Winning in Retirement

Financial Fingerprint & The Akers Way

• Akers Financial Group

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Brian Akers and his son Noah discuss the concept of a "financial fingerprint," emphasizing the unique nature of each individual's financial situation. They highlight the importance of comprehensive financial planning, which includes identifying all assets and liabilities, educating clients on their financial status, assessing risk tolerance, and intelligently allocating investments. They stress the need for ongoing portfolio evaluations and the significance of having a detailed financial plan. The Akers Financial Group approach focuses on understanding clients' goals and providing tailored advice, contrasting with product-driven sales. They also discuss the importance of knowing where one's money is and the benefits of having a fiduciary relationship with a financial advisor.

Unknown:

The following is a pre recorded Show. Welcome to winning in retirement with your host, Brian AKERS, Certified Financial Planner, professional and founder of AKERS Financial Group now helping you win in your retirement. Here's Brian AKERS,

BRIAN AKERS:

welcome to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS, president and founder of AKERS Financial Group. With me today is Noah AKERS, president and founder's son from AKERS Financial Group. No AKERS, we welcome you to winning in retirement this morning. How are you doing? Doing? Well, thanks for welcoming in here. Well, Noah, you've been around AKERS Financial Group for a long time. You've actually started out, I guess, high school, right into college and MBA school, and then you been full time working at AKERS Financial Group, and you've been a full advisor, working with my team of at AKERS Financial Group. And today's topic is one of those things where you're always the person involved in creating and working on the financial fingerprint for our clients, right?

Noah Akers:

No, I am. I do all the behind the scenes stuff. I get to do it with all my clients now, which is really exciting. Get to walk them through this whole process. I get all the questions, I see all the different variability is that people have with their finances, and get to walk them through our financial fingerprint process, which is, it's not patent pending, or I think, I think we don't own the rights, but it's such a great step by step method to take clients through.

BRIAN AKERS:

It is. So the show today is we call it financial fingerprint. So the reason we call it that is because a fingerprint is individual to yourself. You are unique. So is your finances. Your finances are unique, like a fingerprint or snowflake. What do you agree with that? One, the financial

Noah Akers:

fingerprint has a better ring than financial snowflake, especially because, like, your fingerprint lasts longer. Snowflake kind of comes down.

BRIAN AKERS:

I wasn't recommending we change the snowflake not work for me. I like fingerprint, all right. I know you like fingerprint. Is it true that you did a project on fingerprint as a child?

Noah Akers:

I did in sixth grade. We had this fair where we had do we had to come up with, like, a hypothesis or a thesis and try to do all experiments. And so I did that on fingerprints, and I asked the question if they were hereditary, which is an easy Google search. Mind out that it's not now it is the Google really wasn't around much. No, it wasn't, not in sixth grade, nor did I think I knew how to use it, yeah. And so we know they are not hereditary. They're formed in the womb. It's when the infant gets to rub its hands on the other side of the womb, yeah, and that's how they form their fingerprint,

BRIAN AKERS:

all right. So how does that apply to finance? Let's go with this. Financial fingerprint is not hereditary, so the finances are that are good by your parents. Doesn't mean that you're going to have those same good habits. You have to develop your own habits with your own family. A financial fingerprint is where are you right now? So if you go to our website at AKERS, a k, e, r, s, a financial group.com, and you go under Documents, you'll see how to discover a financial fingerprint, what kind of information that we need to find out about where you are today. Now, gathering information is a process with all new clients, and even with clients, with reviewing and especially when we get a client at that point of financial independence and they're ready to retire and so no How do our clients give us information? What's the actual logistical way of giving us information.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, a lot of times I'll get the email of what do you guys need, and we get that kind of started in our conversations, in that first meeting, and I send them a checklist that has all of the information that we need. That way, they don't have to think for themselves in the form of bank accounts, legal documents, financial statements, retirement account statements as well, even we like to see their home and auto insurance policies make sure that they're getting the right coverage, because like your license and property and casualty right? Yep. And so it's really good to get a full top to bottom analysis of where everything is at,

BRIAN AKERS:

your business assets, the investment accounts, how you have your assets arranged, life insurance, group benefits, if you think about it, financial debts, everything we need to see that we want to read the pages. We want to believe what you tell us, but we want to prove it by seeing it on the paper.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, it is difficult to get into, like, a second or third meeting where the plan is really starting to become implemented a little bit more. And then they go, Oh, I just found this credit card that I have a balance of about 1015 grand on. It's like, oh, okay, we might need to stop and let's do that first, work on handling that debt first. Yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So the idea is this, we're going to take our AKERS way. Our AKERS way is financial planning. Financial planning begins with where you are now, and truly, wherever you are now is where we need to start. We're not one that says, oh, when you gather enough assets, then come see us. We believe. We believe that the best way for you to gather assets, to come see us is that by seeing us, then you'll gather the assets and build and grow and become a saver.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, like our first step. In our five part plan is we identify and a lot of times, if you go to a different advisor, the first thing they'll ask is, How much money do you have? Let me have it. That's not what we do.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, that's a difference in product driven advice or product driven sales versus financial planning. Financial Planning. The goal is to get to know the client, understand their situation, their goals, their risk tolerance, and then come back with the answer. Being an independent financial firm like AKERS Financial Group is and fee and our commission, what we want to do is provide based on what they have. That doesn't mean they have to change everything. Sometimes we can become the broker of record. Of things, what's broker record? Huh?

