Mullooly Asset Management
Fiduciary Fee-Only Financial Planner | Investment Advisor in Wall, NJ
Mullooly Asset Management
Behind the Battle: Leukemia Fighter to CFP®
Strap in for a riveting tale of resilience and triumph as my son, Casey, defies the odds. Not only has Casey been battling leukemia with an unshakeable fortitude, but he's also been laser-focused on his studies to become a Certified Financial Planner (CFP). The cherry on top? His leukemia is now undetectable, and we couldn't be happier to share this wonderful news. But our conversation doesn't stop there. We also navigate through the labyrinth that is the CFP exam, dissecting the relevance of its six key areas. We shine a spotlight on the practical application of tax planning and underscore why working with a CFP is beneficial.
In the second half of our conversation, we unpack the essence of trust in the advisor-client relationship. Why should you trust a CFP? How does that certification build credibility?
As we delve into these questions, we emphasize that out of approximately 1 million people in the industry, only 91,000 hold the coveted CFP designation in the US.
Tom and Casey share insights into why this certification is a beacon of trust for clients and how it forms the bedrock for a plan that clients can stick to.
So come, join us as we traverse this journey of victory, education, and trust.
Hey, this is Tom Mullooly. I'm jumping in here ahead of the podcast episode. I just want to give you a heads up on some things that we're going to be talking about in this episode. This is episode number 449, my chat with Casey Mullooly. Casey spends a lot of time talking about studying for the CFP and eventually passing the CFP, but there's a very private and personal story embedded in this episode with Casey. He briefly touches on it, but I wanted to share a little more with you, our listeners. You get about 9, 10, 12 minutes into this. I left the entire conversation unedited on purpose, so you can hear the words that Casey uses to describe what was going on in his life. It's very important that you understand this and, because it's unedited, you're also going to hear some background chatter as well. We apologize if it's a little tough to listen, but we recorded this right in the middle of the office, the reason why I'm bringing all this up.
Tom:Casey started studying for the CFP exam in 2017. He had to stop in 2018 because in March of 2018, his entire world, our whole family's world, was completely rocked when he was diagnosed with leukemia. He was diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia. It goes by CML chronic myeloid leukemia. None of us knew how to handle this. None of us knew what this meant or what was even going to happen to us. So it's been quite an interesting couple of years, not only for Casey but for all of us as a family, and then layer on top of that a family business. There's a lot of moving parts to this, and we were. You know, casey took us for an interesting ride, and I use past tense because I have some additional news that we found out after we recorded this episode. Days after we recorded the episode, casey got test results back showing that his leukemia is now undetectable. Thank you God, thank you, it's now not detectable. This is the news that we have been waiting for five years in the making, and I can tell you a sincere word of thanks to our clients, our extended family, all of you, our listeners. I can tell you that I have lost count of all of the conversations I've had with so many of you. That started with hi Tom, how you doing, how's it going? And then the very next question is how's Casey? How's Casey doing? So, thank you, thank you so much for your prayers and your well wishes. They're greatly appreciated. This is absolutely much, much bigger news than passing the CFP. Casey's leukemia readings are now under control and we are just delighted. But we want to talk about what he's, what he was going through during those years and how he had to pick himself up, dust himself off and get through this. Thank you for tuning in, and here is my chat with Casey Mullooly. Is this thing on. Oh, we're rolling, we're live.
Tom:Welcome back to the Mullooly Asset Podcast. This is episode 449. 449. I am Tom Malooly and joining me today a very special guest, Casey Mullooly. Happy to be back. It's been a while. It has been a while. This was the last episode you were on, do you remember?
Casey:I would say it was probably March, maybe early April.
Tom:And we're recording this in the latter half of July. So what have you been doing for the last almost four months?
Casey:My face has been in a textbook for the last three months or so. I've been studying for my CFP exam, which, I am happy to say, I had a successful outcome and passed, and it feels pretty good.
Tom:So July 13th you passed the CFP exam. Congratulations, Thank you very much.
