Short Answer:
Your portfolio will be custodied at Charles Schwab Institutional and we cannot take money.    Schwab has implemented safeguards to protect you and your financial assets.  Only you have authorization to pull or transfer money out of your account.  Any money leaving your account will only be sent directly to your address of record and in your name.  They will only let you change your address with written consent.  The institutional services team will verifies your signature to the one they have on file.  We cannot take possession of cash or securities in any form at any time.

Long Answer:
With that said let’s get into it a little further.  The first thing to understand is you will have a “Private Investment Account” or sometimes referred to as a “Private Managed Account.”  The significance to this is when an investor opens an account the account is held with a major independent custodian.  So the investor gets statements directly from that custodian who is not affiliated with our firm in any way.

There are a lot of reasons why this is important.  In the past few years there have been a lot of major investment scandals that have been brought to the knowledge of the public.  Some of these scandals cost investors billions of dollars.  In those circumstances investors were dealing with private funds.  An example of a private fund would be a “Hedge Fund” mainly.  In the hedge fund world there is not nearly as much regulation as there is in the private investment account world.  When we look back at those firms and why some of those problems existed and why so many people lost their money, we first have to look at what kind of accounts they were.  They were loosely regulated, pooled dollars, and the clients investment statements were generated by the same firm managing the money.  These were all warning signs that looking back the regulators should have been paying more attention to what shady firms were doing.

With this said it is really important for people to understand that our accounts are Private Accounts and that the custodian of those accounts is Charles Schwab.  Which is a well known custodian.  We are able to manage those accounts using a third party investment authorization form.  We are simply given the authorization from our clients who own a private account to be able to manage their account using our methodology.

The last point to note here is that our portfolios are fee-only.  That means we have a fiduciary obligation to our clients interests first above our firms.  This is important because someone who is fee based or commission based does not have that same fiduciary obligation.  This also means we are transparent.  We don’t get any kick back from any company for using them.  The only compensation we get are what we charge and there is nothing more than that.