Noah Akers:

What does it mean to be the broker record means to be the broker on on that contract.

BRIAN AKERS:

All right, so if they paid the first advisor of commission, we can become the advisor on it. And we get statements, we see the accounts, it links to the portfolios, or we can see it. You don't have to change. You don't have to pay a new commission. It's there, yeah,

Noah Akers:

and it really allows us to get in and be able to help the client to its fullest

BRIAN AKERS:

and make changes that are needed, such as portfolio design, adding beneficiaries, which is all the time.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, that's a lot of the first meeting kind of conversation is, who are the beneficiaries on this account, or who do you want to be beneficiaries? And a lot of the times, it's not who they want, or it's not written up correctly. And so if they were to die tomorrow without us being able to get in and be able to help, things could go awry, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

And this takes a lot longer to clean things up if it's not done properly. So the idea of how to get information, so the way we give information, get information from clients, comes a couple different ways. We give you the list, and then you got to provide to us. Of course, paper still works, yep, but paper is not as much fun. Paper you already have stuff electronic. Why can't you say PDFs and then upload or download? So we have that and we can upload through our website.

Noah Akers:

Yep, Black Diamond. We gave you a link to upload that's a secure load. It's fairly simple. I'm able to walk people through it every day if they need to emails as well secure. They encrypt it, right? We encrypt it. And so then, if anyone were to hack either of our inboxes, that's already encrypted, right?

BRIAN AKERS:

So encrypted? Is it a safe way to transfer information, and can you explain just a little bit how it works? Like, how do you log into it?

Noah Akers:

How do you log into Black Diamond? No, encrypt it. Oh, and see the cryptid? Well, for us, we we shoot the email out, sure, and so it's an outgoing so they will receive it in their inbox, and it says secure in the top of it. If it says secure in brackets, that means it's encrypted at the bottom of the email. It also gives you a little sign that says this email has been encrypted for security reasons. And so you're able to reply to that and to send us your information, and we're at that point, we're then able to begin to see where your financial fingerprint is at. Everybody has one, but whether they know their fingerprint, or if they know where everything's at, like, a lot of times we'll see clients have an account that they started 2030, years ago. They're like, I haven't it doesn't grow very much. I don't know why. And then we see that statement. It's like, well, it's in the money market. Yeah, it's not in anything that's supposed to grow.

BRIAN AKERS:

I love when somebody says, Oh yeah, I bought an IRA at the bank. And what they meant was they bought an IRA at the bank as Ira savings account, so the baskets and IRA, but what's actually in it is a savings account earning, like, point oh four. And I'm like, Well, I believe we can do better than that.

Noah Akers:

And so, like this identifying part of the process. It's information gathering, but it's also walking through and realizing, like, what they actually have most people don't know. And then

BRIAN AKERS:

we gather it and put it all together, and did our planning software. That planning software is where we're able to then identify a balance sheet. The balance sheet is going to show you all your assets and all your debts is going to show something that's very valuable for you to judge yourself by which is net worth? How do you tell if you're doing better or not? Is truly net worth? What is net worth?

Noah Akers:

No, yeah, your net worth is your assets minus your liabilities, equals your owner's equity or net worth. We do it for businesses on the tax side, and we like to do it for each personal person. If we run them like a business, if we see your cash flow analysis, see the money coming in, sure the money coming out, it's got to make sense, or else it's going to be unsustainable. You're going to go into debt massive amounts.

BRIAN AKERS:

And that's a normal American way is to go into debt and worry about paying it over time. We'll save money later. We want you to have a different mindset, and that is this, let's learn to save first. Well, how you want to do that? Well, let's help you. Let's figure out where the money's going, where it's flowing, where we can cut and then let's save first, make that savings a bill. So we would like, we like to tithe and give money to charity first, and then then give money to your future self through savings. That saving might help clean up your foundational finances, which we got to fix. But what we start with, with a financial fingerprint, is getting to know you and for you to have everything put together and see if it all works the way you want it to go. And that's where we begin. And we create a written. Things To Do, list of things that need to get fixed and cleaned up, and we help where we can. Yes, you'll have some work to do. But within a year, what's nice is when things are organized, cleaned up, and we're like, Huh, what are we gonna do now? And that's when the fun begins. That's when the goals and dreaming and what do you actually want to do? Yeah, and then a couple years after that is, like, you know, want to reach a goal. I like that

Noah Akers:

sometimes that identifying is also identifying the bad habits that they have, oh, yeah, and so we have to get them into a better rhythm. Like, if you're eating out every single day, like, that is a dietary bad habit. There are financial bad habits that we get into.

BRIAN AKERS:

One of the worst case scenarios was a husband and wife, where they were helping kids out, and they're in their 30s, helping them out, but all the time, and there's always little pieces, but they never, ever added it all up. We took a whole year of bank statements and added all up for them, because they were asking the questions we make. They were making, like, $300,000 a year, and that then the question I had is, where is it? And they have no money in the bank and this and nothing saved. They only had long term investments, so nothing in the short term. That means nothing's hitting that hitting the cash. And they said, Well, let's think about it. So ultimately, what happened with a financial fingerprint is we're able to identify the problems, and those problems became a way to have a solution where we then had the kids come in for financial planning and come up with a way, but then live within their own budget to stop asking the parent bank. Yeah, you said the American way spending more than you have. 90 some percent of Americans are not savers. They spend first and then they're in debt for most of their life, and then they retire with very, very little. What we want at AKERS Financial Group is understand that the AKERS way of doing things is financial planning. Financial Planning leads to good strong advice. Good strong advice is directed towards what's best for you, and then we implement and apply it based on you. Because when we retire, the best part of retirement is going to be getting your time back, where you decide how to use it. Before retirement, your time is tied up with other commitments, you know, mainly your job. A lot of that goes away. In retirement, your time is now consumed by things that you want to do. It's so easy to begin winning in retirement. Go to our website, at AKERS, financial group.com, go ahead right there and tap to schedule a meeting. Let us know you'd like to schedule a free consultation with one of our team of advisors. That's AKERS financial group.com or you can call us at 833 win retire 830 3w, I n, r, e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule a free in person meeting. Go to AKERS financial group.com or call us at 833-946-7384, this is our planning for your retirement. Now, what does gardening have to do with your investments? We'll explain this in a moment.

