Our Insights
With over 25 years in this industry, we continue to provide our clients with our knowledge and professional insights. We do this to help guide them in the right direction to fulfilling their financial needs now and into the future.
We have taken the time to record these short videos regarding specific topics that many of our clients have had concerns related to over the years. Please watch and contact us if you have any questions.
FAQ #1: Who We Work With and Why?
I discovered a long time ago that when I sat back and I saw working class people like my mom and my dad, I realized that the overall environment of investing had changed and it became a situation situation where people, companies were getting further and further away from pensions. So all of a sudden now it became a situation where people now had to do the responsible for their own, whether it be through 401K, building an IRA and the like.
But what I realize is with those people is they did not have the time to become more, I guess, acclimated to the overall investment world. So ultimately, many of these people were busy with family functions, going to work, working overtime, working Saturdays. And by the time they’re ready to go ahead and retire, they realize, Holy cow, I’m just not prepared.
That’s where I believe I came in. And this is where our business came from. It came from a situation. It was really, in essence, hatched. The idea was hatched, that where there wasn’t much advice and much assistance. This is where I believed that there was a space, that there was an opportunity for me to build a business around helping people, people that I often like to simply call alarm clock totalers, right?
You set an alarm at night and you shut it off in the morning and you go off to do your life’s work. We work with firemen, we work with policemen, we work with teachers, we work with pharmacists, we work with small business owners, a myriad of people. And ultimately, again, go back to it is the fact that the satisfaction I get out of that is just simply being in a place where you get people into those AHA moments where they sit back and say, hey, you know what?
I’m smart enough to know I’m not that smart. I’m going to turn it over to someone that relates to me and that understands me and appreciates what it took for me to get to where I’m at today.
FAQ #2: What is Our Process?
The bottom line comes down to, I’ve always said, is that if you really should try the pants on before you leave the store, right. You’re lucky if they’re too loose or you’re very upset and surprised when they’re too tight.
But I think what happens is in today’s society is that everything is how easy we can make it. So everything becomes very canned, everything becomes very homogenized. One person all of a sudden equates to a whole group of people. So one size fits all.
Whereas with us, we’re customized, we’re personalized, we’re individualized, and we do that for a reason.
We do it because, number one, it’s the right thing to do. Number two, we do it because it’s the respectful thing to do.
You spent 40 plus years of your life working for what you have. So all of a sudden now you’re going to turn it over to an adviser who doesn’t really know you, doesn’t really know how you tick.
Our job is to be able to understand your risk tolerance and true risk tolerance. We need to understand what your goals, what your dreams, what your wishes are, how you want things handled in the points in cases of emergency and the like. That’s in essence our process.
We get to know you first before we ever take one dollars of yours and go ahead and invest it on your behalf.
FAQ #3: What Are Our Goal for Our Clients?
You cannot expect to have success if you’re working with a self absorbed, selfish person. This is a team effort. We know we’ve done well when we look at our client base and realize the length of time, the longevity of the relationships that we have, and the reason why those relationships have had the opportunity to take root and grow is because we’ve taken the time to get to know these people. We get a chance to know what they like, what they don’t like, what their favorite restaurants are, where they grew up, where they went to high school.
So for us, our goal for our clients is to be able to help them get to a point where they can safely and assuredly feel good about, hey, I can now make that. I can take that next step and go to retirement. There’s nothing better than looking at a husband and wife, a team. And you look at them and they introduce, they bring you in as part of their team, and you can actually celebrate together. And you look at them, sit back and say, “you know what, Hun? You know what? We did a really good job. We’ve done a lot of good things here and now.”
We can now entrust somebody such as us, such as myself, to be able to go ahead and carry them to and through retirement.
FAQ #4: What’s Our Business Philosophy?
Our business philosophy is first and foremost, it’s people first. You have to be able to go ahead and personalize what a person has done to get themselves to this point. Accumulate what they have, what they’ve gone through, the pains, the sacrifice, the struggles, the successes, the growth and the like. It’s very important to us to be in a situation where we also go ahead and we separate needs and wants.
