When most people evaluate a wealth advisor, they start with investment performance. While that’s intuitive, it misses the bigger picture. Our belief is that most of that value doesn’t come from picking better investments. Instead, it comes from guidance around the portfolio, such as planning, behavioral coaching and risk management.
At Ancora, advisory value is driven by planners, investment professionals and risk specialists working in close coordination. Rather than one advisor wearing many hats, clients benefit from a team of specialists working in concert. It’s a model built on the belief that the most meaningful outcomes come from disciplines that reinforce one another, not operate in silos.
What does that look like in practice? In the sections that follow, we explore three areas where we see the benefits of working with an advisor show up most clearly. Beyond returns, we see the greatest measure of an advisor’s value being found in a client’s freedom to focus on living well.
Plan With Clarity
It’s easy to describe what you want out of life in general terms – work purposefully, retire comfortably and leave something behind for the kids. But for a wealth strategy to be effective, it needs to be built around specific goals. Our first job is to close that gap, taking ‘someday’ and making it concrete enough to plan around.
That process begins with a single organizing idea: financial freedom. Early in a career, your greatest asset is your human capital – your time, expertise and effort. Financial freedom occurs when your assets become capable of sustaining your lifestyle on their own, without needing to rely on your human capital.
What you do with that freedom is entirely yours. Some people keep working as a source of identity and purpose. Others shift to philanthropy, travel or spending more time with family. Whatever financial freedom looks like for you, defining an endpoint makes it possible to build a roadmap towards it.
With that vision outlined, the questions become practical:
- What will it take to achieve financial freedom, and how long?
- How much lifestyle spending do you need to feel confident and secure?
- Does your plan require you to take more risk than you’re comfortable with?
An advisor should stress-test your plan across different return environments, spending levels and market conditions until there’s confidence in the answers. There’s a simple phrase for this process: plan your work, then work your plan. The value an advisor adds here is accountability and guidance, helping you clearly define your goals and develop a path to achieve them.
Invest With Confidence
A sound plan means little if you don’t have the conviction to follow through on it. Almost every meaningful wealth strategy requires you to take on some level of informed risk. Working with an advisor can give you the confidence needed to take those risks and stay the course when markets are turbulent.
That confidence comes from embracing three truths about how wealth actually compounds:
- Staying on the sidelines is costly. According to the Rule of 72 equation, at 7% annual returns, it would take about 10 years for money to double. At 2% in a savings account, that same doubling takes 36 years. When your goal is financial freedom, avoiding all risk can become the greatest risk of all.
- Temporary volatility is not permanent loss. Berkshire Hathaway fell by roughly 50% three separate times during Warren Buffett’s tenure, yet the company has endured as one of the most successful long-term investments in history.[1] Permanent impairment comes from concentration, panic selling and an investor being forced out of their position early. Well-constructed portfolios are designed to weather temporary volatility, not avoid it entirely.
- Uncertainty is the point. The only certainty in life is uncertainty. But that’s not a bad thing – if we knew the future, security prices would reflect that certainty, and the returns available to investors would be closer to cash. It’s precisely because the world is unpredictable that disciplined investing can generate returns exceeding the risk-free rate.
The job of an advisor isn’t just building a strong portfolio. It’s also coaching you through the difficult stretches, preventing temporary volatility from becoming permanent loss. In the end, the goal is to help you see volatility for what it is – the price of admission, not a reason to leave.
Protect What You’ve Built
Even with a sound plan and the confidence to invest, there are risks that sit outside the portfolio. An advisor’s job is to spot them before they have the chance to unravel decades of hard work.
Think of a personal trainer watching you load up the barbell. You feel strong, your routine is dialed in, but your form is slightly off. A good trainer catches that mistake before it becomes an injury.
An advisor plays a similar role, identifying the exposures you didn’t know you had. As your wealth grows, blind spots can grow alongside it. Picture a buy-sell agreement that was never formalized, an umbrella policy that hasn’t kept pace with your net worth or long-term care exposure that no one has properly modeled.
And like a trainer pushing you through a few extra reps, we think a good advisor should also hold you to the standard you’ve set for yourself. Without accountability, it’s easy to mistake ‘not urgent’ for ‘not necessary.’ Details like updating estate documents after a life change are easy to postpone indefinitely – until the day they cause problems.
None of this is glamorous. But having someone in your corner checking your blind spots may be the difference between a plan that holds up and one that doesn’t. The result: the quiet confidence to focus on living well.
Beyond the Portfolio
Everything above – planning, investing and protecting – is financially oriented. But the full value of working with an advisor should extend into life itself.
Done right, working with an advisor should allow you the freedom to stop managing complexity and start enjoying what you’ve built. And when a challenge comes up, sharing it with your Ancora team is a good place to start. Chances are, someone in the firm has the experience or the relationship to help point you in the right direction.
That’s the benefit of being part of a network built over decades, across thousands of family relationships and more than 100 professionals. The value of a network grows with its number of participants, something singular to firms of Ancora’s size and scale. When life throws you a curveball, knowing that you have a team in your corner can offer valuable peace of mind.
Planning gives you direction, confidence helps you stay invested and protection ensures the plan holds up. Thriving is what happens when all three work together, allowing you to shift from a mindset focused on solving problems to one focused on enjoying life.
[1] Warren Buffett downplays recent market volatility as ‘really nothing,’ saying it’s part of investing, CNBC Link