An Introduction
Welcome to the inaugural post of Koch Capital’s retirement-focused blog. The goal of this blog is to increase awareness around retirement planning issues and to provide best practice tips and practical solutions for the independent, intelligent individual investor. The name Retirement Assist comes from a specific retirement planning service that we provide clients who prefer to manage their own finances but use Koch Capital for investment recommendations as well as targeted retirement advice. In essence, we serve as the investor’s co-pilot, ready to provide our services if and when our clients request it.
Retirement planning is very different animal from investment management, even though you’ll often hear the two terms used interchangeably in the press. For the retirement-oriented investor, creating future outcomes with certainty is more important than relying on the hopeful expectations of a rising stock market. Main question we’ll return to in this blog time and time again is, "what is lifestyle certainty worth to you and how do you get there?"
Oh No...Another Text-Based Blog?
Nobody likes reading homework, so we designed this blog to use as much video, charts and interactive visual applications as possible since we believe this approach is a more effective and engaging way to explain complex financial concepts. Here at the Retirement Assist blog you’ll experience more visual beef and less jargon-laden dribble.
Tools Available Here
The first web-based tool we are going to introduce is Koch Capital's Web Store, which really is a collection of retirement planning tools and resources. Many of the tools are free to the public, but some require client-specific customizations in order to derive their true value. Each week we’ll explore a new retirement topic and its related resource from the Web Store. Thus you, the blog reader, will have an opportunity to play along interactively where appropriate or possibly watch a tutorial video that demonstrates that week’s best practice.
While we believe all our readers will benefit from our financial content, our primary target audience is the do-it-yourself investor who is comfortable managing their own finances and operating in an online, browser-based environment. Please think of this blog as your virtual retirement resource center where you can pick and choose just the items of most interest to you.
What's Up For Next Week
On deck for next week is a discussion of portfolio expenses and how they affect your long-term retirement planning goals. This won’t be your ordinary textbook coverage portfolio fees and trading costs - you’ll have the opportunity to see how portfolio fees drag down your returns and what those fees really cost you in hard dollars. It’s one thing to say, “high fees bad for the investor,” but it’s another to actually demonstrate interactively the affects of negative compounding (we’ll explain - no, show you - that term next week).
Buckle up—it's show time.
About Jim Koch
Jim Koch is the Founder and Principal of Koch Capital Management, an independent Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) in the San Francisco Bay Area. He specializes in providing customized financial solutions to individuals, families, trusts and business entities so they are better able to achieve their goals. Jim sees himself as an "implementer" of financial innovation, using state-of-the-art technology to provide practical investment management and retirement planning solutions for clients.
