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The BIF Bites podcast covers topics that are important to those seeking CFP® certification and really anyone that wants to better understand the financial services industry in general.

Jerry Mee, CFP® is the Director of Student Support at the Boston Institute of Finance (BIF) and has nearly a decade’s worth of experience in the financial services industry.

Adam Scherer, CFP®, MS is the Co-Director of Curriculum at the Boston Institute of Finance (BIF) and has over decade's worth of experience in the financial services industry.

Daniel Kopp, CFP®, MA, MS, founder of Wise Stewardship Financial Planning, LLC.

Full Transcript:

Jerry Mee 

Hello everyone and welcome back to another awesome episode of the BIF Bites Podcast. I'm your host Jerry Mee, joined as always by my faithful co-host Mr. Adam Scherer. How's it going, Adam? 

Adam Scherer 

Great to see you again. Hope all is going well with you this deep in our CFP exam cycle. 

Jerry Mee 

Ohh yeah, but we have a a pretty special episode planned for this week, Adam, we're keeping the guest train rolling. We got an awesome guest this week that I'm really excited to get a good conversation with. Daniel Kopp, how are you doing, Daniel? 

Daniel Kopp 

I'm doing well. I'm so glad to be here and. Yeah, have a very interesting conversation planned. I'm excited about it. 

Jerry Mee 

So for our listeners who don't know you, you are a Boston based independent advisor and you have some pretty interesting kind of niche focuses that you kind of built your business around that I think really warrants talking about because it's some pretty important uh topics and I just feel it would be a really great conversation to bring to our listeners. 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, there's some certain aspects of financial planning that apply, whether leveraging my CFP experience with some of my niche expertise, if you will, with active-duty military and young widows. But a lot of other things that integrate with it that I'm sure we're getting to that today. 

Jerry Mee 

Yeah, definitely, definitely. So you have a lot of great experiences, but let's just kind of talk about you to color the backgrounds for our listeners. You started off in the Air Force. 

Daniel Kopp 

That's right, yes. 

Jerry Mee 

So how many years did you, uh, did you spend in the Air Force? 

Daniel Kopp 

Just under nine, I went straight into the Air Force as an officer right after undergrad at Purdue. I was an economics major and then ROTC. So I commissioned soon as I graduate, had a nice guaranteed job, which looking back in hindsight, was fortuitous in 2009. So I stayed until early 2018 and got out. Always loved personal finance along the way. Didn't know that it was a career, at least in this way. So kind of found my way by accident through a variety of sources. In 2015 found out about the CFP, found out about real like comprehensive financial planning and started my journey there. 

Jerry Mee 

As far as your transition out of the military, did you want to share with our listeners kind of the situation in involving that? 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, there's certainly a personal element to this story that's inextricably linked. I was married to my wife, Sarah. And we were enjoying the many of the aspects of the Air Force life, but she also had some pretty serious health challenges that grew along the way. So by the time about 2016/2017 time frame I had originally been planning on staying in the military for a career, which for most people is at least 20 years. And then you will talk about that with planning as you get a pension after that and things like that. 

Jerry Mee 

Daniel Kopp 

But right about that 7-8 year point, I was becoming more and more of a a full time caregiver to Sarah's, her health kind of failed. So I realized that in active duty life was going to be kind of incompatible with the needs of my family at that time. So I had been interested, I haven't started the CFP coursework in 2016, planning just to use that. I was also a volunteer financial counselor. I did like the Vita tax prep program for a couple of years like I loved helping people with their money. I thought like financial piece that kind of stuff. I didn't know there was a career, so I started doing a lot more research, doing the thousand cups of coffee kind of idea talking to lots of people, and I realized that, oh, maybe I could do this sooner. Get out and become a financial planner and have some better options on the home front. Sarah's health progressed, though, and ultimately in the summer of 2017 we came home to Hospice and she died in August of 2017. So obviously this was an extremely impactful event. Personally, professionally going through that grief journey, I still ended up getting out in 28 early 2018. That had been the current plan. And just need that time to rest, to grieve, to reflect, to think and took some time off with the sabbatical and out of that journey, though, was born, this idea, to have purpose through the pain and the ability to take what I learn. And personally and professionally now go help others often in similar circumstances of widowhood. 

Jerry Mee 

Yeah, I, I can't even imagine. But I do think that is a great lesson. A great message to take from that is giving the purpose through the pain. And that's kind of the origin of your firm. 

