Vice President, Investment Advisor, Mill Creek Capital Advisors

>> My name is Katie Thomas and I work for a boutique investment advisory firm in Philadelphia called Mill Creek Capital Advisors. Our firm serves as chief investment officer for high net worth families and institutions, like endowments and foundations. My role specifically is I'm an investment advisor, so I help mostly families with everything from, you know, understanding what their goals are, what their investment portfolio should look like, helping them figure out what investment they should actually make, whether it's stocks, bonds, hedge funds, things like that. And then helping them with the general planning things, so what to do when tax rates go up, what to do when inheritance tax exists, things like that. You know, there's so many things that you can't control in the world. Obviously, the market is one of the ones you definitely can't control and all the risks that exist in [inaudible]. So, what we spend a lot of time doing is helping people be really diversified and thinking about, you know, preparing for whatever that unknown is because you don't exactly know obviously what it's going to be. But making sure that people understand they have safe stuff and risky stuff and feeling comfortable with what they own. The most usual situation is when a successful entrepreneur decides that they want to retire or walk away from the whatever the majority of their business is, so what we tend to see is most of our clients acquired their assets and essentially got rich because they had, you know, a business or they had something where they decided that they wanted to move in to a different phase of their life and so when we generally get involved is because now they have a whole different type of thing that they were never used to dealing with before. So they ask us to help them stay rich instead of get rich and so we build these, you know, incredibly conservative portfolios that are designed to allow people to just never have to worry about this again. You know, they can collect the income that they need and move on and enjoy their life. That's pretty much the most common scenario. Another scenario is whenever, mostly in the family situations, where the first generation, whoever creates the wealth, is getting of age or potentially passes away and the kids who've never had any experience dealing with this before have to now understand what it is, what they own, what is all the legalese with respect to trusts and so forth if they have to find themselves sorting through and so they hire us to educate them and help make sense of all those things. Because we work with wealthier clients, our clients are typically located all over the country and so we do travel quite a bit amounts to visit with them when we're meeting with them on a quarterly or, you know, monthly basis, depending on however often we meet with them. My schedule on a day-to-day basis is spending a lot of time, you know, when I'm in the office it's preparing for when you're going to meet with them and looking at the portfolio and looking at the markets and basically just doing a lot of reading and analysis. And then when we do meet with clients, we're generally talking to them about updates and what's happening in the world and what's happening with their portfolio and learning more about what's going on in their lives so we can prepare for the next big event, whatever that is.