Latest / Financial Planner Search / Local Wealth Management & Strategic Legacy Planning with Matthew Benson | Financial Planner Search
Transcript
- Gregory Wilnau: Matthew Benson, how are you doing today, Matt: Great, Greg, thanks for having me. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, my pleasure, my pleasure. Okay, so introduce yourself to everybody. Who are you? What do you do? What's your firm all about? Matt: Yeah, so I'm a financial planner. I run a firm in Chandler, Arizona called Sunmore Financial. We serve primarily retirees, ⁓ mostly in the East Valley. So Chandler, Gilbert, Mesa, Queen Creek, Tempe, that kind of stuff. So been doing it for a over 10 years and have a lot of fun doing it. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. What do you like most about working locally in your local area? know a lot of advisors will do remote stuff, but I know you're you're really targeted on you do remote stuff, too, but you're really focused on doing a lot of the local stuff. So what is what's some of the benefit of that to you? Matt: Yeah, I mean, when I'm working with a service provider, I like working face to face. I just kind of like doing it that way. we get to know our clients really, really well. Sometimes through virtual, there's just, certainly I will say when I have meetings that are on Zoom and whatnot, Those meetings tend to be more efficient, ⁓ but it's, I'm not hanging out. Exactly. And, you know, it's not just about fun, but we get to know like our clients' goals and like, we just get to know them a lot better ⁓ when they're coming into the office. ⁓ In addition, like there's some unique stuff for like tax planning in Arizona ⁓ that we're able to help our clients with ⁓ that. Gregory Wilnau: But you're not hanging out, you know? Yeah. Matt: someone else that's maybe not in Arizona wouldn't be able to help them out with. And so that's why it's so fun is just to be able to walk hand in hand with our clients and help them accomplish their goals. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, awesome. OK, so on that, maybe you could describe the kind of person who comes to you. What are they typically? What might ⁓ be something that they're struggling with that finally makes them reach out? Matt: Totally. I'd like a ⁓ really common scenario that we'll encounter is I would say most of our clients are kind of do it yourself first. ⁓ And then the, they just kind of everyday millionaires just keep putting money away, money away and into their 401k. And they've been largely kind of doing it on their own or maybe they've had an advisor help them from time to time. ⁓ But then the numbers start to get a little bit bigger. And they are approaching that spot where they know they're going to start taking distributions at some point in the next three to five years. And they go, man, I'd really kind of be like someone in my corner to help me with the tax piece of this. And then also I don't really want to retire twice. So I want someone to be able to walk me through and make sure that this thing set up for success. ⁓ and that we're optimizing the amount that we can take and that all these things are working together. So anyway, all that to say, typically someone that's three to five years from retirement, oftentimes we'll call it work optional. ⁓ And that's typically where someone engages with us is when those numbers get bigger and the stakes get higher and they go, I could use someone to help me with this. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Okay. So that's a typical situation when they're struggling with, that makes them come to you. ⁓ What's an example of a situation in there that you help maybe lead them through? You mentioned taxes. How do you typically approach that? Like what's your, what do you typically do first? Matt: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, the first thing is, you know, not I won't get way in the details. But the first thing is just understanding the baseline like, hey, where do we sit today? Right? What's what's our tax stuff look like today? And then doing a projection of what does that look like over the next, you know, five, 10, 20 years? ⁓ And we're able to do that. I mean, I kind of jokingly tell my clients, but it's totally serious. The only thing I can tell you about our projections is that they're definitely going to be wrong. ⁓ We're just trying to mitigate our error on those projections, right? And yeah, so like when we're doing tax planning, the kind of visual that I like to use with clients is, you know, imagine a graph ⁓ forecasting your income over time, right? As you know, the... as you age, know, for most people, ⁓ their income's going up in their career. And then when they retire, ⁓ a lot of times their income may come down, maybe not dramatically, but may come down a little. ⁓ And so really all we're trying to do is between the point in time we sit today and whenever the end is for that client, we're trying to pay as much tax as we can at the lowest rates and pay as little tax as we can at the highest rates, right? I mean, in that way, it's kind of a kindergarten level math problem, if you will, but getting into the details, know, getting into the details, that's where it can get a little ⁓ complicated. But quite honestly, if we know what our baseline is today, and we can look into the future and make some sort of estimate of what we think our future income is, the calculation's not a lot more, or the math stuff is not a lot more complicated than what's my current tax rate today? Do I think that's lesser or greater than the? future income tax rate of the future. