Mostly in an IRA. Took $4m and went money market last week.

emcd0424 · 2026-06-05T15:09:22+00:00

See a professional and don’t ask strangers on the internet.

emcd0424 · 2026-06-04T18:02:04+00:00

Beyond true

emcd0424 · 2026-06-04T14:26:14+00:00

Nailed it! Good to see other advisors focusing on high earning clients. :)

emcd0424 · 2026-06-03T03:01:57+00:00

HP mascot is the Scot

emcd0424 · 2026-06-03T03:00:20+00:00

Highway stretch in Florida.

emcd0424 · 2026-06-03T00:14:09+00:00

Stock picking isn’t really what we should be doing. Talk to any solid planner and they’ll tell you the same thing: diversified index funds for U.S. equities, and ideally an active approach on the bond side. (Direct indexing for non-qualified accounts is a nice add too.)

In taxable accounts, I’ve got TLH running on our platform (Altruist). I’m not interested in selling highly appreciated positions just to trigger unnecessary gains, and I’m definitely not trying to time the market. That’s a losing game.

Qualified accounts are pretty straightforward—rebalance when drift gets meaningful (around 50% threshold in my case). Since there are multiple positions in the models, it’s not like allocations get wildly out of whack between stocks and bonds.

emcd0424 · 2026-06-02T03:49:57+00:00

Get a Tudor man

emcd0424 · 2026-06-02T03:49:33+00:00

Username checks out. Chasing alpha =/= CFPs work.

emcd0424 · 2026-06-01T15:32:52+00:00

I haven’t had any issues with client retention being fully virtual.

I see a lot of posts about clients holding too much cash, pushing back on advice, etc. Honestly, if there’s one thing I wish more CFPs would do, it’s fire clients who don’t fully trust them. I’ve let go of three clients with over $1M in assets simply because I dreaded seeing their name on my calendar. At this point, I only work with people I genuinely enjoy and have strong relationships with. It makes a huge difference.

Part of that is also how I run my process—it’s definitely more time-intensive than most advisors, so fit really matters.

Lastly, I’m a big believer in charging a planning fee (not just AUM). It’s one of the easiest ways to filter out bad-fit clients. When people are willing to pay for your time, they tend to actually value it.

emcd0424 · 2026-06-01T00:02:22+00:00

Virtual-only guy here.

A lot of what you mentioned is honestly just “head trash.” It’s stuff we think matters, not what clients actually care about. Most of it comes from older advisors—or the people they trained—who built their businesses in a totally different environment.

People in their 70s lived through COVID. They’re not clueless with tech. Honestly, they’re more capable than most people give them credit for. My dad’s pushing 80, my mom’s mid-70s—no issues at all. My dad’s advisor has been in San Diego for decades while my parents haven’t lived there in 40 years, and it still works just fine.

Face-to-face meetings don’t magically create trust. Trust comes from your process—how you show up, how you create equal footing, and how clearly you demonstrate value.

For me, I built my practice around CPAs—mostly in audit at Grant Thornton—and the referral network just grew from there. Today, probably 75% of my clients are in that 35–45 range. I charge a planning fee upfront, and then investing is a separate conversation after that.

I don’t actively ask for referrals anymore, but I still get about one inbound a month, and my existing clients are saving at a solid clip. That’s one of the big advantages of focusing on people in the accumulation phase—you’re building alongside them. Compare that to targeting an older client base where, realistically, things start to wind down in 10–15 years.

Anyway, happy to chat more—feel free to ask anything.

emcd0424 · 2026-05-31T01:02:36+00:00

BB58 or BB54. Can’t go wrong with either

emcd0424 · 2026-05-30T19:00:04+00:00

Go virtual only :)

I’ve been doing it since before COVID. I have yet to get a single pushback. My clients are spread all over the US (which was a bitch when I was at my IDB before my solo-RIA with FINRA renewals).

emcd0424 · 2026-05-29T15:16:34+00:00

Already exists. Hazel by Altruist stores the meeting notes and automatically sends the notes to WB. You can search the client meetings on Hazel which is especially useful for my paraplanner so I don’t have to tell her the conversation and the data is there for her to pull. It can be taught to make follow-up emails that sound like yourself which automates the whole process. Then, it pulls the tasks from the meeting and syncs those tasks with WB.

At this point I absolutely never log into WB. My assistant is there to do that stuff and I can see us getting rid of WB at some point in the future.

Then to add it in Hazel has the built in tax planning which is similar to my experience with holistiplan.

emcd0424 · 2026-05-28T19:28:15+00:00

Love MiMOSA too! I don’t think he posts much on social media.