Daniel Kopp 

So I had originally looked around and I was exploring opportunities to join a firm. This was pre COVID, so not a lot of virtual opportunities at the time. I had some specific goals about where I wanted to live, and ultimately I decided after turning down a few options, one in California and one in DC that maybe, I'll just try this out, right, not in the sense of not having the competency I had finished the CP course work at that time, ready to go. Financial planning wise, years of experience, I knew if I worked with military that I would have deep expertise in that side of the benefit. But I was like, well, what's the worst that can happen. One of my career coaches was like you could be two or three years down the line and it is not working. But then you have two years of experience and people want to hire you and maybe you will have some good clients that go with it. So sure enough. Not only has that been the case, the firm took off and. it's done really, really well, but yeah, unsolicited job offers regularly. Now it's funny, like we were just talking about that earlier. Adam, I have like this idea of that career transition can often be challenging, but once you get those years of experience, man you're like gold to some people. 

Jerry Mee 

Yeah, especially having the double whammy of both the CFP and being an independent advisor, having that experience. We did an episode a couple weeks ago with one of our former students, Jeff Sussman and he's saying how he has to beat the recruiters back with the bat because he's just getting all these unsolicited job offers because those recruiters are hungry for that experience and hungry for that CFP designation. 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, that's my experience as well. 

Jerry Mee 

So that's great. Yeah, definitely a a very impactful journey that you've been on. And I think our listeners can really get some great lessons from you. So I just kind of wanted to dive in with some topics to kind of talk about your first hand experiences and really where I kind of wanted to start off. What I was really interested in is kind of the military counseling because we have noticed that it is a trend in the industry of, very specific financial advising, choosing A subset of clients and focusing on the clients and really helping them with their very specific needs. I've had students who were financial advisors focusing on dentists, financial advisors who focus on police officers, firefighters, , doctors, what have you. But you're actually the first I've met who focuses on military personnel, and I think that's a really important subject cause also, it's probably a huge client subset. There are so many members of the Armed Services in the country today. 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, there's two elements that I've found over the years that help tremendously. When, so let's talk about the planning piece first. So of course there's the table stakes of just good core financial planning, right, cash flow and insurance and retirement planning, estate tax, all those things, right that those see, if you of course work goes through. And then you have the nuances of the subset of those based on their income, their lifestyle company benefits, and this can apply across the range. So with military, how does helping it focus on. Let me give you a very good example. So when somebody reaches military retirement, generally that 20 plus good years, right? They have a pension and now the military members are going to retire, and them and their spouse, if they're married, have to make a decision. It's called the Survivor Benefit Plan, the SPB decision for most of them. it's the biggest financial decision that they will ever make in their entire lifetime. We're talking net present value of this pension - 1,2,3 million dollars, OK. And they have decided how they are going to provide protection for those where if they die their spouse or potentially their children would get a portion of that for the remainder of their lifetime, right? And you can take all. You could take some you can take none. And when I helped now I think 43, 44 different families over the years make that specific decision. I have an extremely well established workflow process checklist. I've built a custom Google spreadsheets, and all this stuff and I've done it so many times and I've seen it so many times. It speeds up my process. I'm much more efficient and I'm way better. I can't remember the name of the firm, but there was a big box financial planning firm that used to have a client that came to me and they said, hey, we need help with this decision. We went to our other financial advisor and they asked us in the meeting - So how does this Pension thing work. Do you have technical competency in the unique planning aspects of that profession. The military is very about that. Then that sets the technical piece right, and you could extrapolate that across pretty much. Everything then there's on the Marketing side, which is I speak your language, I know your pain points. I communicate with them right in this world of hard it being hard to differentiate, right. I talk about things that don't apply to 99% of people, but. I don't care. Because I only want it to apply to you, this ideal client 1% subset. When marketing always talked about this, this is resonating right? The message reaches your ideal client and they said Daniel gets me right. So there's technical competency that you get to do the same things over and over again, deepen your expertise and there's a marketing piece which is speaking to that subset who says Daniel gets it. 

Jerry Mee 

Yeah, because I mean, you speak the lingo. I think probably the only career that has more acronyms than financial advising is probably the military. 

Daniel Kopp 

Make that joke myself, yes. 