See, when everything becomes one size fits all, you miss things. Our philosophy is we’re going to work off of the needs, then get to the wants. Because today’s modern financials, if you will, the way in which people manage money, it’s all based upon the lure. It’s all based upon, oh, look at the growth. Look at all these opportunities. Well, here’s the problem is that what happens when the sun no longer shines, when the markets do crumble. I’ve been in this business for a quarter century, and I have seen bear markets. I have seen the nastiness of a tech boom tech bus. I’ve seen the ramifications of a 9/11, and I’ve seen the ramifications of the great financial recession.
This is our job. Our job is that we are getting you prepared for choppy waters. We’re getting you prepared to be able to not only again, retire because anyone can. It’s staying retired is where the challenge is. One of the other things, too, as being very much systematic and structured. In our approach, we know what works. We understand what we put in front of our clients.
Number one, we will own them ourselves, which makes us non-hypocritical. And number two, we also believe very much in being very systematic, that the problem is that if all you’re going to get is a person agreeing, hey, no problem, hey, no problem. Well, eventually what happens when there is a problem, right? And then you look at life and you sit back and say, people do not understand. They don’t focus on what risk really is. We’re not people first, but we’re also risk first when it comes to your investments. That’s why it leads us back to doing what we have to do to make sure we take care of your needs and then the wants will take care of themselves.
FAQ #5: What is Risk?
Well, I think that a lot of people do not they do not get their arms around or put their arms fully around risk and the consequences of risk, how much exposure to risk that they have? I often will help people challenge people. Just take a ride up and down Main Street, USA, you see an exorbitant number of assisted living, nursing home type of facilities being built. Why are they being built? Because people are going into them. And at the clips of three, four, $500 a day, that’s where risk comes in. Or they look at their portfolio and say, “Geez, look at how nice it is. It’s just climbing so nicely.” And then they get lulled by that. Well, you have to understand that eventually, as I said before, the sun will stop shining. And when it stops shining, that will only then you’ll be able to recognize how well or how well your portfolio isn’t also being positioned.
Another thing is that a lot of people cannot afford the amount of risk that they’re taking on. If you don’t have a pension and you’re truly living off of your 401K proceeds, what happens if all of a sudden you have another market occurrence like we have between October of ’07 through March of ’09, when the SP 500 dropped over 57%, what are you going to do? What’s going to happen? Oh, that’s why I have diversified. I’m poor. Whatever, you lose 30%. What are you going to do if an emergency comes up in your life? What are you going to do?
So that’s the thing for us is that we take a very deep dive into risk first. We never will deviate from that. And that has also led to us having clients that have had very solid tenure, have had longevity where they’ve been able to go ahead, work with us at 60, and maybe they passed away at 85, but we’ve had 25 years of working with them and their money lasted.
So we know if you control the risk, you isolate the risk, you will have a much, much better opportunity to have longevity.
FAQ #6: How Do I Prevent Running Out of Money?
If you look at the biggest fear that people have going into retirement is they’re definitely afraid of running out of money. What that leads to is that there’s an interruption to the retirement income source, their retirement income streams, if you will. And the biggest thing that we come across is that if we don’t set false expectations, if we’re in line with what we know, this person A, can handle, B, the amount of money can handle and see where the markets are at that given time, we’re able to help these People have longevity. Now, we’re never going to sit over here and promise you a Rose Garden.
I think that is wrong. It’s done a lot in this industry. And people, the common person, the working class person, I hate to say it sometimes don’t know enough that they fall for it. And when they fall for it, next thing you know, they’re in a situation, and I’ve seen this, I’ve seen the ramifications after a bad market. And people come into us and they’ve had nothing but devastation. And they’re looking at you saying, “hey, how can we help you?” Or how can you help us, I should say. And sometimes it’s very, very difficult to have this conversation. But in a lot of ways, there’s a lot of ways we can’t help them. Because from the very beginning, they went ahead and bit off more than they could chew, and they didn’t realize it.
They got lulled to sleep based upon good returns, good statements, their advisors saying, oh, yeah, don’t worry about it. Everything’s going to be fine. And here’s the problem. What happens when life hits them, whether it be a bad market event or not. What if there’s an emergency? You need money. You need more money than you typically are taking out. This is something that we’re always very much focused on. I go back to it.
