Episode Summary

How do you engage with clients who want to combine financial returns with philanthropic impact? That’s just one of the topics we touch on with our guest Max Mintz, a partner and financial planner at Common Interests, a certified B Corp advisory firm based in New Jersey.

In this episode, Max shares his unconventional path to becoming a financial planner, with a background in engineering, social advocacy work, and studies in philosophy and religion. His firm specializes in values-aligned and responsible investing and often works with clients with no minimum asset requirement.

Financial professionals seeking to broaden the accessibility and impact of financial planning will highly value Max’s insights.

Here’s What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• Max shares his unconventional journey to becoming a financial planner
• Using sustainability as a way to engage with younger investors
• The unique onboarding process Max uses to hone in on client values
• Finding a profitable way to serve clients without requiring an investment minimum
• Delivering financial advice to historically underserved communities

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Common Interests
• B Lab
• CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® Certification
• Wall Street Diversity Accelerator (WSDA)
• YourStake
• Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM)

Quotes:

• “I didn’t know if this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. But through Bob’s, he trusted me to follow my own passions and to be intellectually curious about the nature of our work. And that led me down a route, a road towards understanding what is values aligned investing? How do we invest in a way that we’re really comfortable with, where we are understanding the investments in our portfolio, the role that they have to play, but also, their impact on society and on the planet.”
• “I’ve seen cases where clients don’t want to engage with finance. They feel left out. They feel like it’s not something for them. Like they can’t—it’s not accessible. Once we start having these conversations and we start really showing them data around the sustainability metrics in their portfolios, they’re able to engage in a different way. It takes away a certain level of that fear.”
• “We know, and your research has borne this out, that investors, actual investors returns differ significantly from the returns of the market primarily due to buying and selling decisions at the wrong time. If an emotional connection to your portfolio enables you to stay invested through market volatility, that has a dramatic impact on the probability of success of your plan.”
• “If a client can’t generate enough revenue for the firm to make serving them worthwhile, then that’s a challenge. So, we have to look at alternative options for smaller clients to make it both cost effective for the small client and effective for the planner.”
• “I do also try to take at least two or three pro bono cases a year, personally we have, and they tend to be people who have a dramatic need. Somebody whose spouse passed away suddenly without life insurance, and now there’s a critical need. Somebody, people who work at a nonprofit and have some student loans and are struggling under the debt and I can talk to them about public service loan forgiveness and maybe they already qualify for it and just didn’t even know about that stuff.”

Full Transcript:

Sasha: Welcome to the Heart of Advice podcast presented by eMoney. I’m Sasha Grabenstetter.

Connor: And I’m Connor Sung. We’re your eMoney experts. Today on the podcast, we have Max Mintz. Max Mintz is a partner and financial planner at Common Interests, an advisory firm that’s a certified B Corp and based in Metuchen, New Jersey. Max was named to the InvestmentNews 40 under 40 list in 2019, partners with the Wall Street Diversity Accelerator, which is an internship program for students.

Max, you had quite a unique path to becoming a financial planner. Can you tell us a little bit about your interests, your skills, how you got to where you are at today?

The Path to Becoming a Financial Planner

Max: Sure, Connor. And thank you guys for having me. It’s a real pleasure to be here. I’m not your traditional financial planner by the stretch of the imagination. My background goes back to an engineering high school, doing social advocacy work, and teen sexual health and alcohol work in high school. I come from a tradition of, my mom was a sort of a social activist. My dad was a tech, and I sort of married those two threads together. I went to Rutgers University here in New Jersey where I majored in philosophy and religion.

So how did I end up as a financial planner? Well, my parents had searched out, had found out a financial planner who matched their values, who specialized in responsible investing. And this was back in the 90s when it wasn’t quite as big a field as it is now. So, they found a local advisor, local financial planner, CFP^®, who was a fit for them, and he had some health trouble. One year, they pushed, he pushed a piece of paper across the desk, their annual review, and said, “Hey, I’m looking for an associate. Looking for somebody who can be my apprentice, who can learn the business, who I can teach everything I know to, and who can be my, maybe be my successor at some point.” And it had a list of attributes. No skills, no knowledge, no nothing, but a list of attributes of the person that he was looking for. And my mom looked up and said, well, that sounds like Max. And Bob, who was my financial planner as well—he had my UTMA account and had helped me start to learn about what is investing and how do we build wealth and matching a compound interest and all that good stuff. And, so we went out to went out to lunch and he pushed a piece of—I’ll never forget this—he pushed a piece of napkin across the table at me, and he said, “Max, I’m offering you two options here. One is a job. If you want to come here, you can learn how to use Morningstar and learn how to do financial planning and you can come push paper around a desk and be my assistant.” And that’s a choice. Right? “You can do that or if you decide to, it could be your career.”