Jerry Mee 

Yeah, that's great. So what are kind of some of the main pain points that you mentioned, like you said 20 years before, most people retire? If you're entering into the military at age 18, you're looking at a retirement age of 38, that is well before where most people are looking to retire, so that's a long time in retirement. But then also, I mean all the other things that we know about the military, the constant moving. I'm sure that is a pain point. And then also it is a dangerous job if you're in a a combat position. That's a very high risk job to have. And I'm sure that's going to have, major financial decision and impact the financial decisions of families that are in that situation. 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, fortunately, because of the military does acknowledge that there are some very good benefits that exist. If something happens to a member of, well, if they have a death in the line duty so that SV I talked about is paid. Plus there's some VA benefits. There's SGLI, one of the nuances of that, thanks to the Heart Act is so there's 500,000 of group life insurance that can be put into a Roth IRA within 12 months. There's a lot of unique planning aspects around, like family legacy, life insurance, all that kind of thing. Obviously the moving is a huge consideration, especially with the way the housing market is right now. For a long time, everybody was a genius, right? You bought a house. It went up in value. So now you have these situations where if you're moving every 2-3-4 years, how does that work? Should you rent? Should you live on base? If that's even an option, right? If you're going to buy, what's that going to look like. We have in the military world, we call them accidental landlords. So people move from this assignment to this assignment to this assignment and they collect houses. And they don't know what to do with them and they think, oh, I saw somebody on Instagram or Tik. Tok do it so it must be easy, right? And they become a landlord and then they don't know what they're doing. In fact, one of my inoculations against clients becoming an accidental landlord is, to make them join this social media about military landlords and they can see the parade of errors that come through every day from people talking about the horrors of not knowing what they're doing and trying it out. So spouse under unemployment and underemployment, that's a huge issue. So you have income challenges. Tax planning is a huge deal when people are getting out because a lot of our compensation in the military is non taxable. You go to join the real world, right? Not everybody's necessarily retiring in that 38-40 time frame. Oftentimes they're going into a second career. 

Jerry Mee 

Right. 

Daniel Kopp 

So how do you translate that military experience in civilian? I mean, we could go on and on. There's so many things that make this planning aspect unique that Michael Kitces talks about the crisis of differentiation, right? How would you, as a generalist, distinguish yourself? Especially as a solo right? Because you know more about it than anybody else on average. And that's the beauty of this. I'm not worried about being outcompeted by a big box company at this deep level of expertise. 

Jerry Mee 

And I mean it's all about building moats. Your mode is just your experience with the armed forces and like you said, being able to relate to people and knowing their problems first hand and not having to ask how does this pension thing work? So forgive my ignorance but are the branches pretty much the same. Or does it like the Coast Guard have different benefits from the Marines, from the Air Force? Or is it pretty interchangeable? 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, across the DoD and understanding how that all fits in is generally almost always the same. You might have some terminology differences in an office that who runs what program. Yeah, so the basics are pretty much always the same. And across the Federal employment, too. So oftentimes you people getting out of DoD military service then crossing over to the GS - the government service side too. They have working knowledge of that is really, really helpful in this space. 

Jerry Mee 

So you found your clients are kind of a mix of the branches. It's not like you have like all Air Force clients or anything like that? 

Daniel Kopp 

I probably have more Air Force than that because that was my network, right? I initially recruited clients from referrals, but yes, I have from across and there's also like OSHA and Noah and some other related agencies as well. 

Adam Scherer 

In terms of your average client demographics, for the military uh individuals, couples that are seeking your services. When do they commonly get in touch with you? Is it approaching that 20-year mark? Do some people reach out to you earlier? After that? 

Daniel Kopp 

Well, I have kind of two main groups of military clients. The first would be probably what I call that mid career dual male. So officer to married to officer typically, and they've been oftentimes aggressively saving often on a path to FIRE - financial independence retire early, and they reach a level of complexity, oftentimes the tripping point is this backdoor Roth threshold, right. They get told by their tax preparer that you have to take that money out. You can't contribute anymore. They're like, what? What's going on? That's a pain point. Or they suddenly have so much cash sitting in the bank like we got to do something with this tax free deployments, all that kind of stuff adds up. So oftentimes I'm helping the client couples early 30s, mid 30s, things like that. Figure out what to do with all this money coming in because they may be making $250,000 to $400,000 a year when you add in bonuses and all the allowances with dual military. Oftentimes they're wrestling with decisions like, well, if we can't be joint spouse, right, we can't be together at the same place. Maybe one of us should get out. What would that look like? How are the financial implications, the trade-offs of all these things? And then as you mentioned, the other group is probably the group that's approaching that military retirement decision. The whole civilian. The world looks very scary, right? Stock options with this job offer, SVB decisions, right? A whole new world is opening up to them, and they are often a pain point for them to reach out,  

Adam Scherer 

is there a natural, hum, just with the retirement happening so early, is this just one of those places where it naturally is going to employ a lot of the fire principles and strategies just in terms of what are you going to do from here till 65 right on the health insurance side? 

Daniel Kopp 

Right for some, but even with the military pension. Many people in the military are not necessarily super savers, right? So that is a rare subset of the broader population who are reaching out to me in that sense. But yes, there's an idea of right what is optional work, because they're going to want to do something. Nobody sits around, at least that I've ever found in my experience, for 40 years and does nothing right, but now it's like, what do we want to do with spend our time where money income is not the object, right? It might be a side benefit, but it's not the primary goal. So, when I'm using my planning software. I'll model this, what I call the next chapter, and I'll put something very, very low, even $10, $20, $30, $40,000 a year combined income with a couple like you could make that walking the dogs around the neighborhood for your neighbors or working part time or just doing consulting, things like that, helping them broaden their mindset, their reframing. And that's, I think the biggest value we as advisors bring it’s the thinking part. We've got technical expertise that has to be table stakes, but help the client layout options. that's alignment with their hopes, their fears, their dreams. What's important to them, and then marry those two together over a process. 

