Camarda Wealth Advisory Group

Financial Services

Camarda's investment philosophy is proactively managed hedged growth. We seek to be proactive. We watch the markets closely and are prepared to move quickly when we deem it prudent to protect wealth and seize an opportunity. Unlike other advisors, Camarda is not a "buy-and-hold" portfolio manager. While the long-term trend for stocks has generally been up, severe downturns can damage wealth dangerously. Such downturns can sometimes last for a significant portion of the human lifespan. If these downturns occur at the wrong time in your life (such as near or in retirement) your wealth may never recover. This is called the "sequence of return" risk. We think protecting your retirement, legacy, and family wealth is simply too important to leave to "buy and hold" to chance in a random market that may plunge dangerously at the wrong point in your life. Our objective is to not only grow your wealth, but to preserve it and minimize big losses during the inevitable downturns. We think you'll agree that's Wealth Done Right!^®

Retirement planning is one of the very most important and complicated financial planning disciplines. It's also one of the least understood and most poorly executed. This can be tragic. Finding a retirement "plan" is easy. Advisors galore generate colorful pages by the pound. Such plans often suffer from too little thought and analysis. They frequently promote a commission sales agenda that puts your interests last and your retirement at risk. There are many variables to factor in. Pensions and Social Security. Investment returns. Tax hikes. Inflation. Changing wants and needs as one ages. Soaring health care costs, Medicare restrictions, and supplemental insurance costs. Life expectancy. Leaving a surviving spouse properly provided for. The legacy you wish to leave behind. Projecting, updating, and managing these changing factors to provide enough income to stay comfortable and healthy, yet not run out of money whether you live a long time or not, can be extremely challenging. Get the planning wrong, and the shortcomings can be tragic. If you are in or near retirement, risks of running out of money may be high but hard to see. Let us help you do retirement planning right. We'll make it easy to understand, while balancing the many critical factors to help you plan and live the retirement you really want.

Why Choose Camarda Wealth to Help with the 401k Rollover to IRA Decision: In a field where true expertise and professionalism can be very hard to come by, Camarda has invested decades in education and expertise. We've done this for one reason: to be a better resource for investors. Full-time fee-only fiduciaries. We accept no commissions, kickbacks, or other forms of hidden compensation that can distort our advice. We are committed to putting your best interests first, always. Our deep training and decades of experience can make it simple and easy to get the results you want for your retirement. Our team has the "gold standard" CFA^® portfolio management designation and many other advanced investment credentials, and is led by an award-winning PhD in Financial and Retirement Planning. Our TaxMaster, affiliate includes a team of attorneys and CPAs for tax, asset protection, and trust/estate planning. Our firm is not and will not be for sale. We take our commitment to be there for our clients (and their children and grandchildren) very seriously. We have been nationally recognized for many years. Visit our Awards and Recognition page at camarda.com to review details on our awards, national rankings, and featured publications. Our exclusive WealthMax^™ 401k rollover system was designed by our own award-winning Ph.D. in Financial and Retirement Planning. WealthMax^™ can bring you keen insight into your best path on 401k rollover, 403b transfer, and other IRA rollover decisions.

Truly Bespoke Wealth Care - Camarda's Private Client Group: Most investors (even those with very large accounts) are only ever served by the "retail" financial products & services industry. This world is the domain of stockbrokers, mutual fund companies, insurance agents, financial planners, bankers, and others whose job it is to sell products and drive revenue for large banks and other financial vendors. Nowadays they often use titles like "investment advisor", "financial consultant" and others which perhaps obscure the retail distribution function. Often the advice is limited to product placement. Relationships tend to be transactional and not focused on holistic results. Training standards can vary widely. Beware of advisors that can put themselves and their employers' interests ahead of clients'. Costs can be high and hard to spot, and wealth results can suffer without true fee-only fiduciary duty. But there is another world. Is it time to "graduate" to truly customized wealth management? The difference in results can be remarkable. While family office minimums often start at $100 million, Camarda's Ph.D.-designed Total Wealth Care systems allow us to offer such services to families like yours. See why Camarda trademarked Wealth Done Right^®. Try the Camarda difference for yourself. We don't think you'll ever want to go back.

Estate planning is one of the most confusing and often-bungled areas of wealth planning. Poor planning can expose millions of family wealth to needless taxes and other losses. Investors (even wealthy ones who've paid a lot to attorneys or others for expensive estate planning and legal documents) often have incomplete or defective plans. This can guarantee expensive but avoidable probate, the public release of confidential family wealth information, and expose millions to avoidable estate taxes. It can also leave wealth needlessly exposed to lawsuits, will contests, children's accidents or divorces, and other wealth attacks. Getting your estate right to avoid tax and protect wealth requires rare expertise. Not only is it hard to find, but it's even harder for consumers to evaluate. On the surface, the legalese can all look the same, but produce sharply different results. As you get to know Camarda, we think you'll decide we have the deep expertise to carefully map out and correct your estate planning. We have the skills to help ensure your wealth is protected and flows to your family precisely as you wish. Estate planning is included in our standard service. If you wish, we can provide turnkey planning, all in-house, including legal documents custom-prepared by the lawyers on our TaxMaster team. Let us help you put it all together. Avoid estate taxes for generations by using best-practice techniques. Enjoy, control, and protect your wealth better. We make it very easy to get superior estate results.

