I've had the pleasure of working with Chuck at Financial Perspectives in two capacities. First, he…read morehas been managing my mother's retirement money since around 2009 or so. Second, I've been using his services to learn more about managing my own money. I'm not the kind of person who writes yelp reviews much, but Chuck has been awesome, so here's my experience. . .
I'm very involved in my mom's financial situation so I've been interacting with Chuck quite a bit from the beginning. I felt better that my mom having someone professional to manage her money instead of me doing it for her. It gave us both peace of mind, but I secretly felt that I could do just as good as Chuck using a simple balanced portfolio of index funds with low expense ratios, buy-and-hold, then rebalance. So after a few years I compared what how my mom's portfolio did under Chuck's management with performance given what I would have done if I were managing it. I was certain that I would have outperformed since I did not include any fees for my "service." All along, I assumed my mom has been taking a small financial hit in order to get peace of mind of having a pro manage her money. Chuck is super nice, and genuine and my mom likes him, so that was all fine. Well, I was simultaneously disappointed and pleased to find that Chuck's plan did better than mine even including his fees. That bastard!
Even though he "passed" my test, that was a fairly silly, and even unfair, test to put him through. Chuck doesn't claim to predict the market to outperform it. His overall philosophy, as I understand it, is to allow your money to grow with the market, but to limit loss as much as possible from major downturns in the economy. He's seen what's happened, for example, with the housing crisis where people lost half of their retirement money, and he made it his mission to prevent that for himself and his clients. My mother and I are very appreciative of that philosophy.
I've been quite interested in investing and planning for retirement for many years now. I've read several books and quite bit online, and am part of a finance lunch group at work. I've made several large spreadsheets that help me re-balance my portfolio across asset classes, sectors, etc, while minimizing my expense ratios. I've written code to automatically download financial data online for my spreadsheets. Yes, I'm a math and computer nerd, and finances became somewhat of a hobby for me. I thought I had it all figured out.
Recently, I've been talking with Chuck a lot about my investment strategies as part of his services and I'm ashamed to say he has opened my eyes quite a bit. I'm now convinced that this strategy of limiting major losses is both possible and clearly better than my previous strategy of buy-and-hold + rebalance. To paraphrase, portfolios that lose the least are the ones that perform the best. Plus there's less of an emotional roller coaster along the way. It's not some crazy plan that someone cooked up, it's a well studied strategy that he's implemented in way that can be customized to someone's risk preferences. He is super passionate about it, super knowledgeable, and he takes time to explain it well. I'm continuing to work with him to learn how to do it on my own. Since, he's been great managing my mom's money, I'd would let him manage mine, but that would take away one of my few pleasures in life. So for now, I'm using his services to learn how to do it.