Team Name: The Spickler Wealth Management Group
Firm: Merrill Lynch Wealth Management
Senior Members: Melissa Spickler, Stacey Cassis, Matthew Spickler
Location: Bloomfield Hills, MI
Team Custodied Assets: $1.5 billion
Forbes Rankings: Top Wealth Management Teams High Net Worth, Best-In-State Wealth Management Teams
Background: A criminal law major from Michigan State University, Melissa Spickler started her career as an undercover agent for the Michigan attorney general’s office, primarily focusing on business fraud. “I had to learn about people and find out if they were telling me the truth—all of that experience was really perfect for later becoming a financial advisor but I didn’t know it at the time,” she recalls. After three years on the job and a few life threatening encounters, she began selling life insurance to car dealerships. It was in 1980 that she decided to pursue a career as a financial advisor, motivated by a client at one of the dealerships who told her more women were needed in the business. In the first six months after starting her business in 1981, she opened 600 new client accounts—both big and small. Over the decades since then, she grew her business and added to her team, which now has nine people in total and includes two of her three sons. Most clients are ultra high net worth families, with some spanning four generations.
Competitive Edge: While some advisors are all about investment prowess, Spickler argues she couldn’t be more dissimilar. She and her team favor a long term, strategic approach to building and preserving wealth that starts by focusing on retirement, tax and estate planning while also making sure clients have enough to live on. “Investments come last—we first want to know everything we can about the client and what keeps them awake at night,” says Spickler. Of her team’s wealthy clients, most are concerned with not wanting to outlive their money and leaving enough to their loved ones. “When clients have lots of money they’re not necessarily worrying about making a 5% or 10% return—it’s more about getting under the hood and making sure the whole family is taken care of over the long run.”
Investment Philosophy/Strategy: Before deciding on investment direction, the team always first focuses on how much clients need to live on. For the income part of a client’s portfolio, that entails locking in rates of at least 5%, whether through municipal and corporate bonds, certificates of deposit ladders or Treasury ladders, Spickler explains. Once income requirements are fulfilled, whatever money is left gets diversified into a portfolio of growth and value stocks—with a focus on dividend payers and utilities, as well as some alternative investments. The team has been making tactical shifts as needed, including putting money into cash when markets fell last year or more recently, buying CDs and Treasuries as rates went up. “It’s a bit of a bumpy time with markets,” says Spickler. “We’re sitting on the sidelines with cash, some of which we are getting ready to deploy into the market as we position for next year.”
Investment Outlook: “Rates are coming down at some point so markets should do alright,” predicts Spickler. “Rates aren’t going to stay this high forever which is why it makes sense to go further out on the yield curve to lock in rates.” What’s more, she thinks market volatility will increasingly level out once rates start going down—or at least stop going up. “We’re playing it a little bit safer than we normally would,” says Spickler. “Nobody knows for certain whether we’ll have a hard or soft economic landing, but when clients ask me I remind them that a well diversified portfolio will weather any storm as it has in the past.”
Biggest Challenge: A lesson that Spickler learned early in her career was to be mindful of taking on clients who are a good fit. “In the early days, I took on so many clients but some weren’t good fits for me or my team and that was a challenge to let them go,” she says. “In this business advisors and clients have to be a good fit for each other, it’s almost like being allowed into the family.”
Best Advice: After more than 40 years in the business, Spickler’s best advice to clients is twofold. “Stay the course and do not sell on every correction—the market always recovers no matter how ugly it gets,” she says. What’s more, with many of her clients between the ages of 60 and 80, she urges them not to put off doing things that will bring them joy. “Life is short but it’s so true: Do not put off tomorrow what you can do today.”
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