Our Company
Welcome to Capital Ingenuity

What We Do

Simply stated, Capital Ingenuity is in the business of teaching people about personal investing and finance. We provide customized education solutions to individuals, employees of specific companies, brokers, and financial advisors. To read more about the specific services we provide, click here.

In addition to providing paid, customized, financial education solutions, we are also producing a wide variety of free financial education articles on the Resources section of our site. Soon to be included in our resources section will be a subsection where site users can ask specific financial questions to our CEO.

Our Philosophy

The concepts involved in managing personal investments and finances are not generally something that are taught in elementary school, high school, or college. However, it is also not rocket science. Armed with the right knowledge and a little motivation, anyone can take control over there own financial decisions. In a time when the headlines show stories about 401(k) and IRA accounts being wiped out, retirements being postponed, and some of the nation's most well known financial advisors being charged with committing fraud, now is the time to educate yourself about investments and other concepts of personal finance. We believe that having a solid understanding of investments and personal finance is necessary to have the greatest chance of accumulating and keeping wealth, even if using the assistance of a "financial advisor."

What Separates Us from the Rest?

All of our educators/coaches have a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in, or with a concentration in, Financial Planning, Financial Counseling, Personal Finance, Financial Services or another similar and directly related field of study.

The business of being a financial advisor/planner is very different from most other professionals that directly affect us today. If you go to a licensed doctor, you will be getting advice and/or treatment from someone who has at minimum graduated from an accredited medical school. If you go to a licensed attorney, you will generally be receiving advice/counsel from someone who has at minimum graduated from an accredited law school. Unfortunately, many people do not know that receiving any type of formal education whatsoever, whether it is an education relating to finance or not, is not a requirement to become a financial advisor.

Generally, as long as a person passes any exams required by any applicable state or federal laws, complies with all applicable laws, and pays any required registration fees, that person can function as a financial advisor, stock broker, registered representative, or other appropriate term permitted by law. As a result, it can be common for advisors to not be familiar with many investment strategies, some of which are known to simultaneously reduce your risk and give you a greater potential for return. It is not even unusual for some advisors to make incorrect statements to try to scare you away from strategies that they simply do not know how to implement so they can sell you something simpler, and sometimes highly less effective, that they do understand. At Capital Ingenuity, we believe that not having a strict education requirement to advise someone on issues that directly affect both their financial security and their ability to achieve their life goals is simply unacceptable.

We focus on educating and coaching, rather than focusing on selling investments for a commission or providing advice that client's might not truely understand.

Many financial advisors, brokers, registered representatives, and insurance sales representatives, make a commission whether or not you ever earn a single penny. While not all of the time, blindly buying from someone who earns a commission from the sale of a security or other financial product can create some very serious problems.

• A representative/advisor may have pressure from their sales manager to sell the products that make the most money for the company, rather than the best product for you.
• Some products can give a representative/advisor a higher commission than other products. Therefore, that individual may have a financial incentive to sell you a product that is not the best product for you.
• There may be equal or equivalent products on the market that have substantially lower commissions, or sometimes no commission at all, that your advisor has no incentive to tell you about.
• In many cases, your advisor's commission comes directly out of the money you are planning to invest "before" it is invested. In such cases, your account would have to earn a higher return on a percentage basis than the percentage of your initial amount of money you paid for your advisor's commission just to break even.
• If you purchase a product from an advisor that has a one-time up front commission, usually called a "front-end load," there is no direct incentive for your advisor to contact you again to reallocate your funds as necessary.
• An incentive can exist for an advisor to recommend investing all or too much or a client's money at once, rather than "dollar cost averaging" or leaving a portion of the client's funds in cash at times when security prices are exorbitantly high. Funds that are in cash are funds that are not earning the advisor a commission.
• An incentive can exist for an advisor to recommend buying and selling securities repeatedly and frequently just to generate commissions. In industry terms this is known as "churning" or "excessive trading."

In addition to providers that can directly sell you securities, there are also fee-only "investment advisors" that charge for their advice instead of earning sales commissions. Fee-only advisors can be compensated in four different ways. Unfortunately, while not all the time, each of these four ways can have its own particular set of problems.

• A fee-only advisor can charge a specific annual flat fee to advise their clients. For example, the advisor could charge client's a flat fee of $5,000 each year, to be collected quarterly.
• This kind of arrangement can very undesirable, depending on the size of the sum of money you are looking to invest compared to the fee. In the conditions above, someone looking to invest $1 Million would be paying an amount equal to 0.5% of their portfolio in the first year. Someone wanting to invest $50,000 would have a fee equivalent to 10% of their portfolio’s value in the first year.
• A fee-only advisor can charge a fee equal to a percentage of the assets under management. For example, the advisor could charge an annual fee equal to 1.5% of the assets under management in a client's account.
• While this type of arrangement seems to align the interests of the advisor with the client, do not be fooled. If the advisor's recommendations cause the account's value to decrease 50%, the advisor would still collect their fee on what is left of the account.
• While the advisor makes more money if your account increases in value, an incentive can exist for the advisor to take inappropriate amounts of risk in an effort to increase the value of your account as fast as possible. However, if those risks do not pay off, the advisor still gets their fee as mentioned previously.
• A fee-only advisor can charge a fee that equals a percentage of the returns generated in an account, but only if the client has $750,000 of assets under management with the advisor or if the advisor has reason to believe the clients net worth, combined with the net worth of their spouse, exceeds $1,500,000.
• Many advisors will not offer this type of arrangement simply because it absolutely requires them to make you money before they make money. If they do not believe in their own investing abilities or they are too uncertain of the market's direction, they would not want to take the risk of not making any money and offering the client this option.
• Many clients do not meet the assets under management and/or net worth criteria that is required by law.
• While this arrangement does eliminate the possibility of the advisor making money if the account value goes down, it does not eliminate the possible incentive to take on excessive risk as mentioned earlier.
• In the event an advisor’s recommendations cause a client to lose a large percentage of their account's value in the first year but recover a portion of the losses in the second year, the advisor would still earn their entitled percentage of the gains they earned in the second year even though the account's value is still less than when the service commenced.
• A fee-only advisor can charge an hourly fee. For example, the advisor could charge an hourly fee of $300 per hour for time spent managing a client's account.
• If the advisor's recommendations cause the client's account to lose value, the advisor is still entitled to their hourly fee.
• Because advisors do not generally manage client accounts directly in front of their clients, dishonest advisors can claim that they worked for a longer period of time than they actually spent.
• When the total annual fees are looked at as a percentage of the total funds invested, some clients simply cannot afford the fees.

Because we provide our client’s with a solid education in personal investing and finance, instead of providing advice that clients do not truly understand, our clients do not have the assortment of problems outlined above. If our client’s do, however, decide to employ the services of a typical financial advisor, they will have a greater opportunity to recognize if the advisor’s advice is suspect. Through the use of our services, it is very possible to have an even greater understanding of personal finances than a financial advisor who may not have ever received any formal financial education.