And I wrestled with that for a long time. I didn’t know if this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. But through Bob’s, he trusted me to follow my own passions and to be intellectually curious about the nature of our work. And that led me down a route, a road towards understanding what is values aligned investing? How do we invest in a way that we’re really comfortable with, where we are understanding the investments in our portfolio, the role that they have to play, but also, their impact on society and on the planet. And through just being intellectually curious, going deeper and not accepting kind of the marketing that we see from a lot of places. It’s led me into some really interesting places, hence all the nonsense you said at the beginning. So thank you for that. And now here we are ten years later, and I’m working on my CFP^®. So, not a CFP^® professional yet, but, hopefully, in the next year or two, you’ll be able to say that.

Connor: Keep on keeping on. It does, we talked to a few people about that notion, which it sounds like you learned it pretty early about they, you can’t teach all of these skills. Like, you could sit somebody down. You could teach them how to use trading platforms, technology, how to do some of the administrative tasks, but you can’t teach values. And it sounds like the values that you had instilled from your upbringing, your parents, some of the stuff that you were into when you were going get your undergrad, that it aligned extremely well with gentleman that you it sounds like mentored you through some of the financial planning that you do today. And it is just, it’s pretty cool that you were able to have that experience that early on, and now it sounds like now that you use it as part of your core of your practice.

Max: Oh, absolutely. In fact, for me, I would not be here today. I would not be a financial planner without that. It is values first. Right? And that does definitely flow through to my philosophy around financial planning. Right? The numbers, the charts, the pretty pictures, the fancy toys that you guys give me, those are in support of the plan. Right? I always I often have conversations with clients where I say, look, we’re going to talk about numbers. We’re going to look at Monte Carlo projections. We’re going to talk about risk. Those things are all critically important, but all of those things are in service to you, in service to your life planning. And we will talk about what’s possible, what’s necessary, what we can and can’t do, what’s reasonable, but the first step is to sort of put our feet up and say, when we’re doing retirement planning, for instance, right, I want to make sure that my clients have something to retire to, not just something to retire from. Right? And that’s led us deeper and deeper into the psychology of money, the emotions, even the spirituality around money. So, that’s sort of where we’re putting a lot of our efforts right now.

Sasha: Well, Max, you’re speaking my language, especially in financial wellness where I sit in eMoney. When we’re speaking of values, eMoney has done some research on the financial planning process that shows how personalization is an important way to provide more value to clients. And obviously, it doesn’t get more personalized than values-aligned investing and what they call what you said is customized private placements and high impact. So, can you describe a few examples of these types of investments and how your firm facilitates them?

Client Engagement Through Values-aligned Investing

Max: Yeah. Sure. I think it’s always important at this point in the conversation to start defining terms and talk about where we are and where we’re headed. So, when we talk about sustainable investing or values-based investing more generally, often the letters ESG will come up. And we’ll talk about the difference between risk management using environmental, social, and governance data points to help manage risk in a portfolio around the extra financial stuff.

But when we start talking about values-based investing or impact, we’re talking about either removing things from the portfolio that are at odds with our clients’ values, or overweighting things that are more aligned with their values in the public space. So, if we’re talking about investing in public equities, I would say we’re probably not creating a ton of impact there. The goal there is to deliver a portfolio that enables the client to engage with their financial plan.

Oftentimes, when I’m working with younger clients, there’s a certain level of people being sort of disaffected. Not having a lot of trust in the system. And what I’ll see is a lot of times people say, well, finance is kind of esoteric. It’s kind of built to be confusing. The jargon we use, the modern portfolio theory statistics, all that stuff is important, but it is intimidating. And so being able to work with a client and make sure that they know that their portfolio is aligned with their values enables them to engage better with their planning.