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, I like how taxes play a big part. You only want to pay what you owe, ⁓ not leave the government a tip. I think that's a good saying. ⁓ Okay, so let's talk maybe about somebody who's not really a good fit for you. Maybe they're not ready yet. Maybe they think about things a way that doesn't necessarily fit with what you can do. Help me understand a little bit more about somebody who might not be good, the right fit. Matt: No, 100%. Yeah, think the, you know, the ones where we've had like introductory phone calls in the past year and it's like, we had that phone call and I can objectively tell them like, we're probably not, we're probably not what you're seeking. ⁓ It would be really one of a couple things. ⁓ One, investment philosophy, like if someone's like, hey, we wanna own, you know, these individual stocks and own precious metals or whatever else. We're not opposed to that, but if that's the staple of our portfolio, we're probably gonna have a little bit of a disagreement on that and probably not gonna be able to work together. The other... Gregory Wilnau: Mm. So it's not just about investment strategy. I'm sorry I interrupted you. You were going for the second thing. I got ahead of myself. Go again buddy. Matt: No, yeah, no, you're exactly right though. Yeah, not just about investment strategy. you don't have to, you like our investment strategy is very much to be, you know, be allocated towards growth, except for when we need income, right? We view it and we say, when do we want to take our foot off the gas? Well, when we need liquidity, right? And so that's that and for our clients, it's a big part of why they engage with us is because they want to For most of our clients, I'm really not overly concerned about them overspending, like in other words, spending too much. For a lot of our clients, I think the kind of bigger worry, crazy as it may sound, is underspending. What I mean by that is that they get to 75, 80 and they look back and they go, we could have spent more, like we could have spoiled our grandkids more, we could have gone on more family trips, we could have... know, bought that second house or whatever, like stuff like that. I think, I think that's a bigger, that is for most of our clients, that's a bigger regret than, than overspending. Gregory Wilnau: How do you help work with them on that? I'm sure that's something that's always in the back of your mind and maybe even there's too. So is that something that you keep an eye on? Do you encourage your clients to spend their money in ways that enrich their life? Like, do you approach that? What does that conversation look like? Matt: Totally, yeah. Well, would say, so most of our clients are kind of, know, millionaire next door type people, everyday millionaire type. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, they are, like, our clients are like normal people with abnormal money habits is the way I would frame it. Like, if you look millionaire next door type people, right, if you saw them, you'd be like, wow, that's a five-year-old. Gregory Wilnau: So they're used to being frugal, right? Yeah. Millionaire next door, right? Matt: Toyota Camry like 10 year old Toyota Camry, you And You know this you know, I would say, you know, some of our clients have really good earnings But even for our clients that have really good earnings their balance sheets Look, I I kind of will kid my clients a lot of times a lot of times our clients have really boring balance sheets Gregory Wilnau: I love it. Yeah, my type of people, man. best kind. Matt: Right, that's what I tell them. say, hey, you got a boring balance sheet. And I go, that's the highest praise I can give somebody. ⁓ But yeah, sometimes for those people, it's like they have 50, 60 years of money habits of putting money into their 401k and effectively kind of mentally saying, I'm putting that money in there. And whether they've consciously said this to themselves or not, I'm putting that money in there and I'm never gonna touch it. I'm never gonna touch it, never gonna touch it. Well, then once you enter retirement, no, we put money in there so that we can take distributions from that. And so sometimes it can be challenging to kind of unwind that mental head trash, if you will, of, hey, I'm not supposed to spend this money, no. That's why we put that money in there was to be able to spend it down. ⁓ So yeah, there are times where we have to meet with him when we go, know, hey, John, Jane, ⁓ let's, you know, if you continue to spend at the rate that you're spending, you're gonna end up, no worries. Gregory Wilnau: That's my daughter climbing