Summary

In this conversation, Amy interviews Mike, exploring his background, military career, transition to civilian life, and journey into financial planning. Mike shares insights on his experiences in the Air Force, the challenges of transitioning to a new career, and the importance of financial education, particularly for military families. He emphasizes the significance of planning over investing and offers advice for those looking to enter the financial planning field. Mike also discusses his firm, which focuses on serving military personnel and their families, particularly in college planning.

Chapters

00:00 Getting to Know Mike
06:26 Transitioning from Military to Civilian Life
12:14 Advice for Aspiring Financial Planners

Schedule a consultation with Mike: https://nextmissionfinancialplanning.com/contact/

Schedule a consultation with Amy: https://www.instarfp.com/contact

 

TRANSCRIPT

Amy (00:01)

Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Mike. So during a previous podcast, we did a review of who I am, got to know me a little bit. And today we’re gonna spend time getting to know a little bit more about my buddy, Mike.

 

Okay, Mike, to get started, why don’t you give us a little bit of back a little bit of information about your background, where you’re from, where you went to school, tell us about your family hobbies, that that kind of stuff.

 

Mike (01:02)

All right. Yeah. So I grew up in Pennsylvania, just like you. was about 30 miles north of Philadelphia, a small town called Percocet, Pennsylvania, and lived there whole life until I went to college and did that at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York, where I majored in computer engineering. Like you, not finance or anything along those lines.

 

I don’t think I really knew that this space existed at that time. But did ROTC at RIT, which is one of the reasons that I ended up going there. They had a pretty good deal with the ROTC scholarship I got. So ended up there. Enjoyed that. Did the co-op program where we actually

 

Your last three years every three months you’d go work somewhere in between school quarters. So it was was kind of a cool model to actually get some experience while while you’re going to school As far as family Married have a daughter who just started her freshman year in college at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee She’s loving that

 

and I guess right now live outside st. Louis, in, Missouri, Missouri side of the river and, hobbies. yeah, I guess retired marathoner, but still runner. and I also

 

do, you one of my favorite things is live music. So concerts, enjoy traveling for those. And that’s, that’s a lot of fun. And then finally, just, this is still sort of a hobby, the investing side and just like you kind of reading as much as I can on these topics. And so just just enjoy that also. So

 

Amy (03:25)

Awesome. And who do you like to see in concert most?

 

Mike (03:31)

So I’m kind of all over the place, eclectic. So I range from Americana music, know, classic country. But one of my favorite bands in that space is American Aquarium. But then I also, you know, go all the way to punk rock. And that’s the other kind of thing that I travel for for festivals and stuff. So.

 

The Bouncing Souls out of New Jersey are probably one of my favorites in that space. yeah, if it’s in one of those two genres, I probably like it and I’m probably trying to go figure out how I can go see that.

 

Amy (04:17)

That’s pretty cool. I, you know, we’ve known each other for a little while, but I did not know that about you. So tell me more about your military career. So Air Force, just walk me through your time in the Air Force.

 

Mike (04:31)

Yeah, like I said, commissioned right out of college and went into the communications career field at the time. That was the late 90s, so the internet was just starting. So that was the majority of the first few years was kind of building out networks at different bases and running networks. And really enjoyed that, really enjoyed the…

 

kind of hands-on, being still able to be technical, but also the leadership piece was a great kind of initial foray into the Air Force. so just continued moving around and doing that. A few get into the late 2000s, early

 

you know, 2010s and you see kind of the rise of the cyber stuff and we had a combination of the comm and cyber kind of merged and became cyber. So started doing that toward the end of the military career. Got the opportunity to go to school a bunch of times, which was, you know, interesting. The Air Force sent me three different times to get master’s degrees. I guess I, you know,

 

wasn’t very smart. didn’t get it the first time, so they kept sending me back. you know, those are good. And then finally, culmination of the career was as the mission support group commander out at Vandenberg, now Space Force Base. When I got there, it was Air Force Base, and we did the transition right before I retired. But so, yeah, it was was a great career. And, you know, that was an interesting job because basically I was the city manager.

 

for a 100,000 acre base that launched rockets. So it was a really cool assignment.

 

Amy (06:34)

Yeah, that sounds amazing. And I can just imagine the technical changes that happened over, you know, from the nineties. I didn’t mention, I was a data processing technician in the Army or in the Navy Reserves before I went to the Army. And we had to learn how to do punch cards. So I don’t know if you started with punch cards, but, you know, tell me about the transition, just technical transition, if you don’t mind.