We’ve been doing this a long time, and we work off of a real life type of a guideline. We don’t sit around here and try to play pie in the sky like a lot of these large firms or even some of these other firms out there try to do or do, do.
FAQ #7: What if I have no pension or retirement income?
Well, when you look at medical costs, the number one reason why retirees go broke is due to medical costs. Medical costs typically are going to be in the framework in the form of a long term care stent. This is a question that we ask.
We ask, do you have 80 plus thousand dollars per year laying around sitting idle that you can go ahead and you can utilize to go ahead and pay for such things as long term care? And unequivocally, consistently, people will sit back and say, “oh, no, I don’t have that kind of money!” And we say, of course you don’t. So the bottom line comes down to is we ask the question, if in fact this happened, what would you do? And they have not an answer or they have a blank stare.
Blank stare is going to be very consistent with, well, hey, maybe I can avoid this. And here’s the thing, we hope you can too. Just because you have homeowners insurance or just because you have auto insurance doesn’t mean all of a sudden you’re not going to face a home fire or a car wreck. You have it to be able to protect yourself. And that’s exactly what we say to people all the time is that unfortunately working class people are not going to be able to self insure like the very uber-wealthy. And then on the other side of it, they’re in a position where the others who can afford it, but they have nothing to lose. Okay, you are right there, pardon my French, in the sweet spot.
One of the things that we have found that is probably one of the most disturbing yet is life consistent is the loss of a spouse or threat of the loss of a spouse. One of the big scenarios that we come across is that if the person passes away, husband wife passes away, you’re going to lose an income stream. Right. Whether it be Social Security, could be an adjustment on pension. But one of the other things is that you also lose a financial partner, a person that you’re able to go ahead and make decisions with. The worst case scenario is when the dominant spouse predeceases, because now the surviving spouse is left like a deer in the headlights.
The most vulnerable of any person that I’ve ever witnessed is a person who has lost a spouse that did handle all the financial transactions. And now the question comes down to is now what do they do? Who do they trust? Who can they go to? So our bottom line comes down to people is making sure that they understand that the best way to live is have a plan for the inevitable.
FAQ #8: What Are Low-Interest Bearing Accounts?
For the last 13 years, we have all been struggling with low record, low interest rates, which then means that the person who has money in their “safe account” is absolutely hemorrhaging money, and they don’t realize it.
To give you an example:
The national average right now for money markets is 0.6%. So if I had $100,000 invested after 365 days, I would have made a grand amount of $60. Then you couple that with inflation.
Now what? So what we’re. Trying to say to people. Is that there are alternatives, but you have to be able to build these alternatives into your overall financial plan. But Furthermore, one thing that they also have to understand is that these same banks that are offering these absolutely atrocious interest rates to their customers, they’re all posting record profits.
So what does that say? They’re not sharing it with the customer. They’re keeping it for themselves, and they’re investing it. They’re lending it. So they’re making the spread on the money you deposited.
FAQ #9: How Can I Prepare for Future Medical Costs?
When you look at today’s day and age, when it comes to monies, when it comes to retirement,
comes to retirement income, and the like, things have changed for those who are now approaching retirement versus those maybe who would have been twenty / thirty years in front of them or as it relates to government workers now because they receive a guaranteed pension, people today do not have those guaranteed pensions. Most people don’t.
Statistics show that less than nine percent of the American workforce has a pension. So now, what’s a pension? Guaranteed money, mailbox money going to go ahead and get a cost of living adjustment per the state or in essence, a Chartered constitutional number that’s saying, hey, you’re going to get your three percent every year guaranteed until the day you die. Good for them, not knocking them.
But the problem is the majority of people out there that do not have that type of safety, then they do not have that luxury to be able to know that, hey, every day or I can go every month, I’m going to have that mailbox money. And it becomes very much a scary situation because what happens now with the new generation that are now approaching retirement, what happens when you run into a bad market experience and all of a sudden you lose a quarter, half, three-quarters of your investable asset because of a market shift, a market change?