Casey:It was a long process, but now I join you, Tim and Brendan and the four of us are all CFPs here at the firm and I think that's a great thing for our clients and for the industry as a whole, and for us on an individual basis as well. Why why do you say that? I say that because it shows our clients number one, that we know what we're talking about and that we're experienced and that we're always on the lookout to improve our skills and to deepen our understanding of all things finance. So I think that that is important. You never want to be sitting still and just kind of resting on your laurels. I think things are always changing in this industry and keeping up with the designations is a great way to prove to yourself and to the people you work with and peers in the industry that by getting those credentials, I think that you prove that you are staying on top of your game.
Tom:Something that I just discovered. In terms of recent numbers, I knew the ratio, but something I just discovered is that there are approximately a million people in our line of work in the United States, so there are about 640,000 registered reps. These are brokers. These are people that work for Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley and UBS and LPL and Raymond James and places like that brokers. And then there's another 300,000 investment advisors in the business fiduciary investment advisors. So, out of the approximately 1 million people that do what we do in the United States, less than 100,000, about 91,000 people are certified financial planners. I was really surprised to see just 9% of our industry is certified as financial planner CFPs.
Casey:Wow, yeah, that seems very low, but I feel like that probably has had to have grown over the last couple of years. So I feel like the CFP designation has started to become the baseline of people of financial advice, at least from some of the people that I've talked to and some of the discourse that I've paid attention to online. I think a lot of the biggest firms out there are requiring or strongly encouraging their advisors to get the CFP designation, and I took a review course to prepare for the CFP exam and the instructor one of the things that he said pretty much on every single call that we were on was that the CFP exam is not the series seven. That's not to talk down on the series seven, but I think one of the things that the financial industry could do a better job of is requiring a higher bar for people to give financial advice. The series seven is let's pause here.
Tom:Just tell everybody, tell our listeners, what the series seven, when you use that phrase. What is that?
Casey:The series seven. Basically, that is what you take when you want to become a stockbroker. You want to sell any type of security stocks, bonds, everything under the sun.
Tom:You take that and then you can you can get a commission also for things that you sell, whether they're stocks, bonds or investment products. Let's take a moment and just go down that rabbit hole. You can have a series seven, have your brokers license that's what your series seven is but you're not technically considered an investment advisor. That's a different test. Right, the series 65. Okay, the series 65 is now the investment advisor examination. Everybody needs that. Yep, okay, I think one of the bigger issues in our industry is that the CFP board acting independently of FINRA, the financial regulatory agency, ndsec, securities and Exchange Commission CFP board acting independently wants to require a fiduciary standard. I think that's why the numbers of CFPs are still low. Would you agree with that?
Casey:Yeah, it's a more rigorous standard and it's less beneficial for CFPs or the series 65 holders. The difference between the seven and the 65, if we want to get technical is the series seven just focuses on suitability for investments for clients. So basically, as long as the investment falls within the client's parameters and it's suitable for the clients, then the broker can choose a suitable investment with a commission versus an investment advisor would also have to choose a suitable investment for the client and is not able to. They have to recommend something that is the lowest cost for the client. So the difference is basically brokers can get commissions and fiduciaries can't.
Tom:They also have that standard to act. A fiduciary has to act at all times in the client's best interest. I would say that most people who are in the investment world do act in the client's best interest, but the ones that don't read about them in the paper.
Casey:They make headlines, yeah, and unfortunately that's what people pay attention to and that's why the industry can get a bad rap. So that's the main difference. It definitely wasI mean, I took the Series 65 when I first graduated college and first started here, and I think that exam wasat the time. I thought it was hard, I studied a little bit for it, but this test, the CFP exam, was way more intense. I mean, I studied pretty much every day for the last four months, but that really wasn't the start, right? Well, you have to go through a course first, you have to do an education requirement, so that is basically a full-time course load which can takewe all did what Brennan did an actual course, but me, you and Tim did the self-paced one, so you could take as long as you want or as fast as you want for it. It took me a little bit longer than some other people, but Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, I mean I actually started the education requirement for the CFP exam in 2017.
Tom:Six years ago.
