Custodian Information
Centered Financial uses two custodians to protect our individual client accounts. Depending on the investment needs/goals for our clients we use either Fidelity Investments or Betterment Securities. Why is this important?
The custodian is where your account is held. They safeguard your money and process money movement.
You will receive notifications directly from your custodian when your account statements are ready.
You can login directly to the custodian to view account balances, statements, etc.
The custodian reports account balances and transactions to you but does not report account performance.
Centered Financial Dashboard
Each of our clients receives access to a personal online website to track your portfolio and your financial plan. If you haven’t already, you will be receiving an email invitation to create your online login for your account. This dashboard is the main tool that we use to provide financial planning and important portfolio information.
For clients that have been with me for years, you will notice that I have chosen a new software provider. This was a strategic decision. While I have not found the perfect software system, I feel like this choice provides the following added benefits:
Ease of linking and maintaining outside account information. This is important for providing you with accurate net worth, budget, and cash flow projections.
A useful mobile app that has notification functionality so that we can collaborate on things that need to be done
Enhanced views for tax analysis, Social Security and Medicare planning, and investment allocations
Useful tools for debt planning including student loan analysis
Vault
Your financial dashboard includes a secure vault for important documents. This is what we use to share information securely with you regarding your financial plan and investment portfolio. What’s in the vault?
Centered Financial ADV documents/privacy policy
Quarterly performance reports
Financial plan reports
Private folders for your important information
Performance Reporting
I suggest logging in to the custodian to view your monthly statements and tax documents. However, the custodian does not report consolidated portfolio performance. If you ever have questions about performance, you can reach out to us for a performance review. We generate quarterly performance reports for you and in the first month of each calendar quarter, we upload a portfolio performance report into your vault. You will be notified by email when your report is available. The first uploads will be in January 2020 as this will be the first full quarter of portfolio reporting.
Required Minimum Distributions
This quarter we will be scheduling final RMDs for the year to satisfy the 2019 requirements. Going forward if you would like your RMD scheduled for a periodic distribution, we will be updating all of the instructions on file.
Newsletters
We send out an email newsletter typically every two weeks. This will usually have an important main topic along with an article focused on basic financial planning concepts (The Essentials).
Market News
Each Monday, we update the blog with a weekly market summary. This is provided by our back-office Chartered Financial Analyst and gives good insight into what is happening with various markets and the economy. If you are interested in these topics, please check the blog on Monday afternoons for updates.
More to come…
Our goal is to always provide simple access to the information that you need and continually provide education so that you can make the best decisions possible for your financial goals. Please reach out as you have questions.
I am excited to be rolling out some more updates over the next few months, so please stay tuned.