Cross Border Financial Advice In Spain
If you’ve visited the Roman aqueduct in Segovia, you know what an imposing construction it is. The ancient Romans built aqueducts with the idea of letting gravity work, they slope downward to channel water from freshwater sources like lakes or springs to destinations many miles away from their origin.
But that was long ago.
In today’s world, anyone who relocates to another country and has assets in two places faces more imposing challenges than simply transporting water between two points. Language barriers and differing rules and systems complicate the financial situation of nearly every expat in Spain. Yet, according to Peter Dougherty of BISSAN Wealth Management, many of the same concepts that applied to aqueduct construction now hold true in cross-border financial planning:
“Just as the Roman aqueduct engineers did, as expats in Spain we need to conform to local conditions. The type of aqueduct they constructed depended entirely on the situation faced: terrain, elevation and distance. 80% of the aqueducts the Romans built were below ground. The stone arches and bridges that ran above ground — like what stands in Segovia – are less extensive than the underground pipe systems that we don’t see. In financial planning, the circumstance of every expat in Spain is different and therefore the optimal investment portfolio to construct should be as well.”
Peter is the American who works at BISSAN Wealth Management. His mission is to make financial planning easier for expats in Spain. How Mr. Dougherty has approached this mission would likely be familiar to the Roman aqueduct engineers.
Much as engineers in ancient Rome were trained by putting in long hours under demanding conditions in the military, Peter was trained in the modern-day equivalent: working on Wall Street for investment banks Lehman Brothers and Bank of America Merrill Lynch in New York.
And just as aqueduct engineers continued developing new construction techniques, Mr. Dougherty has continued his studies, recently earning a master’s degree in Spanish taxation from Instituto Europeo de Asesoría Fiscal. As Dougherty says, “Because taxes are a frequent source of frustration for many English-speaking expats in Spain, I chose a master’s program here with a very comprehensive curriculum. Earning my ‘Máster en Ficalidad y Tributación’ was challenging, but well worth the effort.”
Dougherty points to two other similarities between ancient Roman aqueducts and his work at BISSAN Wealth Management:
“Aqueducts were built using a mixture of stone, brick and volcanic ‘cement’. It was the innovative substance we now call cement that allowed these aqueducts to remain strong, and one reason why so many are still standing today. To me, investing strategies are comparable to the stone and brick, but financial planning is like the cement. Here’s why:
At BISSAN Wealth Management, we started helping families in Spain with their investments in 2010. Shortly afterward, we began helping these and other families with financial planning. But in 2012 the Spanish stock market suffered a cataclysmic 50% drop. Curiously, the families we’d initially helped with financial planning did not sell their investments in those moments of panic. On the other hand, the families that had merely invested with us — and not received our help with financial planning — often sold at or near the market’s bottoms. The Spanish market quickly recovered, and by the end of 2012, BISSAN’s investments were again in the black for the year. Nonetheless, we learned that financial planning is the ‘cement’, it helps allow our clients to invest successfully.
That’s why we don’t begin our discussion with new clients talking about investment returns. We begin by listening; by asking about your financial goals, what you’d like to accomplish. Is it retirement, funding your children’s education, caring for an elderly parent, buying a home?
We quantify these goals in BISSAN’s unique optimization model to determine your future cash outflows and help you park or ‘guard rail’ the money necessary for these expenditures before they’re due. Once your future outflows are safely covered by these financial ‘guard rails’, the market’s ups and downs won’t concern us like they once might have.
‘Guard rails’ are just one of the innovative financial planning ideas that we utilize at BISSAN. Aqueduct engineers in ancient Rome had a similar notion: they added special valves known as ‘sluice gates’ to redirect water away from damaged pipes onto an alternative path.
From ancient ‘sluice gates’ to financial ‘guard rails’ — the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
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Peter Dougherty, BISSAN Wealth Management
Telephone +34 677 998 261 / www.bissan.es
