Our Core Values guide our decisions to help ensure we are on the right path.

• We are committed to avoiding, eliminating and disclosing conflicts of interest (if they exist).

“A conflict of interest is a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another.” – Wikipedia

• We do not receive commissions or service fees for selling life insurance, variable annuities, mutual funds, or other investment products.
• We do not accept referral fees from other professionals (i.e. insurance or real estate agents, attorneys, accountants, mortgage planners, etc.)
• There is no policy for PTO (personal time off) at One Life. We trust our team will get their work done. The no PTO policy exists so that people can prioritize their life and family above work. They can take the personal time they need when they need it.
• If your advisor is engaged in any outside business activities that could result in a conflict of interest, those activities and potential conflicts of interest will be disclosed to you in writing for your review prior to signing your agreement.
• We provide resources to One Life team members to help them practice what we preach. We believe that taking care of our team will result in empowering our team to take better care of our clients.
• We recently started offering “bundled” pricing, allowing clients to receive both financial planning and asset management services for one fixed fee. This option eliminates conflicts of interest: 1) where assets are held (401k vs IRA), 2) to pay down debt, 3) to gift assets to charity or loved ones, and 4) to invest in a business using investment portfolio assets managed by the advisor.
• Officers of the company have a cap on their salary and bonuses. This allows the business to invest more back into our people, process and the technology needed to serve our clients well.

What are the benefits of having one or more accountability partners in your life? A study by Dr. Gail Matthews, a psychology professor at Dominican University in California found that people who a) wrote down their goals and b) sent weekly goal updates to a friend (accountability partner) achieved their goals 35% more of the time (over 70%) compared to participants who kept their goals to themselves.

• Embracing this core value motivates us to create and sustain a culture of accountability for our team and for those we serve
• Creating a plan is relatively easy. Implementing the plan, performing administrative tasks, and following the plan is difficult for many people. We provide support and accountability to help those we serve get organized, develop a relevant plan, and turn their intentions to action.
• While two can be better than one, we also believe a team of people can be more effective than just two people. Clients of One Life have access to a team of diverse people who specialize in different areas of service.
• We are passionate about keeping and managing “to do lists” to help implement your plan and stay on track for the financial and life goals that you set.
• To save you time, we can collaborate with your accountant, attorney, insurance agents, others involved in managing your affairs to ensure everyone is on the same page with your goals and current financial picture.

COUPLES – We ask that couples both engage in One Life Coaching services and during the annual review. However, it is ok to delegate financial organization and administrative tasks to one client.

If you need a referral to an accountant, attorney, mortgage planner, insurance agent, real estate agent, or other professional, we will do our best to make an introduction to someone that can help you. 

• We help you stress test your life goals within your financial plan and cash flow strategies. Stress testing your cash flow and financial plan can help you determine if you have adequate margin to achieve your goals and accommodate for “life happens” events such as undesirable market circumstances and unplanned spending.

• We believe that high costs can hurt an investor’s chance of obtaining a desirable outcome. Because of this, we strive to eliminate unnecessary portfolio costs for our clients while embracing academic research in pursuit of strategies that can produce premium investment returns.

A recent study shows that fewer than 8% of all U.S. large-cap equity funds failed to outperform the S&P 500. Furthermore, fewer than 4% of all U.S. small-cap core funds failed to outperform the S&P SmallCap benchmark. https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2017.pdf

• The approach we take to develop your financial life plan, portfolio strategy, and cash management strategies is based on your values. This can help you embrace opportunities to better align your time and money with what you really want out of your life.

• Whatever we do as a business should make sense today and for decades to come. We use the “decisions for decades” framework to evaluate our tools, processes and how we can improve the client experience.
• Making decisions for today can be much easier than making decisions for yourself or your family 12 or 22 years from now. Our role as your advisor is to be an advocate for your life today and the life you will have in the future. We achieve this by helping people create a relevant vision for their life and then by developing, and maintaining, a financial life plan to support that vision.
• We are committed to using tools and technology that can stand the test of time and simplify your life. This means that we regularly evaluate our technology solutions and will periodically upgrade systems to improve the client experience.
• One Life’s founder, Brian Lahr, used the “Decisions for Decades” core value to make an important decision in January of 2016. After being affiliated with broker-dealers for over a dozen years, Brian terminated his broker-dealer affiliation and founded One Life’s RIA. The motivation to operate as an RIA was inspired by two primary goals:

1^st – Improve the client experience by providing the appropriate tools and technology needed to achieve our mission.

2^nd – Reduce or eliminate unnecessary expenses that are passed on to clients through the form of broker-dealer program fees, payout reductions, trading, and administrative expenses.

Shortly after starting One Life’s RIA, One Life made several improvements to their client offering including:

1) lower trade fees when purchasing Dimensional funds

2) ability to open accounts electronically

3) mobile access to a secure document storage vault for improved organization and collaboration

4) online scheduling tool

5) using new trading technology to align the client’s portfolio with their financial plan