I’ve seen cases where clients don’t want to engage with finance. They feel left out. They feel like it’s not something for them. Like they can’t—it’s not accessible. Once we start having these conversations and we start really showing them data around the sustainability metrics in their portfolios, they’re able to engage in a different way. It takes away a certain level of that fear. When we start talking about impact, that’s when I start to get into a deeper definition, something called additionality. This asks—I’m going to betray the fact that I was a philosophy major here. Alright? Because I’m going to ask a counterfactual question. Additionality asks, what happened that we can measure because my client took action, which would not have happened without that action or investment? That’s the highest level of impact I found so far or highest definition of impact. And it’s very hard to do. It’s very hard to deliver. Oftentimes, those investments occur off the private markets. We’re talking about private placements typically only accessible by accredited investors or qualified purchasers. And that sucks. Right? Most of my clients are not accredited investors. And so I’ll see deals coming through our broker dealer that sound really awesome and are really cool, but aren’t worth working on because my clients can’t play ball, right? They can’t get into them.

So, it’s only in recent years when things like Reg A, Regulation A, crowdfunding—Regulation CF—have come to market, where we’re able to access private placements that are available to non-accredited investors. We worked on a couple of them. One was a recycling company here in New Jersey that recycles the unrecyclable, has a really interesting business model where they basically function as an ad agency, and they use to fund recycling of materials that wouldn’t be economically viable without an additional revenue stream. Right? That was a really cool investment. And a lot of my clients are the clients who were interested in it and who were willing to accept illiquid positions and things like that. We’re very excited.

The other really interesting one was a lumber investment, where we were working with the world’s fastest growing hardwood tree. And it had a really interesting structure where we were partnering with small local farmers who had land that had been depleted by traditional farming methods, it didn’t have a lot of nutrients in it, couldn’t really be used, and these trees are really cool. They return nitrogen to the soil, they are regenerative, so you will, in order to maximize the sort of carbon capture element of this, you have to cut them down so that they regrow from the stump, right? And we built, there was a revenue split. So, if there’s any profits from the deal, once they’ve sold the lumber, the revenue gets split 50 percent to the farmers and then the other 50 percent is split between the sponsor and the investor. So, for every dollar that our investors take home in profit, a farmer will take home $2.00. It’s those types of structures that enable us to say, look, because you invested and planted an acre of trees, we can we know that X pounds of carbon will be captured out of the atmosphere, we know that a farmer will take home $2.00 in profit for every dollar you take home. And we know that they can do things like intercrop with other products, like coffee or bananas or things like that underneath. And we’re actually regenerating soil. So, we’re able to give actual impact statements, impact certificates out to our clients that say, here are our projections for what’s going to happen. And the company, the sponsor has been keeping up with measuring the diameter of the trees so that our clients know just how much carbon has actually been captured, whether we’re actually hitting those projections. So, this has been really cool.

Connor: That is so cool. I’m going to steal the word “additionality,” and I think it well, number one, it fits extremely well with a lot of the research eMoney has done around engagement and collaborative planning. So I think this aspect of collaborative investing or just the engagement and building the portfolio around their values and impact, it is a, it’s a really cool way to keep people involved in their financial life and not just building the kind of the values-based stuff that you were talking about, a portfolio that leads to a successful plan, but you’re able to offer people that additional monetary or mental monetary, that kind of gratification that you’re not able to associate with most portfolios.

And just even my own kind of side account, I found myself investing in companies that I either really enjoy their products or I really enjoy what they do at a kind of a base mission and vision level. And I found that I look at them differently because it’s less about the actual monetary return that I get, and it is more about the kind of the impact that they have across any number of things, whether that’s the environment, recycling, lumber, like, there and whatever you’re into, there are opportunities to find ways to relate client values into some sort of return. And then you going that next step and helping tell that story of the carbon offset that you had based on the diameter of the tree trunk like that. It just it tells a holistic story and has zero to do with their financial plan success.