Now, where are you going to get the money? You still need that money to live off of and like, but now you’re taking money from a depleted source. So from our standpoint, our job is to duplicate the best of our abilities with the assets that you have, duplicate the experience, duplicate the level of comfort that a lot of municipal Union workers are able to enjoy, with the pension that they get.
FAQ #10: Any Tips on Passing Money to the Next Generation?
From our standpoint, this, I think, is probably one of the most emotional things that people have to contend with is, a lot of times, generations of the path of today people who are looking to retire, they still have a very strong link to family. And they feel like they’re obligated to make sure that they pass law money to their children, to their grandchildren and the like, the issue that a lot of times occurs is that they don’t have a plan for that money.
So when that money gets to that second generation, all of a sudden statistics show that typically seventy percent of generational wealth dissipates by the second generation, ninety percent of the generational wealth dissipates by the third generation. So they don’t have the sweat in that money. They don’t have the sacrifices that were made with that money.
Especially now, with so much money moving forward from 401K’s, from IRA’s that are taxable upon distribution, how is that next generation going to go ahead and handle those distributions? Are they going to handle the distributions in a careful way, in a very mindful way? Are they going to be frivolous with that money? It’s very, very much I implore our client to really give that a deep thought dive, because if they feel that the next generation is just going to just run through it like, you know what, through a goose. You know what we tell them? Spend it yourself.
What about your daughter in law? What about your son in law? See, something happens to your son, your daughter-in-law, whom you may not like, will receive this money and vice versa when it comes to your daughter with your son-in-law. So ultimately, we tell people that there’s a reality to this. So either there’s good, solid planning, which is what we provide for the next generation, or we tell them, you know what, just start having a good, solid distribution plan for yourself, and then whatever is left over is leftover.
FAQ #11: What about Stock Market Volatility?
Let me explain to you, stock market volatility as I see it currently. We are involved with the longest bull market in history. We have eclipsed at certain points of the this market over five-hundred percent from trough to peak. Yeah, we’ve had some interruptions and like, but what people do not realize is when you ask them the question, can the market go ahead? Can you lose thirty-five percent or more of your money? A lot of times they look at you and sit back and say, I don’t know, could I?
You absolutely can.
So the bottom line for us is that our job when we build someone’s portfolio is we build it from a functional need base, and then we drive over here to the want, which obviously will have a little bit more risk involved with it. The problem with the way people invest their money today and a lot of times other advice, it’s just the opposite. You’re concentrating on the want and you’re ignoring the needs, and that’s a very dangerous thing to do. Again, market volatility, it absolutely, positively, can be devastating.
You look at the S&P 500 from ’07 to ’09 to drop fifty-seven percent. If you remember the tech boom, tech bust, you saw the Nasdaq more than half itself to the negative. So these things are a reality. And we have to make sure that we’re in a situation where we’re explaining that fully and we tell people when they come and they’re ready to retire, they come to us to manage their money, that we’re going to manage the bricks, that you have to build the road.
We’re not going to be in a situation where we’re going to try to snap our fingers and try to create something out of thin air and then sacrifice that person’s, I guess, overall future well-being and their family’s well-being.
FAQ #12: What About Unforeseen Legal Issues?
We’re in a very much a sue-happy environment. Unfortunately, one of the things that we have seen in our business is we have seen people come to us and sit back and say, hey, my family member, my kid is in some legal deep “do-do” you’ve got themselves, they may have had an accident and now they’re being sued.
One of the things that unfortunately we see quite a bit of is something they call “Gray Divorce”. People getting divorced later on in life if you will. All we’re just trying to say to people is be aware, be cognizant of the fact, be in a position where you’re prepared for the unexpected main question I ask, if your child got themselves into a legal situation, would you bail them out?
Yes or no?
Why do I ask that? It’s because at the end of the day, they have to understand that there’s vulnerability and they’ve got to make sure that their assets are prepared based upon the potential threats that are going to come down the pike – unfortunately, called for the game called life.
FAQ #13: What If I Have No Financial Plan?
