Is it the right time to hire a financial planner? In this episode, Tommy, John, and Michael dive into the intricacies of financial planning and highlight the importance of expert guidance. They discuss the pitfalls of trying to manage your finances alone, the risks of bad advice, and why getting professional help early on can make all the difference.
Listen in to hear about the importance of being cautious with your sources of advice and how sometimes, valuable insights come from unexpected places—if you're open to receiving them. You'll learn what steps to take when you're ready for financial advice and why hiring a financial planner can prevent you from becoming your own worst enemy. Don't miss discovering how to find the right advisor who speaks your language, understands your unique situation, and meets you where you are in life.
Listen to the full episode here:
What you will learn:
- Why it is important to plan ahead. (3:30)
- Why you should be mindful of where you get your advice. (6:30)
- The importance of doing your own research as well. (11:30)
- What you can do when you’re ready for financial advice. (15:20)
- Why you should hire a financial planner. (17:00)
- How to find the right advisor for you. (25:59)
- Why we always put our clients first. (35:00)
Ideas worth sharing:
- “You don’t know what you don’t know, and you can’t see the holes in your financial planning sometimes. You need that expert help.” - Mason & Associates
- “You never know when you may get wise advice from unexpected sources.” - Mason & Associates
- “Your financial planner can stop you from being your own worst enemy.” - Mason & Associates
Resources from this episode:
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Read the Transcript Below:
Congratulations for taking ownership of your financial plan by tuning into the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast, hosted by Mason & Associates, financial advisors with over three decades of experience serving you.
John Mason: Welcome to the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast. I'm John Mason, President and Certified Financial Planner at Mason & Associates. And today with me—Mike Mason and Tommy Blackburn. Folks, if this is your first episode listening to the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast, we specialize with federal employees.
We have three CFPs right now. Ben Raikes is on vacation, not recording with us, but we have three CFPs on here. A CLU, a CHFC, Tommy's a CPA, and a personal financial specialist. So very, very credentialed. And our whole goal of this podcast is to do really a couple of things. One: support, empower, educate, and motivate you to make changes in your financial plan, build out a resource library for our clients.
And because we've been doing this for over three decades, helping federal employees retire, make social security, claiming decisions, their tax planning, and more. We can't help everybody, doing comprehensive financial planning for millions across the country, but we can share our knowledge with you, our podcast audience.
So thanks for being with us on this journey. If you're returning and you like the episodes and you like the show, thanks for continuing to come back for more. In this episode, we are talking when are you ready to hire a financial planner? When are you ready to hire an advisor? Before we dive into this topic, I do want to share with my co-host today. You notice that I'm in a much nicer shirt.
So last episode, I recorded in a T-shirt. I had some road rash, but I'm feeling much better now, all healed up and dressed more professional. So I'll ask for forgiveness from the audience too.
Tommy Blackburn: Definitely.
Mike Mason: Well, it's nice that you're healed up after going over heels on your scooters.
Tommy Blackburn: We probably said in a different episode, it was an electric scooter, a nice scooter, so he wasn't just scooting down, pushing with his foot. This was a motorized scooter that you were moving along, but we're, yeah, very happy that you're here. You had a pretty gnarly kind of wipeout there. So good to see you're recovering well.
John Mason: Well, things happen so fast. I'm driving down the road. I'm going 15 to 19 miles an hour. I fly over the handlebars and it's like my whole life changes in a split second. So fast. Just bam. Everything that I knew. I'm yelling and cussing in the middle of the street.
I'm angry, but the silver lining here is I have the right disability insurance. I have the right life insurance. We have a good operating agreement at Mason & Associates that talks about what happens in the event of death, disability, etc. So in this life-changing thing that can happen that fast, something so innocent, like just riding an electric scooter can change your life.
I think it's directly applicable to this episode. When are you ready to hire a financial planner? Because there's so much to unpack here, and although there are a lot of educated people listening to this podcast, doing their own research. You don't know what you don't know. You can't see your own holes sometime in your financial plan and you need that expert help.
