Intelligently integrating your life.

Intelligent + Integrations = Intelligrations®

Intelligrations® is the process of intelligently integrating financial technologies to minimize your financial stress to maximize your life. As a boutique firm serving high-net-worth individuals and families, we developed a proprietary financial software in-house to help organize our clients’ “financial junk drawers.” 

Common Problem:

First, clients often have 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. Using our Intelligrations®, we are able to organize “financial junk drawers” to minimize our clients’ financial stress.

Second, when assets are held in a 401k or 403b account with their employers’ financial institution. Managing a clients’ wholistic portfolio  including managing their 401(k), 403(b), or other retirement accounts is vital to understanding the big picture. These tools were not available to fully manage these accounts for you until recently, which can be a meaningful part of your overall portfolio. Financial advisors were not able to monitor these accounts every day, and we believe an annual static review is not enough. Using our Intelligrations®, we now have the opportunity to use innovative technology to proactively monitor, manage, and trade held-away assets.

Third, there is often 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). Our Intelligrations® help minimize taxes by assisting with tax location and properly allocating investments to the appropriate accounts.

Finally, 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 information can produce wrong behavior as individuals may want to react when markets go through scary, volatile times or exuberant times. Our Intelligrations® help align all of these risks to provide a smoother financial journey and set proper expectations with each client.

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 thirty financial and other technologies at Intelligent Investing. Our 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.

We can now proactively manage, monitor and trade your held-away assets such as 401k accounts, 403b accounts and your other retirement plan assets that may be held at another institution. Now you don’t have to wonder, should I be doing some rebalancing or making trades inside my 401(k), or wondering what your asset allocation should be inside your 401(k). Our firm is now able to make sure the entirety of your portfolio is taken care of including your 401(k), your 403(b), and other retirement accounts. This means that you will have a personalized risk number that encompasses your entire portfolio in real time (assets we are directly managing, and assets that we will manage in your held-away accounts (i.e., your 401(k), 403(b), etc…)

Intelligrations® helps us maintain a long-term perspective and prevents us from focusing on recent headlines and short-term market volatility.