Max: Except—I can’t not jump in on that. So, you give the perfect thing here. Right? So, think about your behavior as an investor in that case. We know, and your research has borne this out, that investors, actual investors returns differ significantly from the returns of the market primarily due to buying and selling decisions at the wrong time. If an emotional connection to your portfolio enables you to stay invested through market volatility, that has a dramatic impact on the probability of success of your plan. And what’s more, it’s something we can’t capture in planning software. Right? It says it’s something that will like, it actually brings us brings our hopeful projected results closer to the actual projections of the software. So that’s, I don’t know how to measure that, and if you guys can measure it, I would be grateful. But that would be, that’s part of my theory. Yeah.

Connor: Yeah. It’s like the never-ending curve of fear, buy, sell, and the behavior gap. But I do like that stance. So, we are talking quite a bit about values, and I know you mentioned not only having something retire from but having something to retire to. Your firm has a unique way of onboarding to get to those values pretty early on in the process. Can you just talk a little bit about what that client experience is?

Use Onboarding to Uncover Client Values

Max: Yeah. I have to mention another one of my partners at this point because I’ve worked very closely with a platform called YourStake.org to build out our onboarding process. Because we work in two paths in parallel. One is the eMoney onboarding process. Right? Working with a client to identify the financial goals. The second is through YourStake, where we have a pair of tools, either a behavioral finance, sort of a behavioral values, assessment tool, and the other is a more in-depth sort of values picker, where the client takes a sort of guided journey through what matters to them, prioritizing and deprioritizing different parts of sustainability.

One of the challenges in sustainable investing is there are too many data points. I think in our systems, we have something like 250 or 300 individual data points that we can report back on. And that’s just overwhelming. So, we need to filter it down to something that our clients can really engage with so that it matters to them. Some of those data points, by the way, are also diametrically opposed, pro and anti-certain positions. As fiduciaries, it’s not our job to tell our clients what to believe, it’s to facilitate investments that are in line with their values, not ours. So, there are things in the systems that I don’t believe but some of my clients do and that’s their right. So, we work in parallel, right, we work to understand the financial plan and the values and see how the two fit together, and we’re able to deliver now consolidated reporting around both the risk levels and the values alignment of those portfolios. What we do is we create personas, right, something like a planet protector or a peace defender, human rights advocates, things like that. And we’re able to show people overall within these groups of sustainability personas, how well their current portfolio aligns, if they’re investing themselves, or they have a different advisor, and how our proposal would move them in the in a direction that’s more appropriate for them.

From there, there’s a choice, right? The question becomes how deep does the client want to go? How engaged do they want to be in the sustainability profile of their portfolio? Some people come to me and they’re delegators. They want to delegate that to me. They learn who I am. They learn about my background, who I am and what I believe, and they say, yeah. Cool. We’re in for that. Right? I have a series of model portfolios that I use that express sort of our house view on sustainability. YourStake gives me some tools that allow me to find alternatives at different asset classes—this gets kind of wonky—here we say, okay, if I have a large cap growth position and the client has expressed values that are slightly different than what’s in the model, I can find alternates with mutual funds or ETFs that allow us to move the portfolio in a closer direction while still allowing me to be a nerdy asset allocator and keep that all, not break the scalability of my practice basically.

But some clients come to me, and they say, look, I don’t want any of this. I want to go deep. I want to understand what’s going on. I want the fixed income portion of my portfolio to be completely in relatively high impact things. And it is actually possible to deliver additionality in the bond markets through direct lending. There are a ton of new impact bonds coming to market that are rated publicly available. And we have great support through our broker dealer to gain access to new issuances. So those things go in the portfolios as they come up for those clients. But for the client who says, look, I really want to go deep, I want to understand every single stock in my portfolio. Well, mutual funds and ETFs are kind of out, right? You’re really outsourcing that decision-making process to a manager, and you’ve got to understand the manager’s theories and their philosophy on these things, and those things can and do change, right? We see prospectus updates on a regular basis where people are changing what the screens are in their portfolio, right? Some of the older investment managers in the SRI space have done this recently. So, for them, we did it a different solution. Those have to be highly customized portfolios. And some of the new advances in fractional share trading have enabled us to use direct indexing technologies at a much lower minimum than we used to have. So, through the same vendor, through YourStake.org, we now have a direct indexing platform that’s available at a $25,000 minimum, which is much, much more accessible than the 100 and 250,000 minimums that we used to see.

