Matt Jude:
My name is Matt Jude, and I’m a financial advisor at Rebalance. I grew up in Seattle, Washington. I have two older sisters and my parents, who all still live in Washington state. I came to California because I wanted to learn to surf and get some sunshine. So I went to college at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where I studied financial management, and I loved it so much on the central coast. I met my wife there and spent a lot of time surfing, and I did some work in the employee benefits world for a few years before really getting on track with my real career aspiration of becoming a financial advisor. I really believe in index investing. I think it’s the best way to participate in broad economic growth without taking on unnecessary risk, and that’s what we do at Rebalance. When I learned about this great research done by Standard & Poor’s, the SPIVA Research, I realized that the vast majority of professionals who try to do fundamental evaluation of companies, they end up just underperforming the indexes that they compare their returns to.
It is tempting to try to do better and outperform, and that’s how these active fund managers charge a higher fee. That’s how they make their money is by saying, “We’re going to outperform, or that’s our goal.” But there’s more than just company fundamentals and company earnings that goes into determining the value of a stock. And it’s a really difficult or basically impossible thing to get right and to get right consistently. So by doing index investing, which is how we do it at Rebalance, you are exposing your portfolio to the growth of thousands of different companies. And by doing that, you’re reducing the risk that you take on. You’re not taking bets on any single stock or company, and that’s the best way we think, and a lot of other really smart people out there think that’s the best way to do it.
I use the same investment techniques for myself and my family as I advise Rebalance clients to do. I use index investing. I’m not making bets on individual stocks. I do a financial plan. I have one for myself and my wife. And we think about our short-term needs, our long-term needs, and we try to be proactive. And that’s what I encourage people to do. And, that helps prepare you for the unknown, and it can really grant some peace of mind knowing that you’re prepared for challenges to come. I love the team at Rebalance. I love the people who I work with and the owners. I know the owners. It’s not some corporation out there with faceless CEOs. So we’re a very tight-knit group and we aim to pass that feeling through to our clients as well. We want them to feel like we’re family, we’re partners for them. You should come to Rebalance if you want super high level service and advice at reasonable costs. And that’s really the balance that we strive to achieve for people.
