Our Investing Philosophy

Investing takes time, care, and a plan.

Investing takes time, care, and a plan.

A critical part of the process of finding a financial advisor to work with, is making sure your investing philosophy, style and personality are going to mesh with those of the advisor. After all, the relationship between you and your advisor is supposed to be a long-term, enjoyable, and hopefully, profitable one. It can be a grueling experience if you and your advisor are operating on entirely different wavelengths.

At nVest Advisors, you’ll find that we are in some ways similar to other advisors you may have worked with in the past, and very different in others. Of course, there is no way to know from a mere web page whether the company you are looking at is a good fit for you or not, but if our guiding beliefs about client service and investment management sound like a company you’d like to do business with, we encourage you to give us a call or schedule an appointment to visit with us. After all, it costs nothing but a little time to see if we’re a match made in finance heaven.

Here’s what we believe about managing your money:

We have a duty to care for your money as if it were our own. No ifs, ands, or buts. You have entrusted us with not only your hard-earned savings, but also your hopes and dreams for its use in your family’s future. That is an awesome responsibility; one we never take lightly.

We need to continue to earn and re-earn your trust over time by doing the right things. We know most of our clients don’t have the training, experience, or frankly, desire to manage their own investments on a daily basis. That’s why you come to us! But an advisor has a choice of how to use their financial knowledge: they can wield it as an advocate for their clients, or they can take advantage of their clients. At nVest, our advisors must have the attitude of servant-leaders for our clients. We do it by practicing a strict code of ethics, and by fostering a company culture that sees you not as just another account, but as a real person, with real goals you want to see happen in your life, and real worries about the future.

You’re welcome to be involved in the daily decision-making of your account management, but you probably don’t want to. In nearly every client relationship, our advisor reps are granted, with your express permission, discretionary authority over your daily trading and account management activities. This allows your advisor rep to make split-second decisions if market conditions require it, and gives us greater ability to work hard for you. And since we are a fee-only advisor firm, these decisions won’t cost you an arm and a leg in commissions.

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Investing should be based on your goals, not on today’s market. Study after study has shown that the “talking heads” you see on investing programs or selling books and newsletters, are less accurate than a coin-toss at predicting market direction and the performance of individual investments. That’s no way to invest your life savings. At nVest Advisors, we take a different approach. We strongly believe in a few time-honored investment practices that form the core of how we manage your money.

We believe in diversification. That means, spreading your investments out over a wide variety of different investment “asset classes” (like stocks, bonds and alternatives), geographies and economies, based on what you tell us your money needs to do for you. Our investment models cover a wide range of risk preferences, and we adjust them as changes in the world take place. And while diversification does not guarantee against loss, we believe it helps us mitigate the ups and downs of market volatility.

We believe in investing in quality. Don’t gamble with money you can’t afford to lose. Serious investors working toward goals like retirement or college can’t afford to lose significant portions of their accounts by investing them in speculative or unproven investments.

We believe in keeping your investing costs down. Many investment products, like mutual funds and variable annuities, often have significant costs that can drag down your investing returns. Over 20 or more years, those costs can mean a loss of many thousands of dollars to you. We always consider and seek to lower the internal costs of the investments we use in our models, to keep your investing costs down.

We believe in getting out of your money’s way. When markets go down, it’s very normal to feel fearful or frustrated and want to pull your money out of an investment, but reacting emotionally to a market correction is almost always the wrong thing to do. We believe in building a close relationship with you over time, to help you navigate the choppy waters that investing sometimes becomes.  Let your advisor rep help you stay focused on your goals when times get scary.

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We believe the best way to manage money uses technology whenever possible. We’ve written about why we believe using “Robo” technology to help us manage your money is a very good thing, but the short version is this: technology is impartial, unemotional, capable of extreme accuracy, doesn’t discriminate based on how much money you have, and is never off-duty. That’s why we use as much technology as we can behind-the-scenes, in the daily tasks of account management. This frees our advisor reps up to do what human advisors do best: create great relationships with our clients and the community.

Technology also helps us keep our costs down; savings we can pass on to you. Using state-of-the-art investment technology helps us manage accounts of every size, but we don’t stop there. From VOIP phone service to auto-appointment scheduling, technology helps us run our back office business in an extremely low-cost manner. This lets us lower our advisory fees as much as possible, and allows us to work with even beginner investors.

Technology helps us to be lean, mean, and green. Our use of tech goes beyond managing your account. We’re also a paperless office – most of our accounts can be opened by signing your phone or tablet screen. We also use a variety of electronic forms of communication such as email and social media to stay in contact with our clients instead of the waste and cost of traditional printed “snail” mail.  The majority of our client appointments are conducted using video, and our seminars and client events are all broadcast online.

Our use of technology helps us manage your account better, lowers our overhead expenses, makes it more convenient for you to interact with us on your schedule, and helps us be better stewards of the planet we all share. 

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No matter where you are economically, every family deserves good financial advice. Because larger accounts generally create more revenue for financial firms, many advisors set account minimums or charge minimum annual fees. Call us crazy, but nVest doesn’t work like that. Maybe it’s because our founder, Jeremy Torgerson, himself grew up in very humble beginnings. Or maybe it’s because we are so engaged in the communities in which we live, work, and worship.  At nVest, we believe that, if you are sincere about wanting to make positive changes in your financial future, we want to be able to extend our hand. That’s why we have no account minimums for most of our investment accounts, low cost personal financial plans for families, and special services to get you started investing – with no account minimums – with advisory fees of less than 1% per year.

When you are blessed, you have a duty to bless others. We will be proud to be your financial services firm, and to be the choice of so many. We’re truly grateful for the opportunity to serve your investing needs in a meaningful way, the many families and small businesses we call clients and friends. At nVest , we also believe that when we share success with those in need, we gain so much more in the sharing. That’s why we are committed to donate 10% of our company profits to support good causes in the communities in which we live.

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