Financial Advisor
Columbus Ohio
Certified Financial Planner™ professionals with Fortune 500 experience, Harding Financial Group can help you manage investments, retire comfortably, and pass on generational wealth tax-efficiently.
Financial Planning Services and Wealth Management
It’s our fiduciary duty to put your needs first
Retirement Planning
Determine your retirement income and create a retirement plan to make it a reality
Risk Management
We help you identify areas where you may be financially exposed and can help mitigate that risk
Tax Planning
Adjust your finances to minimize your tax burden and keep more of the money you make
Estate Planning
Efficiently pass on wealth to your family and avoid headaches, arguments, and probate.
Cash Management
Wisely manage your cash, liquidity, debt, and investments
Philanthropy
Give to charities of your choice and maximize the benefit you receive for your generosity.
Fee-based Certified Financial
Planners in Columbus, Ohio
Our investment advisors continuously deliver value by having:
- expertise to help you understand the investments and insurances you have
- “the knowledge to communicate how those investments and insurances impact you and your family’s goals
- an understanding of which alternatives are appropriate for you at any stage of your life or the market cycle
Whether you have an employer 401K, your own brokerage accounts, make contributions to a SEP as a business owner, or have other investments, Harding Financial Group can provide an unbiased, objective perspective to help you understand your whole financial picture. Our fee-based financial advisors in Columbus offer a balanced, flexible approach to financial planning, tailoring solutions aligned to your goals, risk tolerances, and are committed to your long-term success.
Michael Harding, CFP®
Holding the CFP® certification and other industry licenses for over 20 years, Michael is a highly skilled financial planner with a specialization in wealth management for high-net-worth investors. Prior to founding Harding Financial Group in 2005, he won several awards for superior performance and was recognized on many occasions for quality investment management in his 10 years at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch.
Michael Holly, CFP®, ALHC
Carrying designations as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and Associate Life & Health Claims, Michael is a comprehensive financial planner who excels in helping individuals and families achieve their financial goals. Michael previously spent 5 years at Nationwide Financial and is well-versed in tax-efficient retirement income strategies.
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Why Harding Financial Group as your Columbus Financial Advisors?
Columbus Business First Top 20 Fee-Only Financial Advisors list four consecutive years
Harding Financial Group takes a unique approach when compared to many other advisors today. We truly develop individual investment portfolios that are tailored to each client, according to their needs, stage of life cycle, risk tolerance, and investment preferences. We do not use “age-based” plans or pre-built model portfolios of any kind. Every investment in our client’s portfolios is hand-selected to support their stated objectives and is backed by our experienced financial planners through professional research and factual data.
Our belief is that above-average portfolio returns are achieved by squeezing the most out of every dollar invested and doing the gritty work that other advisors aren’t willing to do. The only way for our advisors to have the time required for such personalized investment management is to maintain a limited client list. In an industry where advisory firms are built from the ground up to scale their business quickly, Harding Financial Group has intentionally sacrificed scalability for the sake of providing superior customer service.
Our expertise spans much more than just investment management. Our financial planners strategize to help you keep the most of your money through tax planning, and take a long-term, multi-generational approach to ensure every decision made helps you grow your family legacy through the attainment of generational wealth.
With clear, consistent, and transparent communication, Harding Financial Group is committed to a Satisfaction Guarantee Policy for our advisory services. Our goal is unparalleled quality of services and if not, we return fees for your first 12 months of service.
Financial Advisory and Planning Testimonials
What Our Financial Clients Are Saying
Value-Driven Financial Process – The Four Seasons Formula
Harding Financial Group has developed and refined a comprehensive planning process called The Four Seasons Formula that puts together all pieces of your financial puzzle. Having a process ensures that even as you go through the four seasons of life (Early, Mid, Late Career and Retirement) and needs evolve, our expert team of financial advisors is always there to give you the full picture.
Just as you have certain criteria you are screening advisors for, we also have criteria we look for in our ideal clients. Our ideal clients must be a match not only in terms of investable assets, but also in attitudinal qualities and level of engagement. From the time someone contacts HFG to the time they decide to become a valued client, we will have guided them through 3 distinct phases of the process. Having a thorough process ensures that we are setting up our relationship for long-term success, and that you know exactly what to expect when you reach out to us
Discover
Also referred to as our “FIT Process”, a series of introductory calls and meetings to determine if we are a mutual FIT geared toward financial and personal data gathering including various documents and information to ensure HFG has a thorough understanding of your current financial picture, as well as your lifestyle and financial goals.
Design
We’ll prepare a preliminary investment strategy, as well as list financial planning opportunities and how you can address them. Once this has been reviewed, this is the time where you’ll make a decision on whether to enlist HFG as your trusted advisory firm.
An advisory agreement will be signed, appropriate accounts will be opened, and transfers initiated. Once accounts are ready, we’ll collaborate to finalize our investment strategy proposal and the next steps for addressing financial planning opportunities.
