Custom Portfolio Construction

Every investor has a different mix of goals, risk tolerance, investment experience, and financial resources. Thoroughly getting to know each of our clients as we build their portfolio is a cornerstone of our investment management process. Taking a deep dive into who you are as an investor and what your goals are for your savings as we create your portfolio almost always means the client feels more comfortable with their portfolio throughout their investing career and during volatile markets, when it matters most.

Planning for Retirement Withdrawals

We help clients who are approaching retirement determine when and how to transition from a portfolio tailored for capital appreciation to a portfolio designed to provide retirement income. Our strategy differs depending on many factors, but in general, we aim to move enough capital from equities to lower-risk assets like fixed income and cash so the investor can weather even the most severe downturn without selling equities at depressed prices. We help you maintain the delicate balance between safety of principal and growth as you withdraw money from your portfolio during your retirement years.

Environmental, Social, & Governance (ESG) Investing

Aligning your investments with your values is no small task. Resource Design can help you develop a framework for making informed ESG investment decisions and recommend strategies to incorporate your values into your portfolio without sacrificing returns.

Whether you are interested in environmental aspects such as greenhouse gas emissions, climate change, waste generation, or water management; social issues such as human rights standards, consumer privacy issues, gender equality, or workplace diversity; or governance issues such as corporate board composition, shareholder voting rights, or executive compensation; Resource Design can help you incorporate these ideas into your investment portfolio and develop a framework for ESG investing that makes sense for you.

Developing the Appropriate Asset Allocation

Although we devote a lot of time and energy to researching securities, the mix of different asset classes and categories we recommend for a client’s portfolio plays the most important role in determining long-term investing success. We rely on our market research, experience, and rigorous reading of financial publications to make the big decisions, like how much exposure your portfolio should have to international stocks or what the Federal Reserve’s latest policy decision means for your bond and real estate portfolios.

Risk Reduction Through Dollar-Cost Averaging

The textbooks and historical data suggest that ‘plunking’ your money into the market all at once usually produces the best returns for investors. However, if markets are especially volatile, if the investor wants to be conservative, or if we are making the initial investment of a client’s cash holdings, it usually makes sense to reduce risk by distributing purchases and redemptions over multiple days. Resource Design can help you determine what makes the most sense for moving your money into the market based on your risk tolerance and investing goals.

Indexing Where Appropriate

Is active management ideal for your portfolio, or are passive investments in low-cost indexed funds best? We think it depends on multiple factors. We recommend a mix of active and passive investment strategies throughout your portfolio to try and obtain the best of both worlds: professional management from some of the most skilled portfolio managers in their fields, and broad exposure to market indices for very low costs. We make decisions about where and to what degree indexing is appropriate based on our experience managing portfolios, levels of volatility in the market, historical performance data, and our outlook for global economics and securities markets.

Managing Your Portfolio’s Risk Level

We dive deep into how each of our clients feels about securities markets and the risks involved. Part of configuring your portfolio’s risk level is considering three specific parameters surrounding who you are as an investor. The first two are financial risks — risk required to achieve your investing goals (how much risk you need to take) and risk capacity (how much risk you can afford to take). The third parameter is your risk tolerance, or psychological risk (how much risk you feel comfortable taking in your portfolio). We use this three-tiered approach to help determine what level of risk is appropriate in your portfolio, both during initial construction and on an ongoing basis.

Mutual Fund & ETF Selection

Resource Design is not affiliated with any single mutual fund or exchange traded fund (ETF) provider. Our goal when recommending securities to clients is to pick the best fund for the job regardless of its parent company. We research client securities extensively and deeply in some cases to find the best fit for the client’s needs and risk characteristics.

Actively managing Portfolio Expenses

Even the best-performing mutual funds and exchange traded funds can be weighed down by excessive expense ratios. We are continually evaluating the trade-offs between great performance and fees in our clients’ portfolios, always aiming to keep costs as low as is feasible, given the circumstances surrounding a particular mutual fund or ETF.

Our firm is an institutional-level investor, which means we have access to institutional and admiral share classes of mutual funds that are not available to everyday investors. We are thrilled to be able to offer these lower-cost share classes to our clients.

Resource Design is a fee-only firm, which means the only way we earn money is via the fees paid directly to us from our clients. We do not earn commissions on any security we recommend.

Creating a Withdrawal StrategY

Orchestrating withdrawals from your portfolio while keeping your investment policy in balance, navigating volatile markets, and executing investment initiatives can be especially challenging for the everyday investor. Resource Design can help you determine how to meet your income needs in retirement without sacrificing returns or unintentionally altering your portfolio’s risk characteristics.

Broad Diversification with Mutual Funds & exchange-traded funds

Resource Design, Inc. recommends only mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs) for its clients’ portfolios. Both instruments offer exceptional diversification at very low costs to the investor. ETFs and mutual funds also have the benefit of being highly liquid and marketable, which means we can convert these securities to cash quickly at a reasonable price.

Furthermore, mutual funds provide Resource Design the opportunity to use professional portfolio managers in every area of the client’s portfolio. Typically, a single manager or a team of managers has specialized expertise in the area(s) they invest in and are backed by teams of analysts who gather and analyze data so that the manager(s) can make the best decisions about how to invest the fund’s assets. Finally, mutual funds and ETFs allow Resource Design to build investment portfolios that provide broad diversification to its clients globally, across multiple asset categories and industry sectors, and in companies that range in size from small regional firms to mega-cap multinational corporations.

Contact

Tell us a little about yourself and your investing goals and we’ll give you a call to set up a time to get together.

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