Jerry Mee 

I'm interested to see if, uh, you kind of have the same experience, but I have a lot ofmilitary friends and a trend I notice among all of them is that they all tend to be very into collectibles as an investment vehicle. And I think it's because they have, not only do they have the income coming in, like you said, a lot of it's tax free. But especially if they're in like the Navy, they're stuck on a ship for months at a time. It's not like they really have anything to spend that money on in the first place. Of course, there's always the jokes, getting your signing bonus and buying a Camaro. But yes, I also find a lot of them tend to angle towards the more collectibles and building up assets that they can kind of have that also sometimes retain value and gain in value. 

Daniel Kopp 

Oftentimes you can see this very cyclical pattern of save spend, save spend, especially with like deployed environments. When I was there, like there's not much to spend your money oreven if you could. Yeah. So like C2, your duty. Away from home. It's for a measure of forced savings. You may come back and find you have a pile of cash. You drive past the barracks, there's often a parking lot full of the nicest vehicles. Like my senior airman, the people who work for me, making way less money than me, always drove way nicer cars. And then there's an irony there somewhere. 

Jerry Mee 

Do you feel like you focused the majority of your business on that military network? Do you feel, I mean obviously it it's been working out for you and I feel it a lot of military members do tend to also make their way into the financial industry as well. A lot of our former students have been military person. In fact, one of the individuals who I’m tutoring right now for the exam. He was in the military for years. The personality traits transition very well and also the fact that financial advising tends to give a lot of freedom, it's very attractive to those who are now retiring out of the military and looking for that second career but not looking to necessarily get a a tied down office job. 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, I don't have any historical data, but my sense specially doing that kind of talking and I also host a podcast, military to financial planner, where Adam was a guest where we talked about this career transition: like how do you get into this space and things that you want to know if there's listeners in the audience that are in that kind of subset. But there are a bunch of us who came together to form the military Financial Advisors Association, MFA, who are all former military or military spouse, and we make it a practice of focusing on that. So to answer your first question, I have about, I'd say roughly 2/3 of my client base is somehow connected to the military. There's some Gold Star widows in there, which is the term off you described, those who espouse of somebody who's died on active duty and the remaining third is in that mixture of friends, family and widows that I specialize in serving. I got so many more early military clients because it was my natural network early on, but of late my growth now is more coming from the widowed side. I don't know that I would go back and do niches again. It's a little challenging on the marketing side to go back and forth, but at least so far it's been very rewarding to help people make that transition. Last part of the question you talked about, how does it translate? I laugh because I hear people talk about like compliance burden on this financial advising space. You all must never work for a government bureaucracy before. Like one of my jobs as an as an evaluator in a training squadron. I mean, I would literally have a suitcase like a rolling suitcase that I would take with me out to the jet, with all the pubs that I was required to know and use to help grade my students. It's just ironic to me sitting on this side. So obviously there's some translation, speaking, government bureaucracy and just discipline and self starter and a lot of things that translate well to this planning profession. 

