Adam Torres and Author Russell discuss Russell’s book.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres and Russell Luce, Senior Partner at Planning Legacies Financial Group, go down memory lane with a reunion episode to discuss Russel’s book, Mission Matters: World’s Leading Entrepreneurs Reveal Their Top Tips To Success (Business Leaders Vol. 5 – Edition 4).
About Planning Legacies Financial Group
Planning Legacies Financial Group is dedicated to empowering individuals through financial education and strategic guidance. Their website serves as a comprehensive resource hub, offering informative newsletter articles, financial calculators, and in-depth research content. With a proactive approach to personal financial planning, Planning Legacies Financial Group helps clients navigate key areas such as insurance, investing, retirement, estate planning, and wealth preservation—enabling them to make informed decisions and build lasting legacies.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres and if you’d like to apply to be a guest the show, just head on over to my Instagram, ask Adam Torres and send me a DM and let me know why you’d be a great fit for the show. Alright, so first off for the long-term listeners, you may recall I’ve done some episodes with Russell in the past.
Russell has been published in our bestselling business leaders. Book series mission Matters. And first off, man, Russell, it’s been a while. Welcome back to the show. It’s been too long, man. Thank you my friend. Yeah, it’s hard to believe we were, when we were talking the other day and I said, you have volume seven?
And you said, we’re on volume 21. I’m like, holy smoke. No, we’re on volume 11, man. Volume 11, me like that. Come on. So, but even, you know, even think about that, you know, how this started and how we first met. Back in 19, I think, wasn’t it, 2019? We met. Yeah, we met, we did the first podcast Pre Covid.
Right. Whoa. Yeah, I remember that. That was pretty wild. So, yeah. But it, pretty interesting because I get a lot of people when they come into my office, I’ll tell ’em, you know, reach behind you and they’ll, you know, grab the book and I’ll hand me the book. I send, they look at it and it, you know, it has our, you, you know, your picture and my picture on the cover.
And they looked and said, you wrote, I said, well, I wrote a chapter in this book. I said, it’s a book on leadership. I said, well, I’ll give you an idea kind of. Who I am as an advisor and how I, how I view things. Mm-hmm. And then I’ll autograph and it’s pretty amazing. Even my two brothers, which was funny when the first book came, when the book first came out, my two brothers were like, I hand ’em the book.
And they said, will you autograph it? I’m like, you’re my brothers. They said, we don’t care. We want the autograph. It so it, it’s amazing how that book , and, you know, and the information in it, not just for me, but the information from it, you know, from the other, you know, co-authors of the book and all the podcasts that I’ve listened to with you, it’s, it’s pretty dynamic and pretty interesting.
The quality of people that you have brought to Mission Matters. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s been quite a a pleasure and it’s really, I mean, it’s really been an honor. One of the coolest things I think about our book series and just the community in general is really no. I mean, it’s kinda like, I guess I’ll use the word volunteer army.
Like, like nobody has to Good way of saying it. Yeah. Good way. Has to come on here and share their stories. Nobody has to be in these books. Like we’re all busy professionals, business owners, everybody’s got things to do, but I feel like people taking the time out to come and, you know, give their story to share with others for the benefit of the community.
I think it’s a beautiful thing and that’s how this whole book series has come to, and I, I’m telling you man, I was talking to rag. For those that are listening that maybe don’t know Rag, it’s the other co-founder here. I was talking to him the other day and I was like, man, can you imagine this? We’re on volume 11.
How did that happen? And we were, I was covering, I was covering this other, this other conference where the president was doing the opening keynote and like all this other stuff, Elon Musk is there and all this, and these people are like, kind of really close to me. I’m like, man, like from starting with this little, you know, baby company and we’re still, we’re still small.
I mean, compared to the Yahoos or the, you know, iHeart radios over 4,000 employees. Right. According to Google. So we’re, we’re still babies in the media. Face, but we, we punch above our weight. And I’m like, I’m telling him, I’m like, man, how is this even happening? Like, how cool? Well, the thing is that you punch above your weight, but like your title, your of your company, and of the books, your mission matters.
It’s not just. It’s not to me, when I met you the first time, it’s not a way for you just to do revenue. Yeah. You really care about bringing, people from different diverse backgrounds together with a common goal of everybody learning from each other. I. That’s unique. ’cause everybody usually has some type of, what I call, some type of end game they want.
There’s an end game to what they’re doing for sure. And I don’t think, I don’t see that in Neo. And I, I think we’ve developed a, a really nice friendship to that point because I. Our company’s called Planning Legacy Financial Group, and your company’s mission matters. So the synergy aligns, I think, pretty, pretty amazingly.
