Individuals & Families
"Whoever is handling your money, you need someone else to audit your money…. You need to get an opinion from someone with no agenda, and most people around athletes have an agenda."
- Martina Navratilova’s financial advice to other athletes
The world of personal finance has become very risky. It has been reported that investors in the U.S. lose more than $40 billion annually to fraud. Everyone is familiar with stories of individuals who were victimized by fraud over the past few years; thousands fell victim to Bernie Madoff and Allan Stanford in high profile Ponzi schemes. But thousands more have been victimized by scammers, cybercrime, trusted advisers and business associates. You don’t hear about most fraud because it isn’t reported. The real numbers are significant and are not diminishing. And fraud isn’t the only risk to your wealth.
Wealth-Check for Individuals and Families
If you don’t know the personal financial risks you face, you don’t know if you are taking prudent steps to mitigate those risks. Wealth-Check is our proprietary risk assessment methodology for identifying and assessing the significance of the risks you face. Using our observations, we provide education about identified risks, their potential consequences and prudent steps you can take to minimize your chances of a major loss. You can use this information as a baseline for monitoring your risks and finances going forward; or if you don’t have the time or desire to do it yourself, we can monitor your financial affairs on an ongoing basis.
You may think that your financial advisory firm or financial manager is looking out for these risks. But their decisions, business processes or people may actually be the source of the risk, whether through incompetence, mismanagement or intentional acts. Fundamentally, in any situation, it isn’t wise to have the people handling your money audit their own decisions, operations and controls.
FirstRule’s independence means that we can assess the risks in your financial affairs without being influenced by a real, or potential, conflict with your interests. We aren’t interested in doing your financial management or managing your investments. We’re just interested in assisting you to minimize the risks of suffering a major loss.