Business Innovators Radio - Interview with Dan Brooks, Founder of Xexis Private Wealth Discussing Understanding Critical Concerns of Retirement Planning

Episode Date: April 18, 2024

Dan entered the U.S. Navy’s Nuclear Power program after high school and upon discharge, he purchased the family business which he operated for 7 years.After his father’s death, he discovered his father lost a small fortune due to bad advice from a stock broker. Dan decided to enter financial services to find out how this could happen and help others avoid it.In 2004 he completed the Certified Financial Planner coursework and in 2005 opened a Registered Investment Advisor firm.He owns both a Financial Advisor firm and a tax firm based in Lake Mary, Florida. Dan works with a Registered Investment Advisor firm that manages over $3 billion dollars and is one of the fastest-growing firms in the nation.Dan’s specialty is comprehensive retirement planning, including income planning, tax mitigation, catastrophic health care planning, Medicare, Estate Planning, and Generational Wealth.On a personal level, his proudest accomplishment was being a single father to his daughter, who is a Police Officer. He enjoys golf, hiking, traveling, cooking, and discovering new restaurants.Learn More: http://www.xexiswealth.com/Investment advisory services offered through Virtue Capital Management, LLC (VCM), a registered investment advisor. VCM and Xexis Private Wealth, LLC are independent of each other. For a complete description of investment risks, fees, and services, review the Virtue Capital Management firm brochure (ADV Part 2A) which is available from your Investment Advisor Representative, or by contacting Virtue Capital Management. Information provided is not intended as tax or legal advice and should not be relied on as such. You are encouraged to seek tax or legal advice from an independent professional.Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saundershttps://businessinnovatorsradio.com/influential-entrepreneurs-with-mike-saunders/Source: https://businessinnovatorsradio.com/interview-with-dan-brooks-founder-of-xexis-private-wealth-discussing-understanding-critical-concerns-of-retirement-planning

Welcome to influential entrepreneurs, bringing you interviews with elite business leaders and experts, sharing tips and strategies for elevating your business to the next level. Here's your host, Mike Saunders. Hello and welcome to this episode of Influential Entrepreneurs. This is Mike Saunders, the authority positioning coach. Today we have with us Dan Brooks, who's the founder of Zexis Private Wealth, and we'll be talking about critical concerns of retirement planning. Dan, welcome back to the program.

Mike, I'm going to talking with you again. You know, I always love how words are used and phrases are formed. And when there's a concern, I want to know about it. And when there's critical concerns, boy, I really want to know about it. So to kick things off, share with us what you consider to be the most critical concerns that retirees have to keep in mind when making financial decisions. Well, excellent question. And, you know, if I had to boil it down to one thing, Mike, I would say that most people in retirement planning need to have a guide.

They need somebody that has been there before, you know, knows what to look for, knows the bear traps to avoid and so on. If you have a very simple situation, of course you can do it yourself. But I see people all the time that have, you know, quite a bit of money in a very complex situation. They don't even realize sometimes how complex it is. And they're kind of trying to do it themselves. You know, they try to pick up a little information here. They go to a free dinner workshop and grab this more information. They're trying to put it all together.

And it just doesn't work. So if I had to say one thing, you know, about retirement planning is you need somebody a professional to help you do this because this is a critical decision. I mean, this affects the rest of your life. And you make a mistake now. In many cases, it's, you know, it's permanent mistake. You can't go back and fix it. Yeah.

You know, you mentioned the simplicity or the more complex. I'll bet you that there's some people that would assume that their situation, oh, I'm just fine. I've got basic needs so I can do it myself because what Dan just said was you need a guide for the complex. Mine's not complex. But I bet it might make people feel better even to just have a second opinion just to go, okay, you're on the right track. Or yeah, this is a simple, you know, a strategy. What do you say to people that assume that there's a simple, but maybe it's not? Well, what I find, you know, I've been doing this for decades is that there are things that they don't even know that they don't know.

Yeah. You know, there's decisions that they weren't even aware that they had to make. And there, you know, there's, I call them bear traps laying out there that people aren't aware of. So it's just easy to miss something. And you miss one critical thing, Mike, in retirement and it can really bite you, you know. I kind of use the analogy. of, you know, the decisions you make in retirement are like puzzle pieces. You know, there's the puzzle piece of Social Security when and how to take that.

And, you know, what about taxes? And not just taxes from last year, but what about taxes going forward? You know, if you have any significant wealth at all, you know, once you get to about a half million dollars of retirement assets, tax planning becomes very important, you get to a million and a half, it becomes critical. Yeah. But, you know, there's estate planning piece of the puzzle. What do you want to leave behind and how do you want to do that?

