Jeena and Jeff speak with financial advisor, Brandi Bernazzani. Brandi explains the “debt diet” and how to lose debt. Jeena talks about killing her addiction to Starbucks. Other topics include - how to start saving, responsibly using credit card (or freezing it), and money saving tips.
You can contact Brandi by calling (415) 664-5884
or email her: bbernazzani{at}buildingaroadmap.com
Click to play:
Disclaimer: Unfortunately, it is impossible to give legal information over the internet, no matter how well researched or written. Before relying on any information I give, contact a lawyer to discuss your particular situation. I am a San Francisco bankruptcy attorney. The information given is based on California law.
Transcript
This podcast is brought to you by attorneys Jeena Cho and Jeff Curl of JC Law Group, whose practice is dedicated to bankruptcy for individuals and small businesses.
This podcast is not legal advice. For more information please go to JCLawGroup.com.
This is podcast 3.
Jeff: Hi everyone. This is Jeff Curl. I’m an attorney with JC Law Group PC. I’m here with my partner Jeena Cho.
Jeena: Hi everyone.
Jeff: We’re doing our third podcast today with Brandi Bernazzani. She’s a financial planner in San Francisco and we’re going to speak with her today about recovering after filing bankruptcy and what can people do to avoid filing bankruptcy.
Hi Brandi
Brandi: Hi.
Jeff: Where are you located at exactly?
Brandi: I’m here in San Francisco and my office is on Irving Street between 17th and 18th Avenue.
Jeff: Brandi, we’ve sent you clients before and when someone comes to you who had filed bankruptcy and they maybe had $100,000 in debt or whatever it was and they get to you. Now they come to you with zero debt and they have some cash flow.
What services can you provide for someone who’s in that position who wants to figure out what to do?
Brandi: In terms of the service I provide, I provide comprehensive financial planning. We really do look at all aspects of their financial plan, but when I work with someone who’s just recently filed bankruptcy, we have a couple of key issues that we need to focus on.
One is keeping them from reentering the same situation. So keeping new debt from occurring. Also to put them in a position of strength where if they do have unforeseen costs, that they’re able to handle those and manage those without creating new debt.
Jeena: Brandi, the typical question that I get from my client that’s gone through a bankruptcy is, “I feel so good. I don’t have the $800 monthly minimum credit card payment anymore, but I’ve never had a savings account.”
They don’t even know where to begin. Do you have advice for someone that is in that position?
Brandi: In each case, I like to take into account human behaviors and the national psychology of folks, and that includes me.
The first thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you setup roadblocks to keep yourself from getting in the situation you were in before and then creating automatic new habits.
If I just told you, Jeena, every month you need to keep track of what you’re spending and at the end of the month you need to save whatever is left over. It’s likely that by human nature we’ll spend normally as we would and there may be very little leftover unless we’re super conscientious about what we’re doing.
But if you setup roadblocks, and by roadblocks I mean if you’ve had issues with credit cards or past debt issues that have come from consumer debt, the roadblocks are don’t add any new cards right away. Don’t start using them. Use your ATM or use cash. An ATM is often better to use because you can track your spending.
The second part of that is how do we create the habit of savings? I tell people, “First setup an online savings account,” and I generally recommend a bank called ING Direct. The website is INGDirect.com. Setup an orange savings account because their rates of return are 90% higher than general bank savings rates.
I also recommend those accounts because they’re one step away from your checking, so you can’t go to the ATM, put your ATM card in and take out your savings money because that might have been your previous habit, which is put a little in savings and then take it immediately out.
When you setup the savings account, I want you to nickname it cushion and cushion is what’s in between us and the next emergency or the next unexpected expense.
Jeena: What would be an OK reason to go and take money out of this cushion? If I see this dress that I have to have, can I go into my cushion money?
Brandi: What I tell people from the beginning is this is a ‘Do Not Touch’ account. This is sacred cow money. This is money that doesn’t get touched ever. I start with that because I think mentally you have to prepare for this is not my money. I do not touch this. I do not ever go here because it’s like you have to setup this big roadblock. No, no, no.