Tommy Blackburn: And I was just going to say, I think it's almost a little bit of a teaser as well for another episode we're going to do of Protect Yourself From Yourself and some of the rules of thumb and so forth. And that, as you said, you have many things in place and you've thought ahead. So at least from a financial perspective, everything in the worst case, you've done everything you can to protect yourself from yourself in that situation.
So I think it also led well into that next episode.
Mike Mason: And I want to maybe clarify the title a little bit. When Are You Ready to Hire a Financial Planner? Maybe when should you be ready to accept financial advice? ‘Cause there's going to be a difference. You should be getting financial advice.
You should really be getting it from your parents early on. But when you go out in the workforce as quickly as possible, you may not be ready to hire a financial planner then. But where do you go to get solid financial advice? And this doesn't have to be a teaser. We think that the library of podcasts that we have at Mason & Associates can help anybody that isn't really capable of hiring a financial advisor at 25 to 30 years old.
John Mason: So financial planning in general is beneficial from probably 10 years old through the date of death. There's always something we can change in a financial plan, guys, to improve your financial situation. You're never really on autopilot. I take almost offense to the term autopilot because that's lazy.
So you could be in a great place in your financial plan, right? You could be really, really, really good, but you're never on autopilot. So there's always something we can do to improve. So when should you be doing financial planning? When, Mike, should you be willing to accept financial advice?
The answer is at a very young age, but let's face it, the reason we have a job, the reason that we have a podcast, the reason Dave Ramsey is so successful is a lot of young people, a lot of people do not have good mentors.
And maybe the last person you should take financial planning advice from is your next-door neighbor, your best friend, or even worse, your parents if you've watched them make horrible financial decisions, which probably 50 percent of the country is doing that. You don't want to receive that advice either.
Tommy Blackburn: And all those people you just mentioned, I had the same thought, John. You should be able to look to your parents. And it's innocent, but your parents maybe aren't the most financially astute, depending on your situation.
And they have their own biases that—so everybody's well-intentioned, but they could have some biases that maybe work to a certain degree, but could actually hinder you at a certain point. And that's interesting too, you think about the impact our parents have on us and our views and going through life and then later having to kind of challenge those views and expand upon them.
It's a fun journey for all of us, but I agree, knowing when to kind of get outside of that first-level box that we all grow up in. And maybe to add a little bit more context too, is I thought that through this recently encountered someone midlife young parent asked, when is someone ready for financial planning?
And it is we've all just kind of said you're always ready for financial planning. It's part of everyday life. I mean, it should be something we're doing, and we're not complacent, and we're constantly trying to improve. Doesn't mean we have to do things the hard way, but we shouldn't be complacent either And then it's the question when are you ready to hire an advisor? What type of adviser?
So it's just interesting. It's these different stages of life. How do you go get planning during those? And then when are you ready for maybe a Mason & Associates, for example?
Mike Mason: This reminds me of an interesting story in my life and John's as well. Sometimes you can get financial advice from a source you're not even ready to get it, but you can get great financial advice.
And so John gave his first piece of financial advice when he was a junior in high school. And it was a year and a half after I set it down in front of the computer, took him to the TSP website, said, “Okay, let's start investing $2000 every year into an IRA.” And we used the website, and I showed him that—I forget what rate of return I used 8% or 9%—But at age 65, you'll be a millionaire, and then a year and a half later, there's a guest speaker at the high school who had started life pretty rough. He had gotten to some legal trouble, rose above that, and he made the comment in the class. He says, “I'll never be a millionaire, but I've changed my life,” and John raised his hand and he called on him. He's like, “Well, if you start saving $2000 a year for this many years, you can be a millionaire.” So you never know when you might get some way some wise advice.
John Mason: Well, is there such a key as you have to be willing to receive it?
You and mom were great mentors and parents because you showed me from a young age that you would be able to accept my opinion as a six-year-old, a seven-year-old, a 10-year-old, a 20-year-old. And although you had more life knowledge and et cetera, you showed me that like, “Okay, well, maybe a 12-year-old could have a good idea.”
