October 2025
Our goal with our flat-fee financial planning offering, Modearn®, is to make quality coaching more accessible for Gen Xers and Millennials throughout their wealth-building journey.
Tune in if you’re interested in…
• Learning how Modearn® makes financial planning more approachable
• Understanding how personalized financial advice and partnerships can create peace in your life
• Finding balance between saving, spending, and investing intentionally
• Accessing expert guidance without traditional barriers
Watch previous episodes here:
Ep. 159 How Do I Pay for My Child's College Education?
Ep. 158 Navigating Different Retirement Timelines
Kristin, I'm very excited for this conversation today. I feel like I get excited about all of these conversations, but this one is around Modearn®, our new service offering for sort of the high earners of the world. Because a lot of financial advisory firms require large assets under management in order to get great advice. And that was something that frustrated you sort of early on in your life and even your career here.
So launching Modearn® all of a sudden created this excitement and this energy for you to be able to work with people that didn't have large assets to turn over for management today. But we're building and saving, and we're looking for good advice. And so we're here to talk a little bit about Modearn® and share some stories about that.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to talk about it.
We've talked a little bit in other episodes that the average millennial has 30% less wealth, at age 35 than baby boomers. Cost of living, just the way that the world has changed.
But what I found so fascinating is that millennials seek financial advice at around age 29, whereas it's almost a decade earlier than Gen Xers like myself would start, around age 38, and baby boomers at age 49. Why do you think so many people wait so long to seek financial advice?
I think part of it is you don't know what you don't know, right? And we often think that, oh, we have time. No big deal. You know, I'll just continue living how I'm living and the future so far away. And then all of a sudden, the future is not so far away. And so you start thinking of, oh, man, like retirement.
How is my savings account? How is my bank account? But I think that people are starting younger because of social media. And so you're seeing a lot more ads and people talking about investing and talking about saving and making your money work for you. In fact, over the weekend, I was on Instagram and the amount of ads I mean, granted, I work in the financial industry, but the amount of ads of people who have Instagram accounts about invest investing and how to invest,
It's wild.
It is a nice thing. We've talked a number of times, you and I personally, about the lack of education in the world and how frustrating that is. I mean, they don't teach anybody how to properly manage your bank account, how to invest, you know, what type of mortgage you should get, what car insurance, health insurance, what is a 401K versus an IRA?
So all of a sudden you go through life, you get your college degree, you get your first job, and now you have to go into adulting and you don't quite know what to do. And so what's nice, at least about even though I find it frustrating, what's nice around the Instagram and the TikTok advice is if it's at least engaging people in decisions earlier, then maybe society was subject to before.
I had a meeting with a child of a client who came in because she's taking over her trust account. It's not a huge amount, but it's enough for her to start building on. And we were just having a conversation and kind of having an investing 101 conversation. She has a kid and 529 accounts came up.
She had no idea what it was, and she was just blown away. And I think often a lot of times people feel like they have to have a large amount to start putting away and to start that habit. And I told her, you know, no, you do $50 a month, just kind of start getting in that habit. But again, you don't know what you don't know.
And I think having that conversation, having the education and then just having someone to say, hey, you don't have to start huge, just start little and start making those steps is a big deal.
And that's why I think Modearn® is a really, really good platform to have these conversations.
In her defense, our industry used to have all sorts of minimums. So it hasn't been that long to where you can start small with $50 to kind of get something. I have a friend who's my age now, call it 46, but they started having kids much earlier in life and, they started saving $50 a paycheck for their child's education.
You know, they were in their early 20s. You fast forward 18 years. There was like $47,000 in the 529 plan for their kid to get started in school. So $50 every couple of weeks can add up to a lot of money with the power of investing over time.
And think of what you spend $50 on these days, right? Like, how easy is it to spend $50? And so I suggested to her to just set up automatic transfers, I said, you know, just don't go get coffee for one day a week, you know? And that adds up. And these days I think everything is quite expensive. And so $50 you spend walking out the door.
Well, I ran into you over the weekend. On Saturday. I think you know very well that the breakfast that I took home to my wife, just between the two of us, it was close to $50. Yeah. But when you think about all the things you spend $50 on these days. Well, crayons, sparkly shoes, and headbands for my daughters.
I've got two girls, so $50 goes pretty quick on anything pink and sparkly. So let's talk a little bit about Modearn®. Just the framework. There are three different service level offerings. There's the $6,000 service level offering, which is for planning, you know, then there's the $10,000 tier that includes all of the planning and investment management, up to $750,000.
And then there's the $15,000 minimum fee per year, which is basically like our Morton Wealth client, where they have access to all of the planning, all of the different investments. Now, you've been working with a lot of Modearn® clients for a while. Share with me a story about how Modearn® impacted some of those you've worked with.
This client is in their late 40s. And kind of what I touched on earlier is he's a high earner and he makes money and he just spends it. And he was living a great lifestyle, living his best life.
And then woke up one day and was like, oh man, I don't have savings. My 401K isn't very high. I don't have a 529 for my youngest kid. I'm paying out of pocket for college for my oldest, and he just kind of realized, like, retire. He wants to retire sooner than later. He's an entrepreneur, and he just needed help.