 

Mike (07:01)

Yeah,

 

no, they were still around. I never did that directly. But yeah, it was, you know, the very beginning. So deployed as a second lieutenant before even going to comm school, they’re like, you know, we’re going to hold you off on school that you’re supposed to go to. And you need to go help build out a Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia after the Riyadh bombings.

 

So went over there and we were still doing networks of coax cable at the time. You know, and copper cable was primary fiber was, you know, very nascent and, you know, we did some of that as we were building out. But so, yeah, it went from that to now all the crazy cyber stuff that is out there.

 

was an amazing, you know, just to watch over the 25 years.

 

Amy (08:05)

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it sounds like you’ve done some really, really cool things. what but what would you say was like the craziest or the coolest thing from your military career?

 

Mike (08:16)

So do you remember the Office of Personnel Management hack? You probably got a letter saying, hey, your stuff was lost or stolen because of a breach of their systems. So that was about 21 million people. And I was at the Pentagon at the time, at the DoD Chief Information Officer.

 

Amy (08:24)

Mm-hmm

 

Mm-hmm, yep.

 

Mike (08:45)

and work for the Chief Information Security Officer. So somehow we got tagged to do all those notifications. And I kind of led the way in sending out 21 million letters to all the people that were affected. that was, you know, definitely outside the wheelhouse found some, you know, there’s some printing capabilities within DOD, a place in

 

Indianapolis has the biggest kind of defense printing service at the time. And so we worked with them to, you know, pick all the info, try to figure out addresses for folks, send these letters out. And that was that was probably the craziest thing that I did. Although, you know, there are tons of other cool things that I’m like, you know, I don’t I wouldn’t have gotten this if I had gone right into finance.

 

type thing. So it was a great career. I pretty much love almost every minute of it.

 

Amy (09:51)

Yeah, yeah, that’s so cool. I mean, not, whenever those things happen and you’re probably working long hours, trying to respond to something, it’s just, it’s not that fun. But you no doubt learn some things. So, let’s talk about your transition. Tell me how it went. Was it a hard transition? Do you, you know?

 

Mike (10:06)

yeah.

 

Amy (10:18)

Do you think that you miss the Air Force more than normal or about average?

 

Mike (10:23)

Yeah, so, you know, it was a big transition because we were going, we weren’t going to stay in California. And this is also during a transition in 2021. So pandemic was still going on and that whole thing, you know, was kind of like, all right. And then we also, for the longest time, we thought we’d end up in Colorado.

 

That was the plan. We’d spent some time there. We’re like, yeah, we’re going to go back. But right before the pandemic, I’d gone to do a retirement for somebody that used to work for me there. And we’re like, holy cow, it’s really grown in size. The infrastructure hasn’t caught up. lot of traffic. Do we really want to go here? And then also with the thought of starting the business, it was how do we…

 

not going to have a lot of money coming in. The housing prices were high. So let’s, you know, maybe we need to rethink this. So we kind of threw the map back open. Where else have we been that we liked? Where’s family, which my wife’s is in Northwest Arkansas. Mine’s still in Pennsylvania. All right. This is, is there somewhere drivable to both? And you know, we had been in the St. Louis area about 20 years ago. It’s got Air Force Base, but

 

and so wife has a friend who’s a realtor said, look at this neighborhood. You might like it based on what you’ve said you’re looking for. And so we kind of just said, all right, let’s, let’s give it a shot. And all through the military, was like, you know, our forever home. And I said, let’s just, let’s just take the pressure off and say, you know, it’s, it’s get our daughter through high school into college.

 

Who knows where she’ll end up. Maybe we’ll want to be closer to her in the future. So let’s just say it’s our next place, at least for a little while. And then as far as the overall transition, I didn’t find it that hard. I definitely missed the people. But I didn’t really miss all the day-to-day stuff.

 

I would say it was probably on the easier side for me.

 

Amy (12:51)

Yeah, yeah, I think you brought up a really good point that could be a good piece of advice for folks. And that is like, take the pressure off. Like I know that we spend so much time moving around. So when you retire, you really want to find the spot, right? You’re forever home. But I think you make a really good point. Unless you know for sure.

 

where something is your forever home, don’t sweat it. There’s a good chance it’s really not your forever home, you especially if your kids are not in their career fields already or they haven’t started their families, things like that. So I think that’s a really good takeaway for people.

