January 15, 2019

Why we're here.

Everyone knows you should spend more time on your finances, but when you have a busy job, a bustling family, and a million things on your to do list, it hardly ever seems top of mind. That’s why we’re here: to turn a stressful, nagging, always-in-the-back-of-your-mind-but-too-time-consuming-to-bother-with fact of life into something you can put on autopilot and rest easy at night on.

I’ve always been a geek about personal finance. My fixation with saving probably started when I tried to sell dirt from my backyard to save up for a Nintendo 64, and when my parents took our family on a Caribbean cruise in college, I sat by the pool and engulfed The Intelligent Investor while they were sipping Mai Tais. But if I look at how I’ve put everything I know into practice over the past decade, I see that I’ve left too much money in cash at low-yielding banks, I didn’t take full advantage of tax-sheltered accounts, I don’t rebalance my investments as often as I should, and I took years to refinance my student loans.

Clearly, I’ve failed at some fairly fundamental aspects of financial management, and I love this stuff!

From what I could see while responsible for 30,000 client accounts, I’m far from alone. Decisions like whether to pay down debt or save for retirement, what type of account to save into, or how to invest for buying a house in a few years are often made ad hoc. Even when folks do seek advice, they’re likely to be taken advantage of by brokers with no fiduciary obligation to them, to pay for a relationship rather than performance, and to end up at the bottom of an advisor’s to-do list because they’re already a won client or their assets aren’t worth spending time to keep – or both.

That's why we we're here working on Farther: to simplify and enhance wealth management.

Finance. Simplified.

Our aspiration is to do the heavy lifting of personal finance, so you can focus on what you love. More personally, we’re building the solution we wish existed for our own financial lives. Hopefully, what works for us will work for you too.

We’re starting off with the basics: cash management and investment management or, more simply put, making sure your cash is working for you in a well-diversified portfolio. The less cash sitting around collecting 0.nothing percent in checking accounts, the better, and if it’s going to be in the market, we’re going to make sure it’s in low-cost, diversified, risk-appropriate, tax-efficient portfolios. There’s lots more down the pipe, but we want to get the fundamentals right first.

We’d like to use this blog to keep you up-to-date on our progress building a different type of personal finance company. We’ll post here about what we’re working on, the decisions we’re making, what we’re thinking of building next, and of course some thoughts on how to improve your financial life. This is meant to be focused on the company and community we hope to build.

I mention community, because the most important reason we’re putting this up is to seek advice from you, (hopefully) our clients. We want to know what problems you have staying on top of your finances and what we could do to make your financial life a little bit simpler. Let us hear your thoughts, so together, we can go a little bit farther.