[00:01:11] Larry Heller: That’s really the crux of what we do. so, and he sat in with meetings before, so if he wasn’t really sure, I think there’s a lot of people out there that really don’t know what a financial advisor does. And, and a lot of people are financial advisors, whether you work for a big brokerage firm or you’re independent and you work for, so there’s a lot of different. 

[00:01:29] Larry Heller: [00:01:30] Different meanings and a lot of different ways that people work. So, uh, I think today we’re gonna kind of go through from a high level of what we can, what we can do, and, uh, got a couple graphs we’re gonna throw in to see, make it a little bit, a little bit easier. 

[00:01:44] Matt Halloran: All right. Well take, take it away. I, you know what, Larry, I’ve known you for a long time. 

[00:01:49] Matt Halloran: I can’t wait to hear how you describe, uh, everything that you do. I, I, I guarantee you, I’m gonna take some good stuff home from this.  

[00:01:55] Larry Heller: So, the first graph. right here kind of really gives a little bit of a high level of what, what we do. And you can see the bottom of this triangle is financial planning.  

[00:02:05] Larry Heller: And that’s really the crux, really the starting point. And we’re gonna go through some of that a little bit more detail. But before you can kind of really invest any money, you’re really gonna need to kind of put a game plan together. You need to build a foundation of the house, before we even know where to go.  

[00:02:21] Larry Heller: If somebody came to me and said, Larry, here’s a million dollars. Go invest it. I wouldn’t know what to do unless I went through kind of questions and asking them and digging what their goals are, what the time horizon is, and a lot of things which we’ll cover in a little bit. So really what we start is really the planning. 

[00:02:37] Larry Heller: Just like the person I just told you about, he is looking to retire and create something and determine how much money that he can spend during retirement, how much he can. Buy a second home for, uh, so all those type of things, although, uh, go into the financial planning and that’s really where we start. 

[00:02:54] Larry Heller: We’ll go through the financial planning and the cash flow and all of that before we even [00:03:00] talk about investments. but once the financial. Planning is done and put in place to get started. And that’s an interactive, and that’ll change over time. And we’re continuing monitor that and looking at that. 

[00:03:11] Larry Heller: Then we start putting together the investments. and we kind of call the first level of investments, really the traditional investments, cash, uh, stocks through ETFs and mutual funds and bonds. And how much of each goes into each particular. Bucked reservoir. And that’s, a lot of that is based upon the time horizon and the financial plan that we’ve done. 

[00:03:32] Larry Heller: and then on top of that, now what, what is, what was becoming a little bit bigger, allocation for us, our alternative investments. And we’ll do a separate, we’ve done some podcasts on that before. I’ll mention a little bit. We’ve done a podcast on the private credit, but here are certain investments on the alternatives, which is a, a growing market. 

[00:03:51] Larry Heller: there’s a hundred mil, a hundred million dollar, businesses, 90% of them, a hundred million dollar revenue businesses, 90% of them are private. So there’s a lot of opportunities now coming out in the alternative space, and they’re not always more risky. There’s some that actually are less risky. So that’s kind of the big picture, the planning, the investments, the traditional investments, and then the. 

[00:04:14] Larry Heller: And then the alternative investments. So that’s kind of a big picture. Now we’ll kind of drop down and talk a little bit about some of the other specifics that, that we do and we, and where, where we start. So let’s start with the [00:04:30] financial, the financial planning. What’s on the, what’s on the bottom there? 

[00:04:34] Larry Heller: So let me just share my screen on this one. this is our, process and the financial planning. And we’ll go, we go into each one of these a lot more detail when you come and meet us. But look right in the middle, right in the big circle right there. That’s your vision, your goals. So when someone comes in, we start talking about what’s important to you. 

[00:04:57] Larry Heller: paint me a picture of where your life is gonna be. Five years. Oh, you’re looking for retirement. What are you gonna do in retirement? How is that gonna work? what are some of the things that you want to do? Is there anything important about money that you want to do? People start opening up and talking and everybody is different. 

