10 principles. A shared foundation.
The plan is not the point.
Your life is the point.
The financial plan must support:
your work
your projects
your seasons
your goals
student-loan payoff decisions
home-purchase timing and affordability
your time horizon
your tolerance for volatility
your need for freedom and flexibility
A plan is simply a tool to help you build the future you’ve chosen.
Film, TV, and theater pros can have times of both consistent and irregular income. Their plan must reflect that reality.
So plan design always considers:
cash-flow volatility
emergency reserves
project-based spending cycles
the need for liquidity
uneven earning years
Plans don’t exist in a vacuum — they exist inside the rhythm of your actual life.
Protection is the part of planning most people skip, and it’s the part that prevents financial ruin.
What I mean by protection:
Life insurance: if you die early, it replaces income and protects your family’s plan.
Disability insurance: if you cannot work, it protects your income, which is usually your biggest asset.
Health coverage planning: making sure a medical event does not become a financial catastrophe.
Auto & Liability coverage: if you hurt someone, cause damage, or get sued, liability insurance and an umbrella policy help prevent one incident from wiping out years of savings.
Property coverage (renters, homeowners, equipment): protects what you own so you are not rebuilding from zero.
The point is not to insure everything. The point is to cover the risks you cannot afford to self-insure, so your plan can survive real life and you can stay invested through it.
Important: I don’t sell insurance and I don’t earn commissions on insurance products. When insurance comes up, my job is to help you choose the right type and amount of coverage in your best interest, and coordinate implementation through the appropriate channels as needed.
I operate from a foundational belief supported by overwhelming empirical data:
Markets are broadly efficient.
Prices incorporate available information quickly and globally.
This means I don’t try to outguess the market, time the market, or chase the news cycle. The expected payoff for doing so is low, the behavioral risk is high, and the academic evidence is clear: discipline beats prediction.
Concentrated portfolios create unnecessary risk without additional expected return.
I use global diversification across:
U.S. equities
International developed equities
Emerging markets equities
A disciplined, transparent mix of high-quality fixed income
Currencies (if appropriate)
Commodities (if appropriate)
Cryptocurrency (if appropriate)
Diversification is the only free lunch in finance — it has the potential to reduce risk without reducing expected return.
Decades of independent research show that certain systematic sources of return — known as factors — have historically generated higher expected returns.
The primary factors I consider are:
Market (stocks > bonds over long horizons)
Size
Value
Momentum (cross-sectional momentum)
Profitability/Quality
Term (longer-duration bonds, when appropriate)
Alternative style premia (factors):
Trend (time-series and economic momentum)
Carry
Defensive
Merger Arbitrage
Reinsurance
Private Credit
I tilt portfolios toward factors with persistent, robust evidence in order to improve expected long-term outcomes.
High fees compound in the wrong direction. But cost doesn’t matter in a vacuum — it matters per unit of value. Every investment decision should weigh what you’re paying against what the evidence says you’re likely to receive.
I prefer:
low, transparent costs
no hidden commissions or incentive structures
simple, scalable implementation
strategies with clear, evidence-backed expectations
Cost matters because every dollar you don’t hand over in unnecessary fees stays invested for your future — and the dollars you do pay should deliver real, measurable value.
Tax management isn’t an afterthought — it’s part of the planning process.
I use:
intelligent asset location (placing tax-inefficient assets in tax-advantaged accounts)
tax-loss harvesting where appropriate
minimizing unnecessary turnover
long-term holding periods to capture favorable tax rates
Good tax strategy is worth as much as good investing.
Short-term market movements are noise.
Long-term expected returns are signal.
Everything in my approach — diversification, factor tilts, cost control, tax strategy, rebalancing — is built to serve decades, not news cycles.
When people hear retirement planning, they picture golf. But golf is not the point. The point is turning your hard-earned savings into time and optionality.
Over time, we shift from:
accumulation (saving and investing), to
distribution (using what you built to fund life)
Distribution must be strategic. It’s about deciding how much to take, from which accounts, in what order, and how to adjust when markets are rough, so you’re not forced into bad decisions.
And because life is unpredictable, we also make sure the fundamentals are set: beneficiaries, account ownership, and estate documents that keep the plan intact even if you’re not around to explain it.