How can you tell whether a financial planner is genuinely credible, or whether you’re being pushed into a decision you may regret? In this episode, we explore two sides of financial planning that can have a big impact on how confidently you use your money and choose professional advice. We start by looking at how our memories of the past can influence today’s spending decisions, why we can become anchored to what things used to cost, and how putting expenses into the context of your current income can change your perspective.
The conversation then turns to how to properly vet a financial planner in a world of AI, scams and increasing online fraud. You’ll learn why you should interview multiple advisors, watch out for unnecessary urgency, verify a firm’s regulatory record and understand where your money will actually be held. We also discuss looking beyond reviews, identifying whether an advisor educates or simply sells, understanding a firm’s process and fees, and trusting your instincts when something doesn’t feel right. The goal is to give you practical questions and checks you can use when deciding who to trust with your financial future.
Listen to the full episode here:
What you will learn:
- How past spending habits can influence today’s financial decisions. (5:00)
- Why putting expenses into context can change your perspective. (8:00)
- How to avoid anchoring your financial life to the past. (12:30)
- Why financial planner interviews shouldn’t feel rushed. (17:30)
- How urgency can be a red flag when choosing an advisor. (20:20)
- Why you should verify a planner’s regulatory record. (25:30)
- How to understand where your money will actually be held. (32:30)
- Why you should look beyond reviews and assess educational content. (36:30)
- How to evaluate a planner’s process, fees and ideal client. (43:00)
- Why succession planning and overall trust matter when choosing an advisor. (46:45)
Ideas Worth Sharing:
- “If somebody is pushing you to do things very quickly before you feel comfortable, hyping it up, and creating any sense of urgency, emergency, or opportunity that’s going to pass, that’s definitely time to slow down. It shouldn’t be this way. We should feel comfortable. We should feel like we’ve had a chance to vet what’s going on.” – Mason & Associates
- “Look beyond the reviews, look for educational content, and ultimately, the investments are a tool. If we’re selling investments, that’s not good. We should be selling the education, the empowerment, and the entire experience.’” – Mason & Associates
- “Don’t anchor to a past life that may not exist anymore, and that could be up or down. Your income could have dramatically changed up, or it could have dramatically changed down. We can’t anchor to a point in time that is not relevant or related to today. That doesn’t mean we have to forget the lessons we’ve learned from the past, but it does mean that in order to unlock what is possible and fully enjoy the plan that you have today, you have to be able to live in today, and we can’t anchor to these points in the past.” – Mason & Associates
Resources from this episode:
Did you enjoy the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast? Never miss an episode by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, and YouTube Music.
Read the Transcript Below:
John Mason: Welcome to the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast and the Mason YouTube channel. In this episode, we’re going to discuss living in the past, or rather not living to your full potential, or just generally being confused on where you stand in your financial plan. So we’re going to talk a little stories through that, and then we’re going to move into how to properly vet a potential financial planner that you’re looking to hire, specifically looking through cybersecurity and all the scams that are out there.
How can you be sure that you’re hiring a team that’s real, that’s credible, that can add massive value to you and your financial plan? We’re going to unpack both of these topics in today’s episode. Tommy, welcome to the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast.
Tommy Blackburn: John, it’s fun to do another one of these with you. I think it should be a fun episode. I am really looking forward to the start of it, and I think it’ll be both educational and fun for us to kind of go through what to look for in advisors, particularly with an eye towards avoiding AI fraud, scams, all that type of stuff.
John Mason: I love it, man. Well, today is second episode, June 23rd, 2026. Audience, we said this last time, but thank you so much for all the things you’re doing for us. It’s an honor to grow alongside you. 1,700 subscribers, so many podcast episodes, a lot of reviews on Apple Podcasts, and more. So thank you for all the things you’re doing. If you haven’t already, check out our new e-book on survivor benefits. That’s available at masonllc.net. That’s masonllc.net. Do not decline survivor benefits before reading this guide and checking out our YouTube videos, and please share it with anybody who’s about to make that catastrophic mistake of declining SBP, which is an irrevocable decision, Tommy, as you navigate retirement. So make sure we get that e-book around the country as best we can.
Tommy Blackburn: Absolutely. Yeah, we think it should be highly educational, helpful, and at least help make informed decisions. So if you decide to still decline it, we tried our best. There’s nothing else we can do at that point, but at least we can sleep well at night.
John Mason: That’s right. Well, maybe we’ll bring back our song at some point, too.
Tommy Blackburn: I know. I think about it all the time. It would be a good idea.
John Mason: Let’s bring it back next episode. “You can rest easy once your plan is done.” I think we should bring it back.
Tommy Blackburn: “You will see clearly just how you have won.” Yep.
John Mason: That’s right. All right, we’re going to bring the song back, audience. If you are relatively new and you haven’t been here this entire journey, Mike Mason is our in-house songwriter, and Drew helped produce the song. So we’re going to bring it back. We’ll share it with you next time. If you want to get a jump on it, you can go back and listen to some of the beginning episodes from, golly, 2022 or 3, whenever we started doing this.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah. I think it’s been three years, if I’m not mistaken. Maybe it’s been longer. Wow.
John Mason: It’s amazing. Oh, yeah, audience, if there’s more than one listener out there, please. We just did a mailbag episode. We would love to have your questions in advance. We would love to address those on a future episode or YouTube video. masonllc.net, or connect with us on LinkedIn, Mason & Associates. I know my handle is johnmasoncfp. Tommy’s on there as well, and we would love to have your questions and address them on the next episode or future YouTube video.
