Why choose rebel Financial at the University?


Why choose rebel Financial at the University?

 

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Please refer to our transcription below if it is easier and/or more convenient for you:

My name is Phil Ratcliff and I wanted to thank you again for taking the time to watch another one of our video series to help explain an important investment concept.

First, and this one is Why Choose rebel Financial to help you with your university retirement. The first and most important reason, and I’ve got a whole other video so I’m not going to spend too much time on it on advisors are very important. They bring a lot of value, generally a lot more then they cost so I will refer to that video if you’re familiar with the concept already or you already know that then you can skip that but I don’t want to make this longer then necessary.

It’s very important for most people to have and advisor so that they can make good rational decisions to stay on track, control their risk, optimize their performance, work on their financial planning, retirement planning, tax planning, estate planning. The second important reason is when you say all right, I need to have an advisor what’s the best way to do that? Really, at the universities there’s two main ways to do it. There’s the traditional way and it’s where I started my career is when you look at the big insurance companies that provide retirement plans so AXA Equitable, ING, VALIC, Metlife, Great American, Nationwide, etc. There’s lots. Generally, we’re going to come in about 30% in cost underneath there so somewhere between 20-50%, it just depends, and we’re not going to have surrender charges which means that if we don’t do a good job for you, you can fire us any time that you want to and it doesn’t cost anything. It’s going to save you on costs. When you start looking at rebel Financial, we’re a great value in terms of what we provide for the cost.

The second thing is: we have discretion over our client accounts. What this means is that we can take care of your investments anytime, all the time, whenever we need to, without asking for permission. This is very important because I can just tell you from doing this for over a decade now that there’s many times where we don’t get to meet with people for an extended period of time. When we may need to take somethings back to reduce risk or we may need to re-balance to increase the opportunity, when things are down, and a lot of times our clients are busy with family or with careers, sabbatical. Whatever the case is, it does happen a decent amount and most people don’t pay attention a lot until they get an end of the quarter or end of the year statement and they actually pay attention to it and they’re like, “oh my gosh, what happened?!?” Or if things are just really good they’re just like, “oh, great!” but they don’t understand the increased risk. Discretion is very important and most companies actually spend a lot of money and time to not allow that to happen and to not become the next part which is a fiduciary.

We’re one of the very few investment providers in the state that works with the university that is a fiduciary. What is a fiduciary? Fiduciary is someone who has a legal responsibility to do the right thing for their clients before themselves and their firm. We’re always a fiduciary for our clients. Again, one of the nice things that we work with multiple providers so we work with Fidelity and TIAA CREF and Vanguard so we’re not just representing one product to say, “hey, you want to work with me you’ve got to buy this,” no. There’s lots of, hopefully, choices out there to tell you “what’s good here, what’s good here, what’s a draw back here” and then you can decide what you want to do and we try to be totally open and transparent about how we provide our services. We only take money from you so that 1.2 to .5% that we charge on all of our accounts at the universities it’s just 1% to .5% it just comes from you. We don’t take money from the insurance companies, we don’t take money from investment providers only from you so that really, really diminishes our conflicts of interest so that you know that our financial motivations are what’s good for you.

Those are the four main reasons:

  • So number one: You, probably most people, would very much benefit from having an advisor.
  • If you’re going to have an advisor we provide one of the lowest cost, least strings attached, services available at the University.
  • We have discretion so we can actually take care of peoples’ money.
  • And then lastly, we’re a fiduciary so we’re almost always out there trying to represent what’s best for you not ourselves and I believe that’s very important.

 

Again, I apologize that this video is a little bit longer but again I wanted to put out there good information so you’d say why would I want to select rebel Financial or Phil Ratcliff and it really, I think, lays it out pretty well.

We hope that we can help you, feel free to schedule an appointment online, give us a ring, shoot us an email, thank you.