Someone, a coach, you know, to be able to ask questions to. And it's opened up this space for him to show up to his life at a higher level. And it's just really cool. Like to see how his mind and how he treats things like his finances. He's he has an LLC and so he is a contractor, and he got hired for this job. And, you know, before he got paid, he asked what account should it go in, how should I invest it?
And, you know, we were talking about tax planning with it. And so it's just we're his partner and it's just so cool to be able to be a trusted person in his life. That kind of takes that weight off of his shoulders. So it frees up his time, his mind to be a creative, to be a father, to be a husband and not have to worry about those things or just know that he has a trusted person.
I mean, that's a great story about the power of working with an advisor, because it's not always just around, you know, saving, spending and investments. It's that, you know, financial partner to help bounce off ideas, free up space, a little bit of that accountability. But it's also highlights sort of the stress or emotion that money can have on a person that causes them to, you know, maybe not spend the time, you know, working out or being in shape or having that free headspace to be present with, you know, your family members or your friends or at least confident in the decisions that you're doing.
So I love how that story highlights not only the power of, of having a financial coach with your finances, but how it transforms into who you are as a person as well.
Yeah, I always liken it like in preparing for this, I kept thinking about I love health and wellness, fitness, running, and I think of it as like if I wanted to lose weight or if I wanted to run a marathon, I would go find a coach, right? Like, I'm not just going to go throw some shoes on and and see what happens.
And so I would not think twice about hiring a personal trainer, hiring a coach if I had an injury, going to Pete to help me see the blind spots, to see how to plan to execute my goal. And I think oftentimes, because again, the goal seems so far out, we don't think we need a financial coach. And so I think of Modearn® as financial coaching to have just someone in your pocket, to be able to throw ideas at and bounce ideas out and to see different parts or different blind spots that you may not be able to or just have the accountability because we're all so busy, you know, having two girls and having a full-time job and just life, that sometimes you don't have the brain space. And so it's like, let us have that brain space for you.
Look, it's one of the reasons why I like working in this business is basically I've got 30 different partners inside this building where I can bounce ideas off of, you know, it's it's a stress in my life that I definitely don't have to worry about. But it it transpires, you know, outside these walls to, to many different people about, you know, is that the right decision.
How should I do this? But having a great partner, really helps. All right. You want to play a game?
Sure.
Optimist or pessimist... are budgeting apps actually helping people build better habits?
Yes, and I think that it's as much as you allow it. I think it can give you insight into how you spend money and how much money you spend. Because these days we have a mall in our pocket, you know, and easy access, and we're just tapping.
I had, again, a client say to me, because I check in with her spending, and because she wants me to, she asked me to.
I'm not here to judge or shame her, but she has a high credit card bill and she's like, I don't know how I did it.And she has a budgeting app and so does it work? I don't know, but it sure shows her how much she's spending.
Well, I've never really enjoyed budgets. Yeah. We call them spending strategies here.
So even if you have a spending strategy without being able to monitor that month over month, week over week to really get that gut check, like, wow, I really spent that much money on that thing. Yeah. So that way you can have the visceral reaction of saying, I didn't really enjoy it that much. I'm going to make a different decision down the road without that extra layer of accountability.
Do you think most people in their 30s feel confident about their financial future?
No.
I do not. Because I work with them. And so I think that there's this balance that people aren't really striking of. YOLO. You only live once or live your best life. And so they're trying to travel, have the lifestyle that they want. And so they're not really balancing out current me and future me. So I think that they're spending and not saving up most times.
Stacey and I recently did, an episode around lifestyle creep. You know, as you, the people who are the most successful, in my opinion, in terms of that financial wellness and being financially free, they make sure that they've got a pretty good foundation of what they want to spend money on and where it goes. And as their income increases, their lifestyle creep does not increase nearly as much, and they're able to save and sort of get ahead.
But it's challenging. We're all going through life a little bit differently in terms of when we get married, when we have kids, when we got into the career that we're excited about. You're sort of a career transition person. I was a career transition person when I was 30. I had no money, you know, so it was pretty easy to make good financial decisions that I didn't have any money to, to, to really decide.
But you had to put in work and effort in terms of growing your skill set, growing your career and then understanding the decisions that you could make along the way. And so it took a while for some people that I see around our age to become sort of financially confident.
Yeah, again, another conversation with someone that doesn't have much of a savings, it doesn't have investments. And she makes a good amount of money and she's like, but I have a good lifestyle. And I said to her is like, just set up automatic payments to pay yourself first, you know, live that lifestyle and also set up for the future.
You will not notice it. And so when I was in my early 30s, I started setting aside money and it was just automatically transferred to an IRA. And it was the day that I got paid was the day that it went out. So I didn't see that I had that money. It already paid me and it wasn't much.
You know, because I wasn't making much at the time, but it was still that habit of paying myself. And so now, that's a part of who I am. And so I always suggest that to people.
I love that that's a, that's one of my favorite things is in terms of paying yourself first, because if you're waiting till the end saying, oh, I'll save it, then it rarely happens.
Thank you so much for joining me today.
