The Blue Heron Wealth Management Approach
We always think it's a good idea to listen to our clients.
This allows us to spend our time hearing about what is really important…you! Your plan. Your circumstances and goals, your vision of what you want your wealth to do for you. What you want for you and your family and how your wealth can help you get there.
We listen and then we take time to build a retirement income projection for you, outlining where your incomes will come from during retirement and how your various investment accounts will bear the load. We use this to work with your other financial professionals, such as your accountant, to project out the tax implications of our decisions to best maximize your after-tax returns. We also ask about all aspects of your estate and incapacity planning, and where appropriate, we coordinate with internal (trust officer) or external (notary, estate lawyer) professionals to address those requirements of your plan.
In plain language, we put all of these pieces together and make recommendations to help achieve your goals. Regularly reviewing your overall plan is important, which is where we want to spend our time with you. It is by knowing your entire picture, and what you want your wealth to do for you, that our team can provide the most value to you.
Taking a patient, long-term approach to managing your wealth means we build long-term, trusted relationships with you and your family.
Check out the testimonials from many of our long-term clients.
Listening then acting
Many of our clients want an investment solution that meets both their financial goals and is consistent with their values. We heard concerns about many themes: from environmental sensitivity to carbon emissions and the apparent lack of consistent corporate governance to the health and welfare of the employees of a given business. This is how we began our serious interest in sustainable investing – by listening to what was important to our clients. While investigating, we found a substantial body of academic research to give support to the idea that Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) screening can add value to your investments. Our primary focus is to satisfy our clients' financial needs, so we needed the proof that our clients would be at least as well off. In fact, research shows that you can get better returns by employing an ESG screening strategy (Deutsche Bank, June 2012).
Through real portfolio management experience, we are confident that ESG screening is in fact a value added way to screen and manage investments, just as the research had indicated. As it turns out, we can add performance and reduce risk, while still meeting our clients' financial goals. Part of our success, we believe, is that we weren't repurposing another product (such as an index or a pension fund). We truly started with a blank slate and researched the best way to create an ESG portfolio for our clients. Please see our Fossil Fuel Free Investing page for more details.
Earning our fee
It is interesting to us that many Canadian investors either do not know what they pay for advice, or do not know what they receive for the payments they make. We come across many cases where investors have been paying embedded (or hidden) fees in the form of high management expense ratios (MERs) for mutual funds and segregated funds (e.g. 2.5%-3% or more). Some investors are unaware of what they are paying, or that they are paying anything at all, because they cannot see the charges. We are open about the fees we charge and feel they are not only supported by our portfolios' performance, but by the service and advice we provide. We are committed to earning our fee. We welcome a comparison and are happy to compete for new business.
