Fee-Only Investment Management, Fiduciary RIA
Tax-aware, fee-only fiduciary investment management for HNW families with $1M+ portfolios. Independent RIA — Annapolis MD, virtual nationwide.
We manage portfolios to fund a household's spending for thirty or more years, not to beat a benchmark this quarter. The distinction matters. A retirement portfolio has a job: deliver cash on schedule, in every kind of market, without handing more than necessary to the IRS along the way.
Compound Advisory is a fee-only fiduciary Registered Investment Adviser. We earn one transparent advisory fee. No commissions, no proprietary funds, no revenue from anyone but the client. Assets are held at independent custodians, Altruist and Charles Schwab, in accounts titled in your name.
What follows is the actual work: how we allocate, where each asset lives for tax purposes, how losses get harvested without tripping the wash-sale rule, and what we deliberately refuse to do.
Evidence-based allocation
Decades of market data support a few unglamorous conclusions. Diversification across thousands of securities beats concentration in a handful. Costs compound against you with the same force returns compound for you. And nobody reliably times markets, including the professionals paid to try. We build globally diversified portfolios around those conclusions instead of around forecasts.
Risk is set by the plan, not by a questionnaire score. A household whose near-term spending is covered by 12 to 36 months of reserves and a funded income floor can carry equity risk through a bad market without selling into it. That is the practical link between our income planning work and the portfolio: the allocation is an output of the cash-flow plan.
The hardest part of investing is not selection. It is staying invested through the stretches that feel unbearable, because the market's strongest days tend to cluster inside its worst periods. Part of our job is standing between the plan and the impulse to abandon it.
Sources: SEC Investor.gov: Asset allocation
Asset location: the same portfolio, arranged to pay less tax
Asset allocation decides what you own. Asset location decides where each piece lives among taxable, tax-deferred, and Roth accounts. The same holdings, arranged differently, can produce meaningfully different after-tax outcomes with identical market risk.
The general pattern: assets that throw off ordinary income, such as taxable bonds, belong in tax-deferred accounts, where the income is sheltered until withdrawal. Broad stock index funds sit well in taxable accounts, where qualified dividends and long-term gains are taxed at preferential rates and heirs may receive a step-up in basis. The highest expected-growth assets go to Roth accounts, where qualified withdrawals escape federal income tax and no distributions are required during the owner's lifetime. Municipal bonds enter taxable accounts only when the household's bracket actually justifies them.
Location is a quiet, mechanical edge. It requires managing the household as one portfolio across every account, rather than running each account as its own pie chart, which is exactly what most households and many advisors do.
Sources: IRS: Retirement plan and IRA required minimum distribution FAQs
Tax-loss harvesting and the wash-sale rule
Markets hand every long-term investor temporary losses. Harvesting converts them into tax assets: we sell a position below its cost basis, book the loss, and immediately buy a similar but not substantially identical fund, so the portfolio never leaves the market. Realized losses first offset realized gains without limit, then up to $3,000 of ordinary income per year for most filers, and anything left carries forward.
The wash-sale rule is the tripwire. Buy the same or a substantially identical security within 30 days before or after the sale and the loss is disallowed. The window reaches across your accounts, including IRAs, and your spouse's accounts. This is where do-it-yourself harvesting usually fails: an automatic dividend reinvestment, or a purchase of the same fund inside an IRA, quietly voids the loss. We manage the household's accounts as one system so harvests actually stick.
Honest caveat: harvesting defers tax more often than it eliminates it, because the replacement fund carries a lower basis. Deferral still has real value, and losses banked against ordinary income or a future high-gain year, such as a business sale, could potentially be worth considerably more. We harvest opportunistically all year, not in a December scramble.
Sources: IRS Publication 550: Investment income and expenses · IRS Topic 409: Capital gains and losses
Low cost, rebalanced with discipline
Implementation is deliberately boring: broad index funds and ETFs with expense ratios measured in hundredths of a percent. Every basis point of fund cost is a basis point of return the household never sees, compounded for decades. We hold nothing that pays us and nothing we cannot explain in two sentences.
Rebalancing runs on bands, not on the calendar and not on feelings. When an asset class drifts past its band, we bring it back, which mechanically trims what has run up and adds to what has fallen. We execute with new cash, dividends, and trades inside tax-advantaged accounts first, so rebalancing rarely forces taxable gains. Rebalancing is risk control. It is not a promise of higher returns, and in a long bull market it will feel like a mistake. That is what discipline feels like.
Independent custody at Altruist and Charles Schwab
Client assets are held at independent third-party custodians, Altruist and Charles Schwab, in accounts titled in your name. We never take possession of client funds. Our authority is limited to managing the account and deducting the advisory fee under an agreement you sign, and you can see every position, every trade, and every fee at the custodian at any time.
Statements and tax forms come to you directly from the custodian, not from us. That separation is a structural safeguard: the firm reporting your balances is not the firm being paid to manage them. It is the arrangement we would demand for our own families, so it is the only one we use.
What we do not do
No proprietary products. No commissions. No revenue sharing from fund companies. No annuity or insurance sales. No market-timing calls, no hot stock tips, no promises about performance. If an idea depends on predicting the next twelve months, we do not run it.
This list is the point of the fee-only model. When a firm can only be paid by the client, every recommendation has one test left: does it help the household. That test does not make us right about everything. It does remove the reasons most financial advice goes wrong.
Related Reading
Frequently Asked Questions
Is investment management separate from financial planning?
No. The portfolio implements the plan. Withdrawal sequencing, Roth conversion capacity, and Social Security timing all change what the portfolio should hold and where it should hold it. We do not run money without the plan attached, because the plan is where most of the after-tax value comes from.
What does investment management cost?
We are fee-only. The firm charges a transparent annual advisory fee and earns nothing else: no commissions, no product compensation, no revenue sharing. Underlying fund expenses are kept deliberately low and are disclosed alongside the fee. We quote the full cost in writing during the complimentary Retirement Clarity Assessment.
Can you manage my 401(k) or other workplace accounts?
We advise on them as part of the one-household portfolio: allocation, fund selection from the plan menu, and coordination with the accounts we manage directly. Where a plan permits direct management, we evaluate it case by case. Either way, workplace accounts are included in the asset location and rebalancing math.
Do you use individual stocks?
Broad, low-cost funds carry the core of every portfolio. Individual positions usually enter the picture as inherited or legacy holdings with large embedded gains, and we manage those with tax care rather than liquidating on day one. Where position-level tax management justifies it, we use direct indexing.
What happens to my current investments if I move to Compound Advisory?
Most accounts transfer in kind to Altruist or Charles Schwab, meaning positions move without being sold. We then review every holding for cost basis, embedded gains, and fit before recommending changes. Nothing is liquidated by default, and tax consequences are modeled before any sale.