And the people that you bring, to the mission matters community, I think, like I said, very diverse, but very, I’ll have the same. Passion to bring, you know, a difference to somebody’s life. Whether it’s one person reads the book or it’s a thousand people read the book. If you know you made a difference in one person by reading, you know, a book, or listening to a podcast for mission matters , that to me means we’ve done our jobs, we’ve done, you know, where we’ve impacted, you know, our communities in some form or fashion.
Speaking of your business, let, let’s go further into it. So maybe talk a little bit more for it’s been a while since you’ve been on here, planning Legacies Financial Group. Tell us a little bit more about what you do. Well, I always tease people if it’s legal and ethical. Somewhere in my firm can do it if it’s illegal and unethical, I just have to call Father Guido and company.
That’s the running joke. We’re just basically a full service financial services firm. If I don’t do it, my partner doesn’t do it. Or we don’t have an advisor in our firm that does it. I usually have somebody that I can then say, Hey, I need, you know, get better mortgage rate for my, you know, for our client.
Let me call my mortgage guy. You know, so I have guys that are, you know, I say, use guys very. Very, you know, we have individuals in our firms that have certain, niche situations for our clients. Look who’s getting, look, who’s getting all politically correct in the Midwest today. Russell, look at you, man.
Good stuff. You’re like, wait a minute, what am I supposed to say? You know? I always tell people I should be Popeye. I am what I am. You get what you get with me. It’s not, it’s not somebody you’re gonna, you think that there’s a, there’s a different person. I am. I’m this way all the time. Through all the pronouns for one statement.
I love it. Sorry man, I had to call it out. Go ahead. So you know, so in, our way it’s basically we, we basically look at our every client or every individual that, that raises their hand and asks for our help. We look at it very holistically. We don’t go in there and say, okay, I’m gonna talk about investments, or I’m gonna talk about life insurance, or I’m gonna talk about planning.
We don’t know. Everybody’s different. Everybody has, their. Dreams that they want to accomplish. And sometimes they don’t know how to put that into effect. We had a couple last week that was here, a friend of my, you know, 29-year-old. Old, well now he’s 30, right? Yeah, he’s 30 right now.
One of his best friends’ parents and they finally said, Hey, can we go talk to Mr. Lu? So I called them. They came in under my office and they said, we’ve really never sat down with anybody and we’re kind of. We’re kind of ashamed of that. We’re in our fifties now when we’re really worried about retirement.
You know, my goal is always to make people have, you know, leave my office in some form of way that they came in better, go out better than they came in. And I sat down with them. I said, you know, we went through kind of their planning part of it and I said, okay, tell me your guaranteed income.
What do you have guaranteed? You know, do you have pensions? Do you have social security? What your social security is? Yada, yada, yada. And they said, what the numbers were. And I said, okay. I said, okay. Now what does it cost to live every month? And they came down with that number. I said, okay, so if I’m adding up really quick, down and dirty without really doing any, really, you know, digging in, I said, you guys are fine.
I said, what do you mean? I said, you have more than $2,000 a month extra that’s covering your bills. And they said, oh my God, we never thought about that. I said, so everything we’re talking about now will be gravy. They walked out feeling. Pretty good. And that was, you know, and that’s ultimately you know, our goal, my business partner and I, Tara and I, you know, when we meet, sit down with somebody, we wanna make their lives better than when they came in the first place.
Whether it’s just giving ’em a piece of advice, whether it’s, you know, actually, you know, putting them into a program that makes more sense for them. But we want, we just want them going out feeling better and they came in and and if we do that, it’s just like with, the book and, you know, with our podcast, whoever’s listening, if it goes out and they listen to it and get one idea or they, you know, come out it feeling better than they did when they started listening.
I think we’ve done our jobs. Where do you find people normally go wrong with planning? And I know there that there’s a million different, you know, scenarios, but like, what are some of the general themes that people kind of, where they kind of like, you’re like, ah, you know, we, we, we can fix that.
Well, you get a lot of folks that , are afraid to tell somebody. Where they’re at presently because they’re afraid that they haven’t done enough or, you know, they haven’t done anything at all. You know I always tell people, I said, you know, majority of individuals really don’t start thinking about retirement until on one day they wake up and they’re in their fifties, and it goes, you know what?
We have about 10, 15 years and we’re gonna retire. We really need to start thinking about this. I don’t think you can start planning early enough. But knowing that you can’t over plan either, you have to be able to live. I think a lot of people get wrapped up in not planning, and I think a lot of people get wrapped up with planning too much.
