Patrick Bourbon, CFA, CFP ®

Patrick is your personal Chief Financial Officer and financial problem solver. He is a fiduciary financial advisor specializing in the unique financial planning, investment management and retirement planning needs of expatriates and U.S. citizens globally. He is knowledgeable in preserving and growing your wealth, as well as risk management, and asset allocation. He has selected and monitored over hundreds of mutual funds/ETF. Passionate about investing since youth, Patrick has more than twenty-five years of professional experience in selecting mutual funds and ETF, and has developed a network of relationships with more than 400 investment managers. His aspiration is to make sure that you will have enough assets for as long as you live so that you can enjoy a comfortable retirement at your chosen lifestyle and age successfully.

Patrick's main goal is to give you the best tools possible to improve your financial decisions given your loss tolerance. He provides wisdom, knowledge, and customized strategies in order to help you make effective diversified investments. He explains the possibilities so that you can make wiser, and better, long-term decisions depending on your unique situation. He hopes to bring organization to your financial life.

French by birth, Patrick has personal experience with the life and technical financial planning opportunities and challenges faced by expatriates (around 50 percent of his clients are Europeans living in the U.S. or Americans living abroad). He has lived overseas half his life, visited forty countries, and enjoys a wonderful cross-cultural marriage. His purpose is to help you reach your global goals and go beyond the complexity of cross-border tax/currency planning. Patrick is humble, thinks long term, constantly learning, trying to find high-quality investments and to avoid unforced errors, and thinking what could go wrong.

His passion for investments started in his early teens, when his mother took him to see the Paris stock exchange. At that time, he was given a $2 bill. From that point on, he became fascinated by currency management and he started to check the value of his $2 investment in French Francs every week. His interest in stocks grew when he created an investment club in 1997.

Patrick strongly believes in giving back to Chicago. He is very engaged in Chicago's civic community, actively serving as chairman of Stuart Investments, as a member of the board of advisors of the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Since 2006, he has been the president of UFEC/AFFC. In 2014 (and 2021), he was (re)elected with the most votes “Conseillers des Français de l'étranger ” with the Consulate of France.

Patrick loves sports. For ten years, he has participated in ski and tennis competitions, winning more than twenty-five contests. Competition has taught him concentration, persistence, discipline, self-control, humility, and confidence. It has helped him understand that defeats and failure experiences are to be expected and are good learning opportunities. Ultimate success can be attained by learning from past experiences. Sports, and particularly the mental side of sports, has been a constant positive and influence in his life. He has learned that sometimes, your main adversary is yourself. And, like in entrepreneurship, you need discipline and determination to compete. You must also move quickly from past mistakes or you will miss opportunities.

He also enjoys wine tastings (Pomerol and Champagne are his favorites) and traveling (visited more than 30 countries). Patrick speaks English, French, and Spanish. He has also studied Japanese, Russian, and Greek. Patrick polishes his French accent every morning.

When it comes to investing, Patrick believes in discipline, precision, simplification, slowing down, independent thinking, having a systematic process, being methodical, using checklists, relying on data (what it says and what it does not say), and to keep questioning past decisions. He is focused, pragmatic, analytical, cautious, humble, and believes that there is always room for improvement and to seek ways to be better.