By Kurk LaLomia - Certified Financial Planner, Chartered Federal Employee Benefits Consultant, Turning Point Advisor read more about Kurt  here

As a Financial Advisor, I am often asked how I invest my own money.  The best way to describe how I handle my money is to say, “I’m All-In”.  I guarantee my strategy is not what you’d expect from someone who’s spent most of his career with Wall Street firms.  It’s been an evolution, and through that evolution, along with the school of hard knocks, I’m smarter, wiser and more educated.  It was not always this way, as I’ve made my share of costly mistakes.

All-In means I put my $$$ where my mouth is; I walk the walk and talk the talk, side by side with my clients.  My family is following the same strategies that I talk to my clients about.  I feel so strongly about the team I work with and the work we do in the areas of tax planning, insurance strategies, investments, financial planning, and other areas.

There’s more to it than the sexy, sizzling stock market that you see all over the news.  I’m talking about goal-oriented investing by way of a really well thought out financial plan.  My firm is financial planning focused with a long-term time horizon for most of our clients.  We believe everyone should have a plan, regardless of their age, net worth or stage in life.  It all starts with a plan!  It’s about goals, dreams, fears and making your investment portfolio work to solve for what’s most important in your life.

My family has gone through the same financial planning process that I recommend to my clients.  My wife and I personally went through the planning process as a client would: we dug up and dusted off all the documents our planning department needed to create our custom plan and not only did the financial plan help shape my investment strategy for the future, the experience made me a better Advisor.

At the conclusion of our planning process, we reviewed the customized recommendations and learned more about long term care, our current life insurance policies, the adequacy of our other policies – auto, homeowners, umbrella, etc., asset allocation and more.  The plan went deeper than we ever imagined and spoke to what was important to us.  This process was not the online “calculator” that is used by most other firms in an effort to simply gather new client assets.

We followed the firm’s recommendations and made some important changes.  We adjusted our life insurance policies and purchased long term care insurance – the same hybrid policies I recommend to some of my clients.  We rebalanced our portfolios to align our goals with our unique risk tolerance levels and other metrics.  We now own the same portfolios that I recommend to my clients.  Several other silos were addressed in the recommendation section of the plan, including college savings plans, debt management, our emergency savings fund, 401k & IRA contributions, etc.  I believed wholeheartedly in our process before going through it myself, but now, more than ever, I have so much confidence in our unique process and our ability to help bring you financial clarity.  My only regret is that I’d done it sooner.

I not only love the question, “where do I put my $$$”, but I’m proud to tell my clients and future clients that my family participates in the same portfolios, programs, processes, strategies, and products that I recommend.

I’m All-In and I can’t wait for you to be, too.