Investment Management

The key to successful investment management is understanding your risk tolerance, life stage and personal circumstances.

Personal Investment Advisors

“Ensuring that your investments reflect your individual situation and maximize opportunities for both growth and tax efficiency.”

Our Investment Approach

At Up Financial our investment approach is to first work with you to understand your personal goals, risk tolerance, risk appetite and unique individual situation. From there, we determine the best possible investment allocation that will help you to achieve those goals while carefully managing how you are exposed to risk. By focusing first on what you’re trying to achieve we can help you to avoid emotional decision making and instead focus on your disciplined, long-term success.

Diversification

Diversification is ensuring that your portfolio is not overexposed to any one particular risk. It’s easy to point to stories of individual assets that exploded in value; much harder to replicate such explosive growth year after year. The most successful investors are those who are properly diversified – managing their risk and still being exposed to the opportunities that will help them outperform over time. We focus on diversification between sectors, industries, geographics and asset classes. It’s not a one-time process either – diversification should be adjusted as worldwide economies shift; a portfolio should be a living, breathing thing that changes with the times.

Tax Efficient Investing

When it comes to asset allocation and portfolio construction, tax matters. Tax and inflation are the two largest hindrances on the growth of your portfolio. Understanding how Interest Income, Dividends, Foreign Dividends and Capital Gains are taxed will affect how your portfolio is constructed. Foreign dividends don’t qualify for the dividend tax credit, and within a Tax Free Savings Account foreign investments are subject to withholding tax. Corporate accounts are subject to the highest tax rates in Canada but get to take advantage of the Capital Dividend Account and Return of Dividend Tax on Hand. Trusts offer opportunities for splitting income due to their flow-through nature. All of these structures play into how you should build out your asset allocation. Rather than looking at each account (RRSP, TFSA, CORP, NON-REG etc) individually, each should be used to maximize the tax efficiency of your portfolio as a whole.

Passive vs Active

We’re agnostic about the benefits of active vs. passive investments – it’s our job to do research and select the best tool to do the job we’re seeking to do. When there is no active alternative that can match a passive asset (Index Fund or ETF), we use the passive option. When there is an active manager who regularly exceeds the performance of the passive option, particularly when adjusting for important metrics like down-side or risk, we’ll use the active option. Both are tools in a toolbox – it’s far too limiting to assume that one is always the best when each has its own pros and cons.

Independence

When you go to a bank, they’ll sell you products the bank owns, not the best options on the market. If you’re tired of just being another number and being sold generic portfolios please reach out and we can show you how much better off you could be.

Frequently Asked Questions

CREATING COHESION, EFFICIENCY AND SIMPLICITY BETWEEN ALL THE DISPARATE PARTS OF YOUR FINANCIAL LIFE.
Most financial planning & investment firms are owned by the investment companies that they represent. Under that structure a client will always receive biased advice. Up Financial is an independent wealth management firm with no bias towards any one particular company meaning that we can always act in the best interest of clients and maintain a fiduciary standard of care.

Our advisors have different designations which can be seen in our bios in the “about section”. At minimum your Financial Planning is always completed by a Certified Financial Planner and Investment advice is always completed by a Chartered Investment Manager. Nathan and Eli are both Fellows of the Canadian Securities Institute and Eli holds a number of additional advanced designations that apply to complex financial planning situations. We believe in ongoing education and all of our advisors are currently completing additional designations, furthering the value we can provide clients.

We are compensated on a fee-based structure. Whereas most of the industry uses a commission-based structure where advisors are paid based on product sales, we’re compensated independent of sales which means that our interest are aligned. There are no hidden conflicts of interest to promote one product or strategy over another, or one investment over another.
We work with a range of clients from Business Owners, Successful Professions to Retirees. Our average client has been $500k to $2M in assets with us but we have lots of clients in excess of $5M and a number (especially as we work with our clients children) with less than $100k. We have different platforms available for those who don’t qualify for High Net Worth pricing for certain investment structures. Our philosophy is that everyone deserves quality financial advice and that you should not be restricted just because you “don’t have enough money”.
This will depend on the client and we leave it up to you to speak to one of our advisors to determine a structure that works for you. In the beginning of a relationship we will be speaking weekly for the first 3-6 months until the initial structuring is complete. After that many people move to quarterly reviews or annual reviews. It’s important that we can communicate at least yearly. All clients receive monthly market updates and have access to their accounts online daily.
As a firm we do not believe in asset minimums. We made the decision as a firm that everyone should have access to quality financial advice regardless of their net worth. What we did was establish additional platforms that allow us to take on smaller clients on a cost-effective basis for the client. Certain investment structures have minimums which are not set by us. We utilize robo platforms with low-cost ETF portfolios until your portfolio reaches a size where we can get you access to our regular portfolios. The easiest thing to do is give us a call or send us an email and we can outline the best options based on your individual situation.

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Wealth management is more than just managing your investments. Learn more about how we can help you.

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