What about Medicare? You're going to have to make decisions about that. You know, what about late life health care? We call it long-term care in the industry. And sometimes people need advanced planning and special circumstances like special needs children or, you know, very high net worth people. So all of these puzzle pieces are laying out there. And if you have a guide that helps you put those together, now you can see the big picture. And that's when people feel good about the retirement. When the picture's laid out for them, all of these decisions they had to make, they realize are intertwined to, to put this puzzle together. And those are the people that enter retirement where they're happy and they're satisfied and they're not worried all the time. Yeah. You know, we think about that puzzle. I'm sure that you with your decades of experience can see a certain client's situation

and see those pieces like just coming together like, oh, we need to do that. How do you, how does the guide approach impact how you work with advising your clients when you can see it right off? and you don't want to feel like, oh, let's go one, two, three, four, and here we go, because you need to teach and explain it, educate and guide. So how does that mindset impact how you're advising your clients? Well, you know, the one thing I know is that people are smart.

Successful people are smart. In fact, most people are smart. They just need accurate information in order to make wise and prudent decisions. So, you know, it's the lack of information or maybe it's their information is couched in a sense. sales talk, right? Somebody's trying to sell them a product where it doesn't necessarily fit into their plan. But people are smart. When it's laid out for them, you know, our E's planning process, the first E is educate

because people need to understand. And then once they understand, they can analyze the second letter in the acronym of the E's planning process that we use. So it is a process and, you know, we don't short-step it with any. some people, the process doesn't take a long time. And other people, it takes a long time because they have very complex situation. Yep. I think that makes total sense.

People might not have been able to come up with that strategy themselves. But when you educate them, they can follow along the logic and having that guide yourself there, kind of showing the way and putting the options in front of them just really clears it up. So it just kind of makes me think moving on about. financial planning, it almost is like navigating through a maze where it's like I could go right, left, straight, I could go backwards, and they just stand there almost frozen and scratch of their head. Elaborate on some specific ideas and strategies that you recommend to help retirees really understand and manage kind of that confusion and complexity. Well, again, it comes back to our

ease planning process because it is a maze. That's a perfect word for it. You know, People try to self-educate and they really need professional guidance. You know, I've got a couple of clients that are master technicians at Audi. You know, and outies are fantastic automobile, but they're very complex. And as they would call them, these cars are very persnickety. But when they're maintained and running perfectly, they're, you know, incredible automobile. But these guys complain about somebody that comes in that maybe took their Audi to an independent person who says they can work on But they ended up messing it up and then these guys have to fix it.

That's one of their biggest frustrations. And they say things to me like if they had just brought it here first, it would have been less expensive, less time and way easier on them. But they were trying to save a dollar by going somewhere else. You know, I use other examples. Like if you go to a restaurant that has been decorated by the restaurant owner, it feels one way. And when you go into a restaurant that,

has had a professional interior designer, you can tell the difference. The ambiance is completely different. Or in somebody's home. Some people are better at decorating than others. Some people are terrible. And it shows. They're very good at what they do, but they aren't good at decorating their home. But if they hire a professional, it looks fantastic. So. But it's the same home. It's the same room. It's the same living room. It's the same kitchen. And they tried. But yet here comes someone with that eye for design. that eye for how things should fit together and all of a sudden it's like 10x. So I think that's kind of the example of what you're doing with your clients is as that guide. You've seen it. You've been there and done that and learned the lessons. And now you can go, well, hey, here's how this strategy might come together. Can you think of maybe an example or a case study of how you've helped the

client, you know, put their portfolio together to provide that piece of mind of stability? You know, if somebody asked me to like point to one, it's hard to say because I've helped so many people. And instead, what comes to my mind is that at the end of our ease planning process, I hear the same thing almost verbatim from every client. They say to me when we're done and their puzzle is put together and they can see the big picture. They're like, Dan, thank you so much. We feel so much better about our situation than we did when we first met you. We're confident in it. We know what we're doing now.

We understand how all the pieces fit together. And we just, you know, we know our retirement's going to be great. And in fact, the ease name came from our client saying to us over and over again at the end of the process that we didn't have a name for previously, that they feel so much at ease. So it's not, you know, so much a specific client because they all get helped in different ways. but that consistency of that feeling that they get of comfort and feeling at ease. Yeah, exactly. I think that you're listening to the responses from your clients and it kind of affirms what you guys are guiding them through. So, you know, you said you've got decades of experience and that must have given you some unique insights and stories.

Can you think about a personal example of a time when guiding a retiree through their plan? And maybe even they were like, I don't know, I'm just trusting the process. And then it comes out on the other end. And it resulted in a positive outcome for them. Maybe a couple lessons that they expressed to you or something like that. Again, it's hard to pinpoint one. I'll tell you something very common. You know, a big part of people's retirement is the retirement assets that they've accumulated, IRAs, 401Ks, etc.