Casey:Six years ago, so it has been a long journey. I got about two thirds of the way through. It hit a little bit of a speed pump, pretty big speed bump. Do you want to talk about that? What do you think?
Tom:If you're comfortable talking about it, I say go for it. But if you don't want to, we can work our way around that too.
Casey:Yeah, it was actually a pretty big speed bump in 2018. I got pretty sick and was diagnosed with form of leukemia, that is, chronic myeloid leukemia. So the whole world got turned upside down there.
Tom:How old were you when that happened?
Casey:I was 24 years old and I'm 29, now About to turn 30. So I was putting a lot of my time into studying for the CFP exam. That happened and then I took a couple weeks off, tried to study again after that and couldn't really hack it, so I put it on the back burner for four years.
Casey:It's been a long road. It's been a tough recovery and it's something I still have to manage on a daily basis, but I feel healthy and it's under control. The leukemia is under control, so I finally got to the point last summer where I felt like I could take this back on. I started studying. I finished the education requirement around Christmas of 2022. So it took me about six weeks to refinish the education requirement.
Tom:You were a lot closer than two thirds of the way through when you had to stop in 2017.
Casey:Yeah, I was so close to being done but I probably could have grinded it out and finished it. But I wanted to absorb the material and not just get through it. I wanted to do my best to learn the stuff and to retain it and to carry it forward with me. So I finished it up pretty quickly in December of 2022. And then I started studying for the exam pretty much on a regular basis in starting in 2023.
Casey:And then around March of this year was when I really started to buckle down and hit the books for multiple hours every single day. Yeah, it was a grind, but I am proud of myself and of all the work that I did to get to this point, and it feels great to not have to study anymore. I'll bet.
Tom:So in those intervening years 2018, 19, 20, 21, tell the listeners what you were doing here in terms of staying plugged into the business and continuing to learn different aspects, different facets of the investment advisory business.
Casey:Yeah, besides contributing to the content and the weekly videos and podcasts, I was doing some more of the operational side of the business, doing things like the billing being very plugged into the compliance landscape, doing all of our regulatory filings, making sure everyone here is saying in line as far as compliance goes, casey, you ran the compliance meetings for us for the last four plus years.
Casey:Yeah, compliance Casey that's what the guy's calling me. But I think that that, being as plugged into the compliance side of the business as I was and still am, I think gave me a bit of an upper hand in terms of knowing a lot of that stuff for the CFP exam, because the CFP board code of ethics, all of the regulatory filings, all of the different compliance requirements that advisors and CFPs are under I knew a lot of that stuff going in which definitely helped in terms of passing the exam.
Tom:Tell the listeners some of the different topics that you had to get up to speed on for the CFP exam. And this is I really want to emphasize that some people just blow off the CFP like, oh, it's just another alphabet soup after somebody's name. But you really need to have some good depth in terms of different areas and you have to have some extensive knowledge to be able to talk about some of these areas. It's not just hey, we're buying the stock because it's got a low PE.
Casey:Yeah, I would say depth and breadth. There were topics like insurance, for example, that I had no idea I was going in completely new to the insurance side of the CFP exam, because that's not something that we do here at the firm. The investments so there were six topic areas General principles, which is your code of ethics, compliance stuff, more broad economic concepts and then you had insurance, investments, tax planning, retirement and estate planning. So I'd say I felt pretty good with the general principles, compliance stuff and the investment side of things. Just from working here for the last decade or so, wow has it been a decade no.
Casey:It almost started in 2015.
Tom:It almost has been close. Better part of the decade.
Casey:If we're rounding better part of the decade, the insurance side of things was definitely new and I definitely learned a lot, spent a lot of my time there, but I would say that the tax, retirement and estate sections were the most important for my day-to-day job here. The tax section specifically was extremely helpful in terms of understanding basically how to put together a return for somebody, how to calculate your AGI, all the different credits and deductions and then what counts as active income versus passive income and the different forms of business entities. All of that stuff was, I think, applicable to our day-to-day job here. So it was one of the most challenging areas, but I think it was also the most provides the most value. The exam was broken down. They gave you the percentages that each topic area was tested and tax was only, I think, 14% of the test, but the instructor would always say that it is an investment or a tax question inside of an investment question.
