Recently we introduced The Money Management Tool to help clients better organize their financial lives. The tool has lots of features and we will occasional explain how some of the features are being used by our clients (or should be used) to help them reach their financial goals.
This post will deal with a prospective client who has many accounts and struggles to keep track of how they are invested.
Situation: A prospective client couple approached us looking for help managing his investments. They had multiple investment accounts held at different institutions. And in most cases, the accounts could not be moved or consolidated.
Problem: They struggled to understand what they really owned. They thought they were diversified by owning several different funds, but in reality they owned many passive index funds that tracked the same index. Even though the fund names were different, the underlying investments were all very similar.
Solution: The Money Management Tool could be used to connect all the accounts together. After establishing the connections between the tool and their accounts, they would be able to see a total asset allocation across all their account. We were then able to work with them to adjust their allocation.