So this ripples out into all aspects of your life. It's like you have to be willing to receive constructive criticism. You have to be willing to receive advice. You have to be willing to accept the fact that maybe you can improve or that the old rules of thumb are no longer valid. So it means a lot when you're willing to A.) outsource because you just don't have the time or B.) you're willing to accept advice from people who dedicate their life to doing it.
And as we think about how some of these other folks can be kind of dangerous, these old rules of thumb, or receiving advice from people who aren't in the know, but maybe used to know it better. I'm thinking about the refi heyday or refi decade that we had. How many young people are out there that didn't refinance from 4 to 3.7 to 3.5 to 3.2?
And they were waiting for this magical 2% rate drop because all of their parents said, “You don't refinance because A.) there's cost.” Well, when you use CapCenter, there's no cost. So that's a mistake. Or you need to save 2% before it's worth it. Well, that was true when rates were maybe 10%, but not when they're 3% or 4%.
So what kind of mistakes have we made because we're looking for advice from either the wrong people or we're not willing to accept advice or do our own due diligence? So I just thought, circling back to who are you getting your advice from?
Even me, guys. I love Peter Attia's podcast and some other folks that are out there but you always have to like take a step back for a second, don't you? And say, “Well, what are they selling me?” Because we're all marketing something. So even though we're credible, we're still selling ourselves on this podcast.
So as an audience member or just an active participant who's trying to learn, you always have to step back and say, “Okay, I know they're an authority on this subject, but that doesn't mean I can't also maybe think about it or do my own research as well or like try to think,” I guess I don't know the word I'm thinking, but like objectively think about whether or not they have biases that they're now presenting to you on the other side.
Mike Mason: And if you think about—you say we're selling ourselves and we are, we're selling our financial planning services to the folks that have enough money to hire us. But at the same time, we're putting out quality material that a 25 or 30-year-old, that anybody 25 up, and I don't know why I started 25. Anybody can get great value from.
So there's absolutely no ulterior motive other than to help those folks. And then, we still want to bring on 10 to 12 new clients a year. I can tell you that when I started in the workforce, I joined the Air Force at a young age, and right out of basic training to my first duty station, I was put in touch with—I actually remember this guy, the name of the company, American Amicable.
And he showed me that universal life at 8 or 9 percent interest, if I started doing X, how much money I would have in the future. So when we say be careful of who you take advice from when you're 25 years old and you don't have any money to put under management, then somebody is selling you something, that they're going to make a commission on, so you have to think about that.
There's no reason why a 25-year-old shouldn't have life insurance, probably didn't need whole life insurance at the time. So be careful who you're getting the advice from. And ours is as pure as it can be and you know exactly how you pay Mason & Associates.
There's no hidden costs.
Tommy Blackburn: I think it's all great, great points. And I guess our bias, yes, we are trying to grow our practice and market, but we're also trying to put good out in the world. But as I thought about it just now, our bias is financial planning. We believe in financial planning and we believe that everybody needs it.
That's our angle. As you said, Mike, I don't think there's anything bad about that, but as you listen to others—I agree with John's message—It's kind of, what is their angle? What are they selling? Even if it's not a compensation, what do they believe? So if it's Peter Attia and his longevity beliefs, I mean, that's what he believes. That's what he's selling. Whether it's gonna benefit him or not.
So I think it's helpful to always keep that in mind. What is their perspective they're coming from? And that being said, we certainly believe in what we're putting out there and hope that we're doing a lot of good for people.
I think maybe for me, guys, and y'all tell me if you want to go a different direction is just thinking through like maybe the stages, the typical life stages, and what can people do if they are looking for planning. Where should, where can they go, and maybe what are some things they should be thinking about, and if we should go a different direction, by all means, let's do that.