up the, sorry, she's a little, sorry, little distraction, little view of the world and behind the house. If you continue to spend at the rate that you're spending. Matt: Yeah, well, she probably got perked up when I started talking about retirement income. I... ⁓ Maybe the initial piece of the tax stuff was like, boom, yeah, tee me up, I'm in, I'm in, dad. ⁓ But yeah, they... Yeah, I would say it's common where I'm saying, hey, if you continue to spend at the rate, like under spending, Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, she did. She really did. I think that's why she came in. Dude, like a moth to a flame, Matt: you're gonna end up with a larger nest egg than maybe you want to pass on, right? And if that's what you want, then let's keep doing that. But if not, then maybe you should support some of those causes that you're excited about now, or maybe you should travel a little bit more, maybe you some of that money to the next generation now so you can see them use it, that kind of stuff. Gregory Wilnau: Mm. Yeah. So you encourage them, you help them make the transition from being a good investor ⁓ and you encourage them to invest their money in ways that were different. like back into their legacy, creating more memories, their experiences. Yeah. Different type of investing. Matt: Yeah, the thing like we, yeah, we like we do, we do a Christmas party with our clients every year and it's, it's a very sincerely it's to thank them for letting us be a part of their journey. And it's like every time we do it, it's like, get kind of choked up because it's like our clients are asking them to help them accomplish their family life goals and their charitable goals and stuff like that. And Like that stuff is so fun for us to be a part of. Yeah, like that's, I tell Joe that's on my team, him and I talk all the time and we're like, helping people get wealthier just to get wealthier is really not that satisfying of work. ⁓ But helping clients to manage their wealth so they can support causes that they're really passionate about, whether that's shareable organizations or legacy or family, like. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah. Matt: Man, we love doing that stuff. That is, that is why we come in. Gregory Wilnau: You're a smaller, more boutique firm, right Matt? Okay. What do you think some of the differences are between working with a large firm versus a smaller, more boutique firm like yours? Matt: Yep. Yep. Yeah, we have. Yeah, from a service standpoint, ⁓ I've never worked with a financial planner at a large firm, but I can tell you the thing that our clients really appreciate is that when they call in, they're talking to someone that they know. ⁓ They're talking to myself or one of our operations people that knows them personally and knows their situation. ⁓ And yeah, so it's easy for us to... be really responsive. ⁓ And it's, I wouldn't say it's easy for us, but ⁓ it's easier for us than maybe a larger firm to just kind of have a really tight relationship with our clients and know what they're, know very specifically what they're trying to accomplish. ⁓ I think that is probably the biggest difference. Gregory Wilnau: I love that. Probably also get to understand more nuance because you have a lot of time and a long period of time working with them. So you're able to better customize your recommendations because you personally know the client. Matt: 100%. Yeah, like I was saying, on some of the tax stuff, it's... Largely taxes are boring, ⁓ but there's some fun stuff that we can do with taxes to be able to help support their charitable organizations in ways that are more tax efficient than maybe what they would typically do. ⁓ And then, again, in Arizona, there's some unique tax credits, state tax credits. ⁓ where if we kind of know things that they're excited about, like we can help them accomplish some of their goals ⁓ by optimizing dollars. Gregory Wilnau: I love it. Okay, so I've got a question about ⁓ like maybe how a little bit more of the nuance of how you work with clients. So I know you're very service oriented. I know you do a lot for your clients. And there's likely times when you guys are working on things together. ⁓ And dialogue takes place, right? So how do you know when is there a time where you need to, I want to say the word push, but that might not be the right word, but I'll ask it anyway and you can interpret it as you understand what I'm saying. How do know when to maybe push a client versus when to let them move maybe at their own pace? Does that question make sense? Matt: Yeah, yeah, I think so. yeah, I I'll come I mean, a common scenario, like we meet with our clients on a a on a scheduled cadence of semi annually, right? So once every six months now, of course, if there's more more often than that, we meet more often than that. But ⁓ like a common one that we're having, I would say two, one is one that we already talked about, which is, ⁓ hey, you know, John and Jane. ⁓ you're taking a distribution of 3,000 a month, but you could be taking 5,000 a month, right? I'm not saying that you have to, right? But I'm just saying if we don't