So it becomes a sort of a bifurcated choice early on in the process where we start thinking about investment actual management, where we decide, okay, well, we’re either going to go into a model portfolio direction, we’ve got me as a manager—it’s very old school, core and satellite management modern portfolio theory stuff—or are we going to go in a new sort of fancier direct indexing approach?

Sasha: That’s a lot, Max.

Max: Yeah. I have been accused by my staff of having far too complex organization. They’re not wrong that’s how my brain works.

Sasha: No. But I think it’s, I think that’s really fascinating to think about the different types of clients that you have and how personalized you’re getting. Like you said, there’s those delegators. They’re like, just do it for me—it’s totally good. And then those people who are like, no. I want to know what’s then and then the really deep the deep people. Like, that’s I think that that’s fascinating. So, I I’m I think it’s really cool.

Connor: I do have a quick question. The sustainability personas. Do you come up with the names yourselves?

Max: No. The folks at YourStake did. They did a pretty good job.

Connor: Right. I just I almost imagine it being something that’s near and dear to Sasha’s heart, but being like Hogwarts houses and people, like, really getting into their persona type.

Max: Yeah. Actually, so I have because you asked. We actually have multiple platforms that do it in slightly different ways. So, I primarily use this stuff through YourStake because I really like their approach. They don’t give ESG scores. Anytime you’re looking at an ESG score, some analyst sitting at a desk somewhere has made some values decisions about what matters. There’s always a weighting methodology that’s usually, like, 200 pages long that says, okay, black box data points go in, something magic happens, score gets spit out. Right? And that’s where a big part of the problem, the greenwashing problem exists for me.

One of the reasons that I partnered with YourStake is that they don’t do that. They expose the actual underlying data that gives an overweight or underweight to a benchmark score where it says, okay, you’re—but then it also—when we look at something that is maybe being penalized, right, maybe being flagged as a concern, we then get to drill down into the reasons that the concern is being flagged. And the client gets to make a decision about whether that’s appropriate for them or not. Right? Because a lot of times we’ll talk about say, prison industry exposure. Right? That’s a big, big topic for us and for our clients. We will not own private prison operators in our portfolios. It’s one of my hard values, like ethical screens. I simply will not play ball there. We actually just had to make a fairly major change to our portfolios because one of my small cap positions was holding a private prison company. Not only a private prison company, it was the private prison company that was managing the border facilities that were separating migrant kids from their parents. My clients view this as an ethical breach. This is unacceptable, and they work with me partially because I will not accept those companies in our portfolio.

So, I engaged with that manager for about a year, they refused to sell the position because of the way the index fund was constructed and the way the ESG scoring was occurring. So this really directly relates to that sort of black box issue and so we had to replace that fund with another one to maintain, and we had to make a couple of tweaks to maintain our asset allocation, but other companies will also get flagged, right? Food service companies or mental health facilities or IT providers that provide whose software is used in prisons and jails. Right? And then my clients get to say, well, I never thought about a big IT company as being exposed to the private prison industry. Well, okay. If Microsoft Windows is used as an operating system in prisons, yes, technically, that’s an exposure. Do I really care? That’s not my decision. That’s my client’s decision. That one’s definitely pretty far to the fringe but I do have some clients who say no exposure to private prisons whatsoever. That’s their right. Although I will admit, the more companies like that you try to exclude, the higher the tracking error your portfolio will be from benchmark. That’s unavoidable.

Sasha: But I think it’s pretty fascinating, though, too, like once you’re able to figure out what your clients’ values are, have those in-depth conversations. One thing I wanted to talk about with you, Max, was I read online that you have a no minimum at your firm, and that really makes financial planning available to everyone. Can you share a little more about this for other advisors who may be considering this type of fee structure?

