Oakland CA | Piedmont; The Higher You Climb the Mountain, the Better Your View

HI, I’m Erik Wolfers with First & Main Financial; I’m the founder and managing member. We’ve been helping clients with perfectly personalized financial the solutions for over twenty years now—with all that time comes in a tremendous amount of perspective.

I heard one of the Supreme Court Justices of the United States in an interview talk about how the harder you work, the longer you work, the higher you climb the mountain and the more you see, the better your view. This is probably true for most things. It’s definitely true for being responsible for other people’s money and investing their money and making sure that they get a good outcome.

Over all these years I’ve been marketed to thousands of times. I literally get a half a dozen emails every day with someone trying to sell me their product or presents their solution in hopes that our firm will use their solution and put more money into their product—which causes them to generate more revenue for themselves. It’s amazing to me—I get performance sheets, description sheets of the products and they always look pretty good in the way that they’ve been presented. But, then if I look at them in a third-party solution, a third-party database, they often don’t look anywhere near as good as the way they’ve been presented by the company.

A lot of the financial services industry is that way. People are out there selling something that’s designed to make them money and of course the best products are the ones that are likely to make you, the client, money—and there many of them out there, but there’s so many and there is so much information, sometimes it’s hard to get to the best ones that will be the most effective over time.

When you’re doing your own research sometimes people get connected to ideas or to people that are good writers that seem to have certain insights. In my experience, the system works the way that it is—the way that it does. There is a certain equilibrium and return and volatility are generally tied to risk. With a little bit more volatility, you are likely to get more return over time. There are some products that are more volatile where there’s an element of speculation, where you may not get more return over time and actually likely that you won’t. Some of the most famous mutual funds that were ever created had phenomenal long-term track records and I don’t know of any that have stood the test of time—or maybe there are a few out of thousands—maybe there’s a handful.

When you’re doing your own research, try to find simple solutions and try not to listen to people that have anything sensational to talk about because it’s likely that their interests are not necessarily alined with yours. Good solutions do exist, but if you don’t want to be involved in research, or questioning the choices that you’ve made, or worrying about whether inflation is coming, or if you’ve made the right decision, or whether to put more money to work, or take money out of the markets, then that’s a big part of the reason why we’re in business—it’s for our clients to move those decisions off to us who have experience and the perspective and the training and education—then they don’t have to worry about it and they can just live their best life and know they’re on a good path to keeping their life the way that they want it.

If you are looking for some financial guidance; whether for a one time financial plan or continuing advice on your investments, we invite you to meet with a First & Main Financial planner for a free consultation. We would be more than happy to sit down with you, assess your situation and review our services to help navigate your financial future.