Then you nickname it, so psychologically now you’ve identified what the money is for. This is for something so that when it comes up you go, “Oh.”
A true emergency is not I need tires on my car. We should have saved money for tires on your car. A true emergency is something that you really can’t even foresee that might happen, like a medical expense or maybe you’re early in your savings and something came up and you didn’t have enough to cover it.
Of course you could go to that account, but I start people out with ‘Do Not Touch’. This is ‘Do Not Touch’. No, a dress is not an emergency need. A dress is something that you life, that you want, but not something that you really need.
Jeena: I think that’s an important point that people don’t understand or they do, but they don’t really put into practice the distinction between need and want. I think it gets blurry as to which is what.
Brandi: Here’s what happens in the budget. The budget is the key to figuring out the savings part. Now they’ve opened the account and the account is sitting fallow and they want to know how do I fund it or how to I get myself to put money in it and not touch it.
The key is budgeting. Now that’s not telling you can’t spend. Budgeting is actually looking at what you’re currently spending and picking what you want in those various categories.
For instance, let’s say somebody’s just completed bankruptcy and they go back and they want to look, “What have I spent for the last couple of months?” It’s pretty simple. You go into the accounts you spend from – so if it’s one or two checking accounts or a checking account and a credit card, whatever it is you’ve been spending from – you print out the statements from those last two months.
You can go through them line-by-line and figure out what you’ve been spending and add up the totals. Once you see what you’ve been spending, you can compare that to your net income and see I’ve been spending this and the net income is this.
If those two things are equal, obviously there hasn’t been extra to save. Now if you subtract out that credit card bill that they were paying with $800 a month, they obviously have been paying that. Maybe they can plant that with savings and they could setup that savings account to automatically deduct from their checking account every month.
That means without them having to do anything, instead of paying that credit card bill, they could take that same amount of money and have it go into that ING cushion savings and that could start to grow by itself.
Now that’s creating an automatic habit. It happens by itself and you don’t have to think about it. You do have to consider it when you’re figuring out how much is in your account and how much you have to spend, but it happens automatically.
Jeff: When someone sets up some type of fund, emergency fund or cushion, when is it enough and when can they start something more long-term like an IRA or a 401K or do they start it at the same time or do you just get the emergency cash there on hand and then setup something long-term? How do you typically arrange that?
Brandi: I also like them to be contributing to their retirement accounts as they go, not after the savings is filled up. Why? Because if they work for an employer and they’ve got a 401K or a 403B or 457, some kind of employer sponsored retirement account, each dollar they’re putting into that account actually reduces their taxable income.
Not only it helps them add to their retirement, but it also reduces the amount that they’re paying overall in taxes, so it benefits them in two ways. If they’re a two-earning income household, this is really important because even $250,000 equals $100, which is a lot in terms of the amount of taxes that they’re paying: federal and state.
I encourage them to sign up for and contribute to their retirement accounts at least up to whatever their employer matches. If their employer matches up to the first 3%, then for sure take advantage of that because it’s basically free money. It’s money that their employer is putting towards their retirement on their behalf and it doesn’t cost them anything.
Jeff: We have lots of people in the city because of where we live that are entrepreneurs and self-employed, so they don’t get a 401K. They get a SEP IRA or just a normal IRA or a Roth IRA. What you said about the tax benefit, maybe this is getting a little too sophisticated, but do you have an opinion about a normal IRA versus a Roth IRA and paying the taxes now?
Brandi: Yes. In some cases it makes sense. It depends on how much income they make. If you make too much income, you can’t contribute to Roth, so cross that off the list already. If you qualify to contribute to Roth, those are very handy things to have because they grow tax free over time.
If you are a business owner and you do a substantial business in terms of your income, you should consider a SEP IRA or a self-employed 401K. Both of those are really good vehicles to move money into retirement, but again, the details of those are kind of sophisticated.
Jeena: Brandi, can you talk a little bit about using credit cards? I know it’s a big point of contention and a lot of people get so used to using their credit card and borrowing from the future. Do you have any suggestions on curving your credit card or using your credit cards responsibly?