 

Mike (13:29)

Yeah, and just to add on that, I would even say if you’re considering area, haven’t been to go rent there first. Now, we didn’t do that. And I’m kind of glad we didn’t because we got the super, super low mortgage rate before inflation really hit and the rates went up. So that was good for us. But if you don’t know,

 

go get the sense of the place or at least visit a few times. It was the pandemic, so my wife and daughter went, I think, twice. that was, you know, it was like, well, we’re rolling the dice. But again, took the pressure off that, hey, if it’s not the right place, we’ll look and go find something.

 

Amy (14:18)

Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay, so you were a computer engineer, you were in communications in the Air Force. How did you find your way to financial planning?

 

Mike (14:33)

So, you know, similar to you, it started early in the career. I actually, you know, because we did the co-ops and we were actually making money, I started my IRA in college with my parents, you know, mutual fund advisor, you know, kind of sales guy at the time. But then I got on active duty.

 

and I got sucked into one of those organizations that kind of targets and I’d say praise on military, especially at the time, super high fee mutual funds, selling life insurance that I probably didn’t need at the time to make a buck. so, did that for a couple of years and I realized this is not working.

 

At that point, was like, okay, I’m going to figure this stuff out for myself. Started pulling the books, the internet’s growing at this point. Found The Motley Fool, which is more on the stock side, but went headlong into that and just became voracious reader and learner in the space. And along the way, helped

 

friends and family out and just never really considered it for a career until, I was a couple years out from retirement in the last assignment. Realized I’m now out of the cyber business, kind of doing the city manager stuff. So if I’m going to jump back into cyber, I’m going to have to spin back up.

 

And again, it was pre-pandemic. So the thing I really wanted to optimize for in retirement was the freedom and flexibility. And there wasn’t as much work from home. Now it’s all my tech buddies are work, live wherever, work wherever. But at the time that wasn’t the case. So I was like, well, what can I do that gives me a location flexibility and the freedom to set my own hours and

 

really some of the investing stuff that I had done beforehand gave me that flexibility and the retirement check. So I knew that I had money coming in. So that was really, and I thought, hey, can I really do this? Can I start my own firm or go into the business in some other way? And so I found through podcasts, the XY Planning Network and

 

They were having a conference in St. Louis in 2019. And I was, it was right around, I was going up to Chicago to punk rock festival. So they lined up. So I went to the conference first and then up to my buddies in Chicago. And, you know, just wanted to see if it was going to be possible if there are any other military folks and ended up meeting.

 

I don’t know, six, eight other folks that are now part of our core group of military field-only financial planners. And they said, yeah, you can definitely do this. We’ve all done it. They were a couple years ahead of me, different paths, but said, it’s definitely possible. So they kind of took me under their wing and kind of started a mastermind right after the conference.

 

been plugged in since. So I just decided, all right, I’m going to take the leap and just launch the firm like you. Once I decided that, I started doing the certifications, did my CFP certification, and tested before retiring, which was huge.

 

And it was kind of nice. was, you know, the one we were it was during COVID. So there wasn’t a lot of outside activities that I was having to, you know, kind of miss or prioritize. It was OK. We were running the op center during the day and I come home after that and just study and study on weekends and there there wasn’t much else going on. So that made that, you know, easier than.

 

trying to juggle some of the other if the world had been normal during that time.

 

Amy (19:19)

Yeah, yeah. You know, it’s again, it’s so funny how you just you encounter people that you make a big difference in your trajectory. So it’s awesome that you linked up with the X, Y, N crowd and then found the military folks to kind of help. You know, I don’t know, we’ll say maybe give you a little bit more confidence that, you know, this is a viable career path and it can be done. So that’s pretty cool.

 

In terms of, you know, when you think back about, you know, the transition and getting into this space and the time that’s gone by between launching and now, what would you, is there anything that you’d do differently if you had it to do over again?

 

Mike (20:09)

my-

 

I’m not sure.

 

You know, it hasn’t been a smooth path. You know, I haven’t had the rugged ship of growth. So there probably should be something maybe I do differently. But I guess I’m still looking for that thing that I go, that’s really working. But, you know, as far as what I’ve done and, you know, the folks I’ve been able to help.

 

Yeah, I don’t think there’s that much that I’d change. I’m still enjoying it. that’s, you know, that’s the biggest thing. So, you know, find something that you do for free. And, well, I’ve been doing that for, you know, the first couple of years. So, you know, I probably would even if this wasn’t, you know, even if I could get paid for it.

 

I think I’d still try to find some way to do this because I do enjoy it.

