Aug. 19–When Michael Joyce was 13, he inherited $300 from his uncle.

By the time he went to college — the first in his family — he had invested the funds and doubled his money.

Joyce has been interested in finance ever since. Today, he heads a financial management firm here that offers sophisticated advice to business executives, hedge-fund managers, doctors, even university presidents.

Michael Joyce & Associates P.C. specializes in private wealth management for individuals, typically with a net worth from $1 million to $10 million.

His services include everything from structuring an investment portfolio or creating an estate plan to figuring out the best way to buy a boat or a vacation home in Mexico.

“Our clients are people who want to simplify things,” said Joyce, 42. “They may have financial acumen, but they don’t have time to do everything on their own. They tend to be delegators.”

He’s a busy man himself, with three young sons and a wife who works as a senior financial adviser to a number of businesses.

Joyce competes in triathlons and enjoys (or endures) 5 a.m. Navy SEAL-style workouts two or three times a week.

He’s the president and majority owner of his nine-employee firm, which runs offices on West Broad Street and in Bethlehem, Pa.

In a couple of weeks, he’ll take over as chairman of the National Association of Personal Financial Advisors, a organization that represents about 1,000 financial advisers<cm cq-mjs> around the country.

Its members are all advisers who are compensated solely through fees paid by their clients.

Because fee-only advisers, including Joyce’s firm, aren’t brokers or dealers and don’t market financial products of their own, they avoid many, though not all, of the conflicts of interest that have haunted much of the financial industry in recent years.

That may be one reason NAPFA has seen its membership grow by more than 20 percent in the past couple of years, even as equity markets tumbled and many Wall Street analysts saw their reputations tarnished.

As chairman of the association, Joyce hopes to raise its public profile. “We hold ourselves out to be the highest quality financial advisers.”

Membership in the group is selective, Joyce said. That’s not going to change, but he wants to continue to expand the membership.

Uncertainty in the stock market has provided some opportunities for Joyce’s firm, which handles about 130 clients and has been recognized as one of the nation’s top 250 financial advisers for five years in a row by Worth magazine, a national publication aimed at individual investors.

“In the last few years, a lot of people have come to us just because they’ve gotten hammered in the market,” Joyce said, and they’re looking for someone with experience whom they can trust. “All of our clients come by referral, usually via another client.”

Joyce describes his role as a “personal chief financial officer” who can help his clients craft an employment contract, manage the options and restricted stock they receive as compensation or assess their insurance needs.

Depending on the clients’ objectives, Joyce’s firm will help them invest in stocks, bonds, real estate, private placement equity or venture capital funds, to name just a few.

“This is a relationship business and when we go into a relationship, we expect it to be a long-term one,” he said.

Joyce sits down with potential clients to understand their financial objectives, their current situation and their risk tolerance.

“We want our clients to be involved in the process, to understand what we’re doing. Sometimes, we come up with goals the client hasn’t been able to verbalize.” And occasionally, there are clients “we haven’t taken on because they didn’t have realistic expectations.”

This was a problem especially in the late-1990s boom, when “at least a dozen” potential clients said they expected to earn 20 percent annual returns — after inflation — but were willing to take on no downside risk.

“They never were clients.”

Investors are more realistic these days, Joyce said, and some are downright pessimistic.

His job is to help guide them to reasonable, rational decisions.

“I have an ability to think strategically, but I pay attention to the details, as well.”

After graduating from Penn State with a degree in finance, Joyce spent most of the 1980s as a bond trader in Philadelphia and Denver.

When he and his wife, who was on the executive track with Union Pacific Corp., moved back to eastern Pennsylvania in 1989, Joyce joined a firm in Allentown that specialized in personal financial advice.

He started Michael Joyce & Associates in Bethlehem in 1993 and came to Richmond in 1995 when his wife, Cindy, transferred to work at Union Pacific’s Overnite Transportation Co., which is based here.

His business has grown steadily.

His prosperous clients often have complicated financial needs. But sometimes he has to get down to the basics, too.

He remembers a discussion with one of his first clients after leaving the bond-trading business.

After spending more than an hour talking about the client’s seven-figure municipal bond portfolio, Joyce figured that this doctor “must know what he’s talking about. I asked if he had any questions.”

Just one, the doctor responded: What’s the difference between a stock and a bond?

“He was totally serious,” Joyce said, shaking his head.

That question, at least, was very easy to answer.

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(c) 2003, Richmond Times-Dispatch, Va. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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