A couple of years ago, I had a discussion with my business coach and he asked me if I had checked if MoneyCoach was infringing on Trademarks. I found out after searching the Trademark database, that it was indeed in violation. Someone had the right to the name.
On that day, I knew eventually I would have to change the name of the firm as we continue to grow. I believe this is the perfect time to make the change as we are unveiling a number of changes.
Let’s start with the name itself! Why Breakaway Financial Group?
In hockey, a breakaway means that you are able to break through defenders and attack the net. Since its inception, we have been striving to break away from the financial advice norm and help our clients get top-notch finance advice. We are not sitting down on our laurels. We continue to implement the vision I had when I established the firm.
We think that with the current changes, we will continue to build a firm that offers a more holistic approach to financial planning. The goal is to ensure that we can advise on all aspects of our client’s financial lives in the hopes of better aligning strategies.
Here’s the address to our new website: www.breakawayfinancialgroup.com to see our new look.
What’s New with Breakaway?
Tax Preparation
We will be initiating our tax preparation service in the spring. Our service will only be offered to financial planning clients and will limit the number of returns to 30 for 2022. Our goal is to ensure that the tax planning process gets further connected to our financial planning advice while offering the high level of service you are used to with our firm.
New Investment Custodian: Altruist
In 2019, we received the news that TD Ameritrade was being acquired by Schwab. Recently, Schwab announced that it will begin the transition of TD accounts to its platform in 2022. Over the last couple of years, we have been looking for options as most of our clients’ accounts are at TD Ameritrade Institutional. Our fear is that the larger Schwab company may not be able to keep the level of service we have enjoyed with TD.
We have been working to start a relationship with a modern custody platform called Altruist during the last few months. The custodian offers a fresh approach to the business.
Here’s a quote from their website: “We’re on a mission to make independent financial advice better, more affordable, and more accessible.” Their platform is built to make firms like ours more efficient which will help us keep our costs and our fees low.
Altruist also enables innovation that the big boys do not offer at this time. For example, we are now able to purchase partial shares of ETFs and stocks. This innovation allows us to create new investment models like the Tax Grinder (read more below) and make them available even for small accounts. We can even combine models within accounts of all sizes for further diversification and purposeful investing. Partial shares also help improve account allocation accuracy even for small accounts.
We are happy to get started with them as we believe our clients will benefit from their modern technology.
Here’s the link to their website: https://altruist.com/
New Investment Models
Equity Models
Core Equity
Core Equity is a combination of broad-based low-cost ETFs to provide index-like returns.
Tax Grinder Equity
Over the last couple of years, the creation of partial share purchases and free equity trading allowed investment managers to offer direct indexing. Direct Indexing is the practice of tracking an index by purchasing the securities directly instead of through an index fund. We plan to use direct indexing as a technique to increase tax efficiency within after-tax brokerage accounts.
We created Tax Grinder Equity to purposefully harvest tax losses while expecting performance similar to the Russell 3000, which is a broad US stock index. These tax losses could be used in the future against capital gains. We think it will become especially important to have a plan to aggressively gather tax losses going forward as the Government is discussing the creation of a surtax on Net Investment Income (NIIT).
Thematic Equity
We created Thematic Equity for the value-oriented investor. It uses specialty funds that invest in industries that we think may see better-than-normal growth in the future. Sectors like autonomous vehicles and green energy for example.
PowerPlay Equity
PowerPlay Equity was created with the aggressive investor in mind. It uses specialty funds focused on using investment factors, such as momentum, in the hopes to increase return on investment.
We see the model as being an add-on to other models in a long-term investment portfolio.
Unconstrained Models
Tactical Opportunistic
The Tactical Opportunistic model is a portfolio of up to 5 specialty funds that invest in our top-rated industry/asset classes based on the current and anticipated macro-economic environment.
Diversifying Models
NQ Diversifiers
We have created a diversifying model to help reduce taxable investment income within an after-tax account. The model uses different types of municipal bonds funds to provide protection and tax-free income.
In Conclusion
We are excited to get started in the new chapter of our firm. Our goal is to make Breakaway Financial Group the leading financial planning firm in the Charleston area. We can’t wait for our next meeting to tell you more about it.
