About Northstar Financial Planners

Our sole source of compensation is a fee charged directly to our clients for asset management, financial advice and other investment services. We are not affiliated with any broker-dealer, and do not receive any commissions for selling a particular investment product. We believe that receiving a commission for selling an investment to a client represents an irreconcilable conflict between the best interest of the advisor and the best interest of the client.

Investment advisors are considered to be a fiduciary, which means we have a strict legal requirement to always act in the best interest of our clients. We believe our clients will achieve a better return over time from low-cost investments that do not charge a commission. We have not yet discovered a commissionable investment product that offers a higher expected return over time compared to low-cost, non commissionable investments with the same level of risk, even after accounting for management fees.

In our search for the best investment strategies for our clients, we have determined that a passive strategy focused on structured asset classes in a diversified portfolio of well-managed low cost institutional no-load mutual funds offers a better return over time, given a set amount of risk, than actively managing a portfolio by market timing and stock picking. Academic research, most notably by Eugene Fama at the University of Chicago, Gary Brinson et al and Roger Ibbotson et al, supports this conclusion.