So let’s start off, Tommy, and audience, hopefully you won’t judge me as we lead into this story today, as it’s about alcohol. So it’s about alcohol, and what am I talking about? Recently, my family—me, Sarah, and Carter—went to an Atlanta Braves game, and it was the first time taking our son to a Braves game. He’s six years old, and we’re just really excited about the Braves game. So we fly down to Atlanta. We’re having dinner at this restaurant called Ray’s on the River. The server comes by, and she was like, “Hello, Mr. Mason, would you like to have a drink?” And Carter’s like, “I’ll take some sort of mocktail.” And I was like, “That sounds good.”
And I looked down at the menu, and there was some delicious Old Fashioned for, like, $17 or $20, and I was like, “Ugh, I don’t know that I want to do that.” I was like, “I really want to enjoy this cocktail on the river with my family, but I don’t know that I’m going to spend $20, all in with tip and everything, or more, to get this cocktail.” But I did it. I ordered it, and in my mind, Tommy, I immediately went to Virginia Tech, and I thought, “You know what? I used to be able to go out to TOTS, TOTS Tuesday at Top of the Stairs, and we could be out all night for $2 PBRs.” Granted, this was 2010. I don’t know what a PBR costs at Virginia Tech now. For, like, 15 bucks, 10 bucks, whatever it was. And I said, “Man, those were the good old days. It’s a shame now that I can’t find an Old Fashioned for $2 like I had back then.”
And then, typical financial planner, I took my income from college, divided the drink into my income from college, and came up with a percentage. Then I did my income today, with my Old Fashioned divided into my income, and it turns out that a $17 Old Fashioned is actually a better deal now than that PBR was 17 years ago.
Tommy Blackburn: Exactly. Yes, it’s such a fun revelation. I think it happens to us all the time. It’s just trying to put, you kind of get grounded or stuck in that moment, or nostalgia creeps in. I’m not really sure. It’s a combination of things, but we just don’t seem to, we seem to struggle with time and growing with time. And to your point, that was a much bigger portion of your budget. No, we’re not saying go out and spend frivolously just because you can, but to put things in context sometimes, just take a step back, enjoy the Old Fashioned with your son in that moment, in that environment, and savor it. $17 based on your income today is a much smaller share of your discretionary income than what it was back then. So arguably, you’ve become far more responsible.
John Mason: And I consume a lot less alcohol than I did 17 years ago, I can tell you that. So maybe you can
Tommy Blackburn: Enjoy quality now versus quantity.
John Mason: Yes, it’s more of a quality thing than quantity, as you said. And it’s not like we’re going out spending $17 every night on an alcoholic beverage. But audience and Tommy, I mean, we’ve talked about this before: when we were at Virginia Tech, Tommy refuses to even go into the bookstore because he doesn’t want to see the prices, and he knows he’s not going to buy anything. So he didn’t even go in with me. And this was a way for me to realize that life has changed a lot over 17 years, that I can enjoy a $17 beverage every once in a while on a special occasion and not feel guilty about it.
And I actually took that math into the next day. Audience, I guess I like hoodies, because I bought a Braves hoodie the next day, and it was just a really ludicrous price. It was like $170 for a hoodie. But I applied the same principles, and I said, “Okay. Well, as a fraction of my income, if $17 was a reasonable expense for college John, this hoodie is 10 Old Fashioneds. I only drink like once a month anyhow.” And I was able to quickly get to a point where I was like, “This feels like an expense that I can justify, that I’m excited about.” Whereas maybe even 24 hours before, Tommy, I don’t know that I would’ve been able to pull the trigger on a new hat and hoodie in the gift shop. But somehow going through that mental gymnastics has proven really helpful over the last 72 hours.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, kind of helped you anchor some of these spending decisions, I guess you would say. So it is a good exercise. Oddly enough, not quite the same, but similar: we were buying Zoe some new shoes just the other day—our daughter, coming up on six—some shoes. And Jess was out shopping with her and was like, “I can’t believe the price of these shoes.” And part of it is like you just have to realize, again, nothing costs what it cost 17 years ago. Everything has gotten more expensive. But so has our income. Our income has gone up quite a lot, and a lot of things have improved for the better. So as a proportion of our income, it’s probably less than we were spending on shoes in the past.
The other part was she was asking me, “Should I drive across town to go check this place out to see if they have better prices?” And I will say, at least in that moment, I was like, “It’s completely up to you if you want to go shopping, but for the value of your time, I would say just get the shoes now and don’t agonize over this decision. It’s probably not worth driving across town hoping that we have a better deal.” So in our household, not just me, everybody kind of struggles with these things. And eventually, we hopefully find a way to ground ourselves again. Then Zoe’s going to be excited about the shoes. She’s going to probably wear them for a decent amount of time. She is growing, so I realize she’s going to outgrow them eventually. But kids also put a lot of miles on their shoes, so I’m sure we’ll get good use out of them. Just kind of step back and get over the shock.
Then there are some expenses that really need to have a pause, and we do it as well, right? There are some major expenses where you have to step back for a minute and really think through it. Some of these smaller ones, particularly as a percentage of your income, to your point, John, maybe ground yourself in that. Not worth agonizing over.
John Mason: So how does this relate to our clients and our audience? Well, it relates in that we work with clients who are in or near retirement, who have a million or more in assets, which means they were born, I would say, 1966 or earlier. So for a lot of people, ’66 would put you about 60. Maybe we’re working with some folks in their early 70s, but generally speaking, that was a long time ago. Not calling you old, but that was a while ago, and a lot has changed. There have been periods of high inflation and low inflation. I know that we’ve worked with military clients, Tommy, who remember stretching $20 for an entire month—they had their housing allowance and food allowance, but they had $20 and a paycheck. I think I’m exaggerating a little bit, but it was a small amount. And they learned how to live on that.