Brandi: I have a very strong opinion about this and I have a lot of clients who are trying to avoid bankruptcy in the first place by doing the same thing.
Let’s say we’ve got somebody just out of bankruptcy or we’ve got somebody who is trying to avoid it. In either case, I recommend the debt diet. They call it the debt diet. It doesn’t sound very sexy, but it’s really effective. I tried it on myself and I’ve done it several times, so I know how it works and how it feels to actually do it yourself.
Most of us might have in our wallet an ATM or some kind of debit card that comes from our checking and then we also may have other credit cards, if we didn’t pay off every month, would accrue interest. That’s the kind of thing you’re talking about, borrowing from the future. Paying for something now with plastic that you have to pay for, like a meal.
You went out for Mexican food and then you’re paying for it three months later and you don’t even remember that meal.
In order to avoid it I tell people to go on the debt diet. I tell them go into their wallets and remove the credit cards and put them in a drawer somewhere safe where no one can find them.
Jeena: You don’t tell them to freeze it?
Brandi: That’s right. You could put it in the freezer. Freezing it is fine. Somewhere that they can’t get access to it and only pay from their ATM or their debit card for three months.
How does this work? First of all, it makes people have to look and check at their account balances more often, which is a good habit to get into if it’s been an issue for you anyways. It also keeps you from spending on things that you don’t have the money immediately for, which brings your attention to do I need it or do I just want it.
It starts breaking down some of the things that we tell ourselves. I have to have that dress. I need that dress for work. Actually maybe your closet has four other dresses that you could wear temporarily until you’ve saved a little bit of money to have some extra for things like clothing.
It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever buy those things, but it gets you in the habit of thinking about them and being much more conscious and the debt diet works. The first month is terrible. You’re thinking, “Why did I do this? Why did she tell me do this? It sucks.”
The second month you think, “It’s not that bad. I’m actually getting the hang of it.” By the third month you don’t even notice it and you’ve completely changed your habits. I know it sounds miraculous, but it really, really works.
Jeena: I think there’s something very empowering about doing that and also watching your savings grow, if you’ve never had a savings account before. I had a client of mine call me up recently and say, “Oh, guess what? I have $5,000 in my savings account,” and she was so excited because she’s never had a savings account before.
In terms of doing the debt diet, do you still have them continue to make their minimum monthly payment because you have so people that are just so heavily in debt that they barely have enough money to make the monthly minimum payment, which forces them – it’s kind of like borrowing from Peter to pay Paul type of thing?
What do you suggest to people that are on what I call the monthly minimum payment cycle?
Brandi: We have to figure out whether or not it makes sense, so that’s where people like you and Jeff come in to be able to really determine whether or not bankruptcy is a viable option for them because sometimes people in this situation, they’re really not going to get ahead either with maybe the house that they’re in where they’re upside down or a situation where they have so much debt that really there is no getting ahead.
That they would be 20 years paying on a minimum payment and it just isn’t going to go anywhere and they’re not going to make any more money. That’s a situation where we start looking at is bankruptcy a viable option and what type of bankruptcy and you guys are the experts in that area.
Jeff: Brandi, you’ve worked with lots and lots of clients and I’m just curious. Some of them come to you with, “I have money and help me figure out what to do with it, so I can save for the future.” Some come to you and say, “I’m in trouble. Help me get out of trouble.”
For those that come to you and say, “I’m in trouble and I need help,” what is usually the cause of the trouble? In other words, were they just never taught finances? Is it because some tragedy happened, a divorce? Is there a typical root cause for people that you encounter that have issues?
Brandi: Very good question. It may just depend on what kind of clients come to me in particular, but generally my clients who are in trouble are not coming from a tragedy. Generally it’s not people who’ve had a major illness or a problem with a lack of insurance or a death in the family or some kind of tragic incident. Generally it’s not.
Generally speaking, most people get no personal financial education at all. They’re not getting it from their parents. When they go to elementary school, they’re not getting it. High school, they don’t get it. College, they don’t get it, but by that time they’re already out in the world transacting, like we are.
