Investment Management

Investment Management & Retirement Income Strategies

An investment philosophy focused on retirement.

Faithful Steward Wealth Advisors’ investment philosophy is rooted in research that dates back to before The Great Depression. Markets can be fickle in the short-term (1-3 years) but offer tremendous opportunity for the deliberate, patient long-term investor.

My investment strategies are crafted to match your anticipated cash flow needs during retirement. We don’t pigeonhole you into canned portfolios like “moderate conservative” or “aggressive growth” based on some five-question survey. Instead, we customize your portfolio based on your income and growth needs.

How can you create a dependable stream of retirement income?

Your Retirement Prosperity Plan™ is Your Blueprint

Your Retirement Prosperity Plan™ provides a blueprint for designing your investment portfolio. It tells me when you’ll need money and for what purpose. It also indicates the types of resources that are available to fund your goals.

Using my dedicated portfolio approach, I match the investments in your portfolio to the jobs they need to do in your particular situation:

Cash: to provide flexibility to handle emergencies and seize opportunities

Bonds: to generate stable and predictable income

Stocks: to create long-term growth and inflation protection

The ideal mix of cash, bonds, and stocks is one that’s tailored to your unique retirement needs. We also take into account taxes, investing costs, and your comfort with risk when designing your portfolio.

Stable Income During Market Volatility

The income portion of your portfolio is designed to provide stability during periods of turmoil in the stock market or your life — or both. The highest and best use of bonds is to create a secure and predictable stream of income. I carefully craft your portfolio using low-cost index bond funds and investment-grade individual bonds to create an “income bridge” to tide you through turbulent markets.

Cash flow matching: I design your portfolio to provide cash flow when you need it — like when you’ve planned a big purchase or need a regular “paycheck” during retirement.

Flexibility: By using individual bonds and bond funds, I have the flexibility to change your portfolio as your financial life plan evolves.

Risk reduction for rising interest rates: As interest rates rise, the value of bonds gets eroded. I “immunize” individual bond portfolios by holding the initial bonds until maturity and buy higher-yielding bonds for subsequent purchases. For portfolios holding bond mutual funds, I use short-term bonds to reduce the risk in rising interest rate markets.

Reliable Growth for the Future

The growth portion of a reliable portfolio is made up of stocks, the best investment vehicle to generate long-term growth. We use low-cost index mutual funds blended together strategically:

Time targeting: I optimize your portfolio to maximize the chance of growth to match a specific time horizon. The time horizon is synchronized with the number of years in your “income bridge” which provides by the predictable income portion of your portfolio.

Global diversification with a tilt: I start with a globally diversified mix of stocks. Next, we add portfolio tilts designed to improve the probability of success and manage for downside risk and inflation.

The Minimax Principle: I use a set of mathematical formulas based on the minimax principle. By seeking to improve the worst-case returns, my approach looks to help your portfolio go down less when markets are bad so that you can hopefully recover sooner and get your plan back on track. That’s the “mini” part. At the same time, I look to magnify the effects of up markets as much as possible, which is the “max” part.

Our Investment Management Fees

The following table serves as a guideline to help you estimate the fees for my investment management and ongoing financial planning services:

Assets Under Management

First $1,000,000

$1,000,001 - $2,000,000

$2,000,001 - $5,000,000

Assets Over $5,000,000

My investment management fees are billed quarterly in advance. The minimum fee is $750/quarter.

• Does not include sub-advisor or third-party management fees, which range from 0.25% to 0.55%. This is how the investment manager gets paid.

Other Expenses

In addition to the Faithful Steward Wealth Advisors, LLC advisory fee (discussed above), there are three other investing fees to keep in mind:

Portfolio Expenses

There are no upfront or deferred sales charges. However, each mutual fund or exchange-traded fund charges an expense ratio. This is how the fund companies are paid. The expense ratios of the portfolios we construct typically range from 0.20% - 0.70%. Keep in mind that some strategies invest directly into stocks and bonds, and have no expense ratio.

Custodian Expenses

Trades generally range from $7 to $15 depending on if they are stock/ETF or mutual fund trades. In addition, some custodians charge an annual account fee of up to $160 per account. This is how the custodian is paid.

Note - These are fees you will incur regardless of who is managing your portfolio. We keep these fees in mind in the design of your portfolio and try to minimize them in the execution and management of your accounts.