Over time, with pay raises, retirement, a second career, and a million dollars of assets, the world around you conditions you to this very scary thing. Like, for instance, diesel prices right now are hovering around $5. Premium fuel is hovering around $5. 87 octane is, I think, still north of $4. But that’s a high number, and if you listen to the media, they’ll tell you about how the world’s going to end. But I remember back in 2008 when I was riding my scooter at Virginia Tech, gas was $3 or $4 a gallon. So it’s been 20 years, and gas is the same price as it was when we were in college, give or take.
But what’s happened to our clients’ assets since 2008, 2009? I mean, the stock market’s boomed, pensions have gone up, salaries have raised. We can argue all day long about whether we kept up with inflation, et cetera, but realistically, we believe that most of the clients we know are in a better position now than they were decades ago. But we anchor ourselves to the past. We anchor ourselves—and I’m not a therapist—to these points in time, like “when I was a kid, this is how my parents treated me” or “when I was young, this is how I reacted.” We have these wins and these traumas and these things that happen over our lifetime that we anchor to, and one of the things that we have to help our clients do is pull up the anchor and move to a new fishing hole—move to a new spot where we can enjoy ourselves in the world that we’ve built and the world of today. And I don’t think our audience will ever find another financial planner that tries to get their clients to spend their money as much as we do.
Tommy Blackburn: There are probably some out there. I know that we’ve met and conversed with some, but you’re right. It seemed like a theme during our strategic planning meeting season. I think you’re right. Now, I always like to come back to: we don’t want to tell you a bedtime story. There are certainly situations where we’re living life at a very good balance of what the portfolio can support, so we don’t need to have that conversation. But yeah, there are plenty where you could enjoy your money some. The whole conversation is around pulling up the anchor and moving to another fishing hole. We don’t want to leave an inheritance, but that’s certainly what we’re on track for. What are our regrets going to be? So we’re just trying to, we’re not going to push you, we’re not going to shit all over you, and we’re not going to force you to be something you’re not, but we will certainly raise it just by saying, “Here’s what we’re seeing, just so you know. And if you’d like to discuss it, here are some thoughts to maybe help you through this.” And yeah, I agree. It’s certainly important to us in those situations to bring it up and have a discussion.
John Mason: So in summary, audience, I think the takeaway here—or we think the takeaway—is don’t anchor to a past life that may not exist anymore, and that could be up or down. Your income could have dramatically changed up, or it could have dramatically changed down. We can’t anchor to a point in time that is not relevant or related to today. That doesn’t mean we have to forget the lessons we’ve learned from the past, but it does mean that in order to unlock what is possible and fully enjoy the plan that you have today, you have to be able to live in today, and we can’t anchor to these points in the past.
So hopefully that’s a fun story, and find your own thing. That’s your takeaway. Maybe, you’re not going to do this, I know, audience, dear listener, as we said in the last episode, but we would love to hear from you via email or LinkedIn or somewhere about your math. So mine was a PBR and an Old Fashioned—a PBR from 2010 and an Old Fashioned in 2026. What’s your math? Pick a point in time where you remember the “good old days,” take that expense, divide it by your income at that time, and find a new expense today that you think is unreasonable and compare it to your current income. Put that down in the comments or send us an email; we’d love to relive that with you in a future episode or YouTube video. So with that being said, Tommy, I really hope people do that, by the way.
Tommy Blackburn: I do, too. That would be really fun. That sounds like a ton of fun, yeah.
John Mason: Hopefully Zoe catches that when she’s helping us with our marketing, because that would be a really fun social campaign that gets no traction.
Tommy Blackburn: But it’ll be entertaining to us. That’s right.
John Mason: Okay, so moving on to the other topic for today: we’re not going to get the cart before the horse. We have an idea at the firm, but we’re not going to fully throw that idea out yet, Tommy. But we have an idea for a marketing message in the future and want to talk about how to vet financial planning firms or registered investment advisory firms. We recognize that we have a national presence with this podcast, this YouTube channel, and our brand reputation. So how do you properly select a financial planner in the world of AI, in the world of scams, in the world of “I send you a text, and if I respond to that text and download an app, I might lose my entire life savings if I do something incorrectly”?
The world’s scary out there, and we can understand why it may be scary to engage with a financial planner, because you are effectively transitioning your life savings from where it is now to a new place that you’ve never been before. So for anybody to say that’s not scary has no idea what they’re talking about. Right, that is scary. That is a scary thing. So what we want to do today is empower the audience with some tips and tricks on how to vet firms like us, give people ideas on how they can determine credibility and safety, and help point people in the right direction as they interview multiple people. And maybe that’s step one: you should consider interviewing more than one firm.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, I almost think the first step here. Yeah, I agree. As part of dovetailing onto that, it shouldn’t be this urgent thing. We don’t need to move at a snail’s pace necessarily—we have things we need to get done and relationships to start, and we don’t want to unnecessarily delay things. But if somebody is pushing you to do things very quickly before you feel comfortable, hyping it, and creating any sense of urgency, emergency, or opportunity that’s going to pass, that’s definitely time to slow down. It shouldn’t be this way. We should feel comfortable. We should feel like we’ve had a chance to vet what’s going on. One of those ways is by interviewing multiple advisors, John. So kind of twofold there.
