Savant Wealth Management

How We Work

A Wealth of Resources, Focused on You

We believe comprehensive wealth planning requires more than one perspective. That’s why, at Savant Wealth Management, our financial advisors take a team-based approach—bringing specialists together across key financial disciplines to support you through every stage of life.

When complex needs arise, your financial advisor isn’t working alone. They’re backed by a coordinated team with deep expertise in areas like tax strategy, estate planning, and investment management. And when life throws an unexpected curve, such as divorce, the loss of a spouse, caring for aging parents, or selling a business, our experienced specialists are ready to step in with thoughtful, personalized guidance.

Think of it as having a network of professionals, all under one roof, working in sync to help you make confident, informed decisions. Whatever your situation, we’re here to support you with clarity, care, and a plan for your long-term success.

How We Work

Evidence-Based Investing: Tried- and-True Principles

Markets are remarkably efficient

We believe this has great effects on your portfolio, which is why you need the right mix of various equities, fixed income, and alternative investments.

Asset allocation is important

We believe this has great effects on your portfolio, which is why you need the right mix of various equities, fixed income, and alternative investments.

Markets are not predictable

We avoid market timing because it adds speculative risk, excessive costs, and needless tax.

Broad diversification is necessary

This helps ensure your portfolio is designed to maximize long-term return while controlling risk.

Take a global approach

As global consumers, we believe in investing overseas.

Actively manage taxes

Our goal is to employ multiple strategies to ensure maximum tax efficiency and minimize needless tax- sometimes over multiple generations.

Eliminate excessive costs

The only thing guaranteed in investing is that you will keep more if you spend less.

Systematically rebalance

This method helps reduce risk and capture long-term market returns.

Optimize cash flow management

This is important so that your portfolio delivers income and principal when you need it.

Evidence-Based Investing

An Investment Philosophy That Puts Evidence on Your Side

Our financial advisors don’t rely on hunches or headlines when it comes to growing and protecting your wealth. Evidence-based investing is a disciplined approach grounded in decades of academic research and real-world results. It helps remove emotion from the process and focuses on what’s shown to work over time—with the goal of investing with greater confidence, clarity, and purpose. Explore common questions below to learn more.

evidence-based investing

Evidence Based Investing FAQs

What is Evidence-Based Investing (EBI)?

EBI is a decision-making framework that makes it possible to evaluate the related topics confronting today’s investor and challenge the wisdom of conventional investment advice. EBI offers a way to navigate the investment landscape in a systematic, analytical, and scientific manner; all with the goal of maximizing risk-adjusted after-tax returns for investors. EBI guides investors to make decisions based on data, academic research, and defined process, rather than speculation, greed, and fear. EBI can generally be expressed in the following formula.

EBI Formula Explained

In each of the above ratios, your numerator should be higher than your denominator.  Because we obviously can’t precisely quantify these metrics, think of it as more of a personal scorecard.  If you assess yourself honestly and come up with an overall “EBI Score” of greater than five, you are well on your way to being a bonafide practitioner of Evidence-Based Investing.

Why is EBI a key component in Savant’s investment philosophy?

EBI is critical to Savant’s investment philosophy because it removes emotion from the equation and focuses on an objective, data-driven solution. Without employing an EBI framework, investors can fall victim to their own emotional biases, we believe often to the detriment of their portfolio.

Capital markets are an ever-evolving ecosystem, which is driven in the short term by the herd mentality of its market participants. EBI allows investors to step away from the mob dictating asset price movements and focus on the bigger picture. By taking a 30,000-foot view of the market environment, we can objectively focus on the factors that are critical to the long-term investing journey that is investing.

How did you choose your sources?

Ensuring the credibility of sources is paramount to any research paper. Each source must be objective in approach and unbiased by outside motivations. Sources referenced throughout our EBI white paper come from reputable, industry-leading institutions and their research is based on empirical evidence.

You deserve advice rooted in what works, not what sells. The data guides our strategy. Your best interests guide everything else.

