Located in Houston, Texas, Fitzgerald Financial Partners, LLC is a registered investment advisory firm specializing in five-year retirement income replacement planning designed to help their clients replace 100 percent of their income and finally reach retirement, through a systematic replacement platform. The company was formed in September 2006 by Michael J. Fitzgerald, who holds licenses as a CPA/PFS, CFP, and MST, and as a Fee-Only Investment Advisor Representative, “I did not want to create layers of inefficiencies as I have seen working with so many older advisors, who are afraid of technology,” he says. “I do not employ any employees and have built my model to utilize technology to solve almost every problem. I figure, it is a lot easier for me to terminate an outsource service provider than it would be to replace a key employee. Of course, as new technologies and opportunities present themselves, I can replace the older tools with new ones at a lower cost than my competition.”
STARTING ON THE RIGHT FOOT
The company was created because Fitzgerald says that he saw the problems and constraints on a multitude of CPA, financial planning, and wealth management firms focusing on pushing products and not focusing on what clients are really worried about, replacing paychecks. “His firm was fashioned to offer holistic wealth management and investment advisory services by zeroing in on replacing 100 percent of their client’s income first, then offering a systematic way to replace that income over an obtainable five-year time frame.” He says that most advisors he has come in contact with only focus on three of the eight asset classes and their similar variations: stocks, bonds, and cash. “This is not real diversification and if you are only offering limited asset classes, you are setting your client up for retirement failure and potential fiduciary issues. Once you can ensure that you can maintain your client’s current standard of living, then it is time to start focusing on obtaining market return through using exchange traded funds and using other types of investment products, such as direct participation in real estate ownership, private equity, or income producing ventures, commodities, foreign currency, and hedge funds to fully diversify the portfolio. All of these asset classes offer higher long-term returns than just using stocks, bonds, or cash, but in order to get these higher returns, you must be willing to give up some liquidity. If our clients are really investing for the long-term, liquidity should not be an issue. When building the optimal retirement portfolio, you must adopt a retirement paycheck replacement platform, similar to creating a personal pension for the clients.”
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He believes that clients should first focus, on purchasing such income-producing assets, coupled with debt financed leverage. “This will allow them to leverage up their current asset base by realistically diversifying their portfolio away from what every other retiree is focusing on, stocks, bonds, cash. This will also introduce an inflation protector, and since one of the key benefits of direct ownership of real estate is the ability to use someone else’s money to purchase income, that is adjusted each year by the appreciation in the property, as well as the yearly increase in the rental income. Most advisors are not utilizing one of their client’s greatest tools, their great credit.”