And one of the things we do is a really in-depth analysis of their portfolio. and we take a deep dive into it. And many times they understand it for the first time ever of what they have. But a couple common things is that most people are more risk averse than their portfolio is. They don't realize how much risk they're taking until they've seen an analysis of it. A second thing is they don't realize how much the internal fees can be in a portfolio. And, you know, Mike, the thing about fees. is that if you're getting value for a fee,

then that's a prudent, wise decision to pay that fee. If you're getting no value, then that's not a very good decision. And unfortunately, we see that quite often. Another example would be diversification of a portfolio. One of the truths that my industry tells you is that diversification is your friend. It's true.

But what I see all the time is that a person's portfolio looks diversified. They've got a lot of stuff. but it truly isn't diversified. When you look at it, they got a lot of stuff, but for example, it's all large U.S. companies. Okay, so you own 56 different U.S. companies. Well, that's not diversification because all those tend to move up and down together.

100%. Yeah, for sure. So I think that a lot of times when we're talking about retirement planning, a topic that comes up is all of the investment products that are available. And I think it could be extremely confusing. But based on your expertise and experience, is there a specific set of products or types of investments that retirees should be looking at? And also what kind of caution and red flags should they be looking at for? Well, you know, what I've done over the years is simplify the financial decision making for people.

We've, we've broken it down into five what we call aisles. So we've taken the entire world of financial products and categorize them in five aisles. So we teach people how those aisles work. And I think I've got to, you know, maybe we did another podcast about that if I recall. But it's, you know, it's a chapter in my book. But once again, people are smart. They just need things explained in a way that they can understand them. So we have simplified this complex financial world for people.

And once they understand that they make great decisions. You know, simplicity is key. And everyone is different. And there is never one solution or one cookie cutter that fits everyone. So I think that's what you're mentioning there is there's so many options. And we need to educate you on your specific need. And then whatever you feel comfortable with, we're going to move forward because I'm not trying to sell you anything. I'm the guide.

So I think that is such a great perspective that you guys take. So let's wrap up our discussion in every professional faces challenges in their field. Talk about some of the unique challenges you come across as a financial planner work with the retirees. Probably the biggest one is there's a lot of misinformation and salesy stuff out there. So when I first meet with people, they've kind of been indoctrinated by the financial. services industry to believe things that either they're not true or they're only partially true. So we have to, again, that initial education process, sometimes it's deprogramming people to understand the full truth about specific things rather than something they learned when

somebody was trying to sell them something or something they read in a book. Because as you mentioned a few minutes ago, every situation is different. And all of the different puzzle pieces have to work together to build, you know, that beautiful picture of retirement. So if I had to, you know, pick, you know, one or two things would be the disinformation in this and the salesy side of my industry. Yeah, that's a really interesting point because it reminds me of the movie White Christmas where they say, you know, everyone's got a little larceny and I'm where every, there's an angle. There's a little angle and everything. And if a certain advisor is promoting this product versus that product, is it for their benefit or the client? And I think that's a really big aha.

So I'm glad that you mentioned that. So what's a final piece of advice you'd offer to retirees looking to secure their financial future? Well, when they start looking for a comprehensive planner, they should be looking for somebody that has a process, not a process. not a product. You know, process is how you decide on the products. But if somebody leads with a product, then you know automatically they're coming at you from the sales side of things.

You know, I, you know, decades ago, I started, you know, in a sales organization and I sat in on the Monday morning meetings where they talked about sales skills. And, you know, they say things like, you know, sell them something, just make them a client, you know, Once they're a client, then you can go for the rest of the money.

And, you know, the public might think that the Monday morning meetings are, you know, a fiduciary discussion of how to take better care of your clients. And in most cases, it's just not true. It's how to be a better salesman and answer objections and get the money in the door. So if they work with somebody that has a process, that is a good sign. If somebody's just trying to sell a product, whatever that product is, if they're leading with product, then that's a warning sign. Process over product. I love it. That just makes so much sense. Well, Dan, it's been really enlightening to learn some of these concerns of retirement planning. Thank you for coming back on. What's the best way someone can learn more and also reach out and connect with you?

Well, my business is called Zexas Private Wealth, which is really hard to tell somebody verbally. So I have a way for them to get to it, which is my E-A-S-E-E-E-E-Ease. So if you type in Ease-D-E-S-E-E, planning.com, it'll take you to my website. E-A-S-E-Lanning.com. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming back on, Dan. It's been a real pleasure talking with you again. Thanks, Mike. You've been listening to Influential Entrepreneurs with Mike Saunders. To learn more about the resources mentioned on today's show or listen to past episodes, visit www. www.Influential Entrepreneurs Radio.com.