Uncovering What Wealth Means to You

Located in the Barrington, Illinois, area, The HDB Group is dedicated to assisting affluent clients and their families with their sophisticated wealth management needs. We draw on more than 60 years of collective experience to help you lay out a clear path toward your financial goals.

The personalized wealth management we provide goes beyond investment strategies to a range of services designed to address the entirety of your financial life. Together with your tax and legal professionals we can help you evaluate retirement and estate planning services, tax minimization strategies, legacy planning services and risk management strategies. Our mission is to help you grow and preserve your assets and simplify your financial affairs.

We seek to fulfill this mission through:

Knowledgeable advice and guidance—The members of our team possess diverse experience and professional designations that allow us to consider your wealth management needs from different perspectives. Together these capabilities form a foundation of knowledge and skills that we can draw on in developing and implementing strategies designed to address the challenges associated with the different stages of your financial life: wealth accumulation, preservation, distribution and transfer.

Exemplary service—Integrity and professionalism are the cornerstones of our service. We are committed to putting clients' interests at the center of everything we do and devoting our full attention to every interaction. We seek to keep clients informed about their current financial position, their progress toward their goals and any market opportunities that may arise. We also strive to respond to questions and requests quickly and effectively. It is our belief that our personalized, attentive service is among the reasons that a number of our relationships span multiple years and several generations.

Goals-Based Wealth Management

We follow an approach that seeks to transform clients from merely having objectives to actively pursuing them. Our process begins with determining your current financial situation and helping you articulate your objectives for the future. We also seek to define your risk tolerance, liquidity needs and time horizon. What we learn forms the basis for the wealth management strategies we recommend.

Our discovery process is both quantitative and qualitative. On the quantitative side, we may ask such questions as:

• When do you want to retire?
• What have you already saved toward retirement?

The qualitative side involves questions like:

• What kind of retirement do you envision?
• Do you want to travel, go back to school, start a small business, consult or spend more time with your grandchildren?

Our next step is to present you with a detailed written analysis that addresses your goals, whether they involve accumulating wealth, generating income, solidifying a retirement plan or devising a distribution approach that supports a certain lifestyle or legacy.

Throughout our relationship, we will meet with you regularly to review your strategy. If necessary in light of changes in the market or your personal situation, we can suggest adjustments to help keep your portfolio aligned with your goals and risk profile.

Building and maintaining strong relationships with your other professional advisors are also important parts of our process, helping us integrate the different elements of your financial life. We can collaborate closely, for instance, with your attorney to see that assets are titled properly and with your tax advisor to consider business and personal tax impacts.

Financial Life Cycle

The wealth management strategies we create with you are designed to help you navigate the financial life cycle, from wealth accumulation through wealth transfer. Our goal is to understand where you are in the cycle, then help you prepare for the stages to come.

Wealth Accumulation--It is important to prepare for expenses you may face both in the near term and in the more distant future. Through access to Bank of America, we can help you develop strategies for funding home purchases or improvements, or, through Merrill, we can help you to create strategies to fund your children's or grandchildren's education. At the same time, we can assist you in laying the groundwork for a comfortable retirement by recommending ways to maximize your pretax investment potential through an employer-sponsored retirement plan or IRA. Our strategies are designed to help build your wealth by balancing your asset investment needs against your liabilities.

Wealth Preservation—After your peak earning years, wealth creation may become less important than wealth consolidation. In conjunction with Merrill specialists, we can offer estate planning services, involving such tools as life and long-term-care insurance. Working together with your tax or legal advisors we can assist with tax minimization strategies designed to help preserve your assets for your future use and for your heirs.

Wealth Distribution—As retirement approaches, your attention shifts to finding ways to help maintain the lifestyle for yourself and your family that you've worked so hard to establish. We can help create strategies designed to generate a sustainable income stream that has the potential to increase over time to cover such eventualities as rising health care costs and long-term care.

Wealth Transfer—A well-thought-out wealth transfer strategy should take into account not only your assets but also your values and intended legacy. In collaboration with Merrill wealth structuring and trust specialists, we can work with you and your tax and legal or other trusted advisors to see that necessary documents—such as wills, trusts, durable powers of attorney and medical directives—are in place and up-to-date.

Services Tailored to Your Individual Needs

Our Investment Approach

We believe that investing requires balancing risk and return. We value good returns, but we value good returns with lower risk even more. In our experience, managing volatility can be critical to both the long-term growth of your wealth and its preservation. Our goal is to build a portfolio for you that can perform well in a variety of markets.

The financial strategies we create can focus on such goals as:

• Preserving your assets
• Generating consistent returns while minimizing risk
• Avoiding significant losses
• Tax minimization in conjunction with your outside tax advisors
• Providing liquidity
• To move clients toward these objectives, we adhere to a strict discipline, keeping our eyes on the long term and ignoring fads and market noise.

Discretionary Portfolio Management

Today's markets are fast moving and complex, and many investors do not have the time or inclination to make the day-to-day decisions necessary to navigate them. You can delegate to Matt DiDomenico and Scott Barber the investment management responsibilities for your portfolios, meaning they have discretion over certain investment decisions surrounding your financial strategy. Once they have confirmed your goals and life priorities, as well as identified your portfolio investment objective, time horizon, risk factor and liquidity needs, they will recommend targeted asset allocations for your portfolios to help you meet your specific investment objectives. Granting Matt and Scott authority allows them to respond to market changes, price volatility and global events with the ability to make adjustments, if needed, to help your portfolio stay on track to meet your goals.

Business Owner Services

Very few business owners like to think about a time when they won't be leading their companies. We can help you consider a succession plan and prepare your family for the steps necessary to pass your enterprise to the next generation, if appropriate. We can also provide access to a Wealth Management Lending Officer* from Bank of America, N.A. and other specialists to help address such areas as cash and liability management, retirement and benefit plans, and credit and lending.

*The Wealth Management Lending Officer does not offer investment advice, nor make recommendations on investment products.