Our Process

Wise Counsel in Action

With decades of experience guiding individuals and families through life’s complexities, our financial advisors know that lasting financial success requires more than smart ideas—it requires disciplined execution. That’s why we built our process around a comprehensive approach that considers every dimension of your financial life.

We integrate financial planning across 10 key areas to capture your potential opportunities and address every potential risk. From preparing for retirement to managing risk, from tax strategies to charitable giving, our approach is holistic and deeply personal. We created our process to evolve with you on life’s journey.

Savant Wealth Management Process

Our Process

By establishing a system of professional oversight, we hope to increase your peace of mind throughout each step of the process.
Process Infographic

Advice

  • A clear path & plan
  • Strategies in the 10 key planning areas
  • Alignment of your vision, values, goals, & resources
  • Proactive advice

Implementation

  • The Ideal Futures PortfolioSM
  • Manage risk & return
  • Eliminate excess costs
  • Tax optimized structures

Coordination

  • Efficiency
  • Timely follow-up
  • Advisors work as a team
  • Comprehensive reporting & accountability
  • Cost efficient products

Service

  • Simplicity & ease
  • Responsive to critical life events
  • We are on call
  • Ongoing active oversight
  • Before
  • The Process
  • After
  • No plan
  • Disorganized
  • Too little time
  • Too much cost
  • Uncertain future
  • Lack confidence
  • Too much tax
  • Too complex
  • Ineffective diversification
  • Excess or unknown risk
  • Poor performance
  1. Determine what’s important
  2. Review current plan & portfolio
  3. Develop plan
  4. Implement & coordinate plan
  5. Conduct review sessions
  • Plan and path
  • Organized
  • More free time
  • Lower cost
  • Tax-efficient
  • Simplicity
  • Effective diversification
  • Managed risk
Your Ideal Future

Is Your Financial Life as Healthy as It Could Be?

Just as a physical checkup provides insight into your overall health, Savant’s Ideal Futures Financial Health Assessment(SM) helps offer a clear picture of your financial well-being. Our proprietary tool evaluates your financial life across 10 key planning areas, helping identify unnecessary risks, uncover opportunities, and prioritize what matters most. It’s a thoughtful, objective way to ensure your financial decisions and resources align with your long-term goals so you and your financial advisor can move forward together with a plan.

Health & Wellbeing

The state of your health and wellbeing can impact whether or not you reach and enjoy your goals. Identifying risks related to disability, along with your mental and physical health, helps build a plan that can illustrate strategies to support your wellbeing now and in the future.

Retirement Planning

Without a well-designed retirement plan, it may be challenging to maintain your lifestyle in retirement. Designing an appropriate retirement strategy involves reviewing savings, income sources, and cash flow and optimizing distributions from your investment portfolio (if already retired). By formalizing your retirement plan, you can gain clarity to determine if you are on track to live the retirement you want.

Risk Management & Asset Protection

If you don’t have appropriate insurance, you may not be efficiently protecting the people and things that are important to you. Maintain an appropriate amount of insurance by regularly evaluating your needs, policy types, coverage amounts, beneficiaries, and other factors to help ensure you are protected when you encounter obstacles and detours on the way to your ideal future.

Debt Management

Debt can hinder you from achieving your long-term goals. While debt can be a prudent financial tool, it can cause significant financial distress if not properly managed. With a strategic plan, you can understand how much debt you can afford, how to use debt in a way that is tax-efficient, and ensure that the terms and rates are appropriate for your financial situation.

Education Planning

If putting your children or grandchildren through higher education is important to you, you’ll want to take advantage of all available education planning strategies while you’re balancing saving for retirement. An education plan helps you assess how much it may cost in the future and determine the best ways to fund this expense in a tax-efficient manner.

Income Tax Planning

Tax advice is not the same as professional tax preparation. Tax advice involves working with a knowledgeable advisor to proactively look for strategies designed to minimize current and future tax liabilities. Optimizing your tax situation is an important part of a well-designed financial plan, assuring you pay no more taxes than you are legally required to pay.