Unknown:

You're listening to a pre recorded Show. Welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again. Here's Brian AKERS, indeed.

BRIAN AKERS:

Welcome back to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS. Here with me today is Noah AKERS. Noah AKERS and I are covering the AKERS way. The financial fingerprint is an approach where we sit down and talk with people about where they are now and then guide them through a financial planning process and get the answers that they need. So we're doing in the show today is really trying to explain the why, understand what's going on with this, and really, really trying to give you the reasons to get started, or if you've been running the race hard and fast and not really keeping score, it's a really good thing to gather it all together, especially beginning of a year or anytime, really, where you get all those statements At one time, Pile them all together, then come see us. All right. Now you ready to go second quarter here? Yes, of course. All right. So this is gonna be a tough questions, tough things to work with, but we gardening. I don't feel like you and I are gardeners, so we're gonna struggle with these examples, but I need to explain how I feel about gardening.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, I would love to hear us have a conversation about gardening, all right, and have the wives correct us later, absolutely.

BRIAN AKERS:

So what does gardening have to do with your investment? So I like, I'm sorry. My voice changes every time. I really like the idea of concept of gardening. So what I want to do is talk about the basic you have a garden out and out front of your house. In that garden, there's things that you need to pull their weeds. You got to get rid of them, right, right? So in investments, when we do a financial fingerprint and we see things, we go, oh, that's a weed. That investment's a weed. You bought that in 1998 we need to pull that. Because the question I asked them is, would you replant that? Would you re buy that same one? Oh, no, I'd never buy that again. So why'd you own it? I'm hoping it comes back up. Well, imagine that that's your money, because it is your money sitting there. You might have 10,000 bucks in that investment. That was 80,000 and you just don't want to sell it, because just don't want to feel the pain of that weed. But weeds got to

Noah Akers:

get pulled. Sometimes they've got thorns and thistles, but. They don't bear fruit, right? You're going too far. Like most Weeds don't bear fruit.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, well, if they do bear fruit, it's probably not healthy for us. I wouldn't need it, but there's always an example of something that's an exception. But in this simple example, weeds, we pull the weeds. Same thing in portfolio, pull the weeds. The next thing is you have to prune the good plants. Pruning is the trim, yes. So in portfolio, design is reallocation. It does mean selling even the very best stocks at times to reallocate so that you're not over concentrated in one stock. So what does gardening have to do in investments? Well, one idea is this, pull the weeds, prune the good ones, and you're building a garden, and you start planning and building plants into that same garden that all work together based on your goal. And that's exactly what portfolio and financial planning does, gives your money purpose and lets it grow. So that's my gardening example. Now, no, you're going to go a lot deeper with yours, because you've had consultations with one of your clients?

Noah Akers:

Yes, lots and lots. So we need fertilizer. We need. Are we talking about like, aerating the soil as well? Is that how deep we're getting into this? We compost,

BRIAN AKERS:

explain all of those things and apply it to investments. Because that's what like

Noah Akers:

you'd apply it to investments as well. So composting, we throw like empty coffee grounds and eggshells into our garden and stir it. Mix it up with some dead leaves and twigs and stuff. You know you're supposed to mix brown and green, both living and dead, then let it to marinate. I'm gonna use the word marinates probably wrong, and you let then you add that to the soil, so then things can grow better. I want to talk about that in the form of healthy habits for our investments. Nice, because those that doing that ritually, seasonally at the proper times, is the way to infuse cash. So we've talked about, like dollar cost averaging. That is what we would call a healthy habit. It's when we take the money from your savings account and we inject it straight into an investment. We're not doing all of the investment, all the money from the bank account straight in all at once. We're doing it slowly monthly. Typically, that way we can slowly put the I'm losing the gardening example here, but we can slowly enter into the market and that we're buying at highs and we're buying at

BRIAN AKERS:

lows because dollar cost averaging takes the emotions out of investing and trying to decide, you just automatically put it in every month, buy on high, buy on a low. The concept is you're buying. You're buying for the long term, for one case, do this, anything that comes out of your checking, any type of automatic saving and dollar cost averaging is a great way to buy the market.

Noah Akers:

It does a great job of or mitigating your risk, because if you put it all at once, market's going to shoot up or shoot down. All of your money is currently at that risk. And so going back to gardening, when you fertilize, you're fertilizing everything all at once. So it's a little bit different, but I think it's close to the same. I'm thinking of different kinds of plants that we have, and so we have, like, pepper plants, and peppers grow up, but then they need, like, a string or something that latch on to Sure, maybe it's green beans. I'm getting them wrong. Is your story now? And so sometimes things need a little bit of help when they grow. I see that being a lot of what we do in like our step five of our financial fingerprint, which is that routine evaluation. And so when you're talking about pruning, yep, we're talking about trimming some making sure others can remain healthy, supporting your investments properly. You can be sitting it and forgetting it completely. You can be that pepper plant support. Yes, pepper plant support.

