Thank you for your interest in our financial planning and investment management services. I’m Don St. Clair, and I lead a team I fondly call the Ambassadors of Possibility here at St. Clair Financial.
I’ve been practicing financial planning since graduating with a degree in finance in 1991. I have a background in tax and was an IRS Enrolled Agent earlier in my career.
Even so, I didn’t set out to help people turn Debt & Taxes into Savings & Investment™, that’s just what emerged as a consequence of doing financial planning – for the people I was doing financial planning for. Many of the strategies and techniques I use today developed as a direct result of interacting with clients, and reflect the concerns and challenges we faced together during that time..
Ultimately, I didn’t become a Certified Financial Planner, an Accredited Investment Fiduciary, a Chartered Special Needs Consultant or a Certified College Financial Consultant for the sake of adding letters to my name. That was all driven by a desire to acquire the knowledge and information necessary to serve the best interests of my clients.
But serving those interests takes more than just knowledge and information. It takes skills, sensibilities, and the kind of learned intuition born of repetition, planning, patience and practice.
And it takes relationship. Without the kind of trusted relations I’ve enjoyed over the past 30+ years, I would have never developed the skills and sensibilities necessary to help anyone.
Cultivating and maintaining relationships of trust is fundamental to the success of any business, and St. Clair Financial is no different. Without trusted relationships there is no possibility, and the business itself would not exist.
Which is why I choose to work directly for clients. While other advisors may be employed at Wall Street firms or contracted with insurance companies, I’ve been able to maintain objectivity and independence by working for you, and no other.
While many of my clients are retired or close to it, my practice today is focused on serving the needs of the self-employed. If you’re a sole proprietor, have a single-member LLC, or file as an S-Corp, I’d like to help.
Read moreThere’s an old Spanish proverb that translates roughly to ‘the cobbler’s children have no shoes’. Meaning that someone with a specific skill is often too busy assisting others to attend to their own affairs.
You won’t find that, or any other kind of “do as I say, not as I do” attitude at St. Clair Financial. Not as long as my name is on the door.
Instead, I insist that we eat our own cooking; put our money where our mouth is; and never recommend clients do something that we wouldn’t.
It’s that simple.
This same North Star illuminates our investment philosophy, where you’ll find my personal money invested in exactly the same manner we offer to invest yours.
Our low cost, high conviction, market resilient investment approach extends well beyond our doors. We seek mutual funds whose managers are willing (and able) to invest $1M or more of their own money in the fund they manage; funds priced in the lowest quartile relative to the funds’ peer group; and historical performance demonstrating an ability to capture more of the market’s upside, than of its downside.
While no investment strategy can promise superior results, we believe ours offers a superior approach to portfolio construction.
And we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is.
Read moreI hesitate to even attempt to list the those that have provided the myriad of positive influences I have enjoyed over the past 30+ years, as I will almost certainly forget to mention at least a few. But not trying to mention them, pains me even more. There are no doubt hundreds, if not thousands of Certified Financial Planner professionals I’ve had the opportunity to interact with and to learn from. Among this group, some have had an outsized impact – including, in no particular order: Paula Key, Andrea Hilderbrand, Michael Kitces, Dave Yeske, Rick Kahler, Catalina Franco-Cicero, Elizabeth Jetton, Dick Wagner, Kacy Gott, Ben Coombs, Bill Carter, Elissa Buie, Michael Haubrich, Debbie Grose, Jenny Hood, Nick Nicolette, Dan Moisand, Susan Bradley, Lisa Kirchenbauer, Jim Johnson, Carolyn McClanahan, Louis Barajas, Kirsten Ismail, Marty Kurtz, Paula Hogan, Troy Jones, Matt Sivertsen, Marcee Yager, and Amy Mullin.
At the sane time there are others from outside the profession, to whom I am deeply indebted:
Zvi Bodie
I had already been influenced by the thinking of professor Zvi Bodie of Boston University when we met serving on a professional association task force. Professor Bodie, who literally wrote the book on investments, had long advocated for a safety-first approach to investment advice and was challenging the common sense of the financial planning community by arguing that stocks may become more, rather than less risky, the longer you hold them.
Bodie asserts that the conventional Wall Street idea that long-term investors should always be in stocks is inherently flawed. “The length of your time horizon has nothing to do with your willingness to take risks, stocks are just as risky in the long run as in the short run. In some ways stocks are even riskier in the long run.”
Stephanie Kelton, Ph.D.
I first met Stephanie when she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and I was serving as chair of the Financial Planning Association’s annual Retreat Conference. As conference chair, I was looking for an economist capable of challenging our pre-conceived notions about money – where it comes from; how it’s created; and where it goes when it’s destroyed.
Stephanie is a leading authority on Modern Monetary Theory, a new approach to economics that is taking the world by storm. An expert in the operational realities of money and banking, POLITICO called her one of the 50 Most Influential Thinkers in 2016, Bloomberg listed her as one of the 50 people who defined 2019, and Barron’s named her one of the 100 most influential women in finance in 2020.
Her most recent book, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy, shows how to break free of the flawed thinking that has hamstrung both policymakers and investors alike.
Dr. Fernando Flores
More recently I’ve had the unique good fortune to study directly with Dr. Fernando Flores. Formally trained as an engineer and philosopher, Dr. Flores’ is credited with developing a revolutionary theory of management and coordination based on a new understanding of language and moods. As a young man he was Chile’s Minister of Finance before spending three years as a political prisoner under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
He is the author of severalbooks including Understanding Computers and Cognition, A New Foundation for Design, which he co-authored with Dr. Terry Winograd. The book was named the Best Information Science book of 1987 by the American Society for Information Science, and recognized by Byte Magazine as one of the all-time 20 most influential books on Information Technology.
Dr. Flores has been successful as an educator, entrepreneur, Chilean Senator, and is recognized as the founder of ontological coaching. He has greatly influenced my thinking, my world view, and my work as a financial planner. He is responsible for our tagline “Ambassadors of Possibility.” And we use it proudly with his blessing, and permission from his company Pluralistic Networks.
