Approach
The Saecula Wealth Difference
Endurance-Based Investing.
Instead of dismissing our clients’ concerns about markets and the nature of our economy, we sought to find solutions. The answer we’ve found is seeking to investment in a manner that can endure all outcomes. We know storms will come, but we want to be humble and not predict the weather day to day. Read our investment philosophy below to learn more.
Family Flourishment.
We seek to find the real, deeper purpose behind the plans we create. The goals we define in the plan aren’t the real purpose. Retirement, education, buying a home. These are not ends. Beneath them is some richer and deeper purpose. While only you can truly define purpose and values, we’re here to help you unearth them and ensure every decisions is filtered through that lens.
Focus on Advice.
Our only service, ultimately, is advice. Obviously, that doesn’t mean perfect and all knowing or not colored with our beliefs. However, we do try to do that without conflict and anchored in our core values. Having thought deeply on the impediments to delivering quality advice, we think there’s two key structural issues that the standard way of delivering advice faces:
Building a business versus a practice. Advisory businesses cater to customer wants. Our practice orients towards your needs.
A practice doesn’t grow and scale the same way as a business. To provide the quality we seek, our capacity is limited. The calling to service and toward mastery of craft has to be higher than the calling to commercial success alone.
We don’t look to ‘win’ customers; we strive to earn clients. The sales pitch must give way to deep education and empowerment.
Alignment. Our practice is an extension of what we do for our own family. Our advice is aligned with our personal actions.
Intentionality & Focus. Time and resources are scarce, and the clients who entrust us deserve a singular focus on our shared mission. To attempt to be all things to all people would only dilute the quality we seek to deliver.
Compensation structures matter. No compensation structure is perfect, but we believe the flat fee structure is the least conflicted, most transparent, and fairest form.
Should you pay off your mortgage early? Should you sell your business? Should you purchase physical gold? Our compensation is not beholden to the recommendations we make; you pay us to give the best advice we can.
The size of your assets might be a good proxy for the complexity of your situation, but why use a proxy at all? We aim to charge a fair and transparent fee based upon the complexity of your situation and the time required.
Investment Philosophy
The inflationary nature of our present monetary system has thrust us unwittingly into the role of investor in order to protect and enhance the real value of our savings over time.
Modern investment orthodoxy is hyper-optimized to recent history which breeds fragility. Even within that narrow view of history, orthodox approaches underplay the path dependent nature of investing and the inability to rely merely on 'the average' of returns.
We must invest, and yet, the modern tools leave us ill-equipped to do so.
Modern investing is an implicit and certain bet on the future resembling the recent past. While we do not discount that possibility, our deference to the cycles of history suggests an over-reliance on the methods and means of modern finance invites ruinous outcomes over timescales that matter to individuals and families that must preserve and grow their savings.
The true substance of one's investments must become the focus -- real claims over abstractions; economic value over financial value.
This is not about betting against human ingenuity and progress or betting on the end of the world. We reject entirely the idea of predicting an unknowable future; we believe in being prepared in order to endure.
This is also not about extreme conservatism. We define our approach as one of prudence. We believe prudence demands that you cannot grow what you have not first protected. However, prudence does not merely protect. It also creates flexibility, optionality. It allows you to be responsive not just to the obvious perils before us, but the opportunities that always exist.
Our investors do not seek to outperform or compare themselves to an arbitrary index; they seek to outlast – outlast fads and strategies of the moment, outlast fragile systems. We trade the endless flavors of the week for timeless principles. Being humble, patient, and resilient to whatever the future may hold.