BRIAN AKERS:

All right, so what you're getting at is that there's purpose in growing your plants, and there's a way to grow them better and stronger, and all of those things are adding value to the plant. To get what you want, some people say, I don't have a green thumb, so forget about it, and I'm just gonna go somewhere else. Now we can be that for someone, where what we do is we do it for you. Also, when you have you want to grow it yourself, you still need some guidance on the whole way, how to start, how to get it to grow, and as it's growing, how to get to grow stronger and stronger. And stronger, to maximize the value of the plant, right? I think that's where you're heading. Yeah, I've

Noah Akers:

got another really good one. I just thought we'll try it. No, have you heard of

Unknown:

squash? Bore, no, I have not squash.

Noah Akers:

Bore, is this like insect that comes and attacks just your squash? Okay? So if you're growing squash in your backyard, front yard, garden, and if you don't put a net over it for certain months of the year, squash bore will come in, lay eggs and devour your squash. All right, I'm going to use the example that that is the IRS government squash.

Unknown:

That's taxes, but the word is squash, bore, squash, poor. Squash bore. Spell it for me. Oh, I'm not

Noah Akers:

gonna do value. So squash bore, sure, if you're equivalent that to taxes, to taxes, okay? And so we need to put our net around our taxes, sure, around our investments and the particular ones, because we talk a lot of what's your favorite net buckets? I like, we like the Roth net, absolutely. Roth net does the best job of keeping the Uncle Sam little flying. Uncle Sam coming in his eggs and killing our squash. Yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So pre tax retirement is where you pay. You get a deduction now and then you pay later on the harvest time at the harvest, when the money all comes due, that's when all the taxes are due. At the highest value Roth, Ira, that you pay tax now and never again. To me, it makes really good sense. Yeah, it is such great so don't have squash boredom. My turn. I got Are you done? Yeah, I like that one. All right, let's drop the mic on that one. So for those that are listening, we're talking about financial fingerprint and the basics of financial planning this quarter, we're trying to apply gardening to investments, just so that you guys think about it a different way. Now what happens is not all of us know finances in and out, but we have to deal with our finances. We need to understand what's good and what's bad. We need to understand what is the right thing for you and your family. Financial Planning narrows down what's good for you and your family. Now, what I wanted to cover last year this quarter is about investing. So investing, if someone's presenting you on investment, and they tell you these things, and that is what is a perfect investment. So no, when we think about perfect investment, we want the investment

Noah Akers:

to grow. Oh, man, always grow. I want it to grow better than the market,

BRIAN AKERS:

but you want access all the time. You want access all the time. You want to be able to get that money back out and pull it out, and then you want it never to go down. Yeah. So you want to protect it,

Noah Akers:

yeah. Is that too much to ask? It

BRIAN AKERS:

is too much. So if you want protect it, liquid and growth, those are like a little triangle. You can have two out of three of those things, but you can't have all three. So if an investment is trying to tell you you're getting all three, you need a red flag saying something's wrong, yep. So if we're liquid and growth, that means we can't have protected liquid and growth is the stock market. You can buy and sell stocks any any day of the week. You can get your money back anytime, but it'll be up or down liquid and protect it is money in the bank. That's money that is protected by the FDIC liquid all the time, but you don't make a lot of money. If you looked at protected and growth the category there, I see that as an index annuity, or some type of buffer supported investing, ETFs that have a downside protection, but you have to pay for it. You don't get the full market gain, and you also don't get the liquidity when you have protected and growth, because your money is locked in over time, so there's an early withdrawal penalties or other costs of trading. Yeah.

Noah Akers:

So it makes sense to hedge, to hedge things with those vehicles that we offer to a lot of our clients, but like we were talking about earlier, financial fingerprint, it's about them. It's not about me. It's about we. It's about not selling what we want to sell, because honestly, we don't have anything that we directly want to sell. I like someone telling me their story and then letting me puzzle piece together what they need.

BRIAN AKERS:

And it starts with that financial fingerprint. The hardest part is when you're comparing financial planning process to an investment where they're trying to sell you the benefits of it, and you're listening, oh, that sounds great. I can make money eight, 9% and never lose it all. Access the thing is not true. It's not gonna be true. And so the hardest part is this, what is reality for you is that you need to have good habits. You need to save your money. If you save your money over time and invest it long term, things will work out well for you in time, good habits will get you where you need to be,

Noah Akers:

yeah, how is someone who's not in this field like we are every day? How are they supposed to identify what is bad and what is good from what their other advisors are saying. So a lot of times we even do, like, second advice, secondary advice for people,

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, the opinions on what where they are. Now the hard part I have is this, is that very few people gather all the information. And the reason we're doing a show today called financial fingerprint is explaining how important it is to know all the information, so you can have a groundwork of where we're starting, so we can build from there. And so that really is a key way at AKERS financial group that we our AKERS way starts with planning your financial fingerprint, which is unique to you and your family. We take that information and build the plan, build the advice off of that plan. That's the key that now AKERS Financial Group. We're local. We're independent. We don't report to a big company on Wall Street. We report to you. We have offices in Lutherville and Forest Hill. We meet clients all around the mid Atlantic region, even a bunch around the country and even a few around the world. It's so easy to begin winning in retirement. Just give us a call and schedule your. Free meeting with one of our team of advisors. You do that by calling 833 when retire, that's 830 3w, I n, r, e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule your free in person meeting. Go to AKERS financial group.com or call us at 833-946-7384. To start planning for your retirement. Now, do you know where your money is? We'll talk about that when we come back.

