Adam Torres and Lisa Hutter discuss creating financial plans.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Why is it so important to have a financial plan? In this episode, Adam Torres and Lisa Hutter, Partner at IronOak Wealth, explore Lisa’s journey in finance and creating financial plans.
About IronOak Wealth
Ironoak Wealth, LLC is a financial services firm that represents a diverse group of clients seeking to effectively engage in financial planning, Investment management. Financial Planning and setting strategic Investment objectives is at the core of what they do. Execution and the planning process is what sets them apart. They attribute a large part of our success to treating all our clients like top clients. At IronOak Wealth LLC you will find a group of advisers with specialized expertise and complementary skill sets.
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 on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to apply. All right, so today’s guest is Lisa Hutter, and she is a partner over at Iron Oak Wealth.
Lisa, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Adam. All right, Lisa. So we’re going to talk about one of my favorite topics today. We’re going to get into talking about financial planning, why it matters and what people can do. And I got a whole lot of questions about that, but we’re going to start this episode the way that we start them all with what we call our mission matters minute.
So, Lisa, at Mission Matters, our goal and our aim is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, and experts. That’s what we do. Lisa, what mission matters to you? Well, Adam, I’ll tell you, I have a lot of missions that matter to me, but the one we’re talking about today is a really important one. My mission is to support people in learning about financial matters and how to plan to achieve their goals.
Because, you know, there’s so many opportunities to save for retirement, education, for a new home, for your loved ones, for charities. But a lot of folks just don’t know all of the pathways. Or they’ve not had a coach who could work with them to purposely execute on achieving those goals one step at a time.
So I really love empowering others, sharing tools and resources to allow them to get things accomplished. And there’s nothing more amazing than when it winds up even better than they could have imagined. where did this concept of this thought process of wanting to help people like with their finances in general, like where’d that come from for you?
You know, I will tell you that sort of deep down. I’ve always loved helping people. I do believe that I get that from my grandfather. That’s who he was. I was very close to him. And as the story goes, he used to, you know, Deliver coal in the winter and ice in the summer. And that’s amazing, amazing, right?
And it was actually often said that sometimes on a cold night, the other men would come home on horseback and they would have their blankets around their shoulders and my grandfather would have his blanket on his horse. And it’s just a really terrific story that brings out what was important to him and what I was raised with.
And so what’s important to me is helping others and that financial piece just has so much impact and I’ve seen it in so many various ways. And because of my background as an attorney, as a wealth planner in executive leadership, with taxes and finance and budget and investments, it’s really the one place where I can help make a huge impact and see a big difference in people’s lives.
Hmm. Talk about like the industry as a whole, like you said, you mentioned being an attorney and otherwise, like what led you specifically to like thinking about, you know, I want to, as you, obviously your knowledge and your acumen grew to saying, you know what, I want to help people with financial planning, like where’d that come from?
I took a class in law school. In my second year of law school, we had income tax and we had one class on estate planning. And I remember walking out of the class and saying, that’s what I want to do. And really in the beginning, that’s it. That’s, that’s interesting. Go ahead. It’s amazing. My boyfriend at the time said you’re crazy.
It was one hour. And before that, I wanted to become a district attorney. So like, Criminal law to estate planning. What? And I just said, I don’t know. There’s something really cool about, you know, the tax law and helping them plan around it and being strategic about it. And then I found myself at a big accounting firm because I wanted to learn the accounting and tax side.
And then eventually got into the trust world served as sort of a player coach as a manager and as a You know, a client advocate managed teams of planners did got into financial planning. And then several years ago said, you know what? I really, really love helping clients. I helped a lot of advisors build books over the years.
Now I want to build my own and I want to just take care of my own clients. And so that’s sort of how it evolved and where we are today. Why do you find, and obviously you’ve been doing this for a while now, why do you find that and this is one of the things, so just a quick background. I know my, I know my audience knows this already.
My long term listeners, I should say, but I mean, I was in finance for almost 14 years. I mean, I was, I started in the, you know, IRA department of Raymond James when I was 16 and I was just, You know, work my way up. And so I was a financial planner, you name it, the license, everything else for a long, long time.
And one of the things that used to always like be kind of like, I don’t know if I’d say my pain point, but I was just, it always kept me so fired up with them, like, how can people not have financial plans? Like they need it. It’s so important the sooner they do this. Like the better, but even if they haven’t done it yet they need to do it because better late than never on something like this especially when we go to, if we talk about the full life cycle and then, you know, obviously at somebody, you know, passing, unfortunately with a, without an estate plan or anything in place, and it’s like, oh my gosh, what What a mess.