John Mason: Well, I love it. And so a couple of things. One, we're fee-only. So if you're brand new to this podcast, fee-only means the only people that pay us are our clients. Then there are commission-based financial planners who, when they sell you an insurance or an investment product, they get paid from the provider as like a thank-you for selling this product.
And then there are people that live in the middle ground that do both. So we live at the fee-only ground. There are people that live all over the place. We believe fee-only eliminates a lot of conflicts of interest, but not all of them, but it certainly eliminates a lot of them.
Speaking of conflicts of interest, we don't have any sponsors for this podcast. So as we talk about like, what's our angle, we don't have any sponsors. We pay for this, we produce this, and we don't have any conflicts there because it's produced by us for you, our audience, and for our clients.
So as we start looking at the life stages, Tommy, I thought I jotted down a note and maybe we start here and dive into the life stages at the same time. We're producing biased—hopefully, the audience agrees. If you like it, maybe hit the like button on YouTube, subscribe, leave us five stars, but we believe we're producing amazing content. Can somebody do their own financial plan just by listening to a podcast, or is there some benefit to hiring a planner?
Because I think when I encounter young professionals and really, this could be not just young, but anybody. Well, there's so much great content. There's so many YouTube videos. Y'all are crushing it on YouTube and Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast. Do I really need that next-level service, or can I just implement everything that you guys are saying on your content creation?
Mike Mason: That's a great question. In fact, my mind was going the same direction. First and foremost, I don't know that we can dive into everybody's particular situation. We can give overviews like donor-advised funds and backdoor Roth IRAs and whatnot. There's a whole lot of traps in there trying to do those yourself. And maybe one of the biggest traps is you've been successful.
You're 50,55 years old. You're five to ten years away from calling it quits, it's July 10th of 2024 and the markets defied all logic and still seems to be climbing and you get scared because you're at this point and you think to yourself, it's time to bail. Or the market drops and you think it's gonna go further. So that financial planner is the one that holds your feet to the plan as much as anything else. You've got to have somebody to keep you from being your own worst enemy, which is probably the next podcast we're going to record as well.
Don't be your own worst enemy.
Tommy Blackburn: I agree, and I think, Mike, hopefully—let me jump in here. Thank you. We're ready to hand it off. Also, an advisor can hopefully help keep complacency from happening. As we said, sometimes staying the course—many times staying the course is the right direction to go, but laws change, life changes, there's constant change.
And so somebody who's bringing a new perspective or at least an outside perspective every day to the plan to think about, “Are there other moves we should be making?” I think, John, to circle back to the do-it-yourself thing. One, I think sometimes you don't have a choice. So sometimes it's just what are your resources in life and you may just be in a position where everything's committed elsewhere, and you kind of have to figure out you got to do the best you can, and that's where you got to go out and educate yourself as best you can and get, and it's not easy.
Nothing is easy when it's do-it-yourself. Sometimes it can be fun. But your situation may just dictate that, and that's why we hope that this is helpful, as well as many of the other resources out there. Then there's also light resources, things that maybe aren't as in-depth, don't go to the level of customization we think we go, but still get you pretty far.
So those are options that perhaps we'll explore. And then of course there's like the more white glove, the very customized, what we think we do for a very specific group that we've talked about in many episodes. And I'm sure we'll touch on again. Mike kind of began to hit on, or maybe you both did with this do-it-yourself thing and implement yourself.
We don't know everybody's situation. So we sprinkle a lot of ideas and sometimes we get very specific. Many times it's high level, but I'm thinking to an example, an interaction I had recently where somebody said, “Hey Tommy, you should talk to so and so and tell them that they should be doing Roth 401k or Roth TSP.”
Probably because they've heard me talk about Roth ad nauseam. So I kind of understood where that was coming from, but at the same time, my mind began spinning because I'm trying to think about this person who's not a client and everything about their situation that I don't know. Where it's like, yes, in general, I believe Roth TSP and 401k probably make sense for most, but I'm trying to think that I know this person's divorced.
