Since everyone’s situation is different, we don’t hand out one-size-fits-all portfolios. We cover your day-to-day first, then go after growth. Here’s what that actually means.
Most portfolios are described in percentages. We’d rather describe yours in years.
Ask someone how risky their portfolio is and you’ll usually get a number: a standard deviation, a stock-bond split, a risk score from one to ten. Those numbers are fine as far as they go, but nobody spends a standard deviation. You spend dollars, on a Tuesday, in a particular year.
So we start somewhere more concrete: how many years of your spending would you want covered if the market went sideways for a while? Whatever that number is, we fund it with high-quality bonds. That’s your Lifestyle Runway.
The point isn’t that bonds beat stocks. Over long stretches they usually don’t. The point is that the runway buys the rest of your portfolio something it cannot buy for itself: time. Time to fall, time to recover, time to climb, without you having to sell good investments at bad prices to cover next month’s bills.
That’s also why the runway is a conversation, not a formula. Someone still working with a steady paycheck needs a shorter one than someone drawing on their portfolio to live. Someone who lies awake during a downturn needs a longer one than someone who shrugs it off. Both answers are correct, because both are about a real person.
Whatever your situation looks like, these don’t change.
Before anything else, we set aside enough safe, high-quality bonds to protect the years of spending you’d want covered if the market turns. This part of your portfolio isn’t trying to be clever. It’s trying to be there.
With that safety net in place, we invest the rest for the long haul using individual stocks, funds, and ETFs. We keep an eye on taxes and costs, and we work around whatever you already hold rather than starting from a blank sheet.
We’d rather measure risk as years of spending you’ve got covered than as a volatility number. How long that runway should be comes down to you, your income, and how you actually sleep at night.
No black boxes. This is the whole sequence, start to finish.
What’s coming in, what’s going out, and what’s already invested. We go through what you hold today, what it cost you, and which accounts it lives in, because all of that shapes what we can do without handing you a tax bill.
Together we settle on how many years of spending you want protected. Your paycheck, your timeline, and your honest tolerance for a bad year all feed into it. This single decision drives most of what follows.
We fund the runway with high-quality bonds, sized to the years you picked. The job here is reliability and access to cash when you need it, not squeezing out extra yield by taking on risk that defeats the purpose.
The remainder goes to work in individual stocks, funds, and ETFs, diversified across what you own and mindful of cost. We’d rather own good businesses and broad markets patiently than chase whatever led last quarter.
A new job, a sale, a move, a birth, a loss. Those are the moments that change a plan, far more than any headline does. Tell your advisor and we’ll re-cut the runway around the new facts.
Your plan lives in eMoney or RightCapital and your accounts report through Black Diamond, so you can check either one whenever you feel like it rather than waiting for a statement to show up.
A return you owe half of isn’t the return you thought it was. So tax awareness isn’t a service we bolt on at year end. It’s part of how the portfolio gets built in the first place.
Where a holding lives matters. The same investment can be a fine idea in an IRA and an expensive one in a taxable account. Where we can, we put the tax-inefficient pieces in sheltered accounts and leave the tax-friendly ones where they do the least damage.
Losses are worth harvesting. When a position is underwater, selling it to bank the loss and staying invested through something similar can lower your bill without changing where your money is pointed. Down markets are the wrong time to do nothing.
Legacy holdings get handled carefully. Plenty of clients arrive with a position they have held for decades at a tiny cost basis. Sometimes the right move is to unwind it slowly across tax years, sometimes to build around it, sometimes to use it for charitable giving. Almost never to sell it all in January because a model said so.
Withdrawals have an order. Which account you draw from, and in what sequence, can change what a retirement costs you in tax over twenty years. It is worth planning rather than improvising.
WinCap Financial does not provide tax or legal advice, and nothing on this page is tax advice or a recommendation for your situation. Tax rules change and apply differently to different people. Please talk to your CPA or tax advisor before acting, and we are glad to talk to them with you.
A philosophy is as much about what you leave out.
We’re not going to tell you we know what the next six months hold, because we don’t, and neither does anyone else. The runway exists precisely so you don’t need that call to be right.
We’re a registered investment advisor. There’s no sales quota behind a recommendation and no product we need to move this quarter.
We don’t manufacture the investments we recommend, so we have no reason to prefer ours over something better and cheaper.
Being assigned portfolio number four out of five is not a plan. Your runway length and your existing holdings mean your portfolio starts from your situation, not from a shelf.
You’ll deal with a real advisor who knows your name and your situation. That’s the whole reason the firm exists, and it’s why we keep the team small on purpose.
Whatever topped the charts last year is usually the most expensive thing to buy this year. We’d rather be patient and boring where it counts.
Most portfolios don’t fail because the investments were wrong. They fail because someone had to sell them at the worst possible moment.
Every downturn follows the same emotional script. Prices fall, the news gets loud, and the urge to do something becomes almost physical. Selling feels like taking control. It usually just locks in the damage and leaves you guessing about when to get back in.
What actually helps in that moment isn’t a steadier temperament. It’s knowing your next several years of spending are already sitting in bonds and don’t depend on what the stock market does this quarter. That’s the practical reason we build the runway first: it turns “stay the course” from advice into something you can afford to do.
And when you do want to talk it through, you call your advisor. That’s the other half of the job.
There’s no universal answer, which is why we ask rather than assume. If you’re still working and your income covers your spending, the runway can be shorter, because your paycheck is doing that job. If you’re drawing on your portfolio to live, it generally wants to be longer. And if a bad year would genuinely keep you up at night, that’s a legitimate reason to lengthen it, not something to talk you out of.
This is the scenario the runway is built for. Retiring into a downturn is dangerous mainly because you’re forced to sell investments while they’re down just to fund your life, so they never get the chance to recover. If those years of spending are already covered by bonds, you can leave the rest alone and let it climb back.
Yes, and we’d rather do that than ignore them. Concentrated stock, an old employer plan, a fund with decades of gains buried in it: these are facts about your portfolio, and often the tax cost of clearing the decks all at once is worse than thoughtfully building around them. We’ll walk through what makes sense to keep, what to unwind, and over what period.
That’s not how we’d frame the job. The goal is to fund your life with as little drama as possible, which means the right yardstick is whether your plan still works, not whether we edged out an index over some arbitrary stretch. We invest the growth side for the long term and we don’t make short-term market calls to get there.
Yes. WinCap Financial is a registered investment advisor, which means we are held to a fiduciary standard and are obligated to act in your best interest. We don’t earn commissions on the investments we recommend. Our disclosures page has our Form ADV and Form CRS if you would like the formal version.
Life changes matter far more to your plan than market news does. A new job or a raise, a house, a sale, a marriage, a child, an inheritance, a health change, a shift in when you want to stop working: any of those is worth a call. Give your advisor a shout and we’ll adjust the plan around what is actually happening.
If this is how you’d want your own money handled, let’s have a conversation. No scripts, no pressure, no obligation on the other side of it.
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