You know, I always tell people, you know, , we have life. Life gets in the way. You have families, you have kids, you have work. I always laugh when I sit down. Somebody says, I’ll think about it. And you’re right, you probably will. I said, are you a beer drinker, wine drinker? Are you bourbon? What are you like drinking?
Ah, bourbon. I said, okay, so you’re telling me when you come home tonight. You’re gonna grab, you know, a bourbon and you’re gonna sit down, you’re gonna kick your shoes off, you’re gonna put your feet up, and you’re gonna pull out your financial stuff.
And they look at me like, no. Okay. So, you know, you’re not thinking about it. You’re, you’re hoping you put it in a drawer and , it magically, you know, you wake up one day and you’re, you know, you know, independently wealthy. It doesn’t work that way. People spend more time planning their vacations than they plan their financial lives.
So where do you normally start in your process with people? Getting to know them. I’m brand new, brand new. You know, you’re like, Hey, I like haven’t done much of this before, or maybe I’ve done some, but I don’t know if I’m doing what I should be doing. Like where do you start with people?
It’s kind like when you walk into your doctor for first time, , you take on a new doctor. What does he do? He basically asked you, you, you, a lot of questions. Mm-hmm. Okay. Mm-hmm. Tell me about your health. Tell me about your lifestyle. Tell me, are you a, moderate drinker? Are you a heavy drinker?
Do you exercise? You not exercise basically before you can really have the right to tell somebody something or, you know, you gotta ask ’em questions. If you don’t get to know them you’re just. I’ll say this, I hope, you know, they’re not gonna ever listen, but it’s like, like David, you know, Dave Ramsey and, and Suzy Orman and some of these people that sit on the radio and tell everybody to do something and they don’t get to know that person, you know?
Mm-hmm. I don’t like general answers for, individual problems. ’cause everybody’s individual situations are different. There’s nobody has the same situation. There just isn’t, there’s no way. Mm-hmm. So if you don’t get to know the individual on a more, I don’t wanna say, you know, personal basis, but if you don’t ask them questions to find out what makes them tick, what’s important to them, or where they see their futures being or want their futures to be.
Mm-hmm. You can’t help. You know, so basically it’s kind of, I always tell people we’re kinda like financial doctors. Mm-hmm. We’re gonna ask you a lot of questions and then if we see there, there’s something you’re unhealthy in, we’re gonna probably, you know, prescribe some medication for you. And then we’re gonna do a follow up and make sure that, you know, we’re addressing that, condition.
And that’s kind of the best way to put it with people. You know, you’re, you’re basically, you know, I always tease people if you go into a doctor’s office and first thing they’re gonna do is grab their script pad out and start writing you a prescription. Yeah. Be scared. Are you gonna be really comfortable with that?
Yeah. No. What? Like, dude, what are you prescribing me when he come out? Yeah. Come on. I just walked in. You don’t even know what’s wrong or if there’s anything wrong. I had a laugh. I did this back, I think Bernie Madoff got arrested in 2009, I think it was 2009. And I did a presentation right, right after that, a retirement seminar.
And a guy at the end of it goes how do I know you’re not burning Matt off? I said, you don’t. I thought the guy was gonna fall off his chair. He goes, what do you mean by that? I said, you just met me 45 minutes ago. You don’t know who I am. What I would do is make sure you, look me up on the internet, do your research, talk to finra, you know, go to the SEC, see if there’s any complaints.
Make sure you’re finding out information about that advisor, just like the advisor’s trying to find information out about you. Mm. And the personalities have to fit. If you don’t like the person that you’re sitting across from asking professional, you know, advice from, are you gonna probably do it?
Probably not. Mm. You know? So find an advisor that fits your personality. And ask you, you know, the right questions. Mm-hmm. Ask you about you, about your family, about your dreams, what your goals are, you know, what does retirement look like to you? What do you wanna do in retirement? When I wanna travel?
Do you travel now? No. Okay. You know what kind of traveling, you know, you gotta find information out about people. So it’s like, you know, my son. Is now coming into the business after, for years, saying he wanna get into sales. And I always laugh at him. I said, you don’t realize, you know, son, that you’re selling yourself every day.
Mm-hmm. You, Adam Torres is selling yourself to a prospective interviewer or interviewee. You know, why should you be part of our Mission Matters family? Type situation or you’re going to, you know, other situations saying, Hey, you need to partner us with us so we can tell your story. You’re always selling yourselves in some form or fashion.