 

Amy (21:23)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that question, you know, like when you’re when you’re starting your own business, there’s no way to know what’s going to happen. And so when sometimes when people ask, what would you do differently? It’s like maybe it was a mistake. Like you made a mistake and you do that thing over again. But the reality is like there’s so many variables and there’s so many ways that, you know, things change and unfold that like you just you respond as as

 

the best that you can with the information that you have at the time. And that’s just entrepreneurship, right? You just figure it out and keep going. And that’s part of the fun of it. So one more question then I want you to tell me all about your firm. But what advice would you give to other people who are looking to come into this career field?

 

Mike (21:58)

Yeah, no, exactly. Exactly.

 

Yeah, like you said in your part, it’s do your homework. I mean, I probably could have done more. just kind of fixated and got like, OK, I’m going to go this way. I’m going to start my own firm. Maybe I would have considered trying to find another

 

firm, maybe not on the wire house like you did, but if I could find somebody that was looking for an associate advisor first just to gain a little more experience, like you said, the reps. I mean, I don’t think it’s necessary. The other piece is just make sure your finances are in place if you’re going to launch the business because it can take, you know,

 

couple years till you’re back making money. So if you need those dollars coming in, you know, this may not be the right decision. It may be working somewhere first, building up a cash reserve and then being able to launch your own. So I guess those would be the kind of two things.

 

Amy (23:34)

Yeah, and that’s a really good point. And quite honestly, part of why I made the decision that I made is because I needed a little bit more time to build that runway. So that’s a great point. It is awesome to get out and be able to have the flexibility and have the satisfaction of this career, but it’s not very satisfying if you’re stressed out about your own finances. So that’s a really good point.

 

Okay, so tell me about your firm, who do you serve, and then what do want people to know about you if they’re looking for a financial advisor?

 

Mike (24:16)

Yeah, similar, mostly either active duty military, you know, getting relatively close, you know, within five or so years of retirement. Veterans and then retired military are primarily people who I serve. And you kind of one focus area that I have has been college planning, primarily out of, you know,

 

selfish intent was trying to figure out the best way to use the GI Bill for my daughter. so really kind of went heavy into that, picking the right school. that is a major expense. Maybe not so if you’ve got the GI Bill and only one child, but for a lot of folks,

 

It’s huge. mean, schools, if you’re talking the Ivy League, they’re pushing $100,000 a year or $400,000 for an education. And yeah, most people won’t pay that. But if you’re not doing smart things, I’ve talked to people that have, know, parents that are in their mid fifties that have $300,000.

 

of student loan debt that they took out for their kids. so, you know, that’s really where I focus. you know, the whole like you, the whole planning piece, I think is more important than specifically the investing piece. So if somebody’s coming in and saying.

 

you know, I want to beat the market. And, you know, I’m looking for the next Nvidia. That’s that’s not me. So I’ll try to find you somebody that is more in that space. But, you know, the taxes, the planning, you know, how much you’re saving, where you’re saving that those are all in my mind, more important for most folks than.

 

you know, am I going to get 8 % beat the market or you know that so yeah and then I guess the one thing I do like to provide the educational piece I think it’s important I write a lot it was some of the reason that we decided to start the podcast was to be able to put this information out there so that people you know knew

 

about one that they knew about those decisions that they should be thinking about them and doing their own homework if they’re DIYers or talking to you or me or another financial planner that can really help them because I find out a lot of times that people just don’t know and it’s like, well, what if

 

what did a friend or family member do and it may not be the best thing. focusing and helping people, helping and educate people is really one of the things I enjoy about the job.

 

Amy (27:47)

Yeah, yeah. And I just I want to go back and talk about the college planning stuff that you mentioned. You know, it’s so important, shopping for college the right way. so I love that you specifically help people around that and also enjoy your content. So I’m a financial advisor myself and I read your newsletters. And so if you’re not signed up for Mike’s newsletter, go sign up for Mike’s newsletter.

 

Mike (28:17)

I appreciate the plug.

 

Amy (28:17)

Well, Mike,

 

yeah. Mike, is there anything else you’d like listeners to know about you?

 

Mike (28:24)

No, I think we covered a lot of it. So I hope they enjoyed these two episodes, just getting a little more info on who they might be listening to.

Amy (28:37)

Awesome, yeah, I hope everybody’s enjoyed it. All right, Mike, well, we’ll catch you next time. It was so great to talk with you and catch up. Okay, bye-bye.

Mike (28:45)

All right, take care.