Our story actually begins back in the late 1990’s as clients of a financial advisor for a large, corporate brokerage firm in the Bay Area.  In Silicon Valley, Kevin worked as a Mechanical Engineer in the hard disk drive industry and Andrea was Director of Investor Relations for Yahoo!, Inc.  Just like our clients today, we relied heavily on the advice of our financial advisor and assumed she had our best interest in mind with respect to our investment goals, but unfortunately, she was focused on generating commissions, and not on protecting our assets. She did not diversify our investments and, in fact, over concentrated us in tech and dot.com stocks.  The result was devastating, costing us a loss of close to $300,000 – virtually almost all of our retirement savings at that time and creating a tax liability of over $500,000. 

What we learned through this experience is what we share with clients, by making sure they understand what investments they own and why those investments are important to their retirement plan.  In 2002, Andrea joined Edward Jones and began her 23-year long career helping clients avoid those same mistakes and build consistent, risk managed, all-weather portfolios designed to help clients reach their goals with confidence.  Kevin followed in 2008, joining Edward Jones and credits the challenges of that market year with reinforcing the need for diversification and continual open communication with clients to better manage strategies and expectations.  While at Edward Jones, both Andrea and Kevin held multiple roles in management for the central coast region for the firm, in hiring, training and development of new financial advisors. 

By 2013, it became clear that working for a large, corporate firm, was no longer aligned with their goal of independent financial investment strategies and they left to start their own firm, Meritage Asset Management Group.  Today, they work as a team, for benefit of their 280+ client households.  Managing nearly $85 million of client assets takes a lot of time and dedication to ensuring only the highest quality standards of investment management and client service excellence.     

As we have from the founding of our own firm in 2013, we focus on educating clients on both understanding how the investments work and setting expectations for performance over the long-term.  Helping clients understand what to expect in different market environments helps to keep them informed and stay on track with their long-term goals and allows us to focus on what’s most important to us – our clients.