Deploy
With all agreements in place, we’ll build an investment portfolio optimized to support your unique financial and lifestyle goals. We’ll conduct thorough retirement and tax-savings analysis, identify risk management opportunities, look for pitfalls in your estate plan, and work collaboratively with you to develop and maintain a comprehensive Personal Financial Organizer throughout the course of our relationship.
Throughout the year we’ll have strategic meetings to:
- Review your portfolio in relation to current market conditions
- Explain key data points in your quarterly performance report
- Address next steps in your financial planning process
- Check in personally to ensure your plan is consistent with any recent life changes
These strategy sessions help us ensure the plan maintains its ideal trajectory, timely course-corrections can be made, and we address any questions that may be on your mind.
If you are looking for financial advisors in Columbus Ohio, contact Harding Financial Group below and one of our CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ Professional advisors will happily answer your inquiry.
Schedule An Appointment
With Harding Financial
Group
Let us help you manage your wealth and investments, retire comfortably, and pass on generational wealth tax-efficiently. Get a one-one consultation with our financial advisors in Columbus OH to begin the conversation about your retirement goals, needs, and current financial situation. Give us a call or send us a message and we’ll be more than happy to help.
See our Frequently Asked Questions below for commonly asked questions about Financial Advising.
For A Complimentary Phone Consultation
Frequently Asked Questions
Fee-based advisors are compensated primarily through a fixed percentage of assets under management.
We chose this model of compensation to give clients the confidence that we are on the same team – as our firm’s compensation is tied directly to our client’s performance. This creates a natural incentive to defend our clients’ assets in a down market and grow their assets in an up market.
The “fee-based” model also allows our advisors to facilitate the purchase of insurance products if our clients have the need instead of outsourcing the transaction to an unrelated 3rd party.
Watch our video about Why we are Fee Based Financial Advisors.
Our CFP® professionals are required to uphold a Fiduciary standard, which means they are bound to making recommendations that are always in their clients’ best interest. They have also taken extra steps to enhance their knowledge and financial planning skillset.
To obtain the CFP® designation, they had to satisfy 4 requirements:
1. Experience – Accumulate several thousands of hours of professional experience related to the financial planning process. As a result, CFP® practitioners possess practical experience, in addition to financial planning knowledge.
2. Education – Possess a Bachelor’s degree (or higher), as well as successfully complete the CFP® educational curriculum which includes 70 Principal Knowledge Topics under the categories below:
– Professional Conduct and Regulation
– General Principles of Financial Planning
– Risk Management & Insurance
– Investment Planning
– Tax Planning
– Retirement Savings & Income Planning
– Estate Planning
– Psychology of Financial Planning
3. Examination – Pass a comprehensive 6-hour CFP® Certification Examination that tests their ability to apply financial planning knowledge in an integrated format.
4. Ethics – Satisfy the CFP Board’s Fitness Standards and commit to CFP Board to abide by professional standards, as well as uphold their Fiduciary duty.
Learn more here about Why HFG?
Education is a very high priority in our office as we are always learning and growing to expand our knowledge. We spend hundreds of hours a month in the financial markets, paying attention to macroeconomic data like unemployment numbers, jobs created or lost, nonfarm payrolls, interest rate hikes, trends in different economic sectors, world events, and more.
Each advisor also has to obtain a certain number of required continuing education and professional development hours to remain a CFP® or other professional distinction. Continuing education topics cover a wide facet of industry services including securities, taxes, insurance, college planning, ethics, and more. We keep our licenses current so these requirements are always met.
We’re always trying to find ways to better serve our clients as we view this as a true win-win partnership, and education is paramount to that success.
The mathematics of loss dictate that outperforming in a down market, or minimizing loss, is more important than outperforming in a rising market. Therefore, our investment philosophy is defense first. We have the skillset to perform well in a bull market, but more importantly, have the experience of defending assets through the Tech Bubble of 2000, the Great Recession of 2008, and most recently, the COVID pandemic.
Although we curate a custom investment portfolio for each client, the fundamental strategy remains the same, which is what we refer to as the “Core and Satellite” strategy.
The core of every portfolio is generally comprised of select mutual funds that are appropriate for the client. We are very selective with the Core funds we use – they must have a strong history of outperformance versus their peers and come from top-rated fund managers. Depending upon the stage of the market cycle and the client’s financial objectives, we introduce Satellite positions into the portfolio to get exposure to certain market sectors, and to get away from others. This helps to lean the portfolio in certain directions to achieve one of two things:
1. Defend client assets, or
2. Grow client assets
We briefly discuss our investment strategy using Core & Satellite portfolio positions on our Wealth Management page.
We have clients all over the country and throughout the Columbus area. In particular, some of the neighborhoods include:
Arena District, Bexley, Clintonville, Columbus, Downtown, Easton, Franklin Park, Franklinton, German Village, Grandview Heights, Harrison West, Obetz, Ohio State, Old Towne East, Northwest Columbus, Short North, Upper Arlington, Whitehall, Worthington and more.
In many cases, clients come to our office for an in-person meeting but those that are comfortable via Zoom, we can accommodate that way too.