So much, so much value that’s lost in terms of their the next generation and all that hard work that they put that if it’s not planned, right. Maybe the full, what should be, you know, going to that next generation or charity or whatever, the, whoever it should be going to doesn’t happen the way that you would have wanted it to.
So that’s, that’s my setup for the question. And you can obviously tell I’m passionate about this, but why do you feel so many people don’t have plans out there? I really think it comes down to it’s, it seems really daunting. A lot of folks. Don’t think that they can achieve their dreams. They, they think that there is such a wide gap between what they have built or what they have today and what they want to achieve.
And I’ve had, I’ve had many conversations. I have a client who, when she first came to me, she said, my prior financial advisor told me I would never be able to retire. And we did her financial plan and I said, guess what? You can retire at 60 and she was like, what? and I said, you know, it’s the two sides of the equation, right?
It’s not only what you have and what you’ve made, it’s also what you spend and what your goals are. You know, I had other clients come to me and they had a fair amount of debt. You know, high level, high income wage earners have done tremendous amount for their children. And just came to me and said, we don’t know what to do 1st.
We don’t know to pay down our credit cards to pay off our mortgage right to start saving for college to start saving for this or that. What should we do? And it was really about sort of helping them prioritize and find direction and then write down the steps around what they wanted to execute and how they were going to do it.
And, you know, 6 months later, they said, oh, my gosh, I feel so much better about having. Clarity and purpose and look how much we’ve already saved. They’ve already paid down half of their credit card debt. They refinanced them. They bought another piece of property for one of their children. Just like amazing, amazing things that I see happen when folks will, you know, sit down, devote the time to really think about it and then put a plan on paper.
Right. And as they say, once you tell someone about your plan, now you’re sort of halfway there because now somebody else knows about it. you’ve got to try to get that done. And then, you know, just being really purposeful about checking in. I have one client who calls me her financial coach and we check in every other week.
And it’s really helped her also to get a lot done and to get a lot just resolved and organized and clarity around doing different things. And then when something comes up, somebody reads an article or she hears something somewhere, it’s like, hey, should we be thinking about this? And we always explore everything.
You know, even if. Off the cuff, it doesn’t seem like it would fit. It’s always worth a conversation. So I think that’s why and it’s, you know, it’s never too late for planning. I mean, like you said, some folks will sort of wait, right? Sometimes they wait and they feel like, well, now it’s too late. But some of my clients are retired retired business owners and just now, you know, having done a plan.
So it’s never too late. For those that have never been through a plan or a financial plan or that process, maybe give a little bit of just kind of a flavor of what that looks like, because I feel like that can also be daunting and scary if somebody’s never done it. Yeah, it’s true. And you know what? I often call my initial financial data gathering conversation.
The bathing suit conversation, what would you say? What’d you call it? The bathing suit conversation. Oh, that’s funny. What does that mean? This is good. Right? One of my clients said, actually, I’m going to call it the birthday suit conversation, because I get to know so much. I said, look, I’m going to ask you a lot of really personal questions.
Right? And I know there’s been studies done that 1 of the topics that people are very uncomfortable to. Talking about sometimes. the primary topic they’re uncomfortable talking about is finances. Yeah. So in culture in the United States for the United States, that’s definitely the way I feel it is.
But go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. No, completely. And so when I’m going to now, I have to ask you a lot of things about. How much money you make, how much money you spend, you know, how much money you’ve got saved, where you have that saved. What do you think about your, you know, your goals? when do you want to retire?
So many times I’ll say to folks, what, what age would you love to retire? And I don’t know. You know what they call this, Lisa, in some Asian cultures, they call this a first date. That’s what they, like, that’s, you meet and it’s like, oh, so good, and depending on if there’s arranged marriages or things like that, like, even the parents are asking this in advance.
Like, just depends on the culture, but for some, in the United States, though, we’re shy about things like this. Like, it’s, different, but like, at some, that’s called first date. Yes, that’s funny. Yes, that’s exactly and it’s true. It is. Yes, right. It’s right. Arrange marriage, whatever it is, right? Yeah, I know everything.
Yeah. You know, and that’s the beginning. And it’s so the first conversation is a lot of me asking questions and then talking. and what it does too is on the flip side is it gives me a really good feel about how they, think emotionally around topics. They may say one thing, but how they talk about it or how they’re acting about it is very, very different.