Unknown:

You're listening to a pre recorded Show. Welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again. Here's Brian AKERS.

BRIAN AKERS:

Welcome back to winning in retirement. Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group, here with me. Today is no AKERS. We are financial advisors from AKERS Financial Group, and what we do on our show today is we're doing financial fingerprint the AKERS way, our process of financial planning, gathering information and then gathering your goals and thoughts from you to figure out what is best, putting in writing the answer so that you can then have a plan to guide you that is a key way that we work with people. We highly recommend that you consider this when you're going through things now. Noah AKERS is a financial advisor here at AKERS Financial Group. He has his MBA, and he's also been my son for his entire life? Yep, all 28 years of that. So you've seen me as a financial planner for all your life, right? Yeah, I guess so, yeah. Now for years, you thought about financial grouper and how important that was. Yes, what an industry so financial planning, if you had to define financial planning in your mind, what's the good part of financial planning as you think about things

Noah Akers:

I like. So we can't control everything correct, like that's the first thing that you have and have in mind. But there is a better way of doing things, and so we get to help people, and often it's about finances. We're talking about finances all the time with our clients, but it intrudes into the rest of your life.

BRIAN AKERS:

There's so much more than finances and that all that extra derive the right financial

Noah Akers:

answers, yeah, because we ask a lot of questions, hopefully not drilling clients, but more learning about them, who they are, what they want to do with their money and with their life, because money is going to be the way that they fund their livelihood, what they do, what vacations, what kind of car they drive. And so we want the best for you, and you to be able to be the best steward of your money. And we want to help equip that, equip you to be able to do that. So you've seen me be an advisor for the last part of my life, yeah, and you've been enjoying, enjoying being the father of

BRIAN AKERS:

well, what's cool is when I get to watch you and your your wife, and you doing applying finances, and for me to use you as an example for younger couples to say, this is how my son did it. And that's a very fun thing to say. Now I also tell them I did not bail you out, because I believe that kids need to earn, learn their own way, live within their own means, and parents have to watch bailing people out. That's a That's a crazy fundamental thing, but you got to get in your own trouble. Sometimes you got to make your own decisions, create your own bills. I don't like when parents give a lot of money for a house purchase, and the kid buys too much house early on in their life, and they can't afford the electric, the insurance, all these other pieces so that the niceness of giving them 50,000 100,000 to buy a bigger house all sudden, the whole concept of bigger house doesn't fit that budget. So that's been when I've seen problems in planning is how we treat kids, how we let them make their own mistakes, how we are careful with how we help. I think it's very important.

Noah Akers:

And then when we get into meetings with the parents, you one of your teaser was, Do you know where your money is? And sometimes it's, well, it's locked up in my kid's house right now?

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, sometimes it's that, but sometimes they don't know. Sometimes people, they get a job, they click a couple buttons on the first day of paperwork, and then 10 years later, they haven't looked at it again. Yep, they've never logged in the website, because that's just not their thing. And I'm always hoping that one of the spouses care a lot. That's always a good thing for us, so that we can relate. If both spouses don't care about finances, then we have to become the one that cares about their finances. Sometimes they might care a tremendous amount, and they might become what we call very good savers, clients that can achieve all kinds of unusual goals, like retiring very early in life, having the choice to be financially independent in early 50s, because they're willing to do the work early on. Yeah? So the concept of fire, yeah? Fire, yeah, if financial independence retire early, is fire. Now, do you know where your money is? So everyone out there, just think about it. Where's your money at? Okay, you have a couple accounts. It's nice to know who's the customer. Podium, but how it's invested.

Noah Akers:

What do you own? Does your spouse know where your money is at?

BRIAN AKERS:

Do your spouse knows where your logins are?

Noah Akers:

Yeah, do they know your passwords? Do you know where you've put in? Do they know where you've worked previously? Do they know about that old retirement account from the hospital that you worked out 20

BRIAN AKERS:

years ago? And that's why we cleaned all this stuff up. When we do financial fingerprint, we like to know where you've been, so we can gather all those assets, put it all into one type accounts, and you can then be ready

Noah Akers:

to retire. And if you're this, does your kid know your money is that? No, they know how to handle things. If something happened to both the parents. Well, granting personally for that?

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, no, I'm cautious on when we tell kids money. I believe kids need to know money. When they need to know money, whoever you choose as your trustee or your secondary trustee, your custodian, later after you and your spouse. I think they need to know that they're hired for that job. I think as we get older, and I mean older, that they might need to have family meetings at that time, as the kids come in place to take over, I've been, um, I've seen many horrible situations where, when you tell once you tell kids the money, all sudden, the kids know how much money to try to ask for. And terrible. And we've seen a few clients where, through manipulation, kids have asked a mom for a lot of money until it was gone, and so I'm very cautious on Telling family about all the assets. I believe the assets are the clients money, period to provide for them to their Larry last day. Whatever's left over is for the next generation. Prior to that, if we can calculate there's more than enough money. You can start gifting and doing some other real fun, financial planning, charitable giving, stuff like that. But I want the kids to understand that the parents money is the parents money. It's a gift to them later, a legacy later, but it's they need to have their own financial plan. Survive on their own, save on their own, build their own wealth. It's a hard discipline for people to understand between the two. They say, Oh, my parents have money they should give to me, just like we're talking about earlier. About financial fingerprint isn't inherited. I don't think financial planning, the habits, the good habits, are inherited. They're learned, they're learned, they're developed. All of us need better financial habits. Where's our money? That's a habit. We have websites that help us track where our money is. I love having a website I log into it's all there. Now, these links and all the security causes some things not to show up every day, but generally, I know where the money is, how it's doing,