Buying things and needing to pay things like rent or a mortgage. Most people have very little information that they’re getting about this, so they’re at a disadvantage. This is across the board. People in general who come from families of lots of wealth don’t have any more knowledge about finance, in my experience, than people who come from very modest backgrounds.
Really nobody is getting the proper education, so there’s a bunch of education that needs to happen and generally what I see happening in terms of when people are in trouble are just too long not knowing. Meaning they’ve been going forward in their financial life and they just don’t understand how it works and also, they’ve been creating some habits that are sort of culturally driven, like debt and use of credit cards.
They just assume we buy a car. We have to buy a car with a loan. When we buy a house, we put down the minimum we could to buy a house. If we want something, we buy it now whether or not we have the money and those are very kind of deeply culturally instilled because all around us people are looking – like who doesn’t like to watch HGTV and see how they improve the houses.
That means that everybody gets the concept that regardless if you make $40,000 a year or $400,000 a year, that if you don’t have granite countertops, it’s the end of the world, but it’s not really.
I think some of it is cultural. Some of it is lack of education and then those coupled together often equal really bad habits.
Jeff: When you work with these people that come to you with these habits, are they breakable? I mean if someone’s been doing this for 40 years and that’s all they’ve known – I don’t think you’re keeping statistics on your clients like this, but are you breaking through? Do you get through and do they succeed?
Brandi: I think it depends on the motivation of the person. It’s like anything when there’s a habit, in terms of human nature, and this is why bankruptcy clients can sometimes be most successful because they’ve actually come to a pivotal point where the issues come to a head.
It forced the issue. They had to go through the pain and suffering of going through bankruptcy because it’s an emotional response as well as just the physicality of it.
Jeena: Absolutely.
Brandi: Then once that’s completed, they’re like, “OK. Now I really want to do better. I really want to figure out how to avoid this,” and even if they’ve had 40 years of having problems with debt, their level of motivation is high and with a few small things that they over time, they can really make big changes.
Of course it’s better if you started in your 20’s with an IRA and savings, but if you didn’t, you can start at 60 and still make progress.
The real two keys in finance and success are timing and consistency. If you have less time, you have to really focus on the consistency. If you have a lot of time, a combination of both is a winning duo, but if you don’t have a lot of time, you have to work on the consistency.
Like with any habit, you didn’t just wakeup from the cradle and say, “I know I should brush my teeth and I’m going to brush my teeth everyday from now on because that’s going to be good dental hygiene and I’ll have my teeth at 85.”
Somebody taught you how to do. You probably didn’t like it in the beginning, but after you’ve done it for a while, now you don’t think about it. You just brush your teeth and you know you should be and you do it.
That’s the same thing with any other habit. If you start saving, once you get a little practice under your belt, it becomes very regular and then it becomes part of your life and with people, there’s a funny little psychology when it comes to the dollar amount.
When people have saved $1,000, they usually don’t feel that excited. They feel like they’re still just one step away from disaster. When they’ve saved about $5,000, they start getting happy about it. By the time they hit the $10,000 mark, they’re evangelists. They’re telling everyone they know. “Let’s save money. Let’s don’t go out. Hang out at my house and buy a bottle of wine and stay there or let’s do this or I found this great deal at this place.”
They become evangelical about it because they really feel like they’re very motivated because they’ve seen some really good progress.
Jeena: Maybe we can talk a little bit about budgeting and when someone comes in and they have no idea how much they’re spending on food. You ask them, “How much do you spend on food?” And this is my favorite answer when I ask my client how much they spend on food and they’re like, “$100 for a family of three.”
I think most people have no idea where their money goes. Brandi, when you work with someone and do their budget, is it like you have $100 for groceries and you have $50 for clothing? Do you categorize it? How does the budgeting process work?
Brandi: I have a spreadsheet that I use, but anyone could create a spreadsheet like mine. It’s pretty simple.
On the left hand side it shows all the items that clients, like mine, spent money on and it’s like two pages long. Some clients spend on some areas. Others on different areas. Everybody spends on things like housing and food and utilities.