The Nuances of Finding the Right Fee Structure

Max: Yeah. So, many planners will have relatively high asset level minimums because in the planning space, the traditional billing methods are AUM billing. If a client can’t generate enough revenue for the firm to make serving them worthwhile, then that’s a challenge. So, we have to look at alternative options for smaller clients to make it both cost effective for the small client and effective for the planner. For smaller accounts, I do outsource management. We use a turnkey asset management platform. Yes—more complexity. This is the downside, but we’re working with a turnkey asset management platform that includes transaction costs in their asset billing. So those accounts do not generate much revenue for the firm, but they’re hyper-efficient for the clients who are trading in small dollar amounts, where if you have any ticket charges or anything from your custodian if a client’s putting a $100 a month in and even if you have a $7.00 ticket charge, that’s seven percent for a single trade. That doesn’t work.

So, we had to find an alternative, and we did. We have a CAPM. It enables us to run model portfolios or use third-party managers to get those clients investing on a dollar cost-averaging basis. They’re putting money in every month. And so, when I run a fee analysis, it’s like, oh, you’re paying five cents a trade. Right? If the client’s putting a $100 a month in and that’s broken up into, as a $5.00 minimum trade size, so, you might have 10 trades a month. And the client’s paying a fee, that fee then just covers the investment management side. We meet with the client once a year to review the portfolios, make sure those things are still going right and still aligned with the risk tolerance and plan, but then you really do need to charge separately for planning. And we’re right now experimenting with retainer models.

We also have a, for a long time we’ve used a sliding fee scale based on our clients’ ability to pay, and for hourly work. And the theory there is I’m at the beginning of my career. I’m 36, I’m turning 37 next month. So, I plan on being in this business for the next 30 or 40 years. Right. My business partner retired when he was 80. So, yeah. Alright. I might have another 30 years in me. Cool. That means for me as a young planner, the most important asset I have is relationships and building new relationships. And I see smaller investors, people who care, who really want to work the way I do, who understand the value of values-based investing, and who want financial planning, but who may not be at the asset levels where other planners are willing to work with them. I mean, that is an underserved market. Right? People we had to, I had to stop taking new clients temporarily this year because we had so much interest, and I simply didn’t have the capacity. I’m one planner and I have two staff, but there’s only so many hours in the day and I wasn’t getting enough sleep. So, there are definitely some challenges there and as clients need more ongoing support, I think a retainer model with a monthly fee is a really, really great way to serve those clients. They get value for it, we’re not working for pennies on the hour, and everybody wins because then you’re winning those relationships as well.

Connor: It’s mutually beneficial for sure, especially when you have the capacity to do it. And as you talked about a little bit, for underserved communities, underserved markets, there are, I think, sliding fee scales, hourly structures, some sort of retainer model for some of them. I really like the approach and the way that you’re talking about that our relationships are the most important asset for you and to continue to build them, maintain them, and to retain them as you make your way through firm growth.

But you’ve talked to our team before about your passion for delivering additional financial advice to historically underserved communities and markets, and that includes you as an advocate for pro bono financial planning. Can you talk a little bit about some of the programs that you’ve supported in the pro bono space?

Giving Back Through Pro Bono Financial Planning

Max: Sure. I like to find opportunities to work at scale. Where we are not using necessarily a one-to-one, but a one-to-many model. And so that means finding local groups that already have built trust in their communities—churches, community centers, libraries, things like that—and leveraging their ability to reach the community to put bring bodies through the door, to bring people in and to have them engage, and that means listening first. That means not just coming with a canned presentation of what I want to talk about. Here’s Financial Planning 101. Here’s the magic of compound interest. If people can’t put food on the table, then that doesn’t matter. You need to understand what the stakeholders you’re working with need from you, what the needs are in the community. And start by just listening, by asking and listening. And people will tell you. And then you can craft a program that meets those needs with the knowledge that we have as financial planners, and people will get excited about it, and they will become advocates to bring people through the door.

And then once you do some presentations and you talk to people, you will develop a reputation in the community. And that’s what’s happened with us. People still come in the door, hey. I bought this annuity. What is this? Is this actually a fit for my goals? Okay. Well, now we have to talk about this. Why do you want an annuity and you’re on food stamps? This is not okay. So those are good examples.