[00:05:12] Larry Heller: Some people they wanna. Basically, um, spend all their money. Some people want to take care of their grandchildren’s college education. Other people wanna open up a charitable foundation. Everyone has different goals, and as they’re accumulating money, they also have different time horizons. I wanna stop working by this particular time, or if they’ve gone through a life transition since a divorce or a widow. 

[00:05:37] Larry Heller: They have different visions and different goals. And that’s really the crux of the planning. And then around it are all the different processes that we’ll do, the cashflow analysis, the risk management, tax planning, investment management, estate planning, and retirement. And again, each one, each whole process we’ve done podcasts on before. 

[00:05:57] Larry Heller: Just diving deeper in there. So [00:06:00] this is what kind of explains. our financial planning, and then we’ll go through each one of these areas. And Matt, I can’t tell you that when we go through with particular clients and we do all this, and a lot of times they’re saying, wow, my financial advantage just talks to me about how much their investment can earn and what the performance is. 

[00:06:19] Larry Heller: And, and we’re providing all this, all this in our process as a wealth manager.  

[00:06:24] Matt Halloran: Well, I, I wanna pause you there because you just said something that we really do need to highlight. You know, one, one of the other things that we’ve learned 150 episodes in is, is you have been, you know, really on this podcasting and content creation journey is what you do is so different than the other advisors down the street. 

[00:06:43] Matt Halloran: And you just kind of glossed over that a little bit. So can we pause for a moment and just. That circle that you just shared on your screen. Mm-Hmm. And by the way, for those of you who are listening to this audio only, uh, we’ll, we’ll have those slides in the show notes for you. But when you talk about really starting with your visions and goals, you’re not talking about what you’re, you know, what a lot of advisors are talking about, which is to try to eke out X amount extra and be, you know, with different stocks and bonds and mutual fund recommendations. 

[00:07:11] Matt Halloran: You’re talking about real financial planning.  

[00:07:14] Larry Heller: We’re talking about, you know, what’s, what’s important becoming, you know, relatable because that’s what they wanna do. I mean, the whole show is called Life Unlimited, so we wanna kind of get to them that my goal is that they, that each one of our clients can really enjoy life, not worry [00:07:30] about the investment side, and create a strategy and create a planning. 

[00:07:34] Larry Heller: That they can, if they’re working, work, and then enjoy their family and make sure that they’re comfortable, that their a plan is in place, that they could do that. Matt, I can’t tell you how many people come into us and they, they want it, they say they wanna retire, they wanna buy a second home, but we can’t afford it. 

[00:07:49] Larry Heller: We can’t do this. And when we go through all the numbers. Their eyes open up and say, I didn’t know that I can be able to do that. You would think it’d be just the opposite, that people would think they wanna spend more than they really can. But it’s not that people are nervous. So unless they see the numbers here, they can go through the rest of their lives and sometimes in retirement, not doing the things that they wanna do, not traveling, not buying that second house, not spending time with their grandkids because they don’t think they have that kind of money. 

[00:08:20] Larry Heller: And that’s the whole idea of Life Unlimited. And that’s the whole idea of what we do. And that’s the reason why we do that. And of course, yes, you need the investments, you need the tax planning, you need the retirement planning for you to get to that stage.  

[00:08:33] Matt Halloran: I. So what are, what are some in this, in this process? 

[00:08:35] Matt Halloran: You had just said, you know, Hey, can I buy a second home or do I have enough to retire? What are some of the other questions that you generally hear in this introductory meeting?  

[00:08:44] Larry Heller: Well, it’s interesting, so Reddit did a, uh, did a whole analysis about what are the, the, the top questions that they see on their website about people, what they’re looking for, and it’s not. 

[00:08:56] Larry Heller: You know, how can I make more money from my investments? Well, a [00:09:00] couple of them kind of hit me off the top is, you know, what do I do with an expected inheritance? can I buy a vacation home, just like I said up front with my client? That’s what a lot of people are thinking out there. They want to be able to, to do that. 

[00:09:13] Larry Heller: the second question is, what might a safe retirement look like? Again, the same type of thing. That’s what people wanna know. They wanna know if they can enjoy retirement. They want to know if they can buy a se, buy a second home. and then another question is, what benefits could I get if we combine our retirement accounts and business accounts into one place? 