I'm not sure if they're head of household or if they're single in their filing status. I know they're making pretty good money right now. I know they're paying child support, so they're not getting a tax deduction. I know they're going to retire early because they're a federal. So now I'm thinking through the supplement and the pension and what they're distributing.
In all of which, I come back to like, I need a plan in place before I can say anything as to what you should be doing because I just named 20 variables that I'm trying to sort through in my mind. So I don't know if that's helpful, but to me, that's just where I'm at. The general stuff is helpful and you can try to piece it together yourself, but it's not individually customized.
John Mason: Yeah, podcasts, content creation, seminars, webinars, all of these things are hopefully principles-based. They're good education. You can then take that education and hopefully implement it in your own life. But that starts to get dangerous because you start taking supplements that are not good for you because somebody—that's bad.
You start doing Roth conversions and losing the American Opportunity Tax Credit and Child Tax Credit and all of the ripple effects of taking action on things that you don't fully understand. So it's good education. It's good to be informed. So it's good principles, but it's not necessarily things that should be acted on.
And I think that's where you need a financial planner who can help you decide what things need to be actioned and what things don't. We need a financial planner to help you see the holes in life. Because we all think we're great until you have somebody else that like, “I'm going to see a physical therapist now.” He asked me to turn to the right and he was like, “Ooh, that's bad.”
I was like, “Hey, I thought I was flexible.” He was like, “You're not.” “Okay, great. Good to know.” He was like, “Hey, you're supposed to be able to do this.” I'm like, “All right.” He's like, “You go about one-fourth of the turn you're supposed to have.” Well, I could have gone the next 40 years thinking that I'm a flexible human and I just found out I'm the most unflexible person on the planet.
Now I can fix that. So seeing the holes and then taking action through implementation is something that's so important because if we're self-only, or we're doing this all by ourselves, we have to determine what needs to be actioned. We have to determine how to make the action. We have to do the action.
And then, oh, by the way, we don't want to fall into analysis paralysis. We were joking, Tommy, before you hopped on as we were prepping. “I want a new smartwatch. I can't decide if I want a Garmin, an Apple Watch Ultra 3, or a Series 10, or I can't decide if I should get it now or wait until September when all this new stuff is apparently—” Well, I mean, that's just a watch.
Imagine a Roth conversion, right? That's just $600, $700, $800 watch and I'm going into a tailspin. I can't even imagine the backflips people are trying to do as they think about social security, estate planning, etc.
Mike Mason: Oh yeah. And it gets so difficult when you're trying to do it yourself.
You get analysis paralysis and you do nothing. And if those Roth conversions made sense or those backdoor Roth contributions made sense, but you didn't know exactly how to do it, so you didn't do it this year, and then you didn't do it next year, and then all of a sudden one year turns into 10, and that's where the financial advisor, financial planner, and I want to differentiate here because we've had people ask us at times, “Hey, I can hire somebody at a lower rate than you guys.”
Right? Well, listen very carefully. There's one investment firm out there that all they call themselves is investment advisor. That's not a financial planner, right? That's like if all you know is life insurance, you're a life insurance agent. If all you know is mixing stocks from A to Z and you've got to have one of each in the alphabet, then you're an investment advisor, but you're not a financial planner.
John Mason: So there's financial planners versus investment advisor. There's financial planner versus insurance consultant. Remember, audience, there's many ways all of these people can get paid. So find the one that makes sense for you. So there is a financial planner for everyone in every phase of life.
So if we break it down into early career, mid-career, late-career/retire, those are probably the three phases, Tommy, that you were bringing up earlier. And there are firms out there that specialize with—right now it would be like Gen Z, graduating college, first job. “
I need an initial plan. I need something where I can pay 50, 100, 200 bucks a month retainer fee to give me these action items, to help me see the forest through the trees.” Is that right? So I think so. “Help me see all the things I'm supposed to see and then help me action them.” Maybe they don't need the level of customization that we're providing.
