Irvine, Ca.
It was in the 1980's.My wife and I were embarking on the purchase of our first home together, and starting a family with two boys.
I never had paid any attention to financial planning, after all my father never did, except for a pension plan. His take on the stock market was that it was just gambling, and the big money people end up taking all your money.
My business was finally making a fairly reliable income and my father in law suggested we go see his friend Cal, at IWM Partners (It may not have been called IWM back then, not sure).
Even though there was a predominance of mistrust on my part, we turned everything over to Cal. There were several items on our homework list: Create a living trust. Get life insurance. Get mortgage insurance. Get health insurance. Get liability insurance for the business. Draw up a Will. Then the big game changer: Actually pay the IRS what we owe them and get an actual tax advisor. Then came IRA's and Roth's and other stuff I was clueless about. I hated that but I did it.
I learned a lot from Cal about how our money was diversified and invested, it was fascinating, but I ended up just trusting his expertise and never questioned his recommendation. He always let us put funds in certain stocks we liked such as eBay (Which did quite well), and he listened when we wanted to invest less in oil.
As the years passed, so did Cal, then we had Barbie for a while, and then Michael. Michael is great. He is patient and genuinely passionate about our financial progress. He reaches out to us several times a year to discuss our portfolio and to see if we want to meet up. We are not rich and probably one of his clients with a small fund base, but that doesn't matter, he cares.
In summary, our funds have always grown well under his management, even though we opted to a conservative approach. Oh yes there was that one lousy year we lost all our gains but he was calm about it and encouraged us to ride it out. We did and everything bounced back.
Now that I'm old and collecting IRA payouts, I'm feeling pretty good about our long history with IWM. read more