Welcome to Seaborn Financial

We're excited to finally roll out a project we've been quietly working on for the past six months: Seaborn Financial, LLC. If you're the kind of person who reads this blog, we think you'll be excited, too.

And what kind of person is that? Well, if you're a tech professional in Texas, we're particularly well-suited to help you out. In the tech biz, you often deal with unique issues around employee benefits, in particular ones like ESPP's, stock options, HSA's and the like. What should you do when your options or ESPP vest? Do you use your HSA to pay for medical bills now, or as investment tool? The answer depends on your situation, and we have the tools to run the statistical analysis and help you make the choice that will win out most often in the long run.

Whether or not you're in tech, here are a few other signs that you might enjoy working with us:

You want your money to be fully optimized. There are a lot of opportunities to save money, earn more, or mitigate risk, between optimizing investments, savings, taxes, debt, cash flow, retirement planning, employee benefits, and insurance. We do comprehensive financial planning, which covers all of those and more.

You're analytical. Our approach is methodical, systematic, and data-driven. We'll go as deeply into the numbers behind our recommendations as you care to go, and we avoid hand-waving rules of thumb. Ask us the hard questions -- we love them!

You don't trust salespeople. As advisors, we have a fiduciary obligation to you: we are legally obligated to serve your best interests, as opposed to a salesperson or broker, who is legally obligated to serve the company they represent. We are strictly a fee-only shop -- we don't accept commissions from anyone, ever. Finally, we're not a fan of suits and commissions; while they have their place, it's not in our firm.

You're at home with technology. We use tech everywhere possible to make your life easier, from videoconferencing (so that we can meet in a way that's convenient for you, not just us), to digital paperwork, to an up-to-date, fully-featured financial hub that you can access anytime, anywhere.

You want to learn. We don't just handle your finances for you behind a veil of smoke and 50-page reports; we educate you. We firmly believe that no one knows and cares as much about your finances as you do -- our goal is to educate our clients to the point that they could do all of their financial planning themselves, if they wanted to spend the time.

You're a bit of a geek, or at least enjoy hanging out with them. We love referential humor around here, from Star Wars to Princess Bride. If you'd like to geek out with us, well..."as you wish."

If all of that sounds like you, we'd love to work with you -- and we've built our business from the ground up to make sure there are no obstacles.

We can work with you even if you like to DIY where investments are concerned. We know a lot of professionals like to manage their own investments, and are disgruntled that most financial advisors would ask them give that up. That's not us. We're happy to work with you to come up with an investment asset allocation -- which you can then implement yourself, or let us handle. We can work with you even if you don't have investments outside of your 401(k). We don't have any "asset minimums" -- we're financial planners first and foremost, and while managing your investments is an option (and we do it quite well!), it's not the end-all be-all. As we said above, comprehensive financial planning covers a whole lot more than just investing.

We can work with you even if you're just getting started. Maybe you'd love to have a financial expert to point you in the right direction, but you're not yet making the "serious bank" you feel like you need before an advisor will talk to you. Every expert will tell you, though, that there's nothing like optimizing your finances early! That's why we created Office Hours: we sit down with you for 90 minutes, walk through your situation, answer questions and make detailed recommendations, and are available for e-mail follow-up for a week after.

If you like the feel of paper and don't trust computers, if you feel that an advisor isn't a professional without a suit, a physical office, and fancy client events (and there's nothing wrong with any of that!), we might not be for you. If you identify with the traits we outlined earlier, though -- check out our website, and maybe get in touch with us. Or you could even just subscribe to this blog. We think you'll like what you find.