[00:09:32] Larry Heller: We’ll talk about that on a. Future podcast. Mm-Hmm. About that. But the first two kind of hit home, and that’s kind of what we do and what we create. And that’s what people, that’s what people are looking for, and that’s what we’re going to provide.  

[00:09:45] Matt Halloran: So financial planning is at the bottom of this, this Heller pyramid. 

[00:09:49] Matt Halloran: The second is traditional investments. Where do we go from here?  

[00:09:52] Larry Heller: Yeah. So the first thing that we’re, that we, when we do, when we’re gonna look at invest, is talk about some of the things that we talked about in the, um, discovery, in the planning. But we wanna know, okay, what is your time horizon? What is your tax bracket? 

[00:10:07] Larry Heller: What are your liquidity needs? What are your risk is your risk tolerance, which is such a big one. ’cause if somebody comes in they say, well, I’m very aggressive, or I’m very conservative. It’s so nebulous. It’s so different than than everyone else. So we have a 25 question questionnaire that really. 

[00:10:27] Larry Heller: Determines what their risk is. And we’ve been using [00:10:30] that questionnaire for 20 years and it has been extremely accurate. ’cause we know if we go outside of some of these answers here, when we’re putting together the traditional investments, they won’t stay the cost. So even though we’ve come up with somebody and they showed us, you should be kind of conservative and only have, let’s say. 

[00:10:49] Larry Heller: 40% of your money in things that fluctuates on the stocks, but they wanted to be more aggressive and they went higher, uh, because that’s what they wanted. But yet when we went through some of those dips, they panicked and they were, they, they got really, really nervous and they didn’t stay the course. And what we wanna make sure that if there’s anything invested in things are gonna fluctuate. 

[00:11:08] Larry Heller: ’cause the stock market will fluctuate over times. It will go down a. Over short periods of time, we want you to be able to stay the course. So knowing all those inputs and then knowing the time horizon, when are they gonna need the money? Are they gonna need the money to buy a house in a year from now? 

[00:11:26] Larry Heller: We had a client come in the other the other day and they’re thinking about buying a house, but they wanna make a shortly, but they wanna make more money than just keeping the money in the. The bank. And I try to explain to ‘em, you don’t wanna take that risk because if we go through one of those timeframes and nobody knows when it’s gonna be, when we go through a, correction, you don’t want that to be down when you want to go ahead and buy, buy a home.  

[00:11:48] Larry Heller: So that kind of gives us the, framework for, to determine how much money do you need In short, liquid cash, how much can you put in? Fixed income, how much can you put into the, [00:12:00] the stock market so we can create a diversified portfolio that’ll maximize your return and minimize your risk over the course of your life. 

[00:12:09] Matt Halloran: Okay.  

[00:12:09] Matt Halloran: Alright.  

[00:12:10] Matt Halloran: anything else on traditional investments? Uh.  

[00:12:12] Larry Heller: No, I mean, again, we have numerous podcasts. Yeah. Go into the 150. You can go find some of the podcasts before we have them sorted on our YouTube page. Yeah. Or you can go into our, uh, online to, to listen them to, uh, so we have, we all have plenty of that o of them on the traditional side. 

[00:12:29] Larry Heller: so now we’ve kind of like added over the last few years some of the al what we’re calling alternative investments. Uh, we just rereleased a podcast that we did a while back on private credit. so the question now becomes, is. Right. Why go into the alternative investments and who are they for? 

[00:12:48] Larry Heller: As I mentioned, wait,  

[00:12:49] Matt Halloran: hold on, hold on. Can, can you define, I’m sorry. Uh, I think people understand the definition of traditional investments. Can you actually define, uh, alternative investments? I.  

[00:12:58] Larry Heller: So there, there, there. So a traditional investments is, is something that, let’s say is on the, on the market. So if you invest in something, there is a price that you can get anytime during the day. 

[00:13:10] Larry Heller: It’s totally liquid. You can buy, you can sell that. So a mutual fund, an ETF, A treasury bond, a money market account, a cd. Those are all traditionals where you can see the investment, you can see it, anytime by going into this, the system. and there’s always a [00:13:30] market for that. So that’s really the traditional, the alternatives are something kind of outside. 