Casey:So basically, you have to understand all of the tax implications of something before you can understand the investment side of it or insurance and then the retirement section, going through all of the different rules for IRAs, roth IRAs, 401ks, 457s, 403bs, qualified plans, defined benefit plans, social security, the employee stock options, all the different ways that those things get taxed.
Casey:What's included, what is in it, what can you? Incentive stock options? Incentive stock options what counts as a hardship withdrawal? What counts against you for an early withdrawal from an IRA, how your Roth IRA distribution is taxed, whether it's earnings, contributions, conversion all of that stuff was in there. So, again, very applicable to what we do on a daily basis and it's interesting to see that years ago it used to be.
Tom:People would say, well, I'll talk to my accountant about that. You can't get an accountant on the phone nowadays If you are. It's just been my experience and the experience of others that I speak with that from July and August you might get your accountant on the phone if they're not on vacation, but then in September they're starting to do all the people who took extensions to file. In October. You might be able to catch them before the end of the year, but then January through April they're unreachable, and so people tend to talk to their accountant for about four minutes once a year, but they've got questions 12 months out of the year. We become, as CFPs, a good outlet for that, Even though we're not in the business of giving tax or legal advice. Sometimes you just have questions.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Casey:And I think something that we have talked about on podcasts before is that doing tax planning not necessarily filing your tax return, but you want to do tax planning throughout the year so that you don't go collect all of your tax information in January, realize that you're going to get whacked with a tax bill. It's like the time to avoid those situations is now in the summer months, when you still have four or five months to correct it before the end of the year. So you do have to pay attention to these things throughout the year. And, yeah, I agree that I think having our CFP designation and being as experienced as we are lends us the ability to answer those questions.
Tom:I think it's pretty interesting that now we have four advisors at the firm and all four advisors are CFPs. There are not many firms in central New Jersey or Monmouth County that have four advisors and four CFPs on staff. I think that's pretty unusual. And yeah, and they're all Mullooly's. Another interesting tidbit.
Casey:I mean, I think I give credit to you and Brendan and Tim for leading by example, and I didn't feel pushed to get this, but I also wanted to elevate my understanding and to, like I talked about in the beginning, to broaden my knowledge base and to become a better advisor, to better serve our clients and to help our firm grow and to just improve on who I was, and I think that that is something that I Believe is important, and I know you do as well. And, yeah, I don't know if I would have done it if it wasn't for seeing you and Tim and Brendan go through it. So so thank you for that.
Tom:Why do you think it's beneficial, why do you think it's beneficial for Folks to work with a certified financial planner?
Casey:Well, I think, going back to the first thing that comes to mind is what we talked about earlier with the difference in standards.
Casey:I think the fiduciary standard is a huge deal.
Casey:You want to work with someone that you know is Working in your best interest and can't take a personal, has no personal interest in in anything that they're doing.
Casey:All of what they're doing is solely in your best interest.
Casey:I think that that kind of clears the air, lets the the trust flow Flow more easily, which I think is is the biggest part of any Advisor-client relationship is being able to trust the person that you are sitting across the table from, and I think that having the CFP designation Proves that, that I and that you and all of the other CFP professionals out there know their stuff and Will always work in the best interest of their clients. And I think that that hopefully, hopefully allows the clients to to trust and and believe, and I Think one of the things that we always say is the best plan is is the one that you can stick with. So I think people are more likely to stick with the plan that they have and to listen to their advisors or their planners recommendations if they Can trust and believe that that person is always working in their best interest. I think that that's why it benefits people to work with CFPs great stuff, Casey, congratulations again on Gaining your CFP be seeing you on more future podcasts, I guess I guess.
Casey:All right, thanks for tuning in.
Speaker 2:Tom Mullooly is an investment advisor representative with Malouli sset management. All opinions expressed by Tom and his podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Malouli Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Malouli Asset Management may maintain positions in securities discussed in this podcast.