I also think we need to solve the pipeline problem in the industry. We are still a primarily pale, stale male industry—to steal from a from a good friend who coined that phrase. And so that means we need to create a pipeline of financial planners who don’t look like me. I view my firm, I need to use my firm as a pipeline to bring more people into the industry who can also serve more clients. Right? And that’s why the partnership with the WSDA internship is so important to us. We recruit from historically black colleges, universities, and partner with asset management firms and financial planning firms to offer six-week paid internships. I do believe that a paid internship is a critical portion of that, because many people from historically underserved communities do not have the resources to take an unpaid internship. And so, we pay a living wage, we don’t offer benefits because it’s a six-week internship, but we do pay and we do bring them in and have them sit in client meetings, and they come out of the interns come out of the program with just their eyes open. It’s really incredible. And I hope to be hiring out of those pools and building a talent pool that can do something really interesting. Many of them, in fact, I just met with one of our old interns a couple weeks ago, and she’s now at Morgan Stanley in their wealth management track. So, it’s really, really cool to see.

Sasha: I know that, Max, you and I have worked a lot with the WSTA partnering with eMoney and getting those interns access to the software, really understanding how that works. And so, to hear a little bit more about the program, it’s inspiring, of course. But just also hearing your love of pro bono, which obviously again, I’m in the financial space. I really enjoy that. And we’re really working on some pieces there. So, I’m really excited to hear how the pipeline comes along, especially because we do need it.

Max: Yeah. I do also try to take at least two or three pro bono cases a year, personally we have, and they tend to be people who have a dramatic need. Somebody whose spouse passed away suddenly without life insurance, and now there’s a critical need. Somebody, people who work at a nonprofit and have some student loans and are struggling under the debt and I can talk to them about public service loan forgiveness and maybe they already qualify for it and just didn’t even know about that stuff. So, you can do a lot of good with not a lot of effort sometimes just by bringing ideas to the table that people don’t know exist.

Sasha: And it really makes you a more holistic, well-rounded advisor to have that knowledge and skill set. Because a lot of advisors, I hear, they don’t know about debt management or payday loans or things like that. So, I think that makes you a well, again, a well-rounded advisor to have those conversations with those people who really do need it.

As we round out the podcast, I just want to know how would you define the heart of advice when it comes to financial planning? I would love to especially hear from you, Max.

Max: Oh, man. That I’ve been meditating on this. And that’s a really, really hard question. But I’m going to come back to something I said at the top of this recording, which is that the financial plan has to follow the person and their life planning. It has to follow the arc of their life, and the “what makes them, them.” Again, when we work with a client around a retirement plan, we have to, we can’t start by looking at the numbers and looking at the risk tolerance, we have to start by looking at the people. We have to start looking at their, at what drives them, and who they really are. Because if somebody, you can build the fanciest, most elegant financial plan in the world, but if it doesn’t track the client’s lived experiences, then it’s useless. It’s not, it’s just numbers on a page.

And so, for me, it comes back to that emotional core. Who is that client? What are their core values? And how can we build a plan that supports that? Right? I’ve seen too many clients—maybe it comes back to some of my experiences early on as an advisor—where you have somebody who retires from a long career, very successful, and then they’re just listless. They’re just, they don’t have any purpose in life. And it’s really disturbing to see. And many of these clients don’t, we’re the only person that they’re willing to talk to about this because we are managing the money, and we have a long relationship. But a lot of these clients don’t have therapists. They don’t have a support structure in their life where they’re talking about this stuff. And so, we found ourselves accidentally becoming financial therapists. And I’m not a financial therapist. I’m not qualified to be one. Maybe in the future when I’m done with my CFP^®, we’ll talk about that. But I do think that the heart of advice these days is understanding not just modern portfolio theory and managing alpha and beta and all that good stuff, but it’s about integrating the financial plan and the life plan and making sure that the clients cannot just live and survive but thrive. And again, you’re going to hear me move in this direction where it’s all about both the financials, but also the extra financial externalities. It’s about the things that surround the plan, about what we’re trying to help our clients achieve, and about where we’re trying to help them go.

Sasha: Max, I think at the end of the day, you really get to know your clients, get to know their values, create those personalized portfolios, really work with individuals who need help, and you’re making a difference in the field. So, thank you.

Max, I just want to tell you, thank you for coming on the Heart of Advice podcast. We appreciate your time, and hopefully, some people learned some new things today. And we’ll see you all next time.

Max: Thank you, guys for having me. This has been a blast.

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