Insurance is the primary risk management tool. As such, it can be supremely important to protecting wealth. It can also be extremely confusing to determine what coverage is needed and worth paying for, and what policies are a wasteful diversion of cash flow that compromises wealth goals.Policies are complex legal contracts. Smart insurance decisions require careful consideration of specific risk/reward factors. The right advice not only protects you but can save a lot of money better directed to achieving goals like retirement. You want the right liability insurance for asset protection, and cost-effective property insurance to make you whole should disaster strike. It makes sense to have adequate life insurance to replace income should a breadwinner die. By the same token, you should probably avoid expensive life insurance later in life once wealth targets are attained. For instance, whole-life-type policies, often marketed as "estate plans" or "tax-free" income investments, can be hugely expensive, and far less profitable than non-insurance investment alternatives. Commissions on such policies can transfer big chunks of your wealth to salespeople in confusing ways that can be very hard to spot. Such commissions directly impede wealth accumulation. Camarda's team has extensive experience and insurance certifications like the premier Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU^®). As true fiduciary advisors, we take no commissions. Instead, we share objective analysis and advice laser-focused on what's best for you. To help you get only the policies you need, and avoid those that can cost a lot of money but provide little value.

Our proactive portfolio management is designed to not only optimize returns but to sidestep market plunges to control big losses. This ongoing, actively managed approach sets us strongly apart from other advisors. But the Camarda difference goes far, far beyond that. Our standard services for $500,000+ accounts includes Full-Service Financial Planning ongoing advice on the other critical wealth areas you probably find extremely important. This includes the many items above, and far more. We stand ready to advise on any and all wealth and financial matters, all as part of our standard service offering. All on a totally fiduciary, fee-only basis, with no commissions or conflicting compensation interests. Our Total Wealth Care^™ means just that reviewing, integrating, and optimizing your wealth on a continuous basis. The overarching objective? A simple and easy platform to effortlessly generate more wealth and income for you. Camarda's Total Wealth Care^™ means Wealth Done Right!^®

Losing family wealth to lawsuits, children's divorces, or other financial attacks can be financially devastating. Surprisingly, many successful families are extremely exposed and don't know it. You may have noticed that other advisors don't seem to understand this critical practice area, but with so much at stake, this could be a fatal mistake. As part of our Total Wealth Care^™ process, we'll help identify dangerous exposures to loss that your other advisors may have left you completely unaware of. Asset protection planning is cheap, simple, fast, and easy- if you get and take the right advice before a threat emerges. If you don't and a lawsuit appears, there may be nothing you can do. We'll advise you on simple but effective structures to help protect your wealth and let you sleep easy. All are part of the standard Camarda service.

Annuity marketing claims can seem very appealing but often mask expensive shortcomings. Commissions are often among the highest in the investment world- but often hard to spot or even covered up by salespeople. Ongoing costs like fees, fund charges, expenses, mortality, and rider premiums can be extremely high, but buried in the fine print and easy to miss. Tax rates on annuities are far higher than on other investments. You will pay at your highest ordinary income tax bracket. There are no capital gains or qualified dividends treatment, no estate step-up, and "last-in-first-out" IRS rules accelerate taxes compared to more mainstream investments. Finally, since providing a fixed lifetime income is the essence of these products, interest rates and inflation are critically important considerations. In times of rising rates and high inflation, annuities can be especially bad investments, produce punishing losses for annuity investors. If you have or are considering annuities, Camarda can provide valuable insight and analysis to better maximize your wealth and propose rescue planning when appropriate.

Saving avoidable taxes can be one of the most powerful ways to accelerate and protect personal wealth. Knowing how to convert legally avoidable taxes to family wealth is like turning lead into gold. Forbes says a whopping 93% of business owners overpay their taxes. Even the Feds admit that businesses overpay some $50 billion dollars a year, with overpayments of a billion or more a year potentially stretching back for decades. David Ramsey says, "Every year, more than 2 million taxpayers overpay their income taxes, and we're not talking about pocket change." Kiplinger suggests poor tax planning is responsible for wasting countless wealth to avoidable taxes. Many investors feel their financial and tax advisors don't work hard and smart enough to save every possible dollar. While each investor's opportunities vary, smart strategies can dramatically reduce or even eliminate capital gains, estate, income, and many other taxes. Smart tax is magic. However, finding and identifying smart tax advice can seem impossible. At Camarda Wealth, we not only have advanced tax expertise in-house. but include general tax advice in our standard service. You can even choose to hire our common-ownership affiliate, TaxMaster, for tax returns preparation, strategic tax reduction research and planning, and other tax services for an even greater level of coordination and ease for you. Give Camarda a try and let us explore "smart tax" ways to convert avoidable tax into family wealth.