take that, we might fast forward into your 80s and go, ⁓ man, I wish we would have spent more, right? So that one I'm usually kind of soft with them on because it's like, that's not the end of the world, but I do want them to know, I do want them to take a trip with me if you will. fast forward 10 years and are we going to look back and go, man, I wish I would have done that, right? And sometimes those conversations with clients, like if they're doing a, you know, if they're doing a cool trip overseas or something like that, like I have one client I can think of in particular where they're like, Matt, you tell us this every year. And now like, you know, we do, we try to do one trip overseas every year. Like I don't bat an eye when we, when we upgrade the first class on a 10 hour flight, you know, and Gregory Wilnau: ⁓ baby, that makes a big difference. Yeah. Matt: ⁓ Right? these are like, again, I want to emphasize it, like, my clients are normal people, right? Like, people, normally people fly in first class, you're not associating that with them. These clients, I cannot emphasize to you how normal these people are that are doing this stuff. But they go, well, my alternate is that we just have this, you know, large nest egg that we're going to pass on to our kids. And we love our kids. But They don't need the money, you know? They'll be okay. They'll be okay. So, yeah. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, I love that. So you make them feel good about not just investing money, taking care of it, but also ⁓ spending it in a responsible way. Matt: Yeah, yep. The other example I was gonna use was like, ⁓ you know, we talked a little bit about tax stuff already and trying to pay taxes that, know, if we can forecast future taxes over the next 20, 30 years, ⁓ you know, we wanna pay tax at the lowest rate possible over that, you know, over that time period, right? So oftentimes we'll meet with clients, again, usually we meet with them in the spring and in the fall. So in our spring meeting, we'll do a tax projection forum. for that current year that we're sitting in. And oftentimes we're kind of planting the seed and saying, hey, ⁓ you know, we may wanna do, depending where they're at in their situation, but we may wanna do some Roth conversions this year. So, you know, maybe we wanna do either a Roth conversion and or a distribution of say $40,000 or something like that, right? ⁓ They may not be taking action on that right then when we meet with them in April, but we're kind of planting that seed for them and just saying, hey, this is not something we need to take action on today. But if this is something that you want to do when we meet again in the fall, in October, November, I'm going to press you a little bit harder on it. Because this is something that we need to have done. Gregory Wilnau: Okay. I love that. So you give them permission not to worry about it and you let them know also, hey, I'll make sure that we talk about it when we need to. And you give them permission not to have to worry about it until then. Man, that's so. Matt: Exactly. But if they want to jump on it right then, then we'll do it right then. But yes, we won't let it fall through the cracks either. Gregory Wilnau: I love it. All right, Matt, so this is going to be hard to do. So but I want you to try to put your humble hat on and maybe brag about yourself a little bit. So what's something you do for clients that takes a significant amount of time or energy, but that they'll but that they might never see? Matt: Alright. Yeah. One of the big ones is charitable giving, right? So, you know, lot of our clients are charitably inclined. You know, they may give, you know, 10 to $20,000 a year to different charitable organizations or their church or whatever else. And for most of our clients, when they come in, they're just making those gifts to those charitable organizations with cash. And that is rarely the most effective way to do it. ⁓ So yeah, so we'll help them set up the right ways. mean, the right ways to be able to make those gifts to the shareable organizations so that the organization is getting the same dollars at the same cadence, but it's having a greater tax benefit to our clients, right? ⁓ So, you know, the amount that's leaving our clients' pocket and the amount that's going to the organizations is the same, right? But it helps, it's in most scenarios for our clients, it's saving them a couple thousand dollars in taxes just because we know which hoops that we have to jump through in order to do it the most tax efficient way. So anyway, that's something that ⁓ is or can be a little tedious on our end, but again, it goes back to... Gregory Wilnau: Mm. Matt: That's why we do what we do, is because we want to help our clients accomplish those big goals. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, I love it. Love it, man. All right. Let's talk a little bit more about what it looks like to work with you. So let's say somebody becomes a client. They're ready. It makes sense. ⁓ Maybe walk me through kind of what it looks like to work with you during the course of a calendar year, but specifically the first maybe ⁓ month or two. Like what happens? ⁓ on the front end and then how do you carry that through over the course of a calendar year? Matt: Perfect, yeah. we have, usually our kind of interview process, if you will, clients will interview us over basically two meetings. And so we'll deliver a plan at the end of the second meeting, just by the way that those two meetings are complimentary. So no one's paying us a penny until they know how we're gonna do stuff. At the conclusion of that second meeting, we usually schedule a phone follow-up for a week or two after that. gives them a chance to kind of breathe on it and look, digest it and make sense of, are we the right fit? When we have that phone call, we answer any kind of final questions. And if they go, yep, hey, I think this makes sense. I want to work with some more financial, then the process from there is we kind of outline next steps. What accounts we're going to be opening? How are those accounts going to be being funded? And then Joe, our operations guy, ⁓ who our clients get to know in those initial two meetings as well, he is sending them all of the account opening stuff, getting accounts opened, ⁓ and getting accounts funded. Then ⁓ within the first month or two, we'll schedule kind of an onboarding check-in call. Usually, You know, I mentioned that we like to do meetings in person, but our onboarding check-in call we usually like to do by Zoom. And the reason why is I like to have our clients in front of their own computer. ⁓ Yep. Gregory Wilnau: Mm-hmm. ⁓ Yeah, more efficient. Yeah. Matt: Yep, not efficiency, I just want them to be able to, because what we're doing in that onboarding check-in is I want them to be able to make sure they can log into their accounts, that if they want to be signed up for eDelivery, they're signed up for eDelivery. Like it's all the housekeeping, like silly stuff, ⁓ but it's really important, right? Being able to access stuff, see the stuff the way you want to see it, make sure they can access our secure shared folder, ⁓ all that kind of stuff. So that's what we, that's like the first month or two. And then from there, then we typically launch into our normal review cadence, where again, we're meeting with clients proactively. ⁓ Once in the spring, our spring meetings, we're usually doing it middle of April to middle of May. we're trying to, ⁓ usually in that meeting, we're asking the client to bring their previous year's tax return into that meeting. And we kind of use that as a tax cheat sheet for forecasting our current year's tax projection. ⁓ And then... our meeting in the fall, we usually do mid-October to mid-November, and that meeting is typically pulling the trigger on anything that is urine sensitive, right? So if it's, like I used the example earlier of the Roth conversion, if there's a charitable gift that we need to make, stuff that has a 1231 deadline, we're trying to get that done before. Gregory Wilnau: How about the fun stuff? Like say I want to buy a car or a boat or take my family on dream vacation. When do we have that conversation? Matt: Yeah, if you got the funds to do it, yeah, let's take the funds out. I just had a client last year who we've, over the last four years, they told me, hey, we've got this cabin that's been in our family for generations and we want to remodel it. so we knew that the remodel expense was gonna be quite expensive because it was a pretty substantial remodel. And so we'd been planning for that ⁓ kind of consistently converting money to Roth so that they could self fund that remodel as opposed to taking like a construction loan or whatever else. ⁓ So that's kind of ⁓ maybe a bit of an extreme example. ⁓ But yeah, like we're. Gregory Wilnau: Yeah, those are. so you help them figure it out. Matt: We help them figure it out. the first question I ask every time we meet with a client, like my clients are like, they kind of grow numb to it in some ways is what big expenses do you have over the next 12 months? Right. And, you know, I take notes about what they tell me, but the reason we do that is we're always trying to understand like, Hey, do we have a new car purchased? Do we have a home remodel? Do we have, you know, kids college expense we have to find that kind of stuff because you know, All I, again, all I know is that our projections are going to be wrong. So we just need life to happen along the way to prove that our projections are going to be wrong. ⁓ And yeah, we just want to make sure that the dollars that are invested are in line with, you know, what's going on in our head as far as what dollars we're planning to ⁓ have for outflows. Gregory Wilnau: I love it. I love it. All right. So for somebody who is interested in connecting with you and possibly working with you, how could they get in touch? Matt: Yeah, the easiest way is go onto our website. It's ⁓ sonmorefinancial.com. That's S-O-N-M-O-R-E, sonmorefinancial.com. And then you can just click start here and that'll get you connected with us. Gregory Wilnau: Awesome. Love it. Matt Benson, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate you. Matt: Thanks, Greg. Take care.