We Think Beyond Wealth

We prioritize the financial safety of your assets and family legacy to ensure responsible growth that enables effective wealth, estate and retirement planning.

We believe everybody deserves great financial services and we’ve built a community of clients that rely on our advice.  

Being part of one of the most awarded independent financial services firms in Canada has its perks. Echelon Wealth Partners provides our clients a strong platform of services without biased advice.  

Success starts with a plan. Click here to start your plan today.

We take the complex and make it straight forward.

Our core philosophy is to provide independent financial advice to our clients in a manner that provides a full range of services BEYOND WEALTH, to ensure every person has access to the right financial plan that fits with their life.

 

We work with each client to determine a disciplined strategy based on independent financial advice best practices, and your preferences and circumstances. Our investment plans are based on client goals, market conditions and client tolerance for risk and activity based on where you are in life.

 

We are from the community. Our clients are from our community. We focus on services that benefit our community.

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Our Services

Wealth Management

Portfolio Management

Wealth and Estate Planning

INSURANCE

Expertise & Experience Matters

Our Ottawa-based wealth management team, part of the venerable independent Canadian-owned and operated Ventum Financial Corp., is client-focused, providing complex investment services in an accessible, easy-to-understand format to our community of investors.

Breaking into the investment industry in 1992 with Midland Walwyn Inc, Shelly Lairar became immersed in the world of investment as a sales assistant for 21 investment advisors. She continued her journey working as an investment advisor with Merrill Lynch & Co and BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. before striking out on her own with partner Tom Gougeon in 2012 and joining Echelon Wealth Partners, now Ventum Financial, in 2016.

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Community Leaders Who Care

The standard of living in Ottawa is ranked one of the highest in Canada and the world. Our vibrant city boasts beautiful architecture, a bustling downtown core, and a diverse range of vibrant neighbourhoods. This is our community. We support our community.

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Our Team

Our team is an experienced group of investment professionals and risk management experts. We are a team of two senior advisor partners with with assistants in our Ottawa office. We provide customized service to over 100 families from high net worth, retired, young families and young professionals. We believe that everyone in our community deserves to receive the best financial advice, no matter their portfolio size.

Meet the Team

Photo of Shelly Lairar by Dave Chan

Shelly and Tom are active community leaders giving their time to causes important to their hearts. Shelly has been an Arnprior Volunteer Firefighter and spent five years on the Arnprior  Regional Health Foundation Board.


Tom has a long history of supporting and volunteering his time in support of mental health initiatives. He served on the Board of Directors for Operation of Come Home for many years.

BEYOND WEALTH INSIGHTS

What is Beyond Wealth?

In its essence our core principle of Beyond Wealth, is not only our service promise to our clients but a philosophy of how to inform and educate our community on all aspects of financial intelligence. Our Beyond Wealth resources include what we find is the very best blogs, articles, research, case studies, videos and other content that can inform and educate our clients about making smart, socially responsible financial decisions in every part of their life.

17 Jun, 2024
It seems like just yesterday that you could buy a pint of Stella for $7 or so. Now, more often than not, it is closer to $10. Yep, inflation. It is kind of like a tax on doing things, as just about everything has cost more over the past few years. Hop on a flight, eat at a nice restaurant, refinance your mortgage, the list goes on. With the benefit of hindsight, the current higher inflationary environment can be blamed on a few pretty big factors. Changes in behaviour during and coming out of the pandemic blew up supply changes, as capacity was unable to keep pace with demand. Then, of course, unprecedented money printing magnified the situation, as it made everyone wealthier and more willing to pay $10 for a pint. Of course, the textbook solution is to raise interest rates, which is clearly occurring around the world. These monetary policy shifts are effective but do work with variable lags. Making those lags longer, or even temporally offsetting them, was fiscal policy. It doesn’t take an economist to understand if the monetary policy is trying to slow the economy to tame inflation; materially elevated fiscal spending in an economy that is still growing at a decent pace is counterproductive for the inflation fight.
10 Jun, 2024
If the wealth advice service were in the manufacturing industry, the portfolio would be akin to what we make. Sure, there are many value-added services in addition to the portfolio, but it’s the portfolio that has to succeed for the client to reach their long-term goals. So, the more we can think about portfolio construction, the better.  One challenge is that while portfolio construction is often based on as long a historical time period as possible, things never remain static. Markets evolve and change over time, relationships change, and the available tools in the portfolio construction toolbox also change over time. One recent change that has been a challenge is the bond/stock correlation. After a couple of decades of very low or even negative correlations between these two core building blocks, correlations are back to being positive. The following chart shows the 2-year monthly correlation between Canadian equities and bonds. It looks rather similar for the U.S. and global markets, but we just thought some Canadian content would be nice. The higher correlation means that, more often, equities and bonds are moving in the same direction. Nobody complains when both are moving higher, like in the past 12 months, but when they move lower together, everyone starts getting grumpy, like in 2022. The 2nd line, beta, measures not just the direction of the two asset classes but the magnitude of the relative move.
03 Jun, 2024
The US market is up a little over 10% this year, Canada +6%, Europe +10%, and Japan +15%, while bonds are down about -1%. Huh, that sure does look like asset allocation is working well again after the car crash of 2022. Even better news is that the market is moving higher thanks to good fundamental news, not simply because central bankers are jamming more money into the financial system. Recession risk has continued to fade, as evidenced by the survey of economists. For the UK, Canada, US, Eurozone, China & Japan, the average probability of a recession hit a high in late 2022 at about 60% and has fallen down to a mere 25% of late. The UK, which was as high as 90% and suffered two negative quarters of GDP growth, is now down to 30%, winning the most improved ribbon. Even Canada, which is clearly struggling with higher rates, has improved from over 60% to 30%. Most are clustered around the 30% zone.
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