Jeena, you hit the nail on the head. If you ask people how much they spend, the reason there’s an issue with money in and money out is because they’re not aware. It’s not because just necessarily they’re living high on the hog. It might be just that they’re not aware of where it’s going.
The first portion of a budget is figuring out where it’s all going and you can’t do that based on, like you client said, $100 on groceries. Of course they don’t spend $100 on groceries for a family of four. They can’t. It doesn’t work like that.
We have to look at real date. So I have them look at two months worth of history, so pick two of the most recent months and look at actually what you spent. Print out the statements from the accounts that you spend from and go through them line-by-line and record it all in some kind of page.
You don’t have to use Excel. You can write it on a piece of paper, but you have to look at real data, not hypothetical data, not I think I spend $100 on groceries. What did you really do these last couple of months?
Once they’ve looked at that and they see how much they do spend, then they can go back in and start making some choices, but first there has to be an awareness and people always, no matter which client it is, my most frugal clients and my clients who have the biggest challenges with budgeting, they’re all surprised by what they see when they do this little exercise.
Jeena: I force myself to do it and I was just shocked to see how much I spend on food. I was like, “There’s no way that I can spend that much on food,” but in fact I do. That was quite an experience for me.
Once they do the budget, and let’s say you figure it out and you say, “Oh my gosh. I’m spending too much money on clothing or food or whatever.” How do you scale it back because you’re so used to living a certain lifestyle and maybe you like going out and eating out three nights a week or you like brand name apparel, etc.
How do you go about scaling it back?
Brandi: First of all you have to be making choices with the end goal in mind. You should look up from the paper and look out into the future and think, “What do I want in the future? Do I want debt? Do I want to feel overwhelmed by my life? Do I want to have frustration in my marriage because of finance?” And think what you want.
If what you want out there is saving for retirement, to feel confident about your finances, to not have conflict with your spouse about it, and to feel in a position of power and strength, then you can take those thoughts, that vision, back into the paperwork that you’re doing and say, “OK. Now it’s up to me. Now I have a choice.”
It doesn’t mean you don’t have to choose to eat out. You can’t say, “I won’t eat out ever again,” because, like any diet, that won’t work, but if you say, “I’m going to choose to eat more at home, to cook more meals, and to spend less on eating out,” then you can change the numbers accordingly and that will work.
I know from working with clients, I can’t come up with a budget for them. I have to guide them in the process, but they have to pick the numbers that go in that budget because they know what’s most important to them. Maybe for the convenience of their family eating out more, but less expensively is a higher priority, but then they say, “We’re going to spend less on clothes because we don’t really care about the clothes,” but that makes their life a lot easier.
They can make choices, but if it comes from them, they’re likely to stick more closely to it. If it comes from me, it’s virtually useless because I’m telling them you should and you know what people do when you tell them you should, right?
Jeena: Right. It’s not about really depriving yourself. It’s about choosing one over the other. You would never tell them, “You can’t eat out three times a week.” It’s just they may have to cut back on other expenses.
Brandi: Right and I tell them what I would live with. I don’t believe in a life of deprivation, but I do believe in a life of prudence. I believe in making savings a priority. If you see that vision of yourself in the future and that’s really what you want, you have to make that a priority now.
You have to be paying yourself first, setting aside the savings before anything else and making that really a priority. Then it’s easier when you come down and say, “Oh well. Wow, look at how much I’m spending on X. What if I just made lunches for the whole family?”
One tip I had. I was making lunches for my daughter going to school, but I wasn’t making lunch for myself and my husband. Why? It takes the same amount of time. I thought, “How much more time will it take?”
Then I backed up. I said, “What if the night before I just make a little bit extra dinner? I use the main part of our lunches for the next day the leftovers from that dinner so I don’t have to cook again, but we get a nice meal for the next day. Then I add fruit and some other things in it to complete the lunch, to balance the meal and pack that up.
It didn’t even take me five minutes extra. I did the same cooking the night before, but think how much I’d be saving? That might be $5 to $10 a person five days a week and we had two people who were doing that.
