YOUR ADVISOR
Alex Zazubec is the founder and managing member of Highland Wealth Advisory LLC and the firm’s sole owner and advisor. He formed the company in 2010 after half a dozen years in financial services, mainly as a financial advisor at global giant, UBS Financial Services, where he received substantial training in economics, markets, portfolio development and, in particular, financial planning.
Prior to launching his career in financial services, Alex worked as a product development and marketing manager at Xerox Corporation.
Alex also is active in the community. He is a board member and president of the Foundation for Practical Philosophy, Inc., a non-profit adult education organization. He started there in 1991 and has been an instructor since 1992. In 2014, he re-organized the foundation as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit.
In addition, Alex is a long-time volunteer at the Advent House, a hospice in Fairport, New York
Alex has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Rochester.
He has three adult children and lives with his partner, Janet, in a home that borders Highland Park in Rochester, New York.
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OUR PHILOSOPHY
We are dedicated to helping you reach your life and financial goals by guiding you toward the most effective ways to invest your wealth.
We put our client’s interests first, and, indeed, as a fiduciary, that’s a legal requirement. Our motivation, however, is not to narrowly comply with the law, but to serve you in a personal way that helps you feel secure about your future.
This approach has a number of practical implications upon the services we provide:
- We are fee-based—sometimes called “fee-only”—meaning our compensation is exclusively from you—our clients—for services we perform for you. We get no compensation or commission from any transactions we make, so we are under no external influence to make specific investments. That helps keep our investment advice independent and unbiased.
- With very few exceptions, we create and maintain a financial plan for all of our clients. Why? Because investing without a plan is like navigating in the dark, and we want to shine a light on your path to the future. You’ll get a better result when a regularly updated financial plan serves as the foundation for your investment decisions.
- We focus on providing the services in the areas our investment advice will have the most impact. For individuals and families, those are financial planning and investment management. In the areas of taxes, insurance, and estate planning we work with your other professional advisors to optimize your financial plan.
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OUR PROCESS
When you decide to work with the Highland Wealth Advisory, we follow a defined process of best practices that have been proven to help people reach their financial goals. The basic steps in our process are:
1. Prepare for our initial planning meeting
Gather relevant financial documents to bring to our meeting, including your:
- Annual after-tax spending summary
- Latest bank statements
- Most recent Social Security statements
- Annuity statements and prospectus
- Most recent state and federal tax returns
- Insurance policies, including long-term care and health insurance
- Wills, power of attorney and healthcare proxy
- Employer retirement account statements
- Employer benefits summary
- Estimated inheritances
- Trust account statements
- Real estate values
- Mortgages with balances, interest rate and payment
- Long-term debt summary
- Other relevant information
2. Initial meeting
We discuss your life goals, including financing higher education, weddings, real estate, major remodeling, retirement, travel and other aspirations. We will also ask about potential financial risks, such as health issues, which may impact the duration of your plan. And we gauge your aversion to risk.
3. Develop the plan
We use the information gathered from your interview and financial documents to develop your initial financial plan. The plan begins to reveal your best investment portfolio and Social Security strategies, ideal ages to retire, and most importantly, your standard of living in retirement.
4. Plan review
This is a two-step process. First we deliver the financial plan in an in-person meeting, which often includes a discussion of various “what-if” scenarios. Based on that initial review, we optimize the plan to match your goals, selecting a portfolio allocation and establishing your Social Security strategy. The plan is formulated using Monte Carlo statistical analysis, which calculates the level of confidence you can have that the plan will meet your goals.
5. Invest
When you are satisfied with your financial plan, we make investments based upon your asset allocation, choosing the best performing funds in each of the asset classes.
6. Review
We review your investment performance with you at regular meetings, typically quarterly, updating your financial plan as necessary. Between meetings, we actively monitor your funds and adjust your investments in response to the performance of your funds and to changes in the financial landscape.
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OUR TOOLS
Charles Schwab & Company, Inc. is our custodian of choice, so that’s where your assets are held. We chose Charles Schwab because they provide a comprehensive set of high-quality investment options at some of the lowest costs in the industry and are supported by a solid research team that is available to answer your (and our) questions. Not coincidentally, this is also why they are one of the most popular choices for independent Registered Investment Advisors (RIA)
Your Charles Schwab accounts have a secure log in, and you can access them either directly or through the client portal in the menu at the top of the page.
Morningstar is our main source of research data for determining where to make your investments. They are one of the leading providers of independent investment research in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia, covering a wide range of investment offerings. They provide the depth of research we need to evaluate investment options and identify the best performing instruments in your target segments.
MoneyGuidePro is the software we use for building your financial plan. We chose this program because it automates many functions and calculations, while leaving plenty of room for us to account for your unique circumstances. We’re not alone in choosing this financial planning tool. According to the 2017 Financial Planning Magazine Tech Survey, MoneyGuidePro is the industry’s leading financial software planning tool.
Our own portfolio performance software is what we use to analyze your portfolio’s performance, because it includes some capabilities that aren’t available in off-the-shelf packages. A key one is that, while most portfolio performance software compare performance to a few market standards, such as the S&P 500, we compare performance to benchmarks in the same market space. That means we can have a more finely tuned view of your portfolio’s performance.
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OUR FEES
To ensure that our investment advice is unbiased and completely independent, we are paid exclusively by our clients and accept fees from no other entities. We charge two fees:
- A percentage of assets under our management
- A flat fee for developing your financial plan and a modest annual fee for maintaining it. This fee is waived for higher net-worth clients.
In the industry, this is known as “fee-based” or “fee-only” investing.
Unlike traditional brokerages, we do not receive or accept commissions or payments for investment transactions from our custodian or any other entity, nor do we receive or accept any other forms of back-door revenues. Such payments could influence—or give the perception of influencing—our investment decisions.
Moreover, as a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) firm, we are fiduciaries per the Investment Advisor Act of 1940—required to act in the best interests of you, our client, and to have no conflicts of interest with you. Of course we comply with the law, but our real motivation is that we care about our clients. And that’s something a law can’t mandate.