As business owners ourselves, Camarda knows how to maximize the wealth power of family businesses. We can show you how to capture valuable opportunities other advisors have missed. From tax control to asset protection, to structuring sales, succession planning with or without family members, negotiating capital for expansion, to having the right 401k to avoid dangerous ERISA liability for you as a plan trustee, we have much to offer our business owner clients. In many cases, our advice can cut business owners' income and estate tax by literal millions or more. If you wish, we can show you how to keep your business in the family for generations or structure a tax-controlled sale- all while minimizing or completely avoiding capital gains and estate taxes. We can also help protect your business from being lost to lawsuits and unprotected attacks. For instance, you may have plenty of liability insurance if the business is sued, but what about losing the business itself if you are sued personally? Many business owners are not advised that assets like LLCs or S-corp stock can be dangerously exposed to lawsuits and judgments. The same applies to business and investment real estate. We can show you how to harden your assets to take such low-hanging fruit off the table and protect it- simply and inexpensively. Give Camarda's Total Wealth Care^™ a try, and see how our services extend to complicated business planning and seamlessly folding those plans into your overall family wealth planning.

We use a highly customized approach designed to incorporate: Your portfolio growth & family wealth goals; Income needs across the timeframes of your planning horizon; Tax control considerations; Your total financial picture- not just the part we manage; Your investment preferences and instructions; and Your sensitivity and concerns about risk. As part of our Full-Service Financial Planning, we develop a custom Portfolio Plan for each client, based on a personalized Investment Policy Statement for your family. We custom craft each portfolio, blending from our menu of proprietary Camarda strategies, in a full discussion with you. We also incorporate any specific preferences you have, including advising on existing positions you don't want to sell for tax or other reasons. You'll be pleased to learn we can even manage your current 401ks, without you leaving the plan or having to move assets out. We've even built similar systems for 529s, no-commission annuities, and other "hard to manage" investments. And as a new client, we won't change or do a thing to your existing investments until you fully understand and give us the green light to begin managing your accounts according to the agreed upon plan. Once set up, we regularly discuss and adjust as you, and the world, change. We think you'll find the Camarda way very powerful and quite different! Perhaps unlike other advisors, our approach is truly customized and tuned to you- and can be as simple or sophisticated as you need and wish.

You'll get a written Investment Policy Statement designed just for you. Before we implement it, we will analyze and carefully review tax and other considerations, making sure you're informed every step of the way. We'll develop a detailed wealth plan with you, based on your needs, preferences, and priorities. We'll build an ongoing plan to address asset protection planning, estate planning and trusts, develop tax reduction strategies, create comprehensive financial and retirement plans, and other items as directed by you. scheduled, quarterbacked approach is designed to keep everything coordinated and flowing, without overwhelming you by trying to do too much, too fast. We fold this ongoing wealth care into our regular portfolio update calls with you. This ongoing process is led by your Personal Wealth Advisor (PWA), your personal wealth concierge. Your PWA is responsible for reaching out to update you regularly (quarterly at the very least) to administer and report on your Portfolio Plan, administer and update your Wealth Plan, and act as your gateway to other teams and resources as needed. Camarda's approach means you have access to our entire professional suite as needed, in a systematized manner that makes it easy and time-efficient for you. Our goal is to make things easy and extremely effective for you. We are confident you'll be amazed and delighted at what we continue to deliver compared to the other advisors you've known.

Our financial advice extends to virtually all wealth matters you may need addressed, and such advice is all covered by your comprehensive investment management fee- no extra charges. For instance, Camarda has extensive experience in commercial and residential rental real estate, including development. Founder Jeff Camarda flipped his first house in 1982, developed a residential portfolio of about one hundred mostly single-family houses from scratch, and has developed multiple projects. We can help with decisions from basic financing and transacting a primary residence, to complicated decisions on developing or liquidating real estate investment portfolios. Advice ranges from evaluating proposed loans and refinances to analyzing returns and advising on the wisdom of buying or selling specific investments. Most importantly, our advice can be key to unlocking missed deductions and optimizing tax consequences to compound family wealth. In the right fact patterns, we can even share powerful tax strategies to defer and even completely avoid capital gains, including on depreciated properties. Such advice can prove far more effective than the mere tax deferral of exchanges. As a critical family wealth asset class, Camarda knows real estate and stands ready to help our clients get the most from it.

As you can probably tell by the educational accomplishments of many of Camarda's staff, we believe strongly in the value of education, and finding the most tax-advantaged ways to enable client families to provide it for those they care about. Camarda is proud to offer this service as part of the comprehensive Full Service Financial Planning enjoyed by virtually all of its clients.