A financial advisor can help you with many important decisions you will need to make over your lifetime. If you do not have the time, interest, or expertise to manage your own money, we are here to help. Our clients reach out to us for help with preparing for retirement, tax and estate planning, investment management, and any other financial decisions they are faced with. We will work with you to help identify your goals and follow through on them by holding you accountable for your financial to-dos.
Yes, we are fiduciaries. This means that, when working with clients in an advisory capacity, we are legally obligated to act in your best interest. We will always put the needs of our clients before our own.
We are a team of individual financial advisors and we do business through LPL Financial. Your assets will be held at LPL, which is the largest independent broker dealer in the US. This means that we are not limited to certain investment companies when making our fund selections and we are free to choose the investments that we feel are best for your portfolio.
We aim to work with kind, down to earth people who do not have the time or do not enjoy making their own investment decisions or doing their own financial planning. You can read more about our ideal client characteristics on our website. Our clients are like family to us, and we spend a lot of time curating these relationships.
Most of our compensation is through what are called Advisory fees. This means that for all Advisory accounts, the annual Advisor fee on your account will be a percentage of the total assets that we manage for you. Our Advisory fees depend on the size and the complexity of the account and range from about 0.5% to 1.5%. If you request a brokerage account only, we receive a commission as a percentage of trades made in the account. For our project based work and financial coaching program, we charge a flat fee. You can find more details on these programs and their costs on our website.
We work as a team here at Mardin Capital Group and you will work with all of us. Most of our meetings will have two advisors in them and we collaborate behind the scenes to make sure everyone on our team knows you. When you call in, you can talk to any one of us and we will make sure your questions are answered.
We will want to meet with you at least once a year. With that being said, we are here for you as often as you would like. You can always call in with questions or to schedule a meeting about something that you would like to talk about.
LPL has a large investment research team and through our partnership with them we are able to fully utilize their analysis and stay up to date. We mostly use their recommended list of mutual funds and ETFs, but are able to use other funds if we feel they would be a better fit for your portfolio. We believe in a diversified portfolio and do not try to time the market. We do our best to discuss market conditions and volatility frequently with our clients to prepare them for the inevitable ups and downs that occur in the market.
For clients who are drawing money from their retirement accounts on a regular basis, we use our specific distribution strategy. You can read more about this strategy on our website. For clients seeking to draw money from their non-retirement accounts, we will distribute your funds in a tax-conscious manner.
Although we will talk to you with about your estate and tax plan, we are not attorneys or CPAs. We can refer you to an appropriate attorney or CPA as needed.
While we do look for tax planning opportunities within your account(s), we are not licensed to offer tax preparation. We are not CPAs and do not work on tax returns or answer major tax related questions. We can work with your CPA to make sure they have all the necessary information on your accounts with us. We will look for opportunities throughout the year for tax loss harvesting, qualified charitable distributions, and possible Roth IRA conversions. We will also take capital gains taxes into account whenever we make a trade in your non-retirement account(s).
You will have access to view all of your accounts through LPL’s Account View. You will also have access to your financial plan through our financial planning software, eMoney. To keep you informed on the market and news in the finance world, we send out a weekly market commentary to your email and post weekly to the blog on our website.
1As reported by Financial Planning magazine, June 1996-2021, based on total revenue.
