Travis Freeman is a partner at a $30 billion RIA and author of Make Your Money Work and The Fortune of Youth, his newest release that explains how time is the greatest asset for building wealth.
In this episode, we talk about Travis's journey from a life-changing accident to becoming a top financial advisor. We also discuss his experience building a startup, how he approaches marketing, the future of wealth management, AI, Madonna, and much more.
Please enjoy our conversation with Travis Freeman.
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The Investipal Podcast is produced by www.investipal.co. Past guests include Peter Lazaroff, Douglas Boneparth, Jamie Hopkins, Tyrone Ross and many more.
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Find Travis Freeman at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/traviscfp/
https://monetagroup.com/professional/travis-freeman/
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00:00 The Journey of a Financial Advisor: From Door-to-Door Sales to Wealth Management
06:19 The Power of Time: Leveraging Finite Resources for Financial Success
21:52 Financial Education and the Client-Centered Approach in Wealth Management
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Cameron Howe
Hi everyone, we're back with another episode of the Investipal podcast. Today's guest is Travis Freeman. Travis is a partner at a $30 billion RIA. He's also out with a new book called The Fortune of Youth, meant to help individuals build wealth, simplify their finances, and avoid some costly mistakes along the way. Travis, welcome on.
Travis Freeman
Thanks, Cameron.
Cameron Howe
You know, you've had a very successful career. You're out with a book now. I'm curious, you know, maybe to help frame it for our audience on, you know, how did you get started in the financial advisor space? And what do you think? Well, we'll all get to the second point. So I guess I need to kick things off. Talk a little bit about your journey as an RIA.
Travis Freeman
Sure. So journey is an RIA or kind of how I got into the space, or I can bring it all together.
Cameron Howe
Both. Yeah. Yeah.
Travis Freeman
Interesting story. So whenever I was 17 years old I was in the backseat of an SUV with some friends of mine. The driver was going a little too fast. We ran into a tree. It was the middle of the afternoon. No drinking or anything. But myself and the other two guys that were in the car were in pretty bad shape. I broke my fifth and my seventh vertebrae in my neck. I don't remember the ambulance or the helicopter or the two hospitals that I was in. So when everything was said and done there was some cash left over after paying all my medical bills. And I came from a family that didn't have much money. And my dad said, look, you're about to go to school. This is more money than you've ever had. We've ever had really in our family. Let's find a professional. Let's find a financial advisor. Well, through asking around, because my folks didn't have a financial planner, we were connected with one. And I actually learned a bit about the wealth management industry when I was 18 going off to school by having my own financial advisor. And it wasn't a lot. I'm surprised the guy even took me on. But that made me infatuated with the industry. And I declared my major of finance right when I went to college. From there, I was kind of eager to get started. So I was selling door to door, Cameron, at the age of 19.
Cameron Howe
Direct sales?
Travis Freeman
Direct sales. It was the insurance side of the business, right? So a lot of us have been around a while. You get started on that side and eventually you grow out of it.
Cameron Howe
But I learned that I did not want to do door-to-door sales on the insurance side. And that translated into joining an independent broker dealer after college. I even worked as an employee of an online broker dealer in college. But I was with an independent broker dealer for, gosh, 12, 13 years, and then wound up at the large RIA that I'm with now. There are about 62 of us that own the firm together. And that's the short and sweet version of it. That's very fascinating.
Cameron Howe
What did that, you know, I'm glad you're all better now, but that 18 year old self, what did you end up learning from that financial advisor at that point in time?
Travis Freeman
So he asked me some good questions about what do I want to do? Right. What kind of liquidity do I want? And what do I want to focus on long term? Which it was a little tough, right? You can imagine at 18 years old, I was just out of high school. What do I really know? But we did set some things up that were for my future, some things that helped me make a down payment on my home when I got out. And then that's how I was able to afford living and paying for college as well through school is the money that we set aside for that. So I learned quite a bit. And again, real knocking on my wood desk here, real thankful that everything turned out. I'm healthy, I'm walking. But boy, it was an interesting life lesson.
Cameron Howe
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I still drive that way a little bit, but never to that degree. But I can imagine the trauma that you had to go with dealing with that. At least there was some monetary compensation off the back of it, but still doesn't usually do it justice.
Travis Freeman
Yeah, that's all right. Now, I drive the speed limit everywhere I go and my kids see that and I'm hoping they're going to do the same when they start driving here soon.
Cameron Howe
So was this experience part of the inspiration for publishing this book?
Travis Freeman
So the book, the inspiration for the book came about because I have met so many people that get to their later years in life and they say, I regret, I regret, I regret, right? I wish I would have done this when I was younger. I wish I would have known this when I was younger. I wish I would have worked with a professional when I was younger. In fact, in the intro of the book, I'll give you a little sample of this, Cameron. I talk about a story of a dentist. Whenever I met this dentist years ago, I was probably in my late 20s. And of course, I was excited that this dentist wanted to potentially work with me. He was about 60. And after I met with him, we went through all his financial affairs. Him and his wife virtually had nothing. Even the practice, even his dental practice, if he sold it, it was dead on the practice. And the way they were living, there's no way that they could have lived more than three or four years in retirement. wow. And what he told me was, he said, Travis, I'm at this point in life where I just want to get back and step into retirement soon. I'm tired of drilling, filling and billing. No joke. And I put that in the book. I'll never forget that phrase that he gave me, tired of drilling, filling and billing. So the inspiration for this book was for all the people that are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, maybe even their early 50s on how to leverage the best asset that someone has and that is their time. Money is infinite. You can make infinite amounts of money, but time isn't. Time is finite. So what do you do with that finite amount of time to turn it into the things that you really want to have in your life? And the earlier you start, the more powerful those concepts can be. And that's the reason I wrote that book.
