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Gary Matthews, LCPC, CFP®
Certified Financial Planner®
Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor
406.579.8577
gmatthews59718@gmail.com

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Investment Portfolio Management

Many people struggle to obtain the financial independence they desire. Often it’s because they don’t take the first step — getting started.

A Certified Financial Planner® can help you define your goals and objectives, determine the level of risk that is right for you, and work with you to create an investment plan. For many, working with the right professional money advisor is the single most important investment that they make.

Individuals have different goals and expectations. Therefore, everyone needs an individual investment plan. For instance, a 35–year–old investing for retirement needs a different investment portfolio than for a retired couple depending upon their investments to provide current income.

Financial advising firms differ. They receive compensation based upon different fee structures, provide different services, have different investment strategies, and different qualifications.

Most financial planners receive a significant portion of their compensation from commissions generated from the sale of financial products. Some receive all of their compensation in the form of commissions. By refusing to accept commissions from the sale of financial products services are provided objectively. Working for commissions creates a conflict of interest because an advisor cannot provide objective advice when his/her compensation is based upon the sale of certain financial products. In addition, financial planners who receive commissions typically sell a limited number of investment products, those products that will provide them commissions. Financial planners who receive the majority of their compensation from commissions have little incentive to provide true financial planning services because these services may not generate commissions.

Please read more about fees. Since compensation is based upon fees for service, you receive objective financial advice and no sales pressure. Please read about financial planning services. You can rest assured that recommendations are the best product for you, not products that generate the biggest sales commission.

You deserve investment management options that meet your needs. Please read more about the investment portfolio management options and investment strategy.

Most Certified Public Accountants are not Registered Investment Advisors. The law limits the investment advice a finance professional can provide unless he/she meets the requirements and registers as an investment advisor. Please read the investment advisor disclosure brochure.

Consider What is Behind the Advice

— an exerpt from George Mannes, Money Magazine senior writer, September 27, 2007

"The only way a commissioned adviser can help you is by selling you something. When you walk into an adviser’s office, she could be thinking less about your needs than about what products she has that can be shoehorned into meeting your needs.

Kent Grealish, an ex–broker who now works as an investment adviser in San Bruno, Calif., faced this problem when he was urging clients not to buy tech stocks during the dotcom bubble.

It was, he says, a "perverse" compensation system: "Sometimes by giving the right advice — don’t buy — you didn’t get paid," he says, "while you could be rewarded handsomely for giving bad advice."

Once you’ve bought an investment, your commission–generating potential has by no means been exhausted. Manhattan Beach, Calif. certified financial planner Eileen Freiburger recalls that on one of her first days as a bank branch manager a decade ago, an employee proudly showed her a thick file of customers whose annuities, he said, were "coming due."

Problem is, annuities don’t "come due"; these were annuities that soon could be surrendered without penalty, making it easier to switch these customers unnecessarily into new annuities and earn a new round of fat commissions."

"I recall he ended with a ’cha–ching’ and a wink," says Freiburger. When an adviser wants to swap out an old investment for a new one, press hard for a good reason why.