John Mason: When we were with Centaurus Financial, we were a hybrid commission and fee shop, and we would advertise on the radio and whatnot. I just remember from my compliance lessons that we were never able to advertise things like, “Register now for our seminar. Space is limited. Come out to our free steak dinner seminar. If you’re not one of the first 20, you’ll never be able to come, and this product that’s amazing, you’ll never be able to get, so register now.” We weren’t allowed to do that as a hybrid commission and fee shop.
But if you turn on the radio—which I think people still listen to—there are people who advertise, “Space is limited to our free financial planning workshop.” I don’t know who those people are and who they’re regulated by, or if they’re regulated at all, but I can tell you that sense of urgency being created was not allowed for us then, and it’s certainly not something we do now. The only thing that our audience will hear from us is, “We’re in strategic planning meeting season. We’ll see you in June.” And then we say, “We kind of shut down for new clients in November and December. We’ll see you in January. And our process takes a little while, so if you want to do it, don’t call us the day before you retire.”
So we are trying to create a sense of urgency by sharing our process, which is another thing on here: do they have a repeatable process? Yes, our process is very repeatable in that we don’t take new clients in April and May, and we take a lot of time off in December. So if you want to work with us, you’re going to have to work in our window. So yes, we want to create a sense of urgency: if you need help, come see us, and you should do it before you think you need to, because if it’s during our periods and stuff, you know what I mean?
Tommy Blackburn: We’re letting you create that sense of urgency really, right? Yes. So it’s, “Here’s our schedule,” because it’s not urgent, and it is important, but it’s not an emergency, and we can be thoughtful, take our time, and be intentional. If you have an emergency or a rushed schedule, we’ve let you know, so now let us know and we’ll do our best to match the timeline that you need if we can. But I would say it’s only if you have that sense of urgency. Otherwise, like you said, we’re happy to say, “We’ll see you in three or four months,” with no sense of rushing. Now, arguably, we don’t need to slow it down more than is necessary, but there’s certainly no sense of an unnecessary rush, because we’re looking for a long-term relationship. Anybody you’re thinking about for investments is long-term, and any relationship should be long-term. So there shouldn’t be a crazy rush.
John Mason: And to your point, when we meet with a family—let’s say we’re meeting with Joe and Sally, and we have a great intro call, and then Joe and Sally meet us for an intro meeting, and then we deliver the initial plan—you just go through the process. There is a speed at which it is reasonable to keep the momentum going, and there is a speed at which it is unreasonably slow that slows down momentum, makes our job harder, and makes it harder for the client to see the value in the ongoing relationship. So it is about finding a delicate balance between keeping the process and the ball moving forward. When you start dragging out three months in between each meeting, it’s like you’re always starting over from scratch. So we can’t have that either.
So hopefully we’ve done a good job talking through that. There should be some sort of, “Yeah, I want to do this and I’m excited about it,” but it shouldn’t be a salesy reason to do it.
Tommy Blackburn: Well, it shouldn’t be an emergency, right. It shouldn’t be like, “Hey, you need to get in now,” or, “You’ve lost your opportunity.” Or another one to vet or watch out for here is if they lead with investments. If it’s all about, “Hey, this rate of return,” if that’s what we’re focused on, that should be a red flag, too. So I think it’s this opportunistic urgency of, “We’ve got to get in now.” Like they’re trying to play on emotions or get us to make a decision quickly. That’s where we need to slow down. Most ways of getting defrauded in this world involve a sense of undue urgency—our radar should go up, and our guard should go up.
We also don’t need to have an unnecessarily slow process to get things moving. We do want momentum, and we do want to make progress on things, but that’s very different in my mind. That sense of, “It’s an emergency, urgency”—that’s a pressure, right? If you feel a crazy pressure, versus, “Hey, we’re doing good, right? Let’s keep moving. Let’s keep implementing. Let’s keep the momentum going.” Not the same pressure.
John Mason: So I think what we’ll do, I want to hit on investments real quickly, and then I think I just want to go to the top of your list that we kind of curated through ChatGPT, I think. You mentioned investments, and again, I was sitting down with a new client today, and they mentioned to me that they started interviewing financial planners last year. Audience, forgive me if you hear thunder; it’s thundering in Virginia. So, they met with a couple of advisors last year, didn’t move forward with anybody, and I asked why. They said, “You just didn’t get a warm fuzzy.” And they expanded on it, saying Advisor 1 was like, “We’re really excited. We’re going to 5X your net worth or 7X your net worth.” And the client was like, “Well, that just sounds too good to be true.”
And so we expanded on that conversation, Tommy, and it was like, well, we’re never going to say that to you, because we’re going to have you invested appropriately. And guess what? If your net worth goes up 3X, 5X, or 7X, that was probably through no fault of our own, because guess what the market does seven out of 10 times? Goes up and to the right. So that just means we’re not spending our money. If we’re going to 7X your net worth, it just means we’re not spending your money, and maybe I’ve done a bad job helping you see what’s possible in your financial plan. So that person led with investments, led with increasing your net worth.
And this is a person that was found through a very sought-after search tool. I’m not going to name what search tool it was, but it was found through a local community who taught a class, who said you should go here online, and then all of a sudden we’re leading with investments. Not great. Leading with relationships, leading with planning, leading with taxes, leading with all those things, and then controlling what you can control.
