D.R. Harris & Co. Values
Most of our clients are well-educated, high-income professionals, mostly in their 30’s through 60's. They come to us because they want to be liberated from the burden of taking care of their finances. We serve as their personal CFO, family wealth guardian and advocate to help them address all areas of their finances: wealth preservation, wealth growth, tax mitigation, wealth protection, wealth transfer, business and retirement account structure and charitable planning.
Appropriate Pricing
Once you have 5-10 million dollars saved up, it's easy to find an experienced, knowledgable and honest fiduciary fee based advisor, but what do you do until you get to that point? Our firm charges an a competitive flat fee for new clients that we believe is proportional to the benefit clients will receive by working with us. This makes it ideally suited for people in their 30's and 40's when you have to catch up quickly on financial issues after perhaps many years in training, but likely have trouble finding an unbiased fee based fiduciary advisor given your asset level and need to balance the fees you pay with other important family expenses.
Many financial firms don't give fair deals to people in all stages of their careers, but we think that is silly and short sighted. Today's 30 year old is tomorrow's 65 year old, and we intend to do right by our clients from the very start and keep on doing it for as long as they are clients of our firm. Perhaps because of this attitude we almost always have a high renewal rate by our clients each year.
Our Investment Approach
Our investment approach is influenced by the Nobel Prize winning research of Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller and the philosophy of David Swensen, Phillip Fisher and Warren Buffett. In accordance with this approach, D.R. Harris & Co’s first step in helping its new clients begins with making personalized saving and investment recommendations appropriate for your goals. The plan is then implemented with what we feel are the highest quality and best priced asset classes, securities and funds with the right amount of expected volatility to help you reach your goals.
Independence and Maximizing Your Resources
We offer resources and services from a wide range of providers. We can recommend any broker, any mutual fund, any etf, any individual security, any insurance policy from any term or disability life insurance company, any annuity, or any investment. This ensures that our clients get the investments we believe are the very best for them and not those that are the most profitable to the person selling them. We receive no remuneration from anyone but you and so we are free to exercise our best judgement and recommend the very best mutual funds, etfs, securities, insurance policies and other investments without hurting ourselves economically. This is something that captive brokers, captive insurance salesmen, captive mutual fund or etf salesmen and companies simply cannot do. We believe that no one can act in your best interest as easily and as conflict free as we can.
The Benefit of Being Fee-Only Fiduciary
As a fee only advisor, the only compensation we receive for investment advice is directly from you. We receive no compensation from commissions, revenue sharing agreements with mutual funds (i.e. kickbacks from the mutual fund company from steering your business their way), and we do not charge for financial planning for those with an ongoing investment advisory agreement. This distinguishes us from fee based advisors who earn both an advisory fee and a commission or kick back on products they sell and financial planning services they provide.
We believe that we could not effectively be your personal wealth guardian and advocate if we benefitted from the products we recommended. Since investments are so important we think you should have the complete loyalty of your personal wealth guardian.
Focus on the Relationship
We strive to help our clients achieve many of their life-long goals. We do so, in part, by only accepting clients who are committed to a mutually beneficial long-term relationship.