Our Philosophy
Retirement Planning Philosophy Throughout your working life, you accumulate assets for retirement, and then, during the “later” period of the accumulation phase, you ultimately have to decide when to start reconfiguring your portfolio to provide the inflation-adjusted income you’ll need for the rest of your life.

In other words, sometime within the five- to seven-year period just before retirement, you’ll have to decide when to sell some of your growth investments to create your first income ladder—because you’ll need to have it ready to go as soon as you stop receiving a paycheck.

Income ladders are the lower-risk, lower-return part of your portfolio that provides the safe, steady, dependable income you need during retirement, and they’re usually created with the money you get from selling some of your growth investments. They can be constructed in a variety of ways—but they almost always rely on fixed-income investments like bonds, CDs, or immediate annuities to provide the financial resources you may need to pay the bills and enjoy yourself when you stop working.

After selling part of your portfolio to create your first income ladder, you may then be able to let the rest of your assets stay invested in growth-oriented accounts to continue growing at higher potential rates of return. These growth assets can then be separated into a variety of different investment accounts that can in turn be used to fund future retirement income needs.

For example, over the initial five-year period, during which you are spending your first income ladder, the first growth account will have had a chance to increase over a five-year holding period, and will hopefully be sufficient to fund your next income ladder, which will in turn be used to provide retirement income for the next five years. Of course, while you are spending both of the first two income ladders, the second growth account will have had a ten-year holding period, and will hopefully have grown enough to fund the third income ladder. The same process continues on and on, with each growth account having a longer and longer holding period during which it will hopefully increase enough to fund a future income ladder. And, from a risk management perspective, the longer the holding period, the more likely you may be to achieve the rates of return you are expecting and building into your plans.

You will also notice that the final income ladder is highlighted in purple, to point out that it is different from all the rest. This difference is due to the fact that this income ladder will not simply be structured to provide five years of income, but will instead be constructed to provide income for the rest of your life. This can be accomplished using a variety of investment tools such as variable or single premium immediate annuities, both of which offer a variety of payout options, including lifetime income. By taking advantage of these kinds of annuities at this point in time, you should no longer have to worry about creating additional future income ladders—since your income will now be taken care of for the rest of your life. Then, any additional funds that may be available in your portfolio can be invested in an “extra growth” account, which may ultimately be available to help you achieve your wealth transfer, legacy, or stewardship objectives.

Large Cap Core

McHenry Capital's Large Cap Core Portfolio seeks quality well-known companies that have been around for multiple generations and continue to produce superior performance relative to their industry peers.Our investment process starts with the Dow Jones Industrial Average's universe of 30 stocks which give a broad measure of the overall health of the economy.

We rank each of these stocks based on many different factors and levels of criteria such as earnings momentum, value momentum, price momentum, projected growth rate, P/E, and outside independent rankings. Once this universe is ranked 1-30, we do a thorough analysis on the quality of each security and determine what its future value should entail.

From there, we determine how it compares to other high quality, well known companies in its same industry. If there is a better alternative available among its peers, we will replace it accordingly. Our philosophy is really a bottoms-up approach to investing within the framework of the oldest market gauge around, the Dow Jones Industrial Average.