Investment Planning

A sound investment strategy assures you make sufficient returns to meet your goals while not taking excessive risk that can cause needless anxiety. Specifically, a well-executed investment plan reviews the appropriate amounts of risk, builds an optimal portfolio allocation, mitigates taxes, benchmarks performance, understands overall costs, and assures proper liquidity.

Charitable Planning

An optimized giving plan will help you leverage your charitable giving to create impact for the organizations and causes you care about. Being deliberate with your giving can assure your philanthropic strategies align with your values and goals, while also maximizing opportunities to reduce current and future income and estate taxes.

Business Planning & Succession

If you’re a business owner, your business plan should be optimally integrated with your personal financial plan. The two plans should be aligned so that both are working together toward achieving your long-term goals. Your business will likely impact all the other areas of your financial life, so coordination is critical.

Estate Planning & Administration

If you die without an estate plan, your family may end up paying needless tax and legal bills, while your estate becomes a matter of public record. An estate plan assures that your assets are distributed in a manner that perpetuates your values, protects your heirs, reduces or eliminates estate taxes, diffuses family conflict, and makes the administration of your estate simple for your family.

What You Can Expect

When You’re Ready To Take Advantage of Our Wise Counsel

Savant is committed to providing the value and experience you deserve in wealth management. Collectively, we offer our combined expertise, credentials, intelligence, work ethic, character, and reputation to guide you through our platform and process. We’re looking forward to meeting you! The following is helpful background about our initial process.

Savant Wealth Management

Becoming a Client FAQs

What is a fiduciary?

A fiduciary is a professional who stands in a special relationship of trust, confidence, and/or legal responsibility with a client. Savant is a Registered Investment Advisor, which means we are required by law to act in our clients’ best interest. We take this responsibility very seriously.

What is your fee structure?

Our fees are based on a percentage of assets managed. Your financial advisor can provide more specifics.

How are you different from a brokerage house?

Unlike a brokerage house, Savant does not generate commissions through buying and selling securities. As a fiduciary, we hold ourselves to put the best interests of our clients ahead of our own. Brokers adhere to a lower suitability standard, meaning they are required to sell products that are suitable for a client, even though there may be better alternatives.

What does “fee-only” mean?

Savant serves as a true fiduciary. “Fee-only” means that we only receive compensation from our clients. We don’t receive commissions or other payments from the providers of financial products that we recommend to clients. Our costs are easily ascertainable and transparent.

Do you have a minimum amount that I need to invest?

We typically work with clients who have at least $750,000 in assets. That said, we also consider partnering with individuals and families who expect significant growth potential from a future inheritance, career trajectory, or other expected financial gains.

What is evidence-based investing (EBI)?

Evidence-based investing (EBI) is a decision-making framework for investors. It offers a way to navigate the investment landscape in a systematic, analytical, and scientific manner and guides investors to make decisions based on data, academic research, and defined process, rather than speculation, greed, and fear.

It is the framework we use at Savant to design and implement portfolios on behalf of our clients.

Click here to learn about evidence-based investing in a way that best fits your own style in our multi-media learning center.

What should I look for in a financial advisor?

When you’re looking for a financial advisor, it’s smart to take your time, get to know each advisor, and ask the right questions. It is one of the most important financial decisions you will make and the research will take some work, but we believe partnering with the right advisor will help reduce your stress and give you more confidence and security.

Things to consider when choosing an advisor:

  • Qualifications and designations
  • Depth of services and expertise
  • Experience
  • Philosophy
  • Size of their team
  • Compensation and fees
  • Conflicts of interest
  • Typical clients they serve

There is no right or wrong way to have your money managed. Just be sure to figure out what works best for you and your family. Learn as much as you can about the financial advisor that you choose, how seriously they take your interests, and how much you are paying them.

Financial Advisor Providing Wealth Planning Services to a Group of Executives

Wise Counsel Illuminates the Road to Your Ideal Future

With the help of Savant’s robust team of professionals, a complex collection of seemingly unrelated documents and outdated plans can transform into a straightforward and streamlined roadmap to set you on the right path toward your ideal future.

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