[00:13:36] Larry Heller: Outside of that, it’s really investing in what we’re not calling private equity private companies or private credit. So like I said, off the top of the show, there’s. 90% of companies that have have over a hundred million are private. So how do you invest in some of these private companies and not companies that are just listed on the stock exchanges, and how do you take advantage of some of these and some of the returns that you can get? 

[00:14:02] Larry Heller: I. So there, there is, there are certain requirements, especially on the pri, you know, private credit, private equity, uh, net worth and credit and eligibility. So there are some other caveats that you have to have. and it’s not for everybody. Some of these are not. Totally liquid. You may have a longer term, a lock in period, or you may have a one year lock in with a small penalty, or you may not be able to get out of the investment on a one day notice. 

[00:14:31] Larry Heller: It may, you may be only be able to get out of it. Orderly. So there’s a little bit, you know, a little bit, uh, of a difference there. Some of them may have more risks. Some of them we think have less risk. So they’re not public investments, they’re private investments and they’re not offered to everybody. So, but working with, you know, firms like ours, we can, we have access to these. 

[00:14:55] Larry Heller: Private equity and private credit deals and that we can get a little bit more [00:15:00] return, but also diversify a little bit from the traditional investments. So the private credit, like I said, we just did a whole podcast on that. currently the rates of return are higher than what, what are sitting in the money market for a little bit more, a little bit more risk. 

[00:15:16] Larry Heller: So listen to the private credit podcast to learn more about that and to see if that’s a right investment for you.  

[00:15:22] Matt Halloran: Alright, with all of this said, with the three, you know, tier that you’re talking about, uh, your process, who do you work with?  

[00:15:32] Larry Heller: Yeah, so a a, as I mentioned before, we’re working with people that kind of wanna, have a financial plan, a game plan. 

[00:15:38] Larry Heller: A lot of times, a lot of times it’s, it’s a life transition. Like I said, closing in, in retirement, but not necessarily, but people that’s looking for advice. People that have goals and objectives and want to figure what’s the best way of getting there, not only just investing it, but how do I maximize my, or minimize my taxes? 

[00:15:59] Larry Heller: Because the great to, to make money on your investments, but if you have to pay a lot of taxes on that, it’s not what you earn, it’s what you keep. So we all also coordinate. Anything that we do or coordinating that with your, with your account. So the, the people that we’re trying to, to help are people that are looking for some advice on the planning side, whatever that, whatever that may be. 

[00:16:23] Larry Heller: we have a few different certified financial planners. One of them works a lot with our, uh, with [00:16:30] unfortunately women, widows and, and divorce, retirement clients, even business owners need some, some planning. We’re gonna do the next podcast on some of the business owners and some of the, the specifics, the specific side by that. 

[00:16:42] Larry Heller: But, uh, again, a big, big portion of our clients are those that are. Closing in on retirement, transitioning to retirement, because what we found when you are in retirement, it’s a whole different mindset than if you are before retirement. So your investment strategy should change, but also your risk now may need to change because now there’s no more money coming in the door. 

[00:17:06] Larry Heller: So you may be a little bit more conservative, and not want to hold the course. So I again, and. It doesn’t make a difference how much money that you have when there’s no more coming in, and we go through these ups and downs. How do you protect yourself from that so you don’t have to worry about those up and downs? 

[00:17:22] Larry Heller: We’ve done another podcast on our reservoir strategy, which really talks about, really talks about that. So, you know, those are the kind of clients that we’re, we’re looking, we’re looking for. we work on a fee only basis. Our minimum is. a million dollars. A lot of our clients probably in the three to $30 million range as far as net worth. 

[00:17:46] Larry Heller: so those are kind of the clients that we can help. They have planning issues and, uh, looking for some help along those areas.  

[00:17:52] Matt Halloran: Alright. You just talked about fees. Uh, so do, how deeply do you want to go into that on today’s show?  

[00:17:58] Larry Heller: Yeah, so I’m, I’m gonna touch on [00:18:00] this because we talked to our prospect and we started to talk about what our fees were. 