So how do you find those folks? Well, XY Planning Network is a great place to. If you're a young person looking for a fee-only financial planner, a lot of those folks charge one-time planning fees, or they'll do hourly consulting or monthly retainers, so maybe you just need a check-in. Find somebody that can do a one-time project fee.
Awesome. How else, if I'm a young professional, Tommy, what else am I looking for? And we'll just stick with XY Planning Network. Their search tool is pretty cool. So what else can we search for there?
Tommy Blackburn: So if we're just thinking about, well, I'll just throw out there some other ones, just so people have a few resources is you go to cfp.net, find a CFP, and I think you can see different ways that billing models.
So maybe they do a retainer and hourly, if that's what you're in need of. FPA, I think, has a “Find a planner” search as well. So those are some ones that maybe it'll get you a little bit more qualified and allow you to search.
XYPN, XY Planning Networks is pretty neat because you said there's a lot of criteria. So not only can we say, “Hey, I want to hire somebody to do hourly work or a one-time plan work”. But you can say, “I am in generation Z or I am a new career person, or I'm a federal retiree.” So you can really kind of say, “Here's my demographics.”
And I'll say, “Great. Here's an advisor who says they specialize, they work with folks who fit your situation that you just described.” And as I think about like early career, a lot of times it's get some good habits in place I guess I think. Build an emergency fund, begin saving and investing.
Think about which accounts we should be saving and investing in. Maybe mapping out some of the career track and moves that may be possible. Taking advantage of benefits. That's a lot of early career stuff. My mind is jumping towards the family, the young middle-aged family, just because that's what I encountered recently.
So it's hot on my mind and it's relevant to John and myself just where we are in life. And that's almost like, there's a lot that can go on in there, and it's not necessarily who we specialize with. We do have some of those families for various reasons, but my thoughts there are okay, I know you've got kids, so estate planning, having things like wills, power of attorneys, a revocable trust, form of insurance in my mind, and you gotta have it, so that jumps into my mind, and I just mentioned insurance, that family, life insurance, or having, understanding what are financial resources available if something happens to us in death or a disability.
Being able to answer those questions, understanding your benefits and what it may bring. And then also, still, how are we saving and investing? Do we have a pension? What's the plan for that? Just taking advantage of some career benefits. And so forth.
Mike Mason: I really like helping that early 25 to 35.
Because it's hard. It's hard for them to find real professional help because it's expensive, right? So some of the things you said, make sure your life insurance is right. It goes without saying, your health insurance, the live within your means, probably the most important. Have an emergency money fund.
What good is an investment in X, Y, Z stock if the minute the car breaks down, you have to sell it at the worst possible time? So the Emergency Money Fund and, and I guess Dave Ramsey probably does a pretty good job there. And many churches will implement a Dave Ramsey thing.
But getting the basics done, start saving instantly in that 401k at 10%. You'll build your budget around that. Get the life insurance right, get the health insurance right, if you're a professional and being injured—would keep you from earning that high income. Then you have to have that disability insurance as well.
John Mason: Well, I think your points are valid. Both of you made great points and I oversimplified. I made a mistake when I said you have the early career, mid-career, late-career/retiree, because inside of the XYPN search tool, you can say, “I'm going through a divorce.” You can say, “I'm starting a family.” I think you can say, “I am changing jobs,” right?
So not only do we have these three big phases that we can group people in from like a generational planning, but then we have life phases that we all go through. “I'm going to buy a new house. I just got a pay raise. I'm having a child.” All of these things are reasons why you would seek out a financial planner.
And Mike, I love everything that you're saying. I would just encourage all of our audience. If you're young, go get a one-time financial plan. Find somebody that can do hourly work for you. If you're an older client and you have children, encourage them to do the same. And I know nothing about Vanguard personal advisors.
They charge somewhere under 0.5% I think. I have no idea about their quality of their advice, but if I had to say Vanguard personal advisors or somebody like that versus a financial planning firm, a registered investment advisor, or a fee-only financial planner that you could find on CFP or XYPN, I'd rather take one hour of their time and pay a premium for it than a year's worth of Vanguard personal advisor time at a discount.