Jerry Mee 

I've only had one government job in my life. When I worked for the Census Bureau and my job was literally to take a stack of papers on the left side of my desk, look it over for mistakes, sign my name and put it on the right side of my desk and that’s the entirety of my job working for the Census Bureau. So I can only imagine the compliance issues and paperwork that you've had to deal with over the years. But yeah, that is also a a good transition to kind of the other niche that you focus on and that is that is grief counseling and I really must commend you for that because when I was working with clients dealing with widows and widowers and helping them was probably the most difficult part of the job, and it's definitely the part of the job that I see a lot of advisors really shrink away from. When I was working as part of a team would often work with the widows and widowers, cause the other advisors in the team just didn't want to deal with it. They weren't comfortable with it 's something that they kind of want to hold an arm's length, but you really grab the bull by the horns and really focus on it with your practice. 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, it's funny because in the financial planning world, we deal with taboo subjects. One of them, of course, being money in our culture and our country, right, our family of origin often says we don't talk about these things, but yet in our profession, that's what all we do. So we've gotten very used to that one, at least. Maybe that's the people who are attracted to this, right? You don't have that inclination as much, but then you marry that with another taboo topic which is death, right? And of course there's estate planning which is planning for that. But on the other side of it, right, there's just this anxiety, and I'm not a psychologist. I don't know all the reasons behind it, but there's certainly this element of I'm afraid I'm going to say the wrong thing, right? I'm afraid I'm going to have them cry. I don't know what to do when people cry. Right. Emotion is not my strong suite. Maybe more of us are attracted to the planning because of that technical expertise. And I think we could all agree on this call, planning is really about marrying that science with the art of interpersonal connection and communication. And so those are learned skills just as much as technical expertise. But we have a lot of training. Certainly the CFP program is around technical expertise, but maybe not so much around the interpersonal side, right? communication and grief literacy and just learning how to be human. So they're a lot of sources out there, Amy Florian and Brené Brown, and anybody who's talking about being human, right? But in my case right I'm able to speak the language of grief because that has been my own journey and there's a certain element there that's not necessarily directly translatable, but I had so many widowed people who I've talked to who tell me things like I don't even have to explain this. I know you get it right. And so there's, there's an opening there. There's an interest. There's a safety that some people feel in this. And as far as like how do you get better at it by practice and not being afraid to make mistakes. You're probably going to like one of the things that's super easy to start with. Whenever you hear about something bad, like a death or some other kind of loss that somebody experiences changing one small word in your vocabulary. Our cultural reflex is to say, oh, I'm so sorry. And I know everybody means well when they say that, right? As somebody who has received that dozens, hundreds of times. That means well. What it might be better I found in my experience is instead of saying, I'm so sorry. Say I'm so sad, so just replace. Sorry with sad, right? I'm so saddened to hear that right? Similar motion, but different. And it's going to break through that and then don't be afraid to say the name of the deceased spouse. I mean, I mentioned her name. Sarah, I'm now remarried. My wife Anna and I have a great marriage at this stage, but I love when people come and still mention Sarahs name. So for those of you dealing with a  client who may have lost a spouse. That person probably loves when you say their name., when you talk about that person, don't shy away from those things . But that's kind of some big picture things that the audience could take away. 

Jerry Mee 

Honestly, I think that might be the best single piece of advice I've heard from any guest on this podcast. I think that is great. I've never really thought about it that way, but that that just clicks. That is some great way to look at it and approach it. I really take my hat off to you. 

Daniel Kopp 

Well, thanks. I'm glad to be a help. 

Jerry Mee 

A lot of Estate planning, planning around death, it unfortunately really has to be done while the individuals are alive, just the legality of it, and things like insurance and trust and all that. But a lot of clients we find don't necessarily have that in place. The death is unexpected or they just put it off because, like you said, they just don't want to think about it. How do you help clients that maybe don't have these plans in place, and now you're kind of doing damage control after the fact? 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, I mean, I could fill this podcast with hours of the stories of those things not done well and right. So sadly I get to help see that side of it. It all translates well to the other side of my practice, like telling, helping clients get motivated about the reason why we do this. It's a gift of love. So you're not dumping this mess on a grieving person when brain fog and all these other challenges are ever so prevalent. This is probably where, at least in my experiences, I'm more of a quarterback than the lead, right? So helping to be that translator for that grieving widow. That widowed person, right? A lot of the stuff that's done poorly or not at all, is going to be more in the realm of like an estate planning attorney. Whether that's walking through some of the probate process or the other legal issues that can come up when accounts aren't titled and things like that. So oftentimes, attorneys are very busy people and/or billing higher, higher hourly rates than mine, or in the case of like I'm doing comprehensive planning, that's unlimited access, right, there's not running an hourly meter. Even just being there helping a client like sift through their mail and like figure out what's important and what's not. What to put in the now, soon and later buckets. To use Susan Bradley's term around that financial transition is to great resource around this stuff too. Being a translator and being a quarterback to who can come alongside and say we need to bring in an enrolled agent or tax preparer who specializes in innocent spouse relief. I don't need to be the expert in all the nuances of that, but having those people and bringing them in as part of the team and just walking with that widow through that challenging time. That's probably one of the bigger things that I do in those issues. A lot of it I can't fix after it's broken, right? It is what it is. 

Jerry Mee 

And what are some of the kind of unexpected challenges that you ran into that you didn't necessarily would have thought of going into it? I remember when I was working with clients we had some crazy one off situations with little old lady lives very frugally in one bedroom apartment. And then when she passed away, her relatives found out she had 2 million dollars in the bank account. That's kind of a great situation where she had lots of planning. Have there ever been any kind of just like really interesting situations that you've run across that you never thought you would have run into? 

