FAQ

Evident Financial is a division of AllStreet Financial, LLC, a Registered Investment Advisor supervised by the Pennsylvania Department of Banking & Securities. Located in Erie, PA, Evident Financial provides investment management and financial planning services to clients moving through major financial transitions such as retirement, inheriting wealth, divorce, and selling a business. We also help families transition from meeting the day-to-day financial needs of raising a family to building wealth for retirement.

Evident Financial is a fiduciary. As such, we have a legal duty to act in your best interest. Of the more than 300 advisors in the Erie region, only a few work to a fiduciary standard, the highest standard of care in the industry.

Working with an advisor who is not a fiduciary puts you and your investments at risk. The good news for investors is that brokers who are paid to sell high-fee investment products such as annuities and mutual funds are finally coming under greater scrutiny to become more transparent and fair. 

We offer a variety of accounts to help you save and invest:

• Individual and Joint  
• Traditional IRA
• Roth IRA
• IRA Rollover
  
• Employer retirement plan 401(k) and 403(b)
  

An initial investment of $500,000 is typically required.

Evident Financial will build you a diversified portfolio of ultra, low-cost exchange traded funds (ETFs), choosing from more than 5,000 available funds. Your portfolio is customized to your investment goals and how much risk you are willing and able to take.

Decades of research supports the benefit of investing in a diverse set of funds that charge minimal fees. And the reason is simple: over time, it’s impossible to pick individual stocks or bonds that outperform the market as a whole, especially when high fees drag down returns. Investing in index funds, even when the market goes down over the short term, is advantageous because in the long run the market goes up.

An ETF is a basket of hundreds or thousands of stocks or bonds in a single fund. Owning many stocks or bonds wrapped up into one fund is less expensive and less risky than owning individual stocks or bonds.

Index funds are used as a benchmark to gauge how the market or sector of the market is performing as a whole. For instance, the most common index ETFs track the S&P 500, a basket of 500 large US companies.

Charles Schwab, one of the world’s leading investment firms with over $3 trillion in total client assets, holds your assets. Evident Financial never directly handles client funds, and only you have access to your money. Your personal information and money are safeguarded under Schwab’s Security Guarantee, the highest level of data protection in the financial industry.

Your investments follow an investment strategy that is decided and approved by you before your account is opened. You are hiring Evident Financial to monitor and manage your account for you. As such, you will not have to give us permission to perform routine management and trading.  

Evident Financial charges one simple annual management fee based on a percentage of assets managed. You do not pay sales commissions of any kind. The only other fee is a low fund-level fee, averaging about 0.09%, which is paid directly to the investment fund sponsor such as Vanguard or Charles Schwab.

                  Fee Schedule*

Amount Invested        Annual Fee

First $250,000              1.00%
Next $250,000              0.80%
Next $500,000              0.60%
Next $1,000,000           0.40%
Over $2,000,000           0.30%

*Fees are tiered, meaning the first $250,000 will always be charged a 1.00% fee, the second $250,000 will always be charged a 0.80% fee, and so on.

A popular, peace-of-mind benefit we offer is for you to name a trusted contact, someone you authorize us to contact should you become incapacitated. Your trusted contact is not a beneficiary and can't make decisions about your account.

The account opening process at other financial institutions is grueling and time consuming with mounds of paperwork for you to fill out and sign. At Evident Financial, you can open an account in a matter of minutes. Our onboarding process is entirely paperless, making it quick and easy to open an account.  

Transferring your account from another advisor to Evident Financial is simple. Charles Schwab handles everything involved in transferring your funds.

We understand that a relationship with a financial advisor can be personal -  after all, your advisor knows a lot about you. After you've decided it's time to leave, there can be a mental barrier to get over when breaking up with your old advisor. If so, a nice thing to do (depending on your relationship) is to send them a personal note stating why you’re leaving and thanking them for their past work.

Evident Financial is located at 900 State Street in downtown Erie, PA in the Erie Technology Incubator at Gannon University. It is a privilege to be in the company of other progressive-thinking businesses on the cusp of bringing transformational changes to the Erie region.