Why Choose Us?

Why choose us as your financial advisor? Our founder and lead financial advisor, Phil Ratcliff, has over 12 years experience as a financial advisor, is a Certified Financial Planner (CFP®), Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC®), and a Certified Life Underwriter (CLU®). We are dedicated to serving our clients with the highest level of professionalism and continuing education:

• Retirement Planning:

• Social Security Planning/Maximization.

• Windfall Elimination Provison and Government Pension Offset.

• OPERS Retirement Planning.

• STRS Retirement Planning.

• Estate Planning:

• Simple Estate Planning.

• Trust Design and Management.

• Charitable Giving/Planning.

• Complex Estate Planning and Legacy Planning

• Business Planning:

• Employee Benefits.

• Retirement Plan design.

• Executive Benefits.

• Succession Planning.

• Exit Planning.

We specialize in Comprehensive Financial Planning:

Beyond our specialties, we like to provide our advice in a comprehensive approach. Please watch the following video to gain a better understanding of how we help our clients evaluate their financial options to design better financial plans:

Fee-based and a Fiduciary to our clients:

We generally only take compensation from our clients, not the mutual fund , investment, or insurance companies. This means that we have less conflict of interests than many other financial firms/advisors and a greater financial loyalty to looking out for our clients’ best interests. In addition, we are a fiduciary to our clients at all times, which means that we have a legal responsibility to look out for our clients’ best interests before our own.

Read our Regulatory Filings, Firm Brochures & Disclosures

We protect our clients from most of the risks associated in working with a small firm by relying on large custodians to hold all of our clients’ funds and accounts (such as TD Ameritrade, Fidelity, TIAA-CREF, etc.) so that you may benefit from the agility and freedom that being small affords us so that we can:

• Reduce bureaucracy and inefficiencies.
• Pass savings on to customers more quickly.

• Quickly adapt to industry and market changes for our clients.

• Implement technological solutions more quickly and efficiently.

• More easily provide our clients with transparency.

We are dedicated to offering our clients the freedom to choose how they want us to serve them and how they want to pay us. There are far too many businesses and professional firms that will not transparently tell you what they charge. We frown upon this practice and display our fees for all to see because we know that we provide tremendous value to our clients. We are not embarrassed or threatened in being completely honest and open with you:

We very much believe that technology can improve the lives of our clients, help us to serve them better and reduce costs. In this endeavor we continually look for ways to improve and upgrade our technological integrations to make this possible. Please review some of our current integrations:

• rebel Financial Personal Website 

• Morningstar Office.

• Salesforce.com.

• Docusign.

• iRebal.

• FinaMetrica.

• Jemstep.

• Wealthminder.

• Oranj.

• MoneyGuide Pro.

• NetDocuments.

• Olark.

We stand for what we believe are the ethical obligations of our profession for our clients and the average citizen in general. We deplore the greedy nature that much of the financial industry has devolved into and the self-serving politicians and government organizations that serve them. In our efforts to represent our clients and society in general we contribute in four important ways:

1.Progressive Investment Philosophy:

• Socially Responsible Investing (SRI)/Environmental, Sustainable, Governance (ESG) Portfolios.

• Christian Values based Investing.

• Shariah/Halal based Investing.

2.Financial Activism:

• Standing up for what is right and not turning a blind eye to white collar crimes. For instance:

• People should have gone to prison for crimes perpetrated which greatly contributed to the financial collapse of 2008. To date there have been no significant convictions and only a handful of fines (not even seriously denting the significant profits made from these fraudulent activities).

• Addressing and punishing the fradulent practices of Predatory Trading, which came to light in Michael Lewis’ new book “Flash Boys.”

3.Voting Proxies for clients.

• This allows us to hold companies accountable to shareholders and society in general. Today, very few investors have the time or inclination to vote their shares and thus the board of directors and institutional investors have free rein to do what they want. Our hope is that if there are more firms like rF that we may be able influence Mutual Fund companies to vote with us. This would constitute a huge voting share that might actually influence public companies in the future to do the right things for responsible long-term growth and not just short-term profit-mongering.

4.Donating 20% of all profits to Charity:

• RIAandIndependentAdvisors.org (RIA) – An organization started to help other advisors/firms leave the big financial firms and start their own firms which would be independent and better suited to “Serve clients, not corporations.”

• rebelFinancial.org – An organization we created to help the community that has helped to make us successful. rF.org primarily invest in education, research & development, and infrastructure investments in Columbus, the State of Ohio and the United States as a whole. We are particularly focused on helping to provide grants for higher education/research while assisting to lobby the government to give the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institute of Health (NIH) greater funding to provide more grants that will provide jobs and opportunities for future generations.