Daniel Kopp 

That's a great question, Jerry. Again, lots of stories that could come out of this, but two things that probably stick away for the audience is like there's no financial plan that I deliver, say, I found that works best is just breaking the plan down into a very modular process, right? We do one small little thing at a time, prioritized in triaged in order, but not dropping some giant binder of here's your financial plan. Right. But just bringing in, today we're going to do this one small thing right? And just recognizing that the planning process may look very different. You may have 17 things that you think are the most important and you are going to have to pick one, maybe two to help. Just because there's elements of grief and brain fog. As far as like, surprising, strange, very interesting things. There are two tools out there that your audience may not be aware of. 1 is missingmoney.com so it's the website that coordinates across all the states in the US to help reunite people with lost funds, unclaimed property. And you can help your client by going there and putting in their names. And the other one, of course, is the NAIC's life insurance policy locator. So oftentimes records are not kept well or policies may have just gotten lost or something like that, especially when you're helping a widowed person reorganize their financial life. Historically, most of my clients., are the ones who are never involved in the household finances on a big picture level like future planning and stuff like that. So using tools like this to go out and find things that may have been lost or never discovered otherwise have found my clients thousands, 10s of thousands of dollars of valuable property that otherwise they didn't even know they had. So two tools that can be a help. 

Jerry Mee 

Yeah, I can actually speak first hand of that. When my grandfather passed away, we used findmass money. I think it's Massachusetts, like version of that same website, we found out and found out he had all these Bank of America stock at a computer shares that we had no idea about and thanks to that service that that we were able to locate that and get it transferred over and into the probate process. 

Daniel Kopp 

We in this profession often have the curse of knowledge, right? We forget that we know so much. And that even just the smallest little things about where to look for information can be incredibly valuable for clients. 

Jerry Mee 

Right. Now another topic that I wanted to bring up was kind of a passion of yours of financial therapy. Do you want to get into that a little bit and kind of explain that to our listeners? 

Daniel Kopp 

So I've referenced it several times already, but dealing with the interpersonal part is one of the things that's empowered me the most in this profession. And so I started working with clients especially early on. Perhaps, like many of us could share, I shared the right answer. How come the client didn't do it? Like why didn't they? I told them to do XY and Z. Client couple comes in and somebody wants to do one thing and somebody wants to do the other thing and you can't get them to agree. And you're like, OK well, I thought that if I just said, here's the answer, this is all the problem, right? And then they buy a boat, slightly tongue in cheek, of course. Anyway, that made me curious. I'm like, what's going on here? How can I help? What’s more to learn about this? So as I got deeper into my professional experience, learned that there's this nascent kind of field, the financial therapy and I ended up going to Kansas State University and getting a Masters in their personal financial planning program, including their graduate certificate in financial therapy. And wow, what a journey that was. First, personally, I mean, I've benefited incredibly well professionally using tools with clients, but if I did nothing else but gained the personal benefits from it, it would have been worth it and that's the self work. So financial therapy is just the blending of modalities of interventions of techniques that have been used many cases for decades and a very long period of time over in the world of mental health. And we're taking those, and we're just applying it to the realm of money, historically, right, mental health world did not talk about money. And historically, our world did not really talk about emotions and mental health. So it's blending those two together. So one of the things that I do is use certain modalities like narrative therapy, solution focused, financial therapy as just tools, techniques, interventions to help clients understand their own money story. What life was like their money scripts, how they've come together as couples, as family units, how he blend that present and future goal recognition with the journey of their past that inextricably linked. It's all together. It's one mess, if you will, and helping clients sort that out, especially on the widowed side, right? I'm working mostly with widows who have never been household CFO before. This is incredibly new to them in many ways, so we stacked on this wall of grief and then we pile on some financial anxiety. On top of that, separating one from the other is often a challenge, right? I'm not a grief counselor, and I'm not a therapist. I'm not prescribing. I'm not treating. I'm not doing things that only therapists can do. But I'm taking those lessons learned and helping a widow, for example, who is working through financial anxiety, understand what's going on there. How did her money story as a grown up child play into this, what does that look like now that she's dealing with all these new financial decisions, breaking it down, helping her work through that piece, oftentimes going back to that quarterback piece, right, working together with other professionals like a grief counselor like a therapist who's doing that roleand on maybe even on the other side, right. We used to doing this with estate planners. The CPA's. So now she's doing that on the mental health side in a more integrative holistic financial Wellness. So personal benefits for sure, professional benefits. I highly encourage everybody to take a look at what you need to do, especially in your practice based on what would make sense for helping your clients go deeper in those aspects. 

Jerry Mee 

Oh yeah, definitely. 

Adam Scherer 

My wife's a psychotherapist and practice and I've thought about that intersection between the two. Do you think that there's an easier path as a technician, pursuing just the strategies, the skills, those therapeutic interventions? Is that path easier or what do you think it would look like for a clinician, a psychotherapist picking up the technical skills on the money side. I mean, is there a right answer there?  