The potential savings is a lot and I actually now do it because it’s my habit. I do it every day.
Jeena: That’s a great money saving tip. Do you have other tips that you like to give to your clients and how to save money a little bit? I know for me I stopped drinking Starbucks every day because I figured out that that was like $100 a month, whatever it was, $2 a day.
Brandi: And people don’t think. It’s not that you just drank the Starbucks. You did enjoy it. It’s not just that you spend the money, but it’s the opportunity cost. What could that money have been doing for you? If that $100 was in an online savings, it might return 1.1% in terms of interest.
If it was invested over long-term, it might return 7, 8, 9, 10%. If it was invested more aggressively, maybe more. Maybe that’s money that could go into buying a house or saving for your kids’ education. It’s not just that you drank it and used the money, but what could have that money been doing instead?
We travel often and most people in the Bay Area travel to places to see their family and they like to travel. They have cultural interests because that’s part of why they live here. We do home exchanges so we don’t almost ever pay for a place to stay.
We usually exchange with another family and we get to stay in their house, wherever we’re going. It might be a weekend or a longer vacation and there’s no cost for the place we stay. That’s super handy. That’s a super handy thing to do.
One example is a place we stayed in Paris for two weeks. We were able to buy the plane tickets really cheaply, so we picked the time we went and then the place we stayed, we wouldn’t have even taken that vacation because the place might have cost $3,000 and it cost nothing.
So a potentially really expensive vacation cost us very little and because we had a house instead of a hotel room, we were able to cook and eat a lot more meals inside just like we would at home.
Jeena: How do you find these home exchanges? I’ve never heard of that before.
Brandi: I use the site called HomeExchange.com, but people use Craig’s List as well. If you’re a wily coyote, honestly there’s a way to really live a very good life in the Bay Area and make it very cost effective. People just have to be conscientious and spend some time and energy on figuring out how to enjoy their life.
Because I think if you focus budgeting on what you’re deprived of, it won’t work. You’ll just go back to your old habits, but if you figure out, “If I really want travel, there’s a way to get more travel and spend less on it or there’s a way to get really good high quality food and spend less money on it.”
There’s a way to get all the things that you want for less. You just have to think a little bit about what you’re doing. With all the things you’re saving, it’s not just the money. It’s what that means in your lifestyle.
You guys aren’t divorce attorneys, but divorce attorneys will confirm that more people complain that their divorces are caused by issues with finance in the family. Imagine all this time you’re spending on your budget is not just supporting your financial life, but it’s supporting your relationship and your household because you’re happy if you’re not worried constantly about where all the money is going.
Jeff: For our part, Brandi, when we have clients come in and after you’ve met with hundreds of clients, you start to see patterns and practices and you see the same thing over and over. Just for our part, I think the number one problem we see – and this isn’t the root problem, but it’s just that people tend to wait and they tend to recoil and they tend to pull the covers over their head.
What I mean by that is they get into some type of distress and they don’t know what to do, so they start borrowing from their 401K or they start paying off some creditors, some money with what savings they have left knowing full well in the back of their mind that next month or three months from now they’re going to be right back in the same spot.
It just takes them a while to realize that they need to reach out and get help. That’s what kills us is the people that come into us after they’ve drained their 401K when they could have just kept all their retirement if they were going to file anyway.
I’m wondering what pitfalls or what could people do to avoid issues? What are the problems you see and what could they do to avoid them? Do you have certain patterns and practices you see and what should they do?
For us, ours is always called action. It’s just act. That’s the one problem we have is people just failing to pick up the phone and waiting too long. What do you see from your end?
Brandi: I think, Jeff, you hit the nail on the head. I have a friend who’s been a mentor to me for a long time. He’s nearly 80 in St. Louis. The thing he said from his practice in finance for as long as he can remember is once you realize you’re in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging.
It is a little bit difficult to deal with a stressful situation when it comes to finance because people don’t know what they’re supposed to do and they don’t know how to fix it and they don’t know if they should call a bankruptcy attorney. They’re not sure what they should do, but it’s so scary and overwhelming for them that they do the ostrich.