Noah Akers:

yeah, and that's why we do our discussion items, oh yes, to have it written out. So then the financial planner and the client can both see where their assets are at, and then you work through it. And sometimes you'll be in you will have known this client for 510, years, and they go, Oh, you don't have listed this asset that I have, or this timeshare that I purchased a couple years ago, or I just bought a new car. You don't have that on your discussion? I was like, Oh, we haven't spoken about it yet, yeah. And so it's a great way to have a reminder to bring up new topics that you guys need to talk about. Yeah.

BRIAN AKERS:

So I think about my career back in the 80s, when I was just getting started, I was at Virginia Tech finance, taking a lot of investment classes, real estate insurance, all kinds of things. And then I was doing financial planning as an assistant. And what really was, the thing that drove me is that, how am I going to pick an investment for someone without knowing everything about them? And it just stuck in my head that I can't just go around say, Hey, I have this one product, it is good for you, and then go around and sell that to everybody, because that's what the industry wanted. There was insurance jobs or stock broker jobs in New York. I had both offers and but it was not what I wanted. A financial planning was the only way where it started with the client, this is way before the fiduciary rule, way before best interest all that. So becoming a certified financial planner very early on was very important to me to understand that process of understanding what clients want and need, and then comparing what they want versus what they need, and then helping reach goals, and then the planning ultimately gave me what they need to invest in. And so as a top down approach of that, not a product driven approach, and that is a big deal, we started AKERS Financial Group 20 years ago because we wanted to be independent, to be a company that can keep that same process in place. That's not normal in the financial industry.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, you've probably had this conversation multiple times before I have, and it's which we get into a conversation. You're like my other advisor and I we, we never talked about this. Well, we never even thought to look about it in this in this way. And I go, Well, that's good that we're having that conversation now. A new

BRIAN AKERS:

client, I'm what they're about. One of their best friends is their stock broker. And then I said, Well, why do you have money with a little bit of money with me and and all the I say it was like 6 million with them, but why do you why do you have any money with me? And they're like, well, he never talks about this. He doesn't talk about taxes or qcds or where to take money from, doesn't talk about liquidity planning and legacy planning and bringing it all together, doesn't talk about estate planning. And I said, Well, that's the value we had, but we'd love to be your advisor on everything. And so it's hard for us not knowing about everything. And so in that case, we can become they can keep their friend as an advisor as long as he wants to work, then we take it over later. And we also can charge a planning fee to guide them in the right way. But that's hard to want to pay an extra fee because their current advisor doesn't do that. Yeah.

Noah Akers:

And I also finds that a lot of the problem lies with the terminology. They're like, Oh, that's my financial guy. Oh, they actually just sell you life insurance, or they just sell you annuities. And they're calling themselves financial advisors. And so when we call ourselves financial planning advisors, do you hear the difference there? That's planning. It's because we do the whole plan, we operate it, and then we have the keys to unlock all those different avenues as well.

BRIAN AKERS:

Yeah, so the idea is this, when you listen to the show, listen about financial fingerprint. This quarter is about, do you know where your money is? The concept is this, well, do you know where your money is? Have you done true financial planning on your goals? How do we achieve a goal without planning for it? I just don't understand how that's possible, but, but so what happens if we throw a bunch of money at things you're going to do? Okay? Are you really going to maximize your goals and hit every marker in your life that you'd like to do? I'm probably not, probably not. Is there a better ways, better way to do it? I absolutely, totally agree that there is a better way to do things. Well, there's a lot going on when I'm talking about financial planning. It means a lot to me. What I want you to understand out there is this is, will this year be the year you finally have a plan to achieve financial freedom? Financial freedom can be achieved when you have a proper plan for retirement, a plan that is as unique as your fingerprint. We have helped hundreds of families in Maryland plan for retirement. Our goal is for you to have a plan that will allow you to have a true financial freedom that is designed for you. With you in mind, we will monitor. We'll adjust as needed. We are local. We're independent. We don't report to a big company on Wall Street. We report to you, our client. Make this year the year you begin to achieve financial freedom. Give us a call at 833 win retire and schedule an in person meeting with one of our team of advisors by calling 833 win, retire. 833-946-7384 or visit our website at AKERS financial group.com scroll down to the button at the bottom of the homepage and request us the schedule meeting right there. Call 833 win retire or go to AKERS financial group.com is your financial advisor really your financial advisor? Let's talk about that in just a moment.

Unknown:

You're listening to a pre recorded show, welcome back to winning in retirement. Call 833, win retire now to schedule a visit with Brian and his team and begin winning in retirement once again. Here's Brian AKERS, indeed.

BRIAN AKERS:

Welcome back to winning in retirement. I'm Brian AKERS, president and founder of AKERS Financial Group. Here with me today is Noah AKERS, financial advisor and son of the founder, Brian

Noah Akers:

AKERS, so I was gonna say President and founders son, yeah, I don't get that full title, though.

