About Purtill Financial
At Purtill Financial, we have one main focus: helping our clients achieve financial independence and financial security in retirement. Our team of four professionals specialize in security and market analysis. We strive to maximize portfolio returns for our clients' desired risk level. As fee-only advisors, we work commission-free with our clients’ best interests in mind.
Purtill Financial is a large fee-only independent registered investment advisory firm serving investment needs of clients since 2000. Our services include retirement planning, portfolio management, financial plans, and tax planning. We help to grow and protect investment assets for our clients, many of whom are executives, educators, small business owners, retirees, and young professionals.
We have more than $166 million in assets under management, an additional $38 million in assets under advisement, and serve more than 170 families. Our main office is in an office park near I- 271 in Highland Heights, Ohio, an eastern suburb of Cleveland. We also meet clients in Fort Myers Beach, Florida.
Our staff's qualifications include a Wharton MBA, two Certified Public Accountant (CPA) designations, with Personal Financial Specialist (PFS) credential from the American Institute of CPAs, major university degrees in finance and accounting, FINRA Series 65 Investment Advisor licenses, experience at Ernst & Young and Bank of America and a combined 50+ years experience in the financial services industry. Michael Purtill, CFP® holds the CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ credential and is a member of the Financial Planning Association.
We regularly communicate with clients about their investment returns, required minimum distributions, tax filings, and account replenishments to meet monthly or quarterly distribution requirements.
With two CPAs on our staff, we are able to advise clients on tax implications of investment changes and account rollovers and help them with tax questions.
Fiduciary Responsibility to Our Clients
Most importantly for our clients, we are fiduciaries. We recommend what is in the best interest of our clients at all times.
We invest our own personal portfolios in the same mutual funds and ETFs that we recommend to our clients. We do not recommend annuities, investments with deferred loads or surrender periods, investments in securities from firms who pay us for our recommendations, unlisted securities, or any commissioned products. We work for our clients, not for an employer. We accept no commissions or finders fees. Our advice is objective, unbiased and based on our own independent research, not based on what makes us money.
Because our firm does not take custody of your assets, your investments are safely held in accounts with your employer and/or an independent, non-affiliated national discount custodian with SIPC and additional insurance coverage. The custodian will not permit transfers from your accounts without authorization from you. The custodian also provides you with 24/7 account access online and sends monthly statements and confirmations directly to you itemizing all transactions in your accounts.
How We Help Clients Protect and Grow Investment Assets
We help our clients manage their investments for reasonable returns within their desired level of risk. We help improve client returns by keeping their costs of investing low. The fees we charge for investment advisory services are generally lower than many other firms charge. We only recommend securities that have no loads or commissions. We recommend custodians who charge low trading fees, if any, ranging from $0 on no transaction fee funds, $0 on exchange traded funds and a maximum of $45 per trade on transaction fee mutual funds. Our clients have no annual account fees.
We do not invest your advisory fees in receptionist salaries, outside investment managers, advertising, or prospective client dinners.
We recommend a broadly diverse set of investments in mutual funds and exchange traded funds (ETFs). The annual operating expense for the specific funds that we recommend typically average 0.4% annually, compared to a 1.0% industry average.
Our clients pay no trailing commission fees, such as 12(b)-1 fees, insurance and mortality expenses on annuities, deferred sales charges, or separately managed account fees.
Investment Management Approach
Our investment recommendations are custom tailored to your situation, your investment desires, and your risk profile. Based on your desired risk profile, we have developed target portfolio allocations for very conservative, conservative, moderate, moderately aggressive, and aggressive investment profiles. Whether you want an all stock portfolio or a no stock portfolio, we can help you.
When you bring us your investment portfolio, we analyze each security and typically recommend selling securities that are underperformers, carry high fees, have high valuations relative to the market, or that we project will decline in value in the future. We build our portfolio recommendation around the securities that you bring to us. We have no “cookie-cutter” portfolios to recommend.
In designing your portfolio, we choose the most attractive security choices in your employer accounts and from brokerage accounts you transfer to us, and recommend a well-balanced portfolio of investments for your accounts that will place your portfolio on the efficient frontier, where returns are maximized for your desired risk profile. Comprehensive databases from Morningstar, Inc. and Ibbotson Associates are used to help us analyze all securities. Our recommended portfolios are diversified across 20 different stock and bond investment categories.
We use portfolio planning software to keep client portfolios at the efficient frontier and identify rebalancing requirements over time. We regularly monitor investment categories and specific securities so that we can recommend changes to keep your portfolio optimized for the current market.
Purtill Financial will typically recommend a number of portfolio changes as part of our annual rebalancing. We are not frequent traders. We believe that market trends need to be observed for reasonable time periods before they should result in portfolio changes. Our goal is to keep your portfolio in line with market averages through highly diversified portfolio allocation, selection of no load investments and advising on client risk levels in changing market conditions.
Client Service Focus
Our ability to support clients is met through increased investment by our firm in our business and our staff. We have the capability to add one or two new clients each month.
Desirable clients have a reasonable level of investment assets, a desire to consolidate investment accounts to reduce trading costs, and work with us to consolidate securities to increase portfolio efficiency and diversification. We also work with a number of younger clients who appear to have potential to grow their investment assets over their working careers.
Clients to whom we offer investment advisory contracts are open with us and consider our investment recommendations carefully and implement them in a reasonable period of time, usually with our assistance. An open, cooperative, supportive relationship with our clients is essential to meet their investment goals. If you think that you might meet these qualifications, please contact us so that we can arrange a meeting and explore your financial situation in detail.
Get in touch
We at Purtill Financial LLC know that finding the right investment advisor to work with is a choice not to be taken lightly. That’s why we offer a no charge initial consultation to learn your needs, the scope of your goals, and determine if we might be a good fit to work together.