And there are so many things that we just have to say in life, like an air conditioner costs what it costs. I'm going to have to buy that. Well, letting young folks off the hook, not paying for financial planning advice at 22 to 25 to 30 years old is really not an option. It's a mistake, and we can make excuses for them like the housing market is high or whatever or inflation—we can make all sorts of excuses but at the end of the day maybe you don't need somebody every year, but we should be paying for advice as we go through these changes in life that you've never been through before.
Mike Mason: That's a great point. And thank you for clarifying ‘cause you get older—not that I'm old—but you get older and you look back when you were 25 to 30, 35 with two kids and how you were pinching pennies. Fortunately, the things I didn't want to pay for, I put sweat equity in, which might be seeding the lawn or whatnot, but yeah, the good expense is finding somebody that you can pay for that advice that'll at least put you in the right direction.
Tommy Blackburn: There's like a cost-benefit, and I only say this because I think we've even debated in the past internally.
It's like, well, at what point is a fee detrimental to somebody's current cash flow situation? So you gotta find—but there are people out there who specialize in these different stages of life and have built fee structures around it. So yeah, we can't have that excuse. There are people out there who are willing to work with you cost-effectively.
You just gotta go search for them. And I think we've laid out some good directions there for people to look.
Mike Mason: I think we've got a pretty good following for this podcast. And I would guess that that following is 50 and older. And it's just a guess, but so if you are a follower of the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast and you have children, adult children, send this episode to them. Send any other episodes you think will benefit them because the earlier we do—I think the title of this was When Do We Hire a Financial Planner or When Should We Start Financial Planning?
Of course, the answer to that is the sooner, the better.
John Mason: There's a financial planner for everyone, for every phase of life that you're in, for every income bracket, for every customized level of service. So there's discount advisors, there's middle-of-the-road advisors, there's higher-end fee advisors, and anything in between.
So for our audience, where do we stack up? Well, we probably are a little bit more of a premium fee. And at the end of the day, we think we also provide a higher level of customized service than most competitors, if not, you can't say everybody, but premium fee, premium service. I think our clients—we're redesigning our website.
And even from Kelsey, when we were designing—she was like, “Our clients feel important.” And they feel that they're important because they're not a number. We wrote down a tagline for the website. I don't know if we'll use it, but “medium and mighty.” We're not a fly-by-the-night small company.
We're not multi-billion dollars under management either. We're medium and mighty for a reason because of our family values, the way we take service. So important because we have live humans answering the phone and for all of these things that we're doing, we couldn't do it on a discount fee. Just the math doesn't work.
The economics of that model don't work. How do the economics work on a discount advisor? You triple the client load or whatever to get to the same point. You can't have everything. Well, on a previous episode, we talked about how I read a book called The 80/80 Marriage and it said you don't get straight A's in life.
Meaning, pick the three or four things that you want to get an A in, and let the other things slide. Well, in financial planning, if you're gonna make your money, or you're gonna market yourself as a discount advisor and get less revenue per family, what do we have to give up to do that? Probably some level of personalized service, customized service, attention to detail, etc.
Or maybe just general expertise. Maybe we don't have that if we're a discount advisor and that's the way that we stand out from the crowd.
Mike Mason: When we started this Financial Planning for Federal Employees, that cut out one of those negatives where if everybody you meet has a different retirement plan, you're going to spend more time doing research if you're good.
Unfortunately, most people aren't good, so they make assumptions in these—when they meet a person from a different retirement plan every time, so they make assumptions. Fortunately for us, we got to cut through a lot of research time by 90% of our clients having at least one federal employee in the household.
John Mason: To your point, Mike, we cut out the surface-level research and I'm doing this. If you can see me on YouTube, the surface level, the tip of the iceberg research, because that's where most people live. They only want to live up here and the tip, right? And because we weren't always just trying to understand the basics of a thousand different retirement systems.
