Bear Mountain Capital Inc.

Think of us as your financial sherpa—experienced, hard-working, and ready to guide you.

The biggest misunderstanding about financial wellbeing is that if you make more money, you’ll be more financially secure. That is generally not true. If you earn $500k a year but spend most of it on a hefty mortgage in Seattle, send your kids to a private school, own a couple of cars and go on a few well-earned vacations, chances are you are no more financially secure then someone who makes a fraction of your income.

Financial security is a state of mind. If your spending habits increase with your income, will they change once your income goes away? It can be difficult to lower your lifestyle expenses after decades of becoming accustomed to them.

Anxiety about your financial wellbeing creeps in when you realize how much money it takes to maintain your current lifestyle well into retirement. In the end, it doesn’t matter how much you make, it only matters how much money you spend and subsequently save.

Real financial security starts with planning. Confidence in your ability to provide for yourself and those you love comes as much from investing your time in planning as it does from investing your money in the market. Planning is the foundation for a strong financial future.

Our financial planning process doesn’t begin with a questionnaire. It begins with a conversation about what you want out of life. Too often, our financial lives seem to be trivialized into a set of questions. In reality, every client is unique and their situation requires intimate discussions that can only be captured through a natural discovery process.

Our process is broken down into the following three parts:

Discovery & Goal Setting

Our goal is to get you talking about your short, intermediate and long-term needs and desires. These discussions include everything from retirement planning and college savings to caring for aging parents or special needs children. We help you organize your thoughts into succinct, achievable goals with timetables and dollar amounts, so we can begin to plot our course.

Asset Inventory

At the same time that we start the conversation about your objectives, we begin gathering data on your current situation. We help you collect and organize your current statements, investment accounts, life insurance, loan amounts and various financial parts. After we’ve gathered the necessary information, we can do a proper analysis of your current financial status.

Analysis & Results

Once we’ve determined your objectives and inventoried your financial life, we can begin to assess how to bridge the gap between where you are today and where you want to be in the future. Our analysis addresses savings habits, portfolio return expectations, inflation assumptions, future asset distributions, career income variation, tax strategies and any other life circumstance that may affect you financially.

After working through discovery, inventorying, and analysis, we review the results with you in detail. Our online tools allow us to make on-demand changes to assumptions in the plan, highlighting different scenarios, so you can determine for yourself what your options are and how it changes your outcomes. We talk you through the trade-offs of savings, spending, investing and future needs and expectations.

This process will shine a spotlight on your financial life in a way that nothing else will. Whether you are a local to Seattle or live in California or Hawaii, our process and online tools allow us to be there with you to answer your questions and help you understand the landscape. In the end, you’ll have a solid financial plan that will allow us to take the next step in your journey to financial wellbeing.

What Are the Next Two Phases?

Investment Management

The second phase of our approach is to review how best to invest and manage the assets you’ve accumulated to date and how to think about investment management well into the future.

Comprehensive Advice

After completing the first two phases, you will experience our comprehensive approach to wealth management, including introductions to other professionals, access to leading-edge online portals and consistent communication to help you meet all of your financial needs.