Explore questions customers like you ask us.
We are a fee-only fiduciary SEC-registered RIA (Registered Investment Advisor). In plain-English - that means we put our clients first and only take payments from Steward users. No ads, commissions to push products, or shady hidden fees.
Ami Shah, who built our planning algorithm directly based off the wealth management and tax optimization strategies she used to serve ultra high net worth families as a “white-glove” investment advisor:
Steward will only ever take payment from you, and in turn Steward’s first and only priority will always be to care for you and put your best interests first, as fiduciaries.
We don’t earn any revenue from the investments we recommend for your portfolio. We will never take kickbacks to push products on you, sell your info to 3rd parties, or bombard you with ads or credit offers.
Steward makes money in one way. Serving you. We’re are proudly, and fiercely, independent. Steward Inc. is an Investment Adviser registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
We offer families we serve a low-cost, no-obligation annual check-up on finances for $10. It's a mutual investment of time from both sides to see if we're a good fit, and can add significant value to your situation.
For comparison, the average annual fee for a standalone financial plan is $2,400.
We're exploring taking this one step further. If you find that you'd like help "doing it for me" on executing the plan and access to ongoing advisory to support you on navigating money decisions and trade-offs, investment management and coaching, and tax strategies, we hope to soon introduce charging 0.5%-1% AUM, scaling down as your assets scale. We take your success personally. That means we offer our services on an independent and fee-only basis, putting your needs first. We’ll never choose a fund to claim a commission, because we don’t take commissions. We have nothing to sell you but guidance that is aligned with your vision for the future.
Your Steward annual personal finance "check-up" includes 3 parts:
1) Where you are today
2) Where you want to go
3) How to get there
Investing apps allocate and rebalance your personal investments.
Steward gives you more comprehensive end-to-end guidance
teward’s discovery survey is what allows Steward to personalize your plan. It consists of three parts:
(1) you as a person - your big upcoming life events, your priorities, and the relationships that matter to you.
(2) your future finances - your rough estimates the money coming in and going out of your household
(3) your current finances - your estimate of how much cash you have on hand today, and the accounts you hold to help you get organized
We ask you as few as questions as possible, to get you to an optimized plan, to be mindful of your time and privacy.
1. Personal finance should be personal. Steward structures your recommended mix of savings and investment types based on your unique goals.
2. Don't try to time the market. Get in the market and then stay in your seat.
3. Own the market. Take the guesswork out of investing by diversifying broadly across investment types and geographies vs. trying to pick individual winners.
4. Focus on what you can control. Keep fees low, keep lifetime taxes low, and ignore the "crisis du jour" and noise.
5. Simpler is (usually) better. The optimal investing strategy is often the most simple.
We eat our own cooking. The team behind Steward uses Steward, and invests in the same assets that Steward recommends to clients.
Ami Shah and Viktor Muller, the founders of Steward, met at Harvard Business School. They’ve both worked at the intersection of technology and financial services throughout their careers. They founded Steward with a singular mission - to provide personalized plain-talk guidance on how, where, and when to invest in an optimized way, to more families - after seeing their own families struggle to navigate the black box of personal finance. You can learn more about them here.
Steward has a clear and structured 4-step process to working with prospective clients.
Building you a personalized plan requires collecting some personal info. We take this responsibility seriously. We commit to ensuring your personal information is safe, private, and secure at every hour of every day, year round. We will never sell, trade, or rent your info to others. See our Privacy policy for more details on our approach to security.