What did that allow us to do with federal employees? We didn't actually cut our research time, but it was more focused research time. It was deeper research time. It was like tax code research, federal research. It was like, “Let's focus on the things that matter rather than just skimming the surface with a thousand different retirement plans.”
Mike Mason: A great point. Dive down more research. What does this client really want? What are their goals, right?
John Mason: Well guys, I think this podcast is about action items. I think we've talked a lot about when people should hire financial planners, how they can find one. I'm going to do my best. We'll do our best folks to link the XY planning network search tool.
And here as well as the CFP and FPA just so you can see what we're talking about here, but what I love about it, and I don't think it's—you should know we're affiliated or we are members of the XY Planning Network community. So John Mason, Tommy Blackburn, Ben Raikes, we're XYPN members. We've also been on their podcast, which is kind of cool.
But I'm just looking at the search tool now. Business Planning Specialties, Business Financial Management, Business Owners, Business Planning, Family Business, Non-Profit, Small Business, Established Professionals, Junior Executives—these are all like criteria that you can use for a search to find a financial planner that works with you.
And at the end of the day, and my big action, and if you guys please share yours as well, at the end of the day, you want to find somebody who speaks your language. You want to find somebody who can specialize with you and you want to find somebody that can meet you where you are right now in life.
And if you are somebody that's not ready for our level of customized service, we're not going to discount our service offering to meet you there. It's just not what we're going to do. So we will meet you and your financial plan when you're ready to meet with us and the service that we provide. If you're not there yet, find somebody who's going to meet you where you are.
They're out there. You can find them and they can change your life too.
Mike Mason: While you're saying find them, the beauty of 2024 is that you can find this person anywhere in any state that can help you. So maybe where you live right now, there isn't somebody close by. I remember the first time I tried to get some financial advice about six months before I went into the business, I had to drive from Hampton area of Virginia to Norfolk to meet with a Merrill Lynch guy. So you don't have to do that anymore. You've got the whole United States to recruit your financial advisor from.
Tommy Blackburn: As the title of the episode, everyone is ready for financial planning. No matter where you are in your life, as to what makes sense, that's the question of whether it's do-it-yourself, your own self-education, or finding somebody, as John said, who's able to meet you where you are.
And if you are looking for retirement tax planning, particularly if you're a federal employee, retirement and tax planning and you have $700,000, $1,000,000, Mason & Associates is who you should be reaching out to. That's certainly a little biased plug there, but I just want to make it clear who our specific specialty really focuses in on.
A lot of federal employee knowledge, a lot of tax planning knowledge, and particularly we like that retirement phase and all the resources and knowledge we get to bring to bear. But outside of that, you're always ready for financial planning and you should see you should seek it out. Hopefully, we've given some good direction.
John Mason: Masonllc.net, M-A-S-O-N-L-L-C.net on our home page.
We have a special release episode, new client process and experience. If you're curious what that looks like, there's a special podcast episode on that. On YouTube, we always make sure to link that episode so it's right there for you. So yes, please, please, please do all the things for us. Thank you for being on this journey.
Like, subscribe, hit the bell notification, drop us a line, whether it's a comment or an email to masonfp@masonllc.net. That's masonfp—like financial planning—@masonllc.net. We've got so many good episodes coming. We've recorded a guest episode with a social security planning expert. We have some other industry experts that we're thinking about bringing on, maybe some out-of-industry experts that may be coming on to join us on this podcast.
So find a financial planner who can help you. If we're not the team, we'd like to throw our hat in the ring. But if we can't meet you where you are right now, continue to listen to this episode, find an advisor that can meet you there, and if you're somebody that can benefit from our services, we have live humans that answer the phone Monday through Thursday, 757-223-9898. Thanks again for being on this journey with us. We're Mason & Associates, and we'll see you next time on the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast.
The topics discussed on this podcast represent our best understanding of federal benefits and are for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment, financial planning, or other professional advice.
We encourage you to consult with the office of personnel management and one or more professional advisors before taking any action based on the information presented.