Sensible Financial accepts fiduciary responsibility – we invite and honor your trust. We place your interest first, ahead of our own. We have designed our business model and compensation structure to be consistent with our responsibility. No compensation structure can be conflict free. We believe that our structure minimizes conflict, and we highlight situations where significant conflict is most likely to occur.

Sensible Financial offers for your consideration two additional statements about fiduciary responsibility:

• "A financial advisor held to a fiduciary standard occupies a position of special trust and confidence when working with a client. As a fiduciary, the financial advisor is required to act with undivided loyalty to the client. This includes disclosure of how the financial advisor is to be compensated and any corresponding conflicts of interest." (NAPFA’s working statement from its ‘Focus on Fiduciary Initiative’)
• "Given its fiduciary status, an RIA must follow the ‘trust’ standard—the highest known in law—which requires it to place the interests of its clients ahead of its own and fulfill critical fiduciary duties such as exposing all conflicts of interest which might tempt the RIA, to render disinterested investment advice, ‘utmost good faith,’ ‘full and fair disclosure of all material facts’ and ‘reasonable care to avoid misleading clients’ as the Supreme Court set forth in its S.E.C. v. Capital Gains Research Bureau, Inc. opinion. Under the fiduciary trust standard, an RIA must provide its ‘best advice’ to its clients.
• A non-fiduciary broker/dealer and its registered reps follow the ‘suitability’ standard under NASD regulations. This standard doesn’t require a registered rep to place the interests of its clients ahead of its own. Under the non-fiduciary suitability standard, a registered rep need provide only ‘suitable’ advice to its clients—even if it knows that the advice is not the best advice. For example, a registered rep that recommends an S&P 500 index mutual fund with a 5% load and high annual expenses when it knows of an equivalent index fund with a similar track record that is no-load and has low annual expenses ordinarily wouldn’t be liable to its customer for such a recommendation. It is more likely that an RIA would be liable for engaging in such investment conduct because of its fiduciary status." (Drawn from "The Fiduciary Duties of a Registered Investment Adviser" by W. Scott Simon, J.D., CFP®, AIFA® in OBSERVATIONS, ComplianceMAX Financial’s Monthly Investment Advisers Newsletter, May 2006)