[00:18:04] Larry Heller: And our fees are really trans, really transparent. We have a fee schedule. We make a, a percentage. The assets that we manage and it’s declining scale. As your assets. As your assets grow. Each quarter you, the fee comes out of your statement and you see the line. Line. I’m right on there. So we were talking to a prospect and they were deciding whether to come, you know, come aboard or not, and that, and so I asked them, you, are you with somebody? 

[00:18:29] Larry Heller: What are you paying? And they’re like. We don’t know. we looked at the statement, we couldn’t figure it out. We tried to talk to them and they said, well, you’re not paying for this. You’re paying for that. You’re paying for this. They didn’t even have an idea of what their, of what they were paying. 

[00:18:43] Larry Heller: So I’m like, well, you know, we’re clear, transparent, so you, you want to, you know, compare and do that. You can. that’s part of our strategy here is that everything is, is totally transparent. Uh, as clients do well and the assets grow, that our fee will, go up. And if we recommend a change, there’s no upfront commissions, there’s no cost. 

[00:19:07] Larry Heller: We’re recommending a change. ’cause we think it’s in your best interest.  

[00:19:10] Matt Halloran: Alright. Fiduciary. So this is a word that is thrown around all over the place and you actually talked about it at the beginning of the show. Uh, do you want to take a minute and explain what that is before we wrap up today? 

[00:19:21] Larry Heller: Yeah. So a fiduciary must give, legally must give their clients the best options available depending upon their needs and the [00:19:30] options, regardless how it affects their own bottom line. So you would think that every financial advisor is a fiduciary. And that no matter where you go, that you are gonna be working with somebody that has to do that. 

[00:19:44] Larry Heller: Well, that is not correct. Currently only banks or registered investment advisors like our firm can be fiduciaries. If you go to a big brokerage firm, they’re currently not a fiduciary. they try to get that passed a long time ago. Um, president Trump vetoed it. There’s now talk of trying to get that, again, at least for retirement accounts, why the big brokerage are fighting this. 

[00:20:08] Larry Heller: Well, they’re fighting it because some of the. Products that they want to be able to use, have higher fees than some of the other products that they may want to use. So they, and they don’t wanna have the legal liability for all of their advisors to be able to provide the best possible services and products, regardless of their own bottom line. 

[00:20:30] Larry Heller: So I always recommend whoever you’re gonna work with, ask ‘em the fiduciary question and how that would impact them.  

[00:20:37] Matt Halloran: Larry bring it home. 150 episodes in. We just did a little bit of a reset. Is there anything you’d like to say before we wrap up the show today?  

[00:20:45] Larry Heller: No ho for anyone that’s thinking about using our services or wealth manager, a financial planner. 

[00:20:53] Larry Heller: hopefully you’ve learned something about this now, but we’ve just touched the, we’ve really just touched the tip of this coming in to speak with us. [00:21:00] When we go into, we, we go into this, we’ll have a meeting and we’ll go into each one of those planning I I and explain exactly what do what we do, some of the strategies, some of the opportunities that are out there that you may or may not be even aware of. 

[00:21:14] Larry Heller: so that’s what, hopefully you get that, hopefully you get an idea of what we do, how we work, and I’ve done a pretty good job explaining that in a short podcast like this. so if you’re interested, you can, uh, go to our website, hellerwealthmanagement.com, and click and schedule a, a meeting or a call with myself or one of our advisors, or you can give us a call at (631) 248-3600. 

[00:21:38] Matt Halloran: One of the things I love about you, Larry and the firm is, is you’re constantly looking at ways to reeducate people about who you are and what you do. Because it’s important to remind people of the difference of really what life unlimited truly is supposed to be, right? It has to start with a plan. It has to start with a vision. 

[00:21:59] Matt Halloran: It has to start with what do they wanna be in this next phase in their life? You do a magnificent job of having those real conversations, which they’re not getting in other places. Alright, everybody, if you have not subscribed to the show, make sure that you do. If you know somebody who really doesn’t know really a lot about what a real financial planner is and wanted to find out what the life unlimited difference is, please make sure that you share this with them and we will have the links to all of those things that Larry just said, including the phone number in the show notes. 

[00:22:25] Matt Halloran: So for Larry Heller, this is Matt Halloran, and we’ll see you on the other side of the mic very [00:22:30] soon.