As Managing Director at Euclid Harding, Brian Lasher works at the intersection of family, wealth and enterprise.
As we enter 2025, the world of wealth management is changing. In 2023 and 2024, investments in AI, Big Tech and the Magnificent Seven (Mag7) brought impressive returns, causing some to relax their focus on financial goals. However, with the new Trump administration signaling significant changes, it’s more important than ever to stay alert.
Just as you get a yearly medical check-up, it’s crucial to review your satisfaction with your wealth manager regularly. With consolidation on the rise in today’s wealth management industry, a key first question to ask is: Do you know who is actually managing your money? Use this comprehensive three-part checklist to guide you through the process.
1. Assess Your Wealth Manager’s Support
It’s important to ensure your wealth management firm is helping you achieve your goals. Consider these questions:
- Has your wealth manager created a clear savings plan to help you reach your financial goals?
- Beyond investments, are they assisting with estate planning, tax strategies and philanthropy?
- If you own a business, do they provide tailored advice and support?
Remember, areas like savings, retirement planning, tax strategies, investments, estate planning, and business and real estate management are interconnected. Focusing on just one area without considering the others can lead to less effective solutions.
2. Evaluate Investment Strategy
Now, let’s see how your wealth manager is helping you navigate the market and the potentially chaotic geopolitical landscape in 2025. Consider these key investment points:
- Are they actively managing the portfolio, or is it primarily invested in Big Tech companies at all times?
- Do they use a variety of investments—private equity or alternatives—that complement your existing stocks and bonds?
- How does their strategy perform during both good and bad market periods?
If your portfolio never changes, you may be missing out on valuable market opportunities and failing to reduce risk. It’s much ado about nothing if the various items in your portfolio simply replicate the S&P 500 index, a practice known as closet indexing.
Evaluating your portfolio and performance across various conditions and against appropriate benchmarks provides a clearer view of your portfolio’s resilience. Many investors tend to focus too much on recent experiences (recency bias), forgetting the significant negative returns in 2022.
3. Check For Innovation
The wealth management and investment industries are constantly evolving with innovations that improve efficiency, personalization and transparency. This helps clients achieve their financial goals more effectively.
How innovative is your wealth manager? Consider these points:
• Dashboards: Are they using dashboards to guide you through your financial plan, providing real-time assessments and reminders to complete necessary steps?
• AI tools: Are they using AI to provide estate planning insights, such as analyzing your documents, generating actionable summaries and modeling strategies to help you understand your estate plan better?
• Alignment: Do they consider emotional and cognitive factors that significantly influence financial behaviors, such as spending and saving, to help you achieve your family’s financial goals?
Tax Management Innovations
• Direct indexing: Are they using direct indexing, which involves directly owning the underlying securities, for personalized tax management? This can lead to more tax-efficient investing.
• Automated tax-loss harvesting: Do they offer automated tax-loss harvesting to minimize tax liabilities by automatically selling investments at a loss to offset gains?
Investment Strategies
• Unique investment ideas: Are they introducing unique investment ideas, like long/short equity managers, gold or infrastructure at the right time?
• Fixed income investments: Do they consider fixed income investments with shorter durations than the Bloomberg Aggregate Index to mitigate interest rate risk?
• International investments: How are they handling international investments, especially given the anticipated turbulent U.S. relations with other countries and potential new tariffs against Mexico, Canada, China and Europe?
Evaluating these aspects can help you determine how innovative and effective your wealth manager is in helping you achieve your financial goals.
Final Steps
Your values and priorities should always come first. Wealth managers must offer tailored solutions that align with your goals and unique circumstances. Life is too short to be frustrated with your wealth manager and investments.
By following these steps and conducting a thorough check-up with your wealth manager, you can ensure your investments are in capable hands and your plan is aligned with your financial goals:
1. Reestablish communication: Regularly communicate with your wealth manager to gain peace of mind and clarity.
2. Update your information: If you haven’t met them recently, inform them about your current situation, risk tolerance and investment objectives.
3. Meet the team: Get to know everyone responsible for your investments to assess the effectiveness of their strategies.
4. Assess confidence: Determine if you trust this group to guide you through market volatility and life’s high and low periods.
For those experiencing personal life changes, facing complex situations, or simply wanting to make smart decisions in today’s economy, I recommend reading my Forbes Finance Council article, “Successfully Navigating Transitions: Evolving Knowns, Unknowns And Holistic Strategies.”
If your wealth manager fails this check-up or you are uncertain, seek a second opinion from another wealth manager to make informed choices about your next steps. Your actions here can significantly impact your financial journey.
The information provided here is not investment, tax or financial advice. You should consult with a licensed professional for advice concerning your specific situation.
Forbes Finance Council is an invitation-only organization for executives in successful accounting, financial planning and wealth management firms. Do I qualify?
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