations
- Holds your securities and cash in safekeeping
- Processes your deposits and withdrawals
- Provides you with monthly activity and holdings reports
- Provides you with 1099 tax reporting
- Online account access is available
Client Account Insurance
Each Client’s assets are insured through Charles Schwab & Co., up to $150 million aggregate, by SIPC, FDIC and private insurance coverage against fraud and the custodian’s financial collapse, but not against asset value fluctuations.