They bury their head in the sand and feel like, “Let’s just do something. Is there’s some kind of band-aid I can put on this temporarily and then just go on to next month?”
You’re right. The same issue is going to come up, but my first bit of advice is once you realize you’re in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. You need to stop immediately whatever behaviors are leading to adding to the debt and that might mean the credit cards come out of the wallet and that might mean you stop eating out or stop doing whatever you know is obvious until you get to the bottom of what is a solution and really to communicate about it.
I see all the time spouses not telling each other about things that are happening in their financial life. One spouse has a business and the business is slowly going under water and the other spouse is an employee. Until the business is $70,000 in debt, they haven’t communicated to their spouse that there’s an issue.
The first thing is to stop digging and the second thing is to communicate. It might be a call to an attorney. It might be a call to someone like me. It might be as simple as talking to their spouse about it. Even if your spouse will be upset, it’s better to have it in the open because two hears are always better than one.
Maybe your spouse says, “Now let’s get some help,” and you’re too panicked about it to even think through that idea. Maybe you need to tell a friend about it or just communicate. But the communication, people are ashamed of having problems with money, but if they knew how many other people had problems with money, they wouldn’t feel ashamed. They would know that it’s part and parcel of the fact that we have no education around personal finance.
Jeff: You gave me the perfect segway for asking you if someone wants to contact you, how do they contact you?
Brandi: You can reach me by phone at 415-664-5884, which is my office phone number. You can find information about our business online in places like Yelp. You can also email us at – and it’s a very long email because I have a long name – [email protected]. That’s how you can reach us. We’re right here in the city, so even a quick Google search of my last name would bring up all the information about how to reach us.
Jeena: Brandi, when someone comes in and meets with you, what’s the step that you go through with them? What’s the process for people that have never met with a financial advisor? Maybe they think it’s only for people that have a lot of money already. I know that’s what I think of when I think of a financial advisor, like asset managers.
What type of people do you work with? Do you work with single people, married people, older people, people with money, without money and what does the process entail?
Brandi: I work with all sorts of clients. I have clients in their 80’s and 90’s or widows and widowers. I work with lots of singles. I work with couples, both same sex and opposite sex, married and unmarried couples.
I have a really wide range of clients and they’re also, surprisingly, from pretty much every financial sector. There are people who are just starting out with their first professional job or just exiting school. I also work with clients who have gobs and gobs of money, but I’m not an asset manager. I’m a financial planner, so I’m actually helping people work through the process of what to do with all the pieces of their financial life.
I see clients in a series of sessions and when they first call me I setup a free phone consultation. In the phone consultation they tell me a little bit about their background, their situation now, and what they’re hoping to achieve with planning.
Then I explain in detail to them my philosophy, the basics of how I run my office, what the scope of work is, meaning all the things that we cover in the financial plan. The process that I use with all my clients, which is very defined and then I talk to them about the associated fees.
Generally this is not something that’s just for people with a lot of money because everybody needs to know how to setup their W-4 or withholding if they’re employees. Everybody needs to know what kind of insurance to opt-in for and not opt-in for.
Everybody needs to know about budgeting and retirement and if they have kids, education savings, estate planning. All of these pieces of financial planning are things that regular folks need to know, not just people with a lot of money because the assets, like how to diversify your portfolio or how to balance a 401K, those are small pieces of this big pie that we call financial planning.
Jeff: Brandi, I thank you so much. That was really helpful and I’m sure that there are going to be a lot of people who listen to this and have their eyes opened. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
Brandi: Thanks. I enjoyed it and I really appreciate the service that you’re doing for people. I would encourage them to really seek out help, make that first call to a bankruptcy attorney when they’re feeling like they’re underwater because they will feel a lot better just by making the call and they may find out some surprising things about bankruptcy that they didn’t know that would help alleviate some of the pressure that they’re under.
Jeena: Thank you Brandi.
Jeff: Thanks Brandi.
Brandi: Thanks guys.
JC Law Group is a debt relief agency under the United States Bankruptcy Code.
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