Fundmastery Blog

Kurt Brouwer November 7th, 2007

Kurt Brouwer, Rita Lee and Steve Janachowski all contribute to Fundmasteryblog. Kurt is also the editor. As contributors, we write for you, whether you are a novice or an experienced investor. We want to help you gain every bit of insight and information you need to reach your financial and life goals.

Our writing here is based on the knowledge and experience we have gained in our work as financial advisers at a Tiburon, California-based firm called Brouwer & Janachowski, LLC. Our firm is now in its 21st year of serving clients as a fee-only financial advisory firm. We provide ongoing investment management for clients based on our theory that it pays to invest with some of the best portfolio managers (see Brouwer & Janachowski in the Wall Street Journal). We do this by creating diversified portfolios of carefully-selected no-load mutual funds. We also help clients with retirement planning and analysis as well as advice on how they can reach their financial goals. If you would like to know more about our firm and our work as financial advisers, just click on the link in the next paragraph.

Here’s how we started our firm. Back in the early 1980s, when we [Steve and Kurt] were at Merrill Lynch, we began to dream about an investment process that was simple, clear-cut and mutually beneficial for all parties. In took several years of trial and error, but in 1987 we began living our dream when we formed our firm, Brouwer & Janachowski. Our firm has grown over 20 years and we now manage well over half a billion dollars in assets under management.

Since we founded our firm in 1987, we have also written books and articles for investors and this blog is an extension of that work. Whether you are a client of our firm or just someone who is interested in our thoughts, we hope you enjoy it.

We believe in no-load mutual funds. That has been our investment focus for over 20 years. In fact, our first book on mutual fund investing, Mutual Funds: How to Invest with the Pros (Wiley), came out in 1987. Other books include Kurt Brouwer’s Guide to Mutual Funds (Wiley) and Mutual Fund Mastery (Times Business), which Steve and I co-wrote.

We have learned firsthand that mutual funds are a magnificent innovation suitable for investors with $1000, $1 billion or anywhere in between. Mutual funds offer a myriad of investment opportunities and they bring professional management, diversification, safety and other tangible benefits into the hands of all investors.

We also believe in the power of planning. And, we have seen (again firsthand) that if you do not plan ahead with your finances, you are not just failing to plan, but you are planning to fail. Planning may take different forms depending on the situation, but whether it is retirement planning, financial planning or any variant, the point is clear. Do it.

In this blog, we will also cover topics that are related to investing, such as economics, taxation, geopolitics, personal finance and more. And, we like to point out various roadblocks to your success-such as fear, greed and impatience.

Our goal is to help you achieve your goals. You know: love, health, money retirement, loafing around and other worthwhile things. We probably will not be able to help much with love or health, but we will do our best on issues such as money, retirement, planning and investing.

Welcome. Please take a look around the site.

E-mail for Kurt Brouwer can be sent to kurt.brouwer *at* gmail.com (I wrote it this way to foil spambots, remember to put in @ when you type in the address).