Personal Wealth Management

We’re here to serve.  We have clients, not customers. In fact, we’ve worked for most of our clients for so long that they are part of our family and we are part of theirs. We’ve known many of our clients longer than we’ve known our own children. We’ve lived through the ups and downs and ins and outs of each others lives. And while we know our role and why we get paid, our clients know that we care about them. Yes, personal wealth management is what we do, but as each of us knows, money isn’t the foundation of any caring relationship.

Our client philosophy is based on our long-term view.  The best relationships evolve from time spent working together, growing together and celebrating our mutual successes.

• For nearly 40 years, the founder of Intelligent Capitalworks has been dedicated to providing personal wealth management services to help families and individuals plan to preserve, protect, grow, and transfer their wealth and develop the disciplined investment and wealth management strategies to support their plans.
• Our family has committed its capital and most of each of our life’s work to bringing together dedicated people, robust resources and best practices across our firm to serve all aspects of our clients’ needs in an effort to deliver uncompromised personal wealth management  services, exceptional client care, productive technology, and valuable financial counsel to help our clients thrive.

We’ve been at this awhile. We’ve been providing personal wealth management services, advising clients and managing their investments long enough to see the long-term results of our guidance and our investment performance. The founder and senior member of our firm was standing in the center of the S&P 500 Futures pit on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange during the historic 508-point drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average Index on Black Monday, October 19, 1987. He has managed our clients’ accounts through the last three investment bubbles, the last four recessions, the last four bear markets and more than a dozen of the last investment crises.

We start by thinking about risks. Personal wealth management begins with assessing risks. We don’t like losing money, so we think about risks (a lot of them), try to measure them and then develop strategies to minimize them. We try to avoid unrewarded risks. When we do take a risk, we are always trying to earn a reliable reward.

We want as few people between our clients and their money as possible.  Our goal is to improve our clients’ peace of mind (and our peace of mind as well) and reduce the complexity of their financial lives and the number of expense “holes” in their savings and investment buckets. This helps us keep our clients costs down and they like that.

We have learned to be patient investors. Having been at this for more than 30 years, we’ve been presented with and seen myriad investment ideas and fads in all flavors come and go, promoted by all kinds of people, many of whom were in a hurry (wolves in sheep costumes). We favor the long-term compounding of returns that comes from dividend reinvestment in dividend-paying companies.

The money we manage is long-term bedrock money that forms our clients’ financial foundations. Personal wealth management is long-term and bedrock by its nature. You may have heard many investment clichés, but for us, they have real meaning (remember, we’ve lived through the financial lives of a lot of other people). So, our eye is pretty well trained. We’ve learned to look for steak, not sizzle. And, we work to steer clear of men with big hats and no cattle.

We eat what we cook. Frankly, we do think about ourselves while we are working for our clients (sometimes we work really late). After all, we have the same needs too. So our investment ideas are just as much for our retirement plans as they are for our clients’ accounts. They come from our own self-interested thinking and independent, intellectually honest research. So we invest our own hard-earned money the same way we invest for our clients and follow our own intellectually-honest advice.