About

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When you’re considering enlisting the services of a wealth advisor you should satisfy yourself that both the person and firm overseeing your life’s work is ethical and competent, and that the location of your assets is secure.

If you work with me your assets will be held (custodied) at either Fidelity or Schwab. You may already have accounts at those institutions in which case you won’t even have to move them.

As a firm managing well in excess of $100 million for clients, Capital Endurance Group is regulated by the SEC as an Independent Registered Investment Advisor. We are fiduciary advisors, which means we always place the interests of our clients above all else.

You can locate our firm and me in the SEC database.

Please also review our annual regulatory disclosure called Form CRS (includes Form ADV Part II).

Our minimum client account size is $500,000 of investable assets. However, we will sometimes work with clients below that level if the shortfall is temporary.

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The following are my professional designations:

CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERTM (CFP®)

Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA®)

Finally, I’m also active in the Cary Chamber of Commerce in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. You can find me in the directory.

Why People Come to Me for Advice

People generally come to me when they can no longer overlook the three forces shaping their financial lives: Complexity, Scale, and Uncertainty.

I usually start working with executives like you in their 40s or 50s. By that point our lives are becoming increasingly complex, be it the way we’re compensated at work, family responsibilities, or financial obligations.

Capital Endurance Group advisors are limited to 50 clients, so that each rAnd on top of that complexity comes scale. We’re talking about real money now. It might be that back in your 30s you had a few hundred thousand dollars of savings across 401Ks and maybe a brokerage account. Now you’re getting paid a lot more via a variety of compensation vehicles. And you may have inherited money and be unsure of how you should invest it.

And then we add uncertainty to the mix. In our younger years we had our whole lives ahead of us and the extent of our uncertainty might have been which career path to take. But once our 40s or 50s arrive we realize what we do in the next few years will determine what our retirement life looks like.

So the combination of complexity, scale and uncertainty can bring a lot of stress to your life. And you may not even be consciously acknowledging its existence yet.

But deep down it likely is gnawing away at you… letting this slide has a real cost, in terms of net worth, risk of major financial loss, and frankly just emotional wellbeing.

Who I Work WIth

The reason I work exclusively with executives in their 40s and 50s is that there is still time to get them to a prosperous retirement. If you wait until your 60s to start planning, you may have made enough suboptimal financial choices that it may be too late for me to ensure you get the retirement you’ve envisaged.

I get real satisfaction from knowing I’ve changed the trajectory of a client’s life for the better.

My clients are all very smart and successful people. And I think most successful executives know they can’t do everything themselves. That delegation is essential, as is advice from subject matter experts.

The same applies to retirement planning. In fact, outside of medical care, I can’t think of many areas of your life where getting good advice is more critical.

The High Cost of Inaction

The prompt to take action to address these forces varies from person to person.

Sometimes it’s a deep but long suppressed feeling that a lot of things for retirement are falling through the cracks.

Perhaps you know your portfolio should be generating a higher return than it has been and that the cost of that is, say, equivalent to the cost of a year in a private college! Every year!

It may be constant fear of a market downturn that keeps you from earning a satisfactory return on your money. We have ways to address that.

Or it may be the realization that the time to prepare for retirement is running out.

Whatever it is, I encourage you to embrace your anxiety about retirement and resolve it head-on the way you would with other major challenges in life.

Taking Action

For many this stuff is only a whisker less boring than doing your taxes each year! I get it. But frankly it’s a lot more important than figuring out whether you owe the IRS $3,000 or $4,000 on April 15th.

It’s about the rest of your life, and it’s about whether you’ll be able to do the things you have always pictured, or whether you’ll be plagued by financial anxiety in your later years.

That’s why I aim to both reduce that worry, and also to liberate you from most of the work involved in retirement planning. How do I do that? Through my SustainedLifestyleTM Approach that leaves no stone unturned in pursuit of your desired retirement outcome.

7 Ways I’m Different From Other Advisors

  1. Outcome Over Product: at Capital Endurance Group we focus on the outcome you want, and not product. We assemble the best combination of products that we can find in pursuit of the life you want.
  2. Fee-only Fiduciary: we are a fee-only fiduciary advisor firm. We receive revenue only from our clients, and nobody else. We don’t charge clients commissions or receive payments from product vendors. That means I’m always in your corner, searching for the very best solution on your behalf. To me that seems like the ONLY way it should be done, but unfortunately it isn’t.
  3. 50 Max: as a Capital Endurance Group advisor, I am limited to a maximum of 50 clients so that each relationship receives the level of service it deserves. We consider quarterly meetings a minimum standard for clients, unlike many other firms, who incentivize advisors to just keep adding ever more clients – all at the expense of service.
  4. What Works: I focus on what works in investing, while screening out everything that doesn’t work. We rely on the decades of investment research out there, as well as best practices, to guide our work for you. We don’t try to predict the future, invest on hunches, or pretend we can outperform the market indexes with our own stock picks. Be very careful before you entrust your life’s savings to anyone claiming to be able to do that.
  5. Education Focus: I focus on educating clients about their options. And I also try to help non-clients understand what some of the risks and opportunities are in the financial planning space. You’ll see some of that on the Learn page of my website.
  6. It’s My Work: I do the work for my clients myself. I don’t farm the work out to junior employees in the back office for a cookie cutter solution. My impression of the industry generally is that this hands-on approach is very unusual until a client becomes very large.
  7. Seasoned Investor: and finally, prior to my work as a wealth management advisor I worked on Wall Street for 15 years in money management and investment research roles. I’ve seen how the game is played by the big institutions and how to survive the financial jungle out there. Most other advisors you’ll come across grew up in more of a sales role. I’ll leave you to decide which you’d prefer.

How To Decide If It’s Worth Being My Client

From your perspective it’s hard to know whether getting professional advice from me is going to be worth it. You’ve heard me say a lot of things that sound great, but how do you know how much value you’ll get for your money?

Well, to address that perennial question I’ve created the Cost-Benefit Estimator. It’s a 7-minute questionnaire that estimates the benefit my advice could have on your particular situation, and compares that to the fees I’d charge you.

If you’re looking for a bottom-line number semi-customized to your circumstances, then it’s definitely worth the 7 minutes. And it’s based on research and data, not numbers I’ve just pulled out of thin air.

It is anonymous – I don’t ask for your name and I don’t save the data. It’s really a tool to use as a final check before you reach out for a free, no obligation conversation with me.

Now before you do reach out know that I don’t work with everyone. At Capital Endurance Group we have a $500,000 investable asset minimum, and like you, I assess potential clients as to whether we’d likely enjoy working together.

So if all of that sounds good to you, I encourage you to go to the Cost-Benefit Estimator and then consider setting up a call with me via my Contact page.

Education

Columbia Business School

MBA (Finance)

University of Auckland (New Zealand)

Dual Degree: BCom (Economics), BA (History)

Postgraduate Diploma in Commerce (Econometrics)

Professional Designations

CFP® – Certified Financial Planner

CFA® – Certified Financial Analyst

CA – Chartered Accountant (Chartered Accountants of Australia & New Zealand