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, well, I think the financial therapy association is attempting to help answer that question. Right. So that is the place where mental health practitioners are coming together to learn more about money, and that's where financial planners people in the financial services space are coming together to learn about the emotional side of it. So I think the profession is still too new. I mean 10-15 years old at this point to answer that definitively. My experience is, yes, the interpersonal the therapy stuff is a little bit more challenging to integrate and learn as opposed to the technical expertise, but that may be a function of my personality. 

Jerry Mee 

And it makes sense because, I don't have any of the figures in front of me, but money tends to be one of the biggest stressors in people's lives. I think it's the majority of divorces cite conflict of money as the impetus for the divorce. It is stressful, and especially in this day and age with inflation through the roof, rising costs all around. It can definitely be a clear cut straight line between money problems and depression and all sorts of other mental maladies that are sourced from money. 

Daniel Kopp 

We talked about Peace of Mind and comfort and things like that in this profession, and it's hard to quantify that until you've seen it right over and over again with clients and be like, wow, what would it look like if we truly, as financial services, had the ability to focus on that instead of, say some of the other things in his profession historically has done, what a difference that could make financial wellness for our country. 

Jerry Mee 

So rewinding a little bit, speaking about journeys, I'm kind of interested to hear about your your CFP journey. Why you decided to go for the CFP? What the process was like? Any interesting stories that that you want to share with people about. 

Daniel Kopp 

So there I was, standing in the gym at Luke Air Force Base, randomly scrolling through podcasts. This is in 2015 and I'm trying to figure out this thing called financial advising and I stumbled across podcast by XY Planning Network and I heard some guy named Michael Kitsis talking about the CFP and he said to go get it. That’s what I did. 

Jerry Mee 

Don't need to tell me twice. 

Daniel Kopp 

That's the very short answer. Of course, the idea is how do I gain expertise as a career trainer or somebody who's not come from this world right and have somebody teaching me in the office. I'd had lots of one-on-one experiences and doing financial counseling, which was like budgeting and credit score management and debt analysis, and like some of the basics of learning how to save, but as far as technical expertise on estate planning and insurance and things like that, that was well outside of my world and was very new to me going through the CFP experience. I knew that if I was going to do this, that little part inside of me said that the fiduciary, right. What does that mean? How do I insure that I do what's best for my client? I had seen the wrong side of that personally. When my grandfather, many, many years ago was defrauded and several hundred thousand dollars were stolen, very, very, very sad story. And I knew that there were snake oil. salesman out there. And I had wanted to be nothing, nowhere, anywhere close to that. I could feel a fiduciary responsibility, and somebody who's coming into the industry with not regular experience. I want to make sure I knew what I was going to be talking about. All those kinds of combined together to really put me clearly down the path of the CFP. 

Jerry Mee 

CFP was right out of the gates. You wanted to be a CFP first and then that was your goal to being a financial advisor, whereas a lot of people kind of coming from the opposite standpoint where they are financial advisor and then they decide to advance themselves with the CFP. But you really just felt like you needed that credibility right out of the gate. 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, both my internal impostor syndrome, but also reminding me of, like, the Hippocratic Oath kind of idea of the medical profession, right? First do no harm. How do I know I'm not doing any harm, unless I know what I'm talking about. So certainly that applied there. 

Jerry Mee 

And also I mean that I noticed it right on your website when I was doing some homework for the podcast, you just put right there, forefront on your website that you are a fiduciary and you take that very seriously. 

Daniel Kopp 

So that was the academic part of it. Ultimately, when I launched my firm, I did not yet have all the experience hours. So working with the CFP board, I was able to get credit for, I forget exactly how many it was, but a very good portion of that hours from my financial counseling experience that have been documented along the way. Program teaching doing some of that other stuff along the way. So by the by the time that I launched. I only had, I think, a little less than two years of experience that I still needed to get from working one-on-one, so I was not a full CFP straight out the gate. 

Jerry Mee 

So yeah, so starting off the RIA, you weren't allowed to use the marks yet, but you were after about two years. Was that a huge challenge starting the RIA, just fresh out of the gate without the designation to kind of lean on? Yes, you had the knowledge and the skill sets, but you weren't able to market that. How did you overcome that? 

Daniel Kopp 

I can't go back and prove a counterfactual, but certainly I've noticed the benefits of that now in this space. I will say early on, right, I was very careful not to get past my skis and I referred out a lot of potential clients at that time who I knew I was not a good fit for technical expertise wise. But when I did start with, especially with people whose world I knew whose language I spoke in that military space and whose problems were not exceedingly complex, right? And then that allowed me to continue to grow. And thankfully I've been great part of incredible mentorship and support through XY planner network, through study groups. I've had great mentors who have met with me regularly, poured into me. And now as apart of like the military Financial Advisor Association. We're all working in the same space but yet slightly different sub niches within the military space. Having the ability to go and ask 14 to 17 other people who are clearly well skilled in this. Right. Hey, here's what I see. If you use something like this or bounce ideas off each other. Even though I may be a solo practice, I've never ever felt alone in my ability to do the best work for clients. 