That being said, let’s head to number one. So audience, hopefully this was fun. Let’s lead back to number one, Tommy, which is 10 things to vet before hiring a financial advisor. Number one: verify their regulatory record Form ADV. Alpha Delta Victor.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, I think you get this before you start a relationship with an advisor. It’s a lot. It can be good bedtime reading material, but there’s a lot of good information out there inside of an ADV, and I think many people are probably unaware of it, probably don’t know until it gets put in front of them before or as they sign a contract. So it’s questionable as to how much you pay attention to it. Some folks are very diligent and informed and certainly aware of it. But for most people, I really think you should write this down: Form ADV.
I think if you Google it, it should take you to that, or put “SEC ADV lookup,” and that will take you to the SEC’s website—I think it’s the IAPD, some acronym website, but it’ll take you to the SEC’s website where you can look it up. So you could Google or look it up on the SEC’s website for Mason & Associates LLC. It’ll have us on there, have our address of record. You pull it up, and you can see all kinds of things about us: How much assets do we have? How many employees do we have? When did we start business? You can look up on FINRA BrokerCheck: do we have any complaints out there about us? Form ADV Part 2A will tell you about the services and how we bill. Part 2B will tell you about the people in the firm. So there’s just a lot of great information out there.
I think if you just start there: one, if somebody’s fraudulent, they probably don’t exist there, and that alone could be a pretty quick break—like, “I can’t find them; that’s concerning.” Outside of that, you can actually then go read about them and find out quite a bit. Here’s an idea: today with AI, these are all public documents. I’m sure you could download it, throw it into a ChatGPT or Claude or your AI of choice, and have it summarize it for you.
John Mason: It’s a really good point, Tommy. I think you hit on these, but how they’re compensated (fee-only versus hybrid), assets under management, and number of families served. Yeah, I think that’s a big one. Number of families served: it’s like, okay, there’s five advisors and a couple of younger or associate advisors. How many families? What’s the ratio? We say we work with clients that are near retirement with a million or more in assets. Well, you can go to our ADV and look at the families, divide it into the assets that the ADV says we’re managing, and see that’s true. And you can see that we do hold to somewhere between 70 and 100 relationships per advisor. So I think all that’s helpful. If you had one advisor and 700 clients, that may be a little scary, right?
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah. Well, at best, we have service tiers going on there where 500 or 600 of those people aren’t getting real service, and 100 are actually getting a relationship.
John Mason: The first thing I do for ADV as well, and there’s also a Form CRS, if the audience couldn’t tell by the way Tommy talked about all this, he’s our chief compliance officer. So good on you, my man, for taking on that responsibility.
Tommy Blackburn: It’s important. We don’t love compliance, but it’s an important function of a firm. It’s important protection for folks, so we take compliance seriously. I don’t know that I’ll forever be the chief compliance officer, but I think for the foreseeable future, certainly. And we have a great team with a compliance culture. So hopefully that’s encouraging to everybody. We are compliant, we take it seriously, and we bring other resources to bear.
Didn’t plan on going down this path, John, but just in case anybody’s curious: we have outside counsel who helps with the business, but also helps with our entire compliance program. It’s a very symbiotic relationship to help us stay on top of things. So we bring in experts where we need to, and we’re exploring some additional technology to bring in there as well. So I guess to John’s point, if a firm, maybe to bring it back, like, who’s the CCO? Who here is speaking compliance amongst you?
John Mason: Yeah, and also the Form CRS—the government mandated that as of sometime in the last three to 10 years, I don’t remember when. But it’s supposed to be like a consolidated summary of everything that’s in your ADV Part 2A and 2B. And I think it’s mandated that it can only be two pages, if I’m not mistaken.
Tommy Blackburn: That sounds correct. That’s certainly one where we rely on that outside counsel. But it is to try to boil things down a little bit more, and it has questions like, “How am I compensated? What are some conflicts of interest?” So it tries to pull out some key pieces there.
John Mason: And I don’t know if it’s true—maybe you know as our chief compliance officer—but for me, maybe I shouldn’t say for any firm who’s credible, maybe that’s too far, but I feel like if you are an SEC-registered investment advisor, you likely have your ADV Part 2A, 2B, CRS, and privacy policy readily available on your website. It shocks me how many websites I go to that I don’t see it or I can’t find it, and then I wonder why. Are they even registered? Are they a life insurance-only company? Are they behind the times? Do you know? Is it a requirement? I think it has to be there.
Tommy Blackburn: I think it may be. We certainly put it there. I know you have to make it available to clients. One of the ways of doing that is through having it on your website, and when there are material changes, you have to get it in front of them through another method. So I don’t want to get too much into requirements. I know we’re doing what we’re supposed to do. That’s kind of where I live. Once I know we’re doing what we need to do, I don’t necessarily revisit it over and over.
But I agree: I look for this on other advisors’ websites, too, like what’s in their disclosures. Because I know I can learn a lot about somebody, and if I don’t find it there, that’s odd to me. Or if it’s buried, that’s odd. And then I go to the SEC website to try to look a little further to see if I can find it. And if I can’t find anything, well, then I pretty much have dismissed you as not legitimate. Now, maybe there are some exceptions. I’m just telling you how I think.
John Mason: I agree. And further, audience, it gets confusing if it’s not on the website. There’s all sorts of things—like you’re registered as this, but you’re doing a DBA as that. So it can get complicated, and maybe it could get confusing. Like, do you look up Mason? Do you look up Mason A-N-D Associates, or Mason ampersand Associates? So in our opinion, you should just have it on your website.
