We charge an hourly fee and our rates vary depending upon services offered. For more detailed information about our pricing click here. All engagements will begin with a complimentary introductory meeting. Here  we will discuss your areas of concern and what you are looking to accomplish, in doing so we’ll see if we are a good match for each other. If we do enter into a working agreement and you employ our services you will receive an estimate of the total fee  you should expect to be charged for our engagement.

We are a fee only financial planning firm. This means we only get paid for the financial services we perform for you. For investment management we charge .75% per year of assets under management. You do not need to have assets under management for us to be your financial planner. Investments, although a major component, are just one area of financial planning.

Pensinger Financial does not receive commissions of any kind, whatsoever. Nothing we do for you will generate a commission or bonus for an individual or the company at all. This way we’re not encouraged to put you into something you don’t need because we stand to profit from it.

Our ideal client is any person willing to learn to the proper way to invest for a secure financial future.

All of your securities and assets are held in custody at Shareholders Service Group. A custodian holds customers’ securities and assets for safe keeping, thus minimizing the risk of theft or loss. In doing so, your money is given an extra layer of protection because Pensinger Financial does not physically hold onto your money, rather, Pensinger Financial is authorized by you to manage your assets at the custodian.

In addition to holding securities, custodians handle account administration, transaction settlements, collection of dividends and interest payments, tax support, and foreign exchange, amongst many other responsibilities. Please note: keeping assets safe with a custodian does NOT prevent partial or complete loss of principal.  Your assets are offered an additional layer of protection because Shareholders Service Group clears your transactions through Pershing, LLC. Pershing, LLC is a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (SIPC).

Information about Shareholders Service Group can be found here and information about your account protection can be found here. Information about Pershing, LLC can be found here. Lastly, additional information about SIPC can be found here.

RIA stands for Registered Investment Advisor. Pensinger Financial is proud to be an RIA. Because we are an RIA, federal and state law requires us to be held to a fiduciary standard, therefore, we are legally and ethically required to act solely in the best interest of our clients at all times and to put the needs of our clients first above our own at all times.

Also, as an RIA we must disclose any conflict or potential conflicts prior to and during the business engagement, we must fully disclose how we are compensated and we are paid only for advice and to manage assets as we never accept compensation for any investment products offered to you, lastly we must adopt a Code of Ethics.

In short, as an investment advisory firm, we have a fiduciary duty to our clients, that means we have a fundamental obligation to provide suitable investment advice and to always act in your best interests. We will only engage our clients under this professional structure because it is safer and fairer to both parties.

We’re not the right financial planning firm for everybody, but we’re OK with that. You should choose Pensinger Financial for these reasons: because you trust us, because you feel that we can have a good working relationship together, and because you know we will put your interests first, and our interests second.

If you don’t feel this way about us, that’s fine, hopefully some day we’ll be able to earn your trust. This is why we encourage us to meet, even if you are just kicking around the idea of working with a financial planner. We also want to know if we are a good fit with each other so that we will work well together, accomplish your goals and objectives together, and in time become prosperous together. If you don’t choose us, please make sure you have this same relationship with the financial planner you ultimately choose and make sure that s/he is held to a fiduciary standard, as well.

No!  Don’t get caught in this trap.  Sometimes fee-based planners are salesmen disguised as financial planners. They will advertise their services can be purchased for a fee, but most often they fail to tell you they will be additionally compensated by selling you various products and investments. Therefore, they won’t have your best interests in mind as they can be persuaded to sell you inferior products which ultimately gets them paid in the form of commissions.

Fee-only financial planners won’t sell you any financial products, so you won’t get biased investment advice nor advice that is not truly in your best interest. Please keep in mind there are still plenty of fee-based advisors out there who do wonderful things for their clients.

An index fund is a mutual fund designed to match the components of a market index. Probably the most well known example would be an index fund that is designed to track the performance of S&P 500 Index. Generally, index funds provide broad market exposure (thus reducing risk), low operating expenses (thus reducing fees) and low portfolio turnover (thus reducing the impact of taxes).  In short, the saying “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” is perfect here.

Investing in an index fund is a form of passive investing, which is opposite to active investing. With active investing you are paying more for an opportunity to make more than what an index would give you. Often times, if the active fund does make more than a comparable passive fund that ‘bonus’ is lost out to management and operating fees; so in the end, you are just paying more for the same product. In the long run, indexing has been successful in outperforming most actively managed mutual funds.

We define the long run as several years, even decades. Younger people, those that are just entering the work force or have been working for a few years, or are just starting a family and consider college or retirement to be very far off, should be invested and financially planning for the long run right now.

If you are exiting the work force and retiring or maybe you are getting close to collecting Social Security Retirement benefits then you still might have a long run horizon for your investment needs. On the surface, you might not realize that you probably still need a good amount of stock ownership now to outpace inflation (the loss of purchasing power – a dollar today doesn’t buy the same as a dollar tomorrow) and the rising costs of health care if you expect to live several years into retirement.

If you consider the long run to be six months then your and our investment interests do not align and we would not make a good fit with each other. Can we plan for you over a six month time horizon? Of course, and we still encourage you to contact us, but we won’t be putting you into any equity investments because it would be far too risky given your short time frame.

In actuality, a six month time horizon is a very important part of financial planning. Your emergency fund should cover your living expenses for at least six months. Do you have an emergency fund? Do you know what are your living expenses for six months? These are all very basic, but very important components of financial planning, which are covered in depth at Pensinger Financial.

“No. I am not a stock picker. In fact, I’m bad at it (just like everyone else*), so I prefer to essentially do the opposite of it and, instead, own a bunch of different stocks – this is what indexing is all about – owing a piece of ‘every’ stock so as to minimize the risk of putting all of your eggs in one basket (one stock) and losing everything on a dud of a stock. Yes, you’ll miss out on hitting a home run, but you’ll also miss out on completely striking out (and losing everything).” -Michael Pensinger

*Researchers Laurent Barras, Olivier Scaillet, and Russel Wermers studied the performance of 2,076 mutual funds from 1975 to 2006.  Their findings showed no real proof of any stock picking ability; of the 0.6% of managers that did outperform their test, they were statistically indistinguishable from zero, or, in other words, just lucky. The article can be read here.

 As often as you need. Many of the bigger firms get you in the door, get a hold of your money, and then look to not spend any more time with you so that they can focus on getting the next person in the door. A benefit of being a small and new firm is that Pensinger Financial is very flexible to its clients’ needs. It isn’t overwhelmed with too many clients and it isn’t concerned with only concentrating on the special clients (the ones that bring in the most money). Each and every client deserves and will get first class attention.

Different clients will have different needs, of course, and some will have more needs than others. But we always encourage you to give us a call or shoot us an email whenever something comes up, no matter how small. An open and frequent dialogue between you and us will greatly increase the likelihood of you achieving your goals and objectives.