What We Do . . .

Invincibility lies in the defense; the possibility of victory in the attack.

- Sun Tzu

If what you knew to be true, turned out to be false, when would you want to know it?  Today’s complex world demands a great deal of your time.  Decisions are usually clouded in misinformation, bad advice and conflicting data.  As a successful professional or entrepreneur, your time is in high demand; making in-depth research into each financial decision, its ramifications and long-term effects a Herculean task.  Clearly, your desire is for your financial world to grow but how can you find more capital for accumulation without sacrificing your lifestyle?  Traditional planning has created an entire industry based on the notion that to make your wealth grow, you must pursue strategies that yield higher returns.  While high performing solutions are something to be sought, most involve incurring a commensurate level of risk of loss.  Planners and advisors compete for your assets by endeavoring to give you higher returns or suggest you decrease your lifestyle, freeing up capital for accumulation.  These approaches do not address the core of the problem.

The heart of the problem is not about what performance you have from your accumulation capital, but rather from capital that is lost without your knowledge. This lost capital acts like the holes on a leaky bucket.  To fill this bucket, you can either pour more water or plug the holes. These inefficiencies compound over time and as your wealth grows, they do as well.  Further, these inefficiencies generate opportunity costs – meaning you not only lose the capital but also its earning potential for the rest of your life.  Unfortunately, dealing with many of these inefficiencies takes time and expertise in learning how to deal with financial institutions and the government; who understand the rules of the game.  You have to learn as you play. We are experts on these strategies and will put you on par to play the game.

Another misconception is that the solution is finding the best financial products.  While it’s true that you need financial products to grow your wealth, like the instruments in an orchestra, they sound as good as the musician that plays them.  To be sure, it is far better to be a great virtuoso than to have the best instrument.

At Arcis, our strategic approach is to focus on recovering lost capital by identifying the inefficiencies in your financial model.  Recovering these assets is critical to the growth of your wealth.  We will then bring together your various financial processes and position them to act in concert with one another.  This eliminates conflicting strategies and redundancy.  Our objective is to tailor each plan according to the client and his or her wants, to build long-term wealth, lower the overall risk level of your financial model and enable you to fully enjoy the utility of your wealth throughout your life.  We believe that it is only after all of these have come together, can we then recommend a particular product to our clients.  We are an independent advisor and do not believe in charging planning fees or billing for our time.  As a result, we bring the most efficient and low-cost solutions to our life-long clients from a variety of providers.

Expect the best. Prepare for the worst. Capitalize on what comes.

- Zig Ziglar

Traditional financial advisors spend a great deal of their time speculating on the future growth of your wealth.  They make assumptions about market performance, future income needs, rates of inflation, rates of taxation, etc.  Typically you are charged fees for these plans that are a supposed blueprint for you to follow; with the solution being –save more.  The glaring fallacy of this type of planning is that none of the above mentioned elements remains constant.  There are unpredictable movements, sometimes abrupt and long lasting, that negate the conclusions derived in the plan. 

Another major problem in traditional planning is that it assumes that wealth grows mathematically.  Suppose you have four oranges and you eat two of them.  How many oranges do you have left?  How many do you have left after one year?  The mathematical answer is always -two- regardless of circumstance.  But in the real world, the answer depends on erosion.  After a year, even if you do not consume the remaining two oranges, they will decompose and disappear.  Money behaves like the oranges in that it too suffers from erosion.

Our wealth is constantly being eroded by  several elements.  Some of these are obvious such as taxes and inflation.  There are several others that when not accounted for, can decrease the effectiveness of your financial model.

An additional hurdle occurs when due to the great demands on your time, it is nearly impossible for you to assess the effectiveness of your advisor’s strategies until after time has passed and then, it is too late.  At Arcis, we believe the best way to advise our clients is by understanding that various elements such as market performance, future income needs, lawsuits, property and personal losses cannot be predicted.  Our planning is founded on the idea that what is constant is the milieu of eroding factors.

As part of bringing state-of –the-art planning and technology to our clients, we utilize a process called the Lifetime Economic Acceleration Process™.  This approach to planning enables us to capture the critical and fundamental facts about you.  We plot that information on a three dimensional model that unites Protection, Savings and Growth assets.  In addition, we account for the particular factors that erode your wealth. And Finally, we can assess each strategy by simulating its outcome over several years and ascertaining its effectiveness.  In this way, we can test solutions and find the most effective and adaptive strategies for you.