And so it allows me to read them and understand, like, I have one client and it’s funny when we started talking, he said, I hate paying taxes. I mean, he’s like, I pay my fair share, but, you know, I don’t want to pay anything more than I have to pay. And it was just something that came through. So, you know, one day I called him.
I said, Hey, we got to talk about a Roth IRA conversion. I said, I know you hate paying taxes. Well, that’s not fair. But you’re creating a tax bomb, buddy. That’s right. You’re creating a tax bomb. You think you hate it now? You’re going to hate it a whole lot more in the future. We got to talk. Exactly, exactly right.
I just, you know, that and, and as I tell my clients, that allows me to know when I spot something or I hear something because I know my clients so well, I go, oh, this is something I need to talk about with, you know, John and Jane and Jerry, because I know that this would really resonate with them. So oftentimes I’ll say I’m sort of also like a coner, but without the organized crime piece.
And then I really just get to know my clients so, so well that I can often bring them value in that way because I understand what motivates them and what scares them. And I’m right there alongside them to help them achieve what they want to achieve. And let’s say, see, so components of a plan, are you working on the estate side?
Are you working as well on the obviously on the investment management side on the light, like kind of let us into like your process. Yeah, and I don’t know that I, so I sort of talked about the 1st conversation, right? And then from there, oftentimes it’s looking at then what we call a draft financial plan, looking at what does it look like on paper?
Can we achieve all of these goals? What’s, what’s the score? What’s the success rate? Or telling us and then we can adjust from there and then a lot of times folks will say, you know what, I didn’t tell you this, but I would have always dreamed about buying a 2nd home or we were thinking about adding on to our home or, you know, we really want to take a vacation and go on an African safari, but we just never thought we could afford it.
Could we look at that? We could we put that into the plan and see if we can actually do it. And so there’s. A lot that happens with the plan, even after we’ve got all the inputs and we’ve talked through the 1st piece of it. There’s refreshes, right? The investment management we do have. Most of our clients are also doing investment management with us.
We are managing their well. And that also, I mean, right in a year like we’ve just had in the stock market. Terrific. I’ve rerun plans and said, guess what? Right now you can retire a couple years early because this year was a great year for us. So, but we also have every now and then we’ll have clients that come and say, look.
I do my own investment management or I’ve had a financial advisor for a long time. I don’t want to leave them, but they don’t do financial planning, or I have assets that are all a liquid. I don’t have anything for you to manage, but I really feel like I need a financial plan. So in those circumstances, we will do a fee based only financial plan where we do not require investments under management.
Where we have investments under management, our philosophy is a lot about being very customized and creative, but not in a scary sense with our investments. We’re an, which means we’re a fiduciary. That means we hold ourselves to standards even higher than how we would spend our own money for our clients, right?
Their money. We safeguard even more than than we would our own money. It’s even a higher standard. So we do a lot of research on. You know, what are some of the sectors that are growing? What are what are some of the strong companies there? What are some of the values that we’re seeing? Or if clients.
Are more conservative, what are ways that we can get them some of that income to help them to continue to live their lives and live their dreams? So we do that. We also do a fair amount of insurance and annuities. Especially now with industry tire annuities are. Are pretty good in some senses and sometimes they fit not always but sometimes they do so sort of everything you would think on on that financial side of things That’s great.
Well, lisa I just have to say this has been great having you on the show today I’m a huge huge fan proponent of financial planning for everybody out there. If you haven’t gone down that route yet highly recommend figuring it out. And that being said, Lisa, if somebody does want to contact you in your firm to, to start figuring it out what’s the best way for them to do that?
Sure. They can go to our website, iron oak wealth. com. They can email me very easy. Lisa at iron oak wealth. com. They can also find us on LinkedIn and always happy to have a one on one conversation and get to know you. Love it. So, and if everybody listening, we’ll, put, of course, that information in the show notes so that you can just click on the link and head right on over to the website.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters or engage in an episode, we’re all about bringing on business owners, entrepreneurs, and executives, and having them share their mission, the reason behind their mission, you know, why they do what they do and what we can all learn from that so that we can all grow together.
Definitely if you haven’t already. Hit that subscribe button. This is a daily show. So each and every day we’re bringing you new episodes and new content, and we don’t want you to miss out on anything. So definitely hit that subscribe button. And Lisa again, really appreciate you coming on the show and helping, doing what you do day in and day out.
Cause I know it’s not easy and helping clients and helping individuals achieve their goals. So thank you so much for what you do. Thank you, Adam. Thanks for what you do. Thanks for always inspiring us to, be better people. I appreciate you.
