In the News

Vance Barse, founder of Your Dedicated Fiduciary®, noted, “When we look at common planning gaps, we really need to start with the basics. Core financial literacy is not even taught in this country. Clients often don’t know what time value of money is, or the value of compound interest, or even the fundamental differences between stocks and bonds — let alone what their broader financial picture is.”

Helping other financial advisors understand monetary policy, the Federal Reserve, and inflation is commonplace for Vance Barse, founder of Your Dedicated Fiduciary, who describes the Fed’s current rate-hike cycle as in its “eighth or ninth inning, but innings can take a lot longer than you think.”

“The age-old adage is that the Fed hikes until something breaks, and the one thing that hasn’t broken yet is core inflation ex-housing, which the Fed claims is its core metric,” Barse said.

While the wealthiest Americans may have an array of advisors and tools to help them with portfolio management, many still follow the most basic tried-and-true investing advice: Invest in what you know.

“A lot of ultrahigh-net-worth investors are fans of Warren Buffett and like the idea of buying stocks of companies whose products they use consistently,” said Vance Barse, financial advisor at Your Dedicated Fiduciary. “It’s very common for them to ask for our insight on those names,” he added.

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Barse said that prudent financial planning starts and ends with the tax bill in mind. “Many of the CPAs out there are reactive tax filers, not strategic tax planners, and it really takes some expertise to understand which of the two you have in the tax world,” he said.

According to Barse, “Ultimately, the problem with thinking about tax season around tax filing deadline is that the real tax season for the current year is an all-year process.” October 1 through December 31 are the times when most advisors need to be making the proper tactical moves to ensure the best outcomes for their clients. “By the time we’re in tax filing season, for the previous year, many of the tax alleviation and tax reduction strategies for which a financial planning client is eligible are often off the table,” Barse said.

Barse said the historically high inflation has become a “regressive tax” that makes states with lower tax rates even more attractive.

“For many, the tax savings offered by a zero-state income tax state like Texas not only helps offset higher goods and labor costs, it can also be beneficial for employees given that there’s no state income tax,” he said.

“I think the 24-hour news reel on the banking crisis has served as great fodder for the masses to live in their amygdala function, which has resulted in a lot of panic calls because it reminds people of the fear that was so rife throughout the 2008 crisis,” Barse said, referencing the part of the nervous system that handles responses to threats and fear.

“It’s prudent to proceed with caution and really understand what’s in a portfolio and what due diligence and risk management measures should be employed, because we’re living in a world where monetary policy seems to change by the minute,” he added. He advises that individuals set emotions aside and look analytically at the situation and how it is different from 2008, not least because there is not as much leverage in the market.

“I just think that the playbook needs to be updated, both at the Fed and also with respect to stewards of capital and self-directed investors,” Barse added. He labels the lens through which those entities viewed markets and the economy from 2009 through 2021 as “the old playbook.”

According to Your Dedicated Fiduciary wealth strategist and founder Vance Barse, CPWA®, AIF®, many applicants aren’t even covering the basics of spellchecking and formatting their resumes.

Barse said, “It is mindboggling to me how many resumes I have received that have spelling and grammatical errors on them and that have inconsistent formatting. I’m not looking for a Monet here. I’m simply looking for something that is capable of being read and analyzed in a pretty efficient way.”

Vance Barse is the founder of Your Dedicated Fiduciary, an investment advisor firm based in San Diego, Calif., that has made centering women a bedrock of its practice: two-thirds of its clients are female-headed households.

In a conversation with Barron’s Penta, Barse says that if women aren’t part of the financial-planning conversation already, they should be. And if they lose their spouse before that can happen, they should be deliberate, not hasty, in finding a trusted advisor.

No one wants to think about losing a spouse, but it will happen at some point—and as all the statistics show, it’s far more likely for a woman to outlive her male partner. That’s why Barse tries to center female-headed households in his business model, but also why it’s wise for couples to make sure the wife has a say in the family finances before she’s all alone.

Vance Barse, wealth strategist and founder of Your Dedicated Fiduciary in San Diego, said his phone has been ringing off the hook with clients who have two basic questions.

“Across the board, first they want to know about the solvency of the banking system and whether they need to be pulling money out of banks, and second they want to know what idiosyncratic event happened that put SVB in that position, what the administration’s response was, and whether that was appropriate,” he said, referring to Silicon Valley Bank, one of two banks that were recently taken over by federal authorities.

Barse at Your Dedicated Fiduciary has been recommending laddering Treasuries since the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates early last year. He stacks three-month, six-month, and 12-month notes to allow a degree of flexibility as interest rates change. “So our clients aren’t new to the concept of T-bills,” he said.

But could the bank failures cause the Fed to stop raising rates, or even to lower them? At this point, Barse isn’t necessarily recommending clients move more assets into Treasurys. “That has to be evaluated on a client-by-client basis,” he said.