FAQ: Integrated Investment

Kerr Financial is a fee only advisor, meaning that the only person who pays us is our client.  We do not receive any other form of compensation in the way of commissions or trailers.  We therefore provide objective advice, free from pre- conceived biases.  We have a fiduciary responsibility to act in our clients' best interests.

We have developed a sound- customized multi-manager approach to investment management built on many years of experience with high net worth and family office client portfolio management which gives you access to world class managers that combine to complement risk adjusted returns.  We have depth of tax and financial planning knowledge and can bring this to your portfolio to ensure its most tax effective management.  And we are a small boutique firm so we can provide you a highly customized approach and you will work with the same small team of advisors who know all aspects of your financial situation.

Having full knowledge of your family net worth and having done projections to understand your spending or savings targets, we are well positioned to help you make decisions about your ongoing income needs - Can you afford to give your kids a gift of capital?  Can you make a major charitable donation - and how should you do this most tax effectively?  Do you need to downsize the house in retirement and, if so, what can you afford as a replacement?  How much can you withdraw regularly from the portfolio while still preserving sufficient capital?  And, we can help you identify financial priorities and opportunities as they arise with changing circumstances, tax and economic environments.

Like  other firms we look at your portfolio at year end to see if we should harvest tax losses to offset gains realized in the year.  And we look at how to most tax effectively hold different asset classes between different family accounts depending on the tax attributes of each account.  But with a greater knowledge of your tax situation we can go further.  We identify the benefit of realizing losses to carry back to shelter capital gains realized in previous years.  We harvest additional taxable income in years that it will help to utilize medical or charitable tax credits.  We put in place appropriate income splitting strategies to lower your overall family tax bill.  And we are attuned to the tax attributes of all aspects of your portfolio.

Kerr’s process is customized to your individual needs and informed by deep knowledge of financial planning and tax provided by a team of highly accredited individuals working together. Kerr uses an institutional due diligence process to select and monitor managers which gives you co-ordinated access to world class managers that pair well together to optimize risk adjusted returns. With our diversified professional team, we ensure that your investment strategy is well integrated with your family’s overall tax and planning situation to help optimize your overall financial resources.

The main benefit of our integrated service is the confidence it provides you of having your financial affairs looked after by one small team of professionals working closely together.  We ensure that your tax and investment strategies are aligned - and you have one point of contact with professionals that know your overall situation.  Specifically, the integrated service has a number of benefits. It allows ongoing financial planning that takes into account the full knowledge of your financial goals and resources; it allows us to ensure that your assets are most tax-effectively structured and managed; it ensures that you are selecting and managing the best investment professionals to meet your needs; and it helps facilitate the completion of accurate tax returns with minimal hassle on your part as many of the tax slips and information is already close at hand.