Our History
Our story actually begins back in the late 1990’s as clients of a financial advisor in the Bay Area. We were both working in Silicon Valley, Kevin as a Mechanical Engineer in the hard disk drive industry and Andrea as head of Investor Relations for Yahoo, Inc. Just like many clients, we relied heavily on the advice of our financial advisor and assumed she had our best interest in mind with respect to our investment strategy. Unfortunately, her focus was on generating revenue and not protecting our assets and she failed to adequately diversify the risk in our investment portfolio. We lost close to $1.5 million in assets in the dot.com downturn. This was a very painful lesson and we realized we needed to take a more active role in planning for our future.
Driven by this experience, and with an interest in doing things the right way; in 2002 Andrea left the industry and was recruited as a Financial Advisor for Edward Jones. She spent 10 years at the firm, running a successful office in Morro Bay; managing over 1,200 family households of client assets along with helping to run the activities of the central coast region for the company. Kevin joined Edward Jones in 2008, and was the fastest growing branch and one of the top producers in the same region in his first 5 years in the industry. Together, we were responsible for all of the recruiting of financial advisors for the region and the training of these new advisors. In 2013, changes at the firm, including the internal push for advisors to sell products primarily made up of proprietary mutual funds; we decided we needed to make the move to being independent brokers. This move would eliminate this internal conflict of interest and provide us the autonomy to work with clients based on their needs, and the freedom to choose investments most suitable for their goals.
Establishing Meritage Asset Management Group in March of 2013, we developed a financial practice centered on the client’s goals and objectives. Without the constraints of limited investment offerings or the pressure of sales quotas; we have successfully grown the business in client assets while reducing the client base to 250 households – allowing us to give more personalized service to our existing clients and the bandwidth to take on additional clients. Our services include financial planning, investment management, annuities, life insurance and long-term care insurance. We’ve spent the last 8 years helping our clients grow their assets, plan for retirement, manage their assets in retirement, and plan for a legacy for their families. We take our roles very seriously and invest client’s assets as if they were our own. Our focus remains to be on solid investments with long-term track records, along with active risk management that has helped our clients grow their assets without losing sleep at night.