Mm-hmm. You know, selling to me is just trying to find solutions to situations that people are in that need help. And that’s kind of what we do. That’s awesome. So Russell’s and if I can’t do it, I know how to raise my hand really Well, I’m really smart about that. Yeah. So Russell, what’s on the agenda for you this year?
Man? Tell, tell me about the rest of 2025. What’s going on for you, your firm, your family? What’s going on? we’ve had a lot of exciting things. At the end of 2024, we came into a unique financial tools both in the investment space and in the insurance space. And we’re getting ready to we’ve done a lot with it already, but it’s game changing for the financial industry.
And we got really blessed. I’ve been blessed over the years to get to where I’ve met some really great people. IE yourself. To where for whatever reason they’ve taken liking to me and mm-hmm. And made me, you know, and given me opportunities that probably you wouldn’t get normally. And the growth of our firm, we’re starting to add advisors.
I grew to 50 at my previous, corporate world, and I didn’t like managing that many people, so I basically wanted to go back to more of a. Boutique, smaller firm. But we’re at the point now where we’re starting to organically grow, which is exciting. You know, we opened up our second office in Indiana.
And that’s gone really well. We really, you know, like that space where we’re at in near Valparaiso, Indiana, actually we’re down the road from Valparaiso University actually. And we’re also now talking about opening up a third office maybe in 2025 yet, or 2026, you know, down in my favorite part of Florida, which is Clearwater, Tampa, Largo, you know, Palm Harbor, you know, area.
Again we see, you know. People needing help and and mom and pops are getting looked over. Everybody wants to, you know, the whale, everybody wants the, you know mm-hmm. The multimillionaire type of person and the people in, in between that really could use the help aren’t getting it. You know, they’re falling by the wayside.
we’re expanding our special needs programs. I’m in the process of getting my charter special needs counselor designation, which amazingly will put 16 initials behind my name. Wow. Which is mind boggling, you know, being 32 years into business and having two autistic children. There’s a lot of people that need some type of guidance in, planning for family members that have either physical or mental challenges going forward. And I hate these advisors to say, well, I got into it ’cause there’s a niche market. You really don’t know what that is unless you live it and you know, and breathe it.
How much help people need in that, you know, in that arena. So we’re growing that aspect of the firm. We just updated our website. We just got into a company that’s doing a lot of podcasting, you know, putting our podcast on the website, doing a lot of social media, which we really have never done before.
Mm-hmm. Because I. Like I said, I like working with people that I like. If I don’t like the conversation I’m having with a client, or I don’t feel a client is listening and doing things appropriately I’ll either pass ’em on to one of our junior advisors or I’ll just say, you know, what, we’re, our firm’s not a fit for you.
I can recommend a couple advisors that I think would fit you better. But I won’t work with anybody that I don’t enjoy. It is just life’s too short. You know, and so Russell if somebody’s listening to this and they wanna follow up and they wanna learn more, how do they do that? It is a couple ways they can email, which is Russell, R-U-S-S-E-L-L, at PF g.org.
They can also call my cell phone, which is (708) 308-7545. We don’t have an office phone anymore because I’m bouncing between two offices. I tell people, just call my cell phone. And then go to our website, which is www.pfg.org. There’s a lot of really good information there for people, just generally if they wanna find some stuff out.
we actually have some videos on our website that a buddy of mine who’s a comedian actually did on life insurance annuities, where he did a very very humorous kind of presentation. They’re not real long. They’re like five minutes long. They’re pretty funny. What we do is something that people, it’s not tangible.
They can’t sit down and go, Ooh, I like this leather in this seat, in this car. This is great. It’s very untangible. Mm-hmm. So like I said people need to get out and get information. You know, people need to talk to, the advisor at, I always, we always tell people this is not one and done.
We’re not, you know, you’re part of our family now, we’re part of the Mission Matters family, you know and we make people part of the Plan Legacy’s financial group family. It’s not a one and done, we start working with you. , it’s a relationship as far as we’re concerned. Fantastic.
And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put those links in the show notes. so you can just click on ’em and head right on over and check out Russell, his website and some of that comedy man. And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet.
Hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Russell, thanks again for coming on the show. You’re welcome.
And, and I’ll, I’ll say this last minute for everybody who’s listening go back and, look at some of the past podcasts. There’s a lot of really good people with a lot of really good information that Adam has brought. You know, to the air it’s worth your time to, to listen at least once a day while you’re sitting there either in the car or like what I do at nighttime, you know, on my iPad, you know, laying in bed, just reading.
You’ll learn something from almost everybody that he has brought to to the table. It’s worth your time to be part of the mission matters.