When it comes to having a financial plan in place, having one in place is better than not having one at all. Right? Because then from that standpoint, we believe we have a much, much better opportunity, opportunity to get on the same page with that client because there’s a reason why they may have done something.
Let me give you an example.
When you have market runs like we’ve had significant market runs, a person may have had a 50/50, 50 bond / 50 stock. All of a sudden you’ve had this big drive in the stock market, and all of a sudden, now they’re 80/20, but now all of a sudden they’re thirteen years older. So now they’re actually more risk-based than they were thirteen years prior.
The whole point about having a plan is that the plan just simply has an opportunity where we have a checkpoint, we can make sure that we’re well within the risk thresholds. The overall need base, the want base, their “sleep at night capabilities” that they’re not sitting around worried about which way to go. Unfortunately, I’ve read statistics where people that they said that there are people that are on the verge of retirement, that more than fifty percent of them do not have some type of financial plan in place.
That’s dangerous.
All we’re just trying to tell people is think about what you’re trying to do and what you’re trying to accomplish. Going out there and just winging it, especially in today’s day and age, just does not work. People are living longer. Right. You’ve got situations where medicine and healthcare have gotten better. So people obviously are having much more longevity in life. That’s something that we are very much aware of. But just having a system in place, something that you can measure the results on and making sure that you’re in line with where you want to go, you.
FAQ #14: What Makes Casey Wealth Better Than Commercial Investment Firms?
So when people sit back and talk about this type of scenario, another thing that really comes out is taking advice from strangers. These are people you don’t even know. You’ve never met them. So you mean to tell me you’re going to spend 40 years of your life working, sacrificing, clawing to make what you have all of a sudden then to turn over the advisory capacity of someone you’ve never met?
I got Timmy today, Tommy tomorrow, and Tony the next day.
That’s a very dangerous proposition. And again, you’re working with somebody you don’t even know. That’s the difference in working with us from a standpoint of you’re going to have a live person, you are going to have someone return your phone call.
That’s something we very much pride ourselves in. And that’s exactly what financial advisory services should want. That type of respect and that type of attention.
Yeah.
FAQ #15: Why Are Some Investment Costs Excessive?
I’m surprised in today’s day and age, how many people do not know what their true costs are to their investments. They have no idea how much they’re paying. They have no idea who they are paying. People ask me, where would I find it? I said, you’ll find it.
If you go ahead and you look at page forty-eight of your prospectus that you throw out, it’ll have it in there, but you’re not paying attention to it. The whole point is that these fees absolutely eat your performance and all of a sudden, instead of receiving a ten-percent return, maybe you’re going to get a seven-percent return.
Doesn’t seem like a lot in one year. But if you go ahead and you compound that over the course of 10, 15, or 20 years, that’s a lot of money. Furthermore, when it comes to the overall fee structure, that again, people are going to get paid, they need to be fully, fully transparent as to how they get paid as much as regulation and all the different rules say you’re supposed to.
Many people still to this day do not know. On our behalf off, we take the time to go through every item one by one by one, to show you exactly how we’re paid, when we’re paid, why we’re paid and how much we’re paid.
That, I think, is very important that you understand that.
FAQ #16: What is Poor Debt Management?
Poor debt management just simply comes down to being in a situation where you did a bang-up job of creating the debt, but now all of a sudden you’re just going to go, by chance, I’m just going to pay that bill, pay that bill, pay that bill, and realizing that a lot of times you’re never getting out from underneath it.
The people that we find that do the best in retirement have gotten rid of, they’ve had a structure and strategy in place to pay off their house, to pay off that new car that they need going into retirement. We find a lot of times that people do not have that type of strategy. They do not have the ability to go ahead and isolate the pay.
Healthy Debt versus Unhealthy Debt. How much they’re paying so ultimately, they’re paying thousands upon thousands of compounded dollars over the lifetime of that particular loan. It could be a credit card, could be a mortgage, could be a car payment. And if they would have just structured it better, they’d be in a situation where they’d be knocking these debts down faster.
Much more efficient efficiencies create effectiveness. Effectiveness creates peace of mind and also cost savings.