Traphagen CPAs & Wealth Advisors offers a comprehensive suite of wealth management services with a thorough department that includes specialists in all wealth management disciplines. We employ a ‘team’ approach for our clients to ensure that each client establishes a relationship with the team members that specialize in the areas that are most applicable to their unique situation. In addition, this ensures all clients will always have access to at least one of their advisors.
The advantage of a wealth manager that not only manages your portfolio but also protects that wealth through proper estate and tax minimization planning is significant. As fee-only advisors, we always act as a fiduciary to our clients. We derive income from our advisory fee – a sliding scale percentage – based upon assets under management.
Investment Management and Planning
For most clients, determining exactly how to allocate their investment portfolio and the appropriate risk/return profile involves many different factors. Traphagen will analyze your current and future tax situation, personal risk tolerance, cash flow, total return needs and overall financial goals before proposing a detailed investment plan and portfolio.
Traphagen employs a ‘Dynamic Asset Allocation’ strategy to determine how to allocate among asset classes as opposed to a ‘passive core/tactical satellite’ strategy that is used within asset classes.
Dynamic asset allocation means that, over time, the overall percentages of your portfolio allocated to different asset classes will change as the valuations, risks, and correlations of various investments evolve.
Our investment committee concentrates the majority of our investment research efforts on asset class return, risk, and correlation projections. Using these projections as an input into our MVO (mean variance optimization) model, we can determine optimal asset class allocations given a level of acceptable risk.
We hold a foundation of low-cost ETFs (exchange traded funds) to make up the majority of our investment exposure with some individual securities and traditional mutual funds as compliments. This achieves a cost efficient risk/return profile consistent with the desired asset class.
We also employ tax minimization strategies including ‘tax loss/gain harvesting’ and ‘asset location’ to increase after-tax investment returns.
For a more information on our portfolio management strategy click here.
Retirement Planning
Traphagen Financial Group’s CFPs and CPAs are uniquely positioned to be your premier financial advisors because we have a unique tax planning skill set that allows us to develop a comprehensive plan for you and your family. This includes the integration of all the financial planning disciplines such as risk management, cash flow, insurance, income tax, retirement, estate, education and investment planning.
We review our client’s objectives annually and employ the most effective strategies in adjusting your plan for any changes and potential opportunities in tax savings, investment techniques, insurance options and estate planning.
For most retirement plans, we utilize a ‘Monte Carlo’ analysis that runs thousands of different scenarios with your base investment return, income or expense assumptions to produce a good ‘stress test’ for your plan and allow us to create alternate scenarios.
Estate Planning
Traphagen will conduct a review of your current and projected financial situation, and devise a plan to ensure that your assets are distributed to your beneficiaries as you intended, with limited tax liability. By starting early, we can implement the most appropriate use of trusts, gifting programs, and other strategies to secure your assets for future generations.
Tax Planning & Preparation
Traphagen’s CPAs can help you take advantage of all tax saving opportunities. We stay abreast of legislative rules and regulations to provide you with sound advice on the impact of these changes.
As part of our investment management strategy, we employ two main tax minimization strategies: tax loss/gain harvesting and asset location.
Tax loss/gain harvesting is the process of proactively selecting securities to sell that will produce a gain or loss then immediately replacing the security with a similar, not identical, position. This produces the desired tax effect without changing your overall investment allocation.
Asset location involves overweighting tax inefficient assets (high, non-qualified cash flow producers) into tax deferred accounts and tax efficient assets (low cash flow assets) into taxable accounts. This has the effect of either deferring or permanently eliminating ordinary income taxes.
Risk Management
Risk management is one of the most important aspects of a financial plan and investment portfolio. Traphagen puts extensive effort into researching all possible risks to a retirement plan and your portfolio.
Traphagen has developed SmartHedge®, an investment risk management strategy used in certain market environments to contain overall portfolio risk.
To learn more about SmartHedge®, click here.
Insurance Planning
All of our advisors are life and health insurance licensed, so we have the internal expertise to help determine the amount of insurance needed and the best insurance products to use.
Traphagen has partnered with various experts in the areas of life, disability, and long term care insurance. We are not tied to any specific insurance product producer and do not receive any commission from selling insurance products, allowing us to be completely objective in our advice.
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