Jeremy Torgerson, CEO & Senior Advisor

Hello nVest Advisors clients:

We thank you for your continued faith and trust as we navigate the current economic challenges and prepare for great days ahead! For sure, there have been a lot of changes around the economy, the markets, and the financial industry in particular, over the past year or two. Our firm is no different:

  • Since 2022, our investment models have changed substantially enough from the “old” way that we worked with your money, we felt it was necessary to add additional information for clients in our Agreements about how our Discretionary Model system worked.
  • We are adding two new financial advisors in the next six to eight weeks! One is based in South Texas, and the other will support the company’s efforts here in Colorado.

Our company has also been affected by some of the changes at other companies:

  • Our primary custodian for several years, TD Ameritrade, recently completed its merger with Charles Schwab. This has rendered our older client service Agreements that mentioned TD Ameritrade by name, or your TD Ameritrade account number(s) in particular, invalid going forward. We will need to have you re-sign a new Agreement that mentions only Charles Schwab and/or your new Charles Schwab account numbers.
  • Another of our custodians, Betterment, recently added cryptocurrency trading capabilities to the client platform. Although we’d previously updated our agreement for Betterment accounts to include this new language, not all of our Betterment clients adopted the new Agreement on the Betterment website.

Additionally, over the summer, we’ve worked with regulators in Texas and Kansas to actively serve clients in those states, and they’ve had recommendations for our current client agreements that would update and refine the language of our offerings.

So, we have done so.

In the coming few days, each of our clients will be sent a new UNIFIED INVESTMENT ADVISORY AGREEMENT that, in plain English, provides updated service terms and features of working with nVest Advisors for your investing needs. The terms contained in this new Agreement are effective as of the date you sign it, and the updated fee schedules for our custodians are effective as of October 1, 2023. This Agreement updates and simplifies what we do for our investment advisory clients and how we assemble your investment strategy now (versus our previous history). The Agreement also provides you with updated information about all three of the custodians we use to help us manage individual client accounts (ASPire Retirement Services, Betterment Institutional, and Charles Schwab).

The Unified Investment Advisory Agreement comes in two parts: the main body of the Agreement contains all of the information that is universal for our investment advisory clients, regardless of where your account might be custodied.

The second part of the Unified Agreement is a series of Appendices that we can update in the future without having to make you re-sign an entirely new Client Agreement. Each Appendix describes the particular features, fees, and terms of our account custodians. In the future, should another merger or change happen at one of our custodians, or if we add, remove, or change a custodian option for our clients, we can simply issue a new Appendix that will provide you with the most up-to-date information, without voiding our original Agreement.

As a part of clarifying and simplifying our custodial relationships, we’ve taken the opportunity to simplify the Fees we assess for your account management, and those new fee schedules are included for each of our three custodians. These fee schedules better reflect the evolving nature of our business and the size of the accounts that our clients are bringing us.

Because no actual billing will happen for at least another month at any custodian, and because in no instance is a client fee going UP, we are making the new fee schedules effective as of October 1, 2023.

I encourage each of you to read this Agreement thoroughly (we’ve made it as easy to read as possible) and let us know of any questions or concerns. Then, please sign the Agreement and Appendices at your earliest convenience (but not later than October 15 if at all possible).  We will send you gentle reminders that we need this new Agreement signed promptly.

We’ve spent a great deal of time this past year rebranding and “growing up” nVest Advisors, and preparing for it to grow with the addition of new members of our team. There are even more internal changes that should make your experience better, more efficient, and more friendly to your needs.

Please look for your new Unified Investment Advisory Agreement in your email soon!