Point two: understand where your money will actually be held. Without spending a ridiculous amount of time on this topic, there are a few major players and custodians, Tommy, that you would expect your advisor to say where the assets are held. Axos Advisor Services is a big custodian where we have our client dollars. There’s the behemoth of Charles Schwab. There’s Fidelity. There’s Pershing. Altruist is another one. So there are not a ton of players in the space, but if the advisor or the firm says, “This is where your money’s going to be held,” your first instinct should be to locate the custodian and understand where and how your money’s going to be held. Will you have access to it? Will you be able to view it? Will your investments be publicly traded? Is there any sort of surrender charge, lockup period, or black box that you should be aware of?
Where you really get into issues here, Tommy, is that the only check people would ever write to us is if they were paying us to deliver a financial plan or paying us a monthly fee. If we were to say, “Roll over your Thrift Savings Plan and make it payable to Joe Jones,” or “make it payable to Mason & Associates,” that would be a red flag, because the rollover check should be made payable to the custodian for the benefit of the client. So certainly with a major custodian, the custodian should hold the assets, generate the statements, and hopefully generate performance reporting for you as well. The advisor should have nothing to do with statement generation or performance reporting. That should all be handled by outside services.
Tommy Blackburn: Yeah, and that’s how you avoid what happened in the past, and why custody is such a big issue. What I’m thinking of is Bernie Madoff, and I’m sure others before and after him: where is the money actually held? We have a third-party, qualified custodian—meaning that they’re qualified with the SEC to be a custodian—that generates the statements. It’s a check, right? So it’s not Mason saying, “Here’s what your accounts did.” Our custodian, Axos Advisor Services, says, “Here’s what you own. Here’s what they did. Here’s what’s happening here.” And the accounts are in your name.
Some people sometimes do strange things where the naming conventions get a little odd. That to me is questionable, although sometimes it seems to just be required. What I’m thinking about, John, is sometimes these annuity products seem to get a little odd with some of the firms out there. They’re big enough that I’m sure, or I like to believe that the custody issue there is not an issue. They’re not in somebody else’s name, but it tends to be in the firm’s name. But they’re huge. Anyway, we don’t do that. An independent third-party custodian in your name is a nice check for you. So if somebody says, “Send it to my account, send it to something you’ve never heard of, do a wire,” red flags should be going up. And we should also be able to see this in the ADV as to who they custody with and what the custodians are.
John Mason: We’re going to combine points three and four into a single topic. I love these. Points three and four are: look beyond reviews, and do they teach or do they just sell? Take it away.
Tommy Blackburn: So I would probably start with: do they teach or do they just sell? We’ve kind of hit some points there already about leading with investments versus leading with you. We like to believe we’ve got a lot of content out there, and when we work with clients, a lot of the strategic thinking and discussions that happen are based on education, knowledge, applying it to your situation, and collaboration. So again, it’s very much about you and your plan, what makes sense for you, and adjusting it as we go based on what’s important to you. It’s not about, “I’ve got this thing that I really want you to participate in or essentially put your money into.” It’s not about positioning the product or positioning the investments. It’s about positioning you first, educating around the strategies we’re thinking about, and then putting the tools around all of that. So that’s how I would position that point.
John Mason: Yeah. One of our favorite sayings, Tommy, is: we speak your language, not ours.
Tommy Blackburn: So you don’t have to speak ours.
John Mason: Yeah. And that means we’re going to help educate. We’ve said things are what they seem at Mason & Associates. We’re here to support, empower, educate, and motivate you to make positive changes in your financial plan. Clients are hiring us not for investment performance; they’re hiring us because we can unpack tax law, help you through retirement, and share decades of experience as clients navigate retirement. I mean, we’re not vacation planners, but at the end of the day, I can count how many clients have said, “What are your clients’ favorite vacations, and where should I go?” Me being able to share that with other families is valuable.
So there’s so much more to the relationship than investment performance or returns. It is the education component and the motivation, but also us sharing our life experiences, which, at almost 39 years old, we’re better at now. We’re in our prime. You and I are in our prime to deliver massive value to clients because we actually have life experience to back up the education. So yeah, do they teach or sell? And then that also looks at: do they produce content? Obviously, that’s where we excel, Tommy.
Tommy Blackburn: Yes. I love it. A decade of public content is a whole lot harder to do than getting a bunch of five-star reviews out there. Thankfully, we’re proud, thankful, and humbled that we have as many positive Google reviews as we have out there. We certainly hope those continue to be earned and increase, but that is probably easier to replicate than 10 years of content. Our firm has been around doing a radio show, putting blogs out, giving seminars, and now a podcast and YouTube. I think there’s just a long history there, and it’s around education about positioning things that way.
I don’t want to completely slam new firms—just because you’re a new firm and don’t have a history doesn’t mean you can’t be successful. I’m not saying that. But it certainly is a proof statement if you have a decade of content in many different channels with a consistent message. I think that helps validate and verify who you’re dealing with.
John Mason: And Google is good, ChatGPT is good, Gemini is good. So when you look for financial planners that specialize with federal employees, ideally we would show up based on the content that we’re producing, the Google reviews, and having the masonllc.net domain since 2003. There’s a lot that goes into establishing the credibility of the firm.
Tommy, I will echo your point: that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do business with a new firm; it just means you need to fully understand all these questions that we’re going through. We kind of get a pass in that we’re a big firm that’s been doing this, that has a reputation, brand awareness, and strong referrals. So we could maybe not score as high on some of these and still be okay, but that’s not the position we’re taking. We want to score high on all of these because we want to continue to grow the firm and serve more people.
So look beyond the reviews, look for educational content, and ultimately, the investments are a tool. If we’re selling investments, that’s not good. We should be selling the education, the empowerment, and the entire experience.
