Intelligrations™ = Intelligent + Integrations
Intelligrations™ is the process of intelligently integrating financial technologies to minimize your financial stress to maximize your life.
Common Problem:
Nearly everyone has a “financial junk drawer” filled with assets in various accounts amongst different advisors or custodians. Often, clients don’t know what they have in their junk drawers, or why investments are in various accounts. Perhaps they have an old 401k from a previous employer they don’t know what to do with. This “financial junk drawer” problem continues as we age, as we tend to complicate our lives by adding on more accounts and investments, without viewing them with a “big-picture” lens. This adds unnecessary financial stress to one’s life.
Another problem is overlap in investments or asset classes and bad tax location where these accounts have the wrong types of investments in them (i.e., tax-efficient funds in qualified (tax-efficient) accounts and tax-inefficient funds in taxable (tax-inefficient) accounts).
We take a risk assessment with prospective clients and frequently discover they are taking on the wrong amount of risk based on their willingness to take on risk. Some are taking on more risk than they are comfortable taking, and often don’t even know what risk is in their current portfolio. This lack of infirmation can produce wrong behavior as individuals may want to react when markets go through scary, volatile times or exuberant times.
Intelligrations™ Real-time Solution:
By intelligently integrating our clients’ goals, risk, and portfolio, we can have a better understanding of their financial picture and reduce their financial stress to maximize their lives.
We currently integrate over 30 financial and other technologies at Intelligent Investing. These Intelligrations™ help us be better intelligent advisors and help our clients behave better by focusing on what truly matters, ignoring the noise and siren songs that are always blaring.
Intelligrations™ Examples:
Here are a few examples of how we are currently using Intelligrations™.
Our clients’ financial plans are intelligently integrated with the assets we manage in real-time. When we assess our client’s financial plans, we can see their actual assets in real-time. This gives us a very accurate snap-shot of where they stand in relation to their goals. In addition, our clients have the ability to link their “outside assets” that we are not directly managing such as 529 plans, 401ks, HSAs, etc… into their plan in real-time. These real-time Intelligrations™ allow us to inquire and provide additional and timely advice that we otherwise may not have had knowledge about.
Our clients’ risk tolerances are intelligently integrated with their assets held at our custodian in real-time. If a client agreed to take a risk of 40 on a scale of 1-99 in their investment policy statement, then we get alerts when that risk tolerance band drifts up or down from the agreed-upon risk score. It may indicate that the client needs to have a portfolio rebalance considered.
The bottom line is Intelligrations™ helps us maintain a long-term perspective and prevents us from focusing on recent headlines and short-term market volatility.