BRIAN AKERS:

No, that's okay. Now, being a son is something that's probably hard on you, because I've made made you earn every step of the way what you had to do. But as a financial advisor, what happens is this, and Noah and I work really well together for our clients in a way of making sure we're doing what's best for them by knowing our client, understanding that that has become the key thing in the industry is a fiduciary relationship, understanding the best interest of the client. We need to know about you to be able to offer right advice. And we love that that's becoming a new standard, because we have always wanted that to be the standard.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, when we have our meetings, we have a notepad or an iPad or something to take notes to write down everything that we can find out. If you have some sort of dream to be sitting on a beach in Cuba in 30 years, we want to be able to help you with that. I don't know why you'd want to go to Cuba.

BRIAN AKERS:

Why? Just use the word Cuba. Let's do somewhere St Thomas, Florida, Florida. You go to Florida? Yeah, let's say Florida. Some people want to get off the grid, off the grid. That's off the grid is a different radio show. Sorry. So basically, the idea of recently, my talks were Costa Rica for. Someone who went to BYU beach that Costa Rica had good health care tied to us, just as a thought. Okay, so this quarter, in the fourth quarter, we're trying to clean up the financial fingerprint show. And we're trying to clean up is get it, get the ideas out there about why financial fingerprints important. But we want to start in the fourth quarter about this is your financial advisor? A really a financial advisor, is a financial planning advisor. Now there's something called a registered investment advisor. That's an RIA company, and then their investment advisory representatives, they have the ability to charge fees. But not everyone is an RIA or works for an RIA, correct?

Noah Akers:

Yeah. Some are just, actually brokers, where they can just take stock trades, and that's all they do day in and day out. Is just stock trade. Stock trade. They'll just call you, oh, there's one I like. That's not a financial advisor. They're not looking at the whole picture. They're not allowed to look at the whole picture.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, they, they're they're required to get more information nowadays, but they're not like in their software. They can't recommend taxes. They tell you right away, you can't do this. Can't do this advice. So understanding when they say those things, they really are not going to give you that advice.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, and when I make a decision, I want to have all the cards on the table. I want to know everything in and out, and then I want to find the best way. Sometimes it involves looking at a couple different options and then choosing the best one and talking through like, what are the ramifications of putting my money into this instead of instead of doing this or that with it? And so it's really good to find out who your financial guy is, what they do, and then ask the important questions. Like, if they're asking you all the important questions,

BRIAN AKERS:

yeah, so financial advisors, let's talk about something called broker check. And on everyone's web page now there should be a tab called broker check. Broker check means that they're licensed to be a stock broker, or they have another license to be an investment advisor representative, or in like our case, we have both. But through broker check, you type their name in, it'll tell you their history, where they work, what what tests they've taken, and how they're licensed, how their license will dictate what they can do for you. Now, what I've also found is that there are insurance only people. They don't have any security license at all. They really should not be talking about your investments and ever. They shouldn't be giving you advice on what the buyer sell, because they're not licensed to do that, but they have insurance license, and then that means their solution would be insurance. It's sort of like going to a doctor. If you go to one that's surgeon, they're going their solutions are surgery,

Noah Akers:

probably, yeah, I find that a lot of people don't know just how much back work it takes to get to what we do. And so the licenses of taking the sie test, that's about 80 250 hours of studying, then doing the series seven, another 100 some hours of studying, and then doing the series, if you take the 66 or 65 or 63 combined, that's another 100 some hours of studying, and then CFP on top that takes, on average, two and a half years plus five years of work, right? And so it's not just and you have to have a four year degree on top of all that, right? And so if they are calling themselves a financial advisor, and all they did was take one of the Life and Health Insurance exams, which is about 70 to 80 hours, you can see why a financial planning advisor would be different than what

BRIAN AKERS:

they do. Yeah, so that's just the logistical part of how they got licensed, let alone how they work. Now, what happens, though, in business and financial planning business is some people get a niche and they sell, they do a lot the same way it like if they specialize in retirement, they might have a process a way, and that way might lead to doing a lot of things the same. But financial planning is that it's not going to be the same. We're going to take buckets of money. We're going to draw income at the rate that you need. We're going to have cash set aside based on what your needs are. You want a second home, a third home, a fourth a fifth home. We're going to have different designs for each person. Your financial fingerprint is unique to you, so why not design finances that are unique to you? And that's exactly what we want to try to work on. Now the idea is this, when you get a good second opinion from a financial planner, what you want to find is where they would help you get to. And if you feel you're not reaching the goals that you have. That's a good reason to get a second opinion. Our team of advisors have been trained throughout the years here at AKERS Financial Group to truly try to understand what you want, so that you can then figure out how to get there. And that's the only way that I know what to how to do financial planning.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, it is great to even like ask your financial advisor, how are we doing with our money and what is our plan? If they can't answer what our plan is in a way that you accept or that makes sense to you. If it doesn't make sense to them, it's not going to make sense to you, and so it might be best to go get a second opinion the.

BRIAN AKERS:

Topic I would love is, how are we going to retire? Where's the money going to come from? When do I draw Social Security? When I take money on the IRA, when do I draw my pension as a joint life? How do we work all that? And I love having my answer, because that's something we do all the time, and I think it's a very important piece of our planning. Is to guide people into how they use all the savings in the right way.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, we know how to juggle. Some people don't know how to juggle. Yep.