I think we’ve hit on investments. Do they lead with investments? That would be a gigantic red flag. Let’s just summarize that to say: if anybody’s telling you they can beat TSP, they’re probably misinformed, wrong, or inflating the truth of the experience that you may or may not receive with them. TSP is essentially free. If I buy the TSP for you and we charge you a fee, you’re going to get a lower return than the C Fund in TSP because that’s free and we’re not. So the value statement is not “we’re going to beat the market.” It’s not “we’re going to 7X your net worth.” Like I said to the client today, Tommy: 20 or 30 years from now when you pass away, wherever you’re going, I don’t want you to say, “Boy, it was a great decision to hire Mason because we 7X’d our net worth.” I hope that you think, “Boy, we lived a great retirement. It was stress-free. We did things that we would have never otherwise done. We donated money to charity. We helped our family. We had confidence. I loved my spouse even more than I had before. When I died, my surviving spouse was taken care of because we hired Mason to do that.” Wherever you’re going one day, that’s what I hope people are saying about us—not, “Boy, those guys were good money managers.”
Tommy Blackburn: I love it. Confidence, peace of mind, living life. Yeah, that’s what we’re hoping for, and to be a part of it.
John Mason: How about, Tommy, do they have a repeatable process?
Tommy Blackburn: We kind of spoke to this already, but we certainly think we do. It evolves over time, but what is your new client experience? We have that ironed out. We’ve talked about it in many episodes; it’s on our website. What is your strategic planning meeting season? Essentially, what does your client service calendar look like? What services do you have? How do you go about it? That’s just good business that people should have in a professional firm. Here is the process of how this works: it’s customized to you, but it’s also repeatable.
John Mason: Yes. New client process.
Tommy Blackburn: What should my expectations be?
John Mason: New client process and recurring client process: being able to articulate how you’re going to add value initially and ongoing. What I’ve seen 17 years in this business is that people can always lead with the sizzle about how they’re going to make your life better today. It’s a lot harder to communicate how they’re going to add the sizzle for 15, 17, or 25 years, and I think that’s what sets us apart there, too.
I wrote down a bonus question that you can ask that we’ll talk about later, but I wrote down another bonus one: Is their phone number on the website, and do they actually answer the phone when you call? Because we do during normal business hours.
Tommy Blackburn: During normal business hours, or
John Mason: During normal business hours. Yes. At least at this point, we don’t text our clients. We will converse via email or phone call. Not saying all texting is bad, but at this moment, we don’t do that. But I think a bonus question is: call the office during normal business hours and see how their team answers the phone. Maybe see if the advisor is the one answering the phone—that could be a red flag, too.
So, do they have a repeatable process? We’ve talked about slowing down versus speeding up. The firm, Tommy, or the advisor or the team—whoever’s fielding these calls—should be able to really easily articulate where the firm specializes or where they add massive value, as well as the fees that they charge. We believe that we do our best work for people who are in or near retirement with $1 million or more of assets. We do not typically work with college loan forgiveness. We don’t typically work with 32-year-olds in biotech or SpaceX. That’s just not what we do. In or near retirement, $1 million or more, typically federal employees: that’s where we live, breathe, and do our best work. It is possible to have multiple different types of clients, but that does make serving them really hard. So we should understand the fee, understand the ideal client, and really anybody at the firm should be able to articulate those.
Tommy Blackburn: Yes, completely agree. I think you answered them well. Some of this, again, is also in those regulatory filings. So when you look at their brochures and their ADVs, it will also cover this. But yeah, anybody should be able to articulate this.
These are also—maybe to bring us to another point somewhere on this list—professional credentials. Because I think about some of those organizations out there, John, that have “ask an advisor this,” and one of them is: How do they get paid? What’s their ideal client? What does the service look like? So there are other resources you can go to. I think NAPFA, the fee-only organization out there, has a brochure like that. CFP probably has something like that for clients or prospects as well. So you can get some of this information in multiple places or be prompted to ask it. So I completely agree.
John Mason: I guess the last one before we get to the bonus is: trust, but verify. I think we’ve kind of talked about that—looking in totality at the entire experience of dealing with a firm. Everything from how they communicate orally, in writing, on their podcast or YouTube channel, on their website, and how their team answers the phone. You obviously need to look at the reviews, the ADVs, and the entire scope of things we’ve talked about. But don’t turn a blind eye to, “Well, this just doesn’t feel right,” or “This doesn’t seem like a good experience.” I know our team provides a world-class customer service experience. Our operations team upfront has almost more interaction with our clients than we do because they’re answering the phone, generating service forms, helping with beneficiary changes, and doing notaries and medallion signature guarantees. That’s all the kind of stuff that we offer in-house as part of a total relationship, and we certainly don’t want to turn a blind eye to that.
Tommy Blackburn: Absolutely. I love it. Really, it’s this list, and then take it in totality. Professional organizations have resources out there, but I think that’s another one: Are they credentialed? What does their work history look like? It’s not to say that one thing knocks somebody out or elevates them completely; to your point, it’s the totality of the situation. Perhaps they lack in some areas because they’re a newer firm, but if they can make up for it in all the other areas, that’s wonderful. So look at the totality. Do they have CFPs? Are there any other credentials on there? Looking at all of these things is helpful. Wouldn’t look at that on its own; I’d take it in totality.