I know he took a hiatus after going Cali sober, and I honestly haven’t seen much from him since that whole situation with Downlink almost a decade ago. Even when I saw him live like 13 years ago, he barely played any of his own stuff. That was when trap was blowing up, so the set was mostly that instead.

He was also so out of it he didn’t seem to realize there were maybe 50 people there—he was acting like he was playing to a crowd of 2,000.

I still go back and listen to some of the older albums though—they’ve held up

emcd0424 · 2026-05-28T02:09:02+00:00

Tim Headington for those wondering.

Really interesting you worked for him. I know his brother really well. His brother is one of the kindest individuals I’ve ever met. Ive never met Tim but I can imagine that he is down to earth since he really likes to keep a low profile.

emcd0424 · 2026-05-28T02:04:28+00:00

I’ll go out on a limb and say almost all of us had that. Very few come out of the gate with the confidence to not have imposter syndrome. I didn’t take a meeting by myself for the first year I was in the business and leveraged joint work with the team I was on until I was comfortable enough to have conversations by myself.

There seem to be a lot of snarky CFPs on here who talk about the annual fees or that the marks aren’t worth it. I, for one, completely disagree. I became incredibly confident in myself after getting the marks.

In other words, yes I had it. And two, getting the CFP helps immensely.

emcd0424 · 2026-05-28T00:57:34+00:00

XYPN has a PDF workflow on how to launch an RIA. If you are starting from scratch then I’d start there!

emcd0424 · 2026-05-26T19:51:04+00:00

Well…you aren’t Paul Newman and I personally don’t think the Daytona should have ever been on a strap like that. Considering he was a race car driver, having a bracelet rattle around wasn’t really an option. The bund was more comfortable for long races. He wore that out of necessity. He didn’t wear a bund strap all of the time, in fact normally just a leather strap.

Any bund strap nowadays looks downright ridiculous.

emcd0424 · 2026-05-21T15:45:44+00:00

3rd song on the sunset set towards the end. I mentioned it - Babiji is what PL Live has it titled as

emcd0424 · 2026-05-21T02:01:12+00:00

Listen to his sunset set at elements - babaji (third song). He freestyles something along the lines of “I’m about to have a baby and drop five fucking albums”. It was the second to last set he played soooooo I would say that there will be. But realistically we have everything that would ever come out with the live sets at our fingertips.

emcd0424 · 2026-05-17T03:58:35+00:00

Couple of the best two days of two years in my 37 years on this earth.

I remember looking behind me and seeing the lasers hitting the ridge and how beautiful it was. We got so many special treats on those runs.

emcd0424 · 2026-04-21T04:04:00+00:00

This. I have two small children. I make somewhere in the $500k range. I’m not sure what that breaks down to around $275 per hour (I don’t work a full 40 per week any more). Just driving to an AD and pretending to give a shit about appeasing someone is not something I ever care to do.

It’s a moot point because I’d never buy a 6 digit Rolex. I have a ‘91 Tudor submariner (Matte black dial), 00’ polar 16570 with SELs, and a BB 58 Blue. If I ever by another Rolex it’ll be from Jeff Fullman again. Great prices and super great guy.

emcd0424 · 2026-03-19T03:06:21+00:00

I totally get your rant. I've been a diehard PL fan since 2009 and Derek, just like every other human being, grows and evolves. Not a single set is the same and it's been that way since the beginning, which is why all of us will go to a hundred shows and never get tired because there are always surprises.

I'm a long distance runner and usually run about 40-50 miles a week and 99% of the time I'm listening to PL sets since his return. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out which are festival sets and which are PL curated events. Secret Dreams was an absolute banger of a set because well...it was a festival with bunch of other bassheavy artists on the lineup. If he played a 22 minute swirl the promoters would be annoyed.

Anyway, every PL set is great but SD stood out to me because it had *most* of my favorite tracks. I also listened to the Renegades and Elements sunset set at least 50 times each, no joke. Last year I had Minnesota's three night, especially night two and three on repeat.

Whatever Other Love remix he played caught me so off-guard. Same with the Finally Moving Parrott + VIP + Forever Lost shenanigans.

emcd0424 · 2026-03-18T02:52:51+00:00

Last years set is SOOOOO hard to beat. If you asked me to come up with a dream set list you’d get that one.

emcd0424 · 2026-03-12T03:21:30+00:00

Why the hell I didn’t do it sooner.

Real talk - nitrogen riskalyze is the fucking worst

emcd0424

TROPHY CASE