Jerry Mee 

Excellent. You decided to kind of go right off on your own out of the gate, was there any thought about maybe shaking up with one of the big box firms and kind of getting your two years experience from them, kind of the easy way out, and then going off on your own that kind of transition? 

Daniel Kopp 

Well, at least on the personal front. I had saved up for this career transition, so the income goal was not immediate. In other words, I could make nothing from the business for a little over 2 years and be OK personally because I'd had a pile of cash ready to go to help fund some of that lifestyle expenses. That gave me freedom and flexibility to try this out. I knew there was a very specific way of planning that I wanted to do for a very specific subset of clients. The niches that we've talked about here today. And I had strong convictions about doing both of those. And so I did explore some opportunities. Like I said, there was some places I didn't necessarily want to move and I never felt like I really wanted to work with, say, an ultra high net worth segment or just help the people with bigger balance sheets get even bigger balance sheets. Right. So the mission drove me kind of to do this and then validated over the course of time with some success, so I was not originally opposed, I didn't think I wanted to be an entrepreneur until I became one, but now looking back, I don't think there's any other way I could have done this. 

Jerry Mee 

Yeah, I can definitely relate to that cause earlier in my career when I was shopping around at different firms to work for. A lot of firms I would interview at would basically say it's like if a client doesn't have $250,000 assets under management, they're not even worth your time. Don't even talk to them. It's like that's not really how I want to do business, not how I want to treat my clients as just a a dollar value. 

Daniel Kopp 

Yeah, that's well said. I've been able to also do a lot of extra things. So in addition to my work with clients, I'm also a professor at region University and their CFP program. I do a lot of research and advocacy work. I do freelance. I do fintech consulting. In other words, there's been so many opportunities that have kind of just, like, stumbled into my laps, public speaking as well, that I love doing and because I'm my own boss, right? I get to kind of pick and choose. Clients always still come first and that's always my first priority but at least as far as other things, it gives me that flexibility and that freedom to kind of make my own career path. 

Jerry Mee 

Well, that's great, Daniel. So I guess to wrap it up, is there any kind of one piece of advice you'd like to share with our listeners, whether it be with military counseling, grief counseling, start setting up your own RIA? If you could, if you could go back in time and give your past self just one piece of advice. What would it be? 

Daniel Kopp 

When I think about like the CFP journey, studying for that test was definitely the hardest thing that I've ever done. Any kind of one time event made all my military training and exams are there pale in comparison. So thinking back especially working with my students now and knowing that you have a very similar focus too. There's a lot that you have to cover for the exam material and kind of breaking it down into the smallest components and working your way up with a building block approach. I found what worked best for me and often with client or students today is finding those weakest areas and dividing them up from least to worst and really focusing on that ones where you have marginal improvement. For me, estate planning was probably the exam topic that I knew the least going in, so I was able to focus most of my time there, whereas things that I had lots of experience with, cash flow and the investment portion from my ECON background, I was able to study less, spend less time there because I had enough skill and expertise. The last thing that have surprised me going into the exam was how much working with clients over the first two years of experience that I had really helped me on the exam. The case studies (for example), being able to put myself in the eyes of that client scenario that the exam questions were asking me versus I felt like if I had just come at the exam with only book knowledge, I would have been completely lost on some of the questions. So having some real world context, plus focusing on my weakest areas were really the biggest tricks that helped me prepare for success there. 

Jerry Mee 

Adam, anything else you want to chair closing out? 

Adam Scherer 

I think that's a fantastic place to close out there. It brings us full circle with that whole theme of the technical and the personal and emotional. I'm glad you brought that up, Daniel, because that's one of the tips we give our students in our program too, is even if you haven't done much of this, think of people you know. If you don't know anyone that's using this strategy, make up someone. Put a face and a place to this strategy and imagine what that would look like so I really appreciate that you sharing that with our audience. 

Jerry Mee 

Definitely some great advice. You definitely gave me a lot of food for thought. I'm going to take a deep dive into financial therapy after this. That sounds really interesting. Thank you for sharing your experiences. It's been really, really interesting and entertaining, just kind of learning about all of this. 

Daniel Kopp 

Well, thanks for the invitation. I'm so glad I could be here and I hope that this is a help to the listeners. 

Jerry Mee 

So that is it for this week, folks. If you are looking for more BIF Bites. Make sure you go check out www.bifbites.com for all our previous episodes as well as our YouTube videos, example questions and good luck to all of our current test takers. The exam is right around the corner and you guys are marching steadily towards it. I have all the faith in you that you will be successful but best of luck anyways.