BRIAN AKERS:

Now in AKERS Financial Group, we have clients of all net worths, from negative net worth and need to get out of debt to positive 20, 50 million or more. Those clients all have fundamental needs within their own person. They have income needs, cash flow needs, a lot of it's the same, no matter what the the details are, maybe more complex, the more wealthy have, because you have more things to worry about, and you got to put things in place for it. And so when there's a a goal, there's an answer to the goal, and that's what we spend a lot of our time in classes and researching is to make sure we have the right answer for clients. We do radio shows so we can educate the clients on processes that we like. We created our process the financial fingerprint. And when asked Noah to do, is to go over our five points of a financial fingerprint. What we try to do? Yeah, of course,

Noah Akers:

you we do it for everybody. We do it for the low net worth. We do it for the high the high net worth might take more meetings to do, but we are patient, and we work through it. So number step number one is identify. We need to know where the funds are at, where you are at, with your house, with your debt, with retirement, where you're working at, what your plans are, where you're living, what do you plan to live at? We need to know your whole financial picture by identifying and that's where we were talking about in the first quarter, about how to identify all that. And if you want to go back and listen, we have all of our radio show on Spotify. It's on our website. We also on Apple podcasts, any podcast source, okay, you can always go back listen to that first quarter winning in retirement. And so step number two, after you get the identify, after we see where all of your assets are at, we want to inform and educate. That's where we sit down. We walk through all of your statements. Do you know what this is for and what its purpose is, and are we really heightening the potential for each of those accounts, because sometimes someone's trying to grow money in a highly taxable account, or someone's not letting money grow, and it's in a tax deferred account. And so it's, I

BRIAN AKERS:

don't like, when a Roth IRA is in, like a CD, yeah? Like Roth IRA to take a risk.

Noah Akers:

Oh, it's painful. Yeah, it's painful to see. And so that leads us into level number three, the level of risk that you are taking. And so the higher level of risk that you take, yes, you have the higher potential of earning more or making more, but you also have the potential of losing more. Yep, you'd have to take both hand in hand number four, you have to have an intelligent allocation. That's is that where we come in? Are we the intelligence? We are sure trying. AKERS, financial, intelligent financial, intelligent design. Yeah. And so we want to design the portfolios intelligently with every aspect of your life involved in that decision. Not just, do you say yes or no, no, we won't see everything.

BRIAN AKERS:

Take the mark. Take the 2027 plan. Yeah, we don't have it like that.

Noah Akers:

Yeah, I'd like to retire in 2035 let's just put it all in one thing and then let them trade, not how the market's doing, but just by time. So, yeah, that's not a great idea.

BRIAN AKERS:

Well, it's a convenient idea how to make things easy, but it's not the best for that person.

Noah Akers:

No, because everybody has a different risk tolerance, but risk also, you have to think about purchasing power and political risk and knowing exactly when to make the right moves. And that's something that we've we've been experienced in doing number five, the last one is the one that we do most often, I would say would be the routine portfolio evaluation. What do you do in your portfolio evaluations?

BRIAN AKERS:

Father, all right, so when it comes to clients that are existing as we do annual reviews or semi annual or quarterly, depending on what's going on their life, that means we meet with you more than once. You don't just invest and then forget. We want you to come in. You can do a check in. You can do an hour, you know, hour and a half. We we plan it based on how much time we need to cover. So in those meetings, we have written information about where your money is. We talk about that, we talk about your goals, we talk about how things are going in your life. And then we figure out what's next.

Noah Akers:

That's exactly what you need to be doing good job,

BRIAN AKERS:

but they need to be coming in. There has to be a cycle to this. Planning, monitoring, tracking, reviewing, planning. Keep going. The planning doesn't stop.

Noah Akers:

Are you saying that AKERS financial doesn't just meet once have a never again? Correct?

BRIAN AKERS:

Wow. We begged the client please come back. We want to keep talking to you. So I'm like. I did it. Brian fixed it. Yeah, okay, we're good for it. That's might be good for a year, but come back,

Noah Akers:

talking in person or over a phone call or Zoom is so much faster and better way of gathering information, seeing where things

BRIAN AKERS:

are at all. Right. Thank you very much, Noah, for a good show about it, for the financial fingerprint, the AKERS away. The show went quick. Hopefully you guys enjoyed the information we provide it. We do look forward to meeting with you. We want you to win in your retirement by taking advantage of the opportunity to begin planning with us at AKERS Financial Group to schedule your free meeting with one of our team of advisors. Go to our website at AKERS financial group.com scroll to the schedule meeting section and let us know you'd like to schedule a meeting right there. That's AKERS Financial Group Comm, or you can call us at 833, win retire. That's 833, W, I n, r, e, t, I R, E, we'll give you a call on Monday to schedule a free in person meeting with one of our team of advisors. Start planning for your retirement now. Go to AKERS Financial Group calm, or call us at 833-946-7384, thank you for listening. I'm Brian AKERS from AKERS Financial Group, and we want you to be winning in retirement.

Unknown:

You've been listening to winning in retirement with your host, Brian AKERS of AKERS Financial Group. AKERS Financial Group offers securities through arcadios capital. An SIPC and FINRA member firm. Advisory services are provided through arcadios wealth. AKERS Financial Group and arcadios do not share any common ownership, neither arcadios nor AKERS Financial Group provides tax or legal advice. Advice given on winning in retirement is general in nature, and one should seek further advice from their financial advisor, broker, attorney andor tax accountant before investing, be sure to read each prospectus carefully to understand all the risks associated with each investment. Examples and scenarios shared are meant to be for illustrative purposes only past performance is not indicative of future results.