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Why We Need Information

Before we begin, I would first like to explain why we ask for such detailed information, how we use it, and how we protect it.

First of all, as you may or may not know, the investment industry follows minimum standards for business practices. All Investment Professionals need to adhere to these minimum standards. So these standards are something we take very seriously. However, we don’t feel that maintaining just the minimum standard is good enough for our clients. We try to far exceed what other Investment
Advisors do and are required to do.

Basically, an Investment Advisor needs to obtain certain information before recommending an investment to someone in order to help him or her make a recommendation that suits the client.
Although we can never absolutely forecast what is going to happen with any particular investment, there are certain things that just make sense to do or not to do. For instance if you are getting ready to retire then we probably don’t want to invest all of your money in a risky venture in which you may be more likely to lose it all.

So the information that we need to obtain is:
1. Your financial status
2. Your tax status
3. Your investment objectives and
4. Other information used or considered reasonable by us in making recommendations to you.

We need to determine your financial status. We’re going to do that by reviewing all of your brokerage statements, annuity statements, life insurance policies, real estate, and anything else you may own that affects your financial status.

We need to understand your tax status. We can do this best by seeing copies of your current and last year’s tax return. On a minimal basis, this means we need to know what tax bracket you are in now and where you are likely to be in the future. If you know this, that’s great. We will also ask for copies of your current and last year’s tax returns.

In order to make suitable recommendations, we obviously need to understand your objectives.  And certainly one of these objectives is to determine how you feel about the risk you are assuming in
various investment alternatives.

Now let’s look at requirement #4. We need “other information used or considered reasonable.” On the one hand, you might think this is very vague. That’s not what we believe. We believe that with an in-depth interview we can discover “such other information used or considered to be reasonable” that will allow us to help you.