John Mason: The last thing I was going to say on that: you made me think about NAPFA, XY Planning Network, CFP, and Financial Planning Association. Just because you’re a member of these doesn’t mean that you’re somehow more credentialed than other people. But to me, John and Tommy are members of XYPN, NAPFA, FPA, and CFPs, and we’ve been guests on other people’s podcasts, keynote speakers, and featured places. Even being featured, I don’t think we’ve been in The Wall Street Journal, but we’ve been on CNN Money and CBS News. We’ve been featured in some other articles, too, which is kind of cool. So even outside of the stuff we’re producing, we’ve been pulled in or asked to be a part of what other people are producing, which I think adds another layer of credibility. An advisor or a team who has enough industry clout to be worth hearing on other mediums is another good sign—a pat on our back, obviously, but another good sign.
Tommy Blackburn: Circling back, one of the biggest ones is: what’s that gut feeling? If you don’t have a good gut feeling about it, probably just go the other way, because maybe it’s not going to be a good relationship even if it’s legitimate. If somebody just rubs you the wrong way, just go a different direction.
So you already have one bonus question. The other one is—we love this: What if something happens to you? You’ll see that in some of those questionnaires from NAPFA and CFP. Essentially: okay, John or Tommy, one of you gets hit by a bus, or something unfortunate befalls you—what then?
John Mason: It’s very important that there be a succession plan that is communicated and understandable for the firm and for the client. We just had some social media posts about this where you, Ben, and I were all approved preferred best for life insurance recently. We’re bragging about that—one, because we’re in good health, but two, because we’re doing the right things to protect our spouses, our business partners, and our clients. We’re continuing to develop a pipeline. We’ve hired Kyle and Colby, and we’re going to continue hiring.
The Mason entity—we may be the face of the firm, Tommy and me, but the firm is much bigger than us, and it’ll continue to be bigger than us and live on after us because we’re doing all the right things. Would the firm be hurt if we went away? Yes. Will all of our clients be able to receive service if Tommy and I weren’t here tomorrow? The answer is yes, because we’ve worked really hard at that.
Now, there are great solo practitioners or solo shops that provide really great service that don’t have a succession plan, or at least an internal succession plan. So we need to understand what that risk means. There are some solos who have a succession plan, but maybe it would be a firm like Mason, where Joe across the street is serving 70 to 100 clients well and says, “John, Tommy, will you take my firm if I die?” and we say, “Yes.” That’s a version of a succession plan, as well. So you just need to know: what happens if the founders or key people go away? Is the business going to continue to exist? We have operating agreements, insurance policies, and a whole system around making sure that this company doesn’t go away.
Tommy Blackburn: Absolutely. And like you said, there are situations out there where I would be concerned with those solos if there’s no answer. There should at least be a, “Yes, that is a risk. Here’s how it works,” and hopefully something put in place where it goes to another firm or someone identified, or “I’m in the process of vetting this out to put something in place.” But if there is no answer of any kind, I would be concerned.
I love that, too, John, because what we are trying to build really is something that we hope will continue to have a stronger and stronger foundation that’ll run into the future, continue to serve more families, and not be dependent upon any one person—essentially, to outlast us. I don’t know the future, but that’s what we’re trying to do.
John Mason: I agree. And we have a physical presence in Newport News, Virginia. We primarily meet with our clients virtually—like 99% of our meetings are virtual for efficiency and what we believe is a better client experience. But our clients that live in Newport News, Virginia Beach, Chesapeake, or Richmond can come shake our hand in person if they want to. We meet them at the office, say hello, and make sure that we’re real and legitimate. We get that the world’s scary, and at least at this point, we have a physical office. I may have come to the conclusion over the last three days during this office renovation that I’m not capable of working from home, so we may always have an office! But for what it’s worth, we have an office. It’s 2 Bayport Way, Suite 110 in Newport News, Virginia, and we have live people that work here every day—minus Fridays and when we’re under construction. So yes, we have a physical presence. That’s not the end-all, be-all either, but it is another thing that you could look for: Do they have a physical presence somewhere?
Tommy Blackburn: I agree. I think we’ve covered it well. There are certainly more ways that you can dive into somebody, but hopefully we’ve given you at least 10 plus some, which should be a good start. Yes, we check these things, and we’re proud of that, but it’s from our hearts and our concern: we don’t want to see anybody get taken advantage of. So we do hope this is genuinely helpful to people to prevent harm from happening.
John Mason: A good action item, Tommy, is that we can’t help everybody. Maybe you’re listening to this episode and you don’t fit now, or maybe you’ll never fit the “in or near retirement with $1 million or more of assets” criteria. This is a good way to vet other planners. It’s also a good way. You could send this to your friends and say, “Hey, if you’re looking at hiring a financial planner—they could work at Booz Allen or a local hospital—this episode wasn’t federal employee-specific; it was ‘how do I get help, and how do I vet potential people to help me?’” So this could go across the country to anybody that you care about who’s looking for guidance in selecting a financial planner. So like we always say, you can be somebody’s hero by sharing this content. Tommy, I think that’s a good takeaway for our audience here.
Tommy Blackburn: Absolutely. Well, I think another great episode, John.
John Mason: Thanks, man. Audience, please do all the things for us: like, subscribe, hit that bell notification, continue to share this episode and every episode, and a big thank you. We know you’re doing it—we’re seeing the activity. Reminder: you can send your questions to masonfp@masonllc.net or connect with us on LinkedIn.
Remember, we’re financial planners first, and we do this content creation second. We hope you leave this episode and every episode feeling more educated, more empowered, and more motivated to take control of your financial plan. Thank you for hanging out with us on another episode of the Federal Employee Financial Planning Podcast.
The topics discussed on this podcast represent our best understanding of federal benefits and are for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be construed as investment, financial planning, or other professional advice.
We encourage you to consult with the office of personnel management and one or more professional advisors before taking any action based on the information presented.