Cameron Howe
Does it have a lot to do with the power of compounding? And small contributions early on in life can end up paying massive dividends in the future?
Travis Freeman
Yeah. Absolutely compounding is a big part of certain aspects of the book. There's even a chapter I have in the book called the compound career path and think of think of a career path like a compounding curve, right? Obviously, you know that it's exponential and the earlier you start the better your results will be over over decades of time. Well in my story, I just told you I started out when I was 19 in the insurance industry, right? I actually had two insurance gigs and the online broker dealer and I was actually studying for my professional licenses my senior year of college. So my career path started much earlier than a lot of people and I feel like that's the reason that by my late 20s I was in a completely different path. There's a gentleman in the book I wrote about he actually started in his field at the age of 12. And I won't bore you with the whole story it's a really fascinating story. And this guy is now 20 years old and has significant experience as a 20 year old where most people his age haven't even started meaningful work yet, right? The compound career path concept allows someone to take their long -term goals, make the most of it, and then the financial fruits of that labor, they turn into the financial benefits that we know through compounding and investing.
Cameron Howe
Is that essentially like managing lifestyle creep? Like you go from a $50,000 paying job to $100,000, but you treat it like you're still making 50K and you bank all that excess?
Travis Freeman
There's part of that in there. You got it, right? I talk about how everyone can buy their own dream home because a dream home isn't the white picket fence or a place on the beach. It's the home that allows you to adequately save and look to the future for your dreams that you want in life. Because I meet so many people that have two, three homes and they're just drowning in cash flow payments, right? So yeah, you got it. You're hitting the nail on some of the aspects that are in there. I think if everybody at the age of 22 right out of school or whatever age they're out of school could read it, they'd be on better financial footing.
Cameron Howe
I mean, I had the fortune of getting a capital markets job right out of school. And maybe I wish I had the book at that time because I ended up having quite a bit of lifestyle creep as a result of massive salary right after you graduate. Now I have to keep managing those expectations even in startup mode.
Travis Freeman
You know
what? I'm not going to blame you for that because it's just part of modern society. Yeah. And in fact, in the book, I talked about Madonna, her music video Material Girl when it came out in the 80s. And the 80s were really a period of consumerism and a lot of people saying, I want more, I want more. You watch this music video and you see pearls and cars and caviar and all these ridiculous things that you don't need. And it sort of created a norm in society today. So you're not the only one. A lot of people, it happens. It happens to a lot of people.
Cameron Howe
I think it might even be worse now. You have all these social media influencers who post expensive dinners, private jets, yachts, fancy cars, and then the natural assumption, I feel like, from a younger demographic. And I don't know if you address this in the book. I don't want you to give away all your secrets of the book. But, you know, it seems like younger people now are incentivized to really live that consumerist lifestyle and spend well beyond their means to, you know, attract an online following. The closest thing to being rich is feeling rich and you feel rich by surrounding yourself with all this stuff that rich people have, even if you can't afford it. And that is a huge problem with today's society.
Travis Freeman
I know you have, you previously worked in the startup space as well. And, you know, me being in this role currently, I know we had a chance to connect on this before, but I'm curious, you know, if you wanted to dive a little bit more into, you know, outside of the insurance and investment world, a little bit about that startup experience and what you thought it taught you?
Travis Freeman
Sure. So, for all your listeners on the podcast, I started my practice right out of college as a financial planner. But the way that I did that without having a natural network of wealthy people to call on is I wound up in this network of employers. And these employers would have me come in and teach different financial trainings to their employees. And the reason they would have me come in is they would typically see an uptick in 401k and retirement savings deferrals. Maybe they're using the fringe benefits more. They're happier at work. It was a nice perk for them. Well, I got so busy. In one year, I did around a hundred of these trainings. So do the math. I mean, you're... Seven days, you're taking two days a week off usually, right? I mean, I was very busy and I tried to avoid ever doing them on a Friday. So it got to the point where I wanted to grow that segment even more doing these financial trainings, but I couldn't be traveling. I needed to replicate myself. So I said, what if we create an online gamified system where people can take a virtual version of these trainings we've been giving and they can get rewards that could be redeemed for something, right? So we created a platform called Planwell. And Planwell was just that. It had 100 e-courses, similar to the type of stuff that I would teach in person, but it was a real shorter version, right? You might learn about Wills and Trust or Roth Conversion. Or how much life insurance you need. And if you complete tasks within the videos, like confirming your beneficiaries under 401k, you get points and you could redeem those points for rewards that the HR department would have, like a gift card or time with a CFP was another option that you could use. So that venture took me down the path of hiring IT engineers, hiring a new employee to manage the marketing side. I was out there doing speaking engagements, talking about it. And I never thought I'd be in the development space and the startup space, but I was doing that in tandem with one of my practice because they were kind of tied together real fascinating to go down that road. So I'm glad I did it. I am not in that space any longer. I'm focused just solely on my practice and the book, but I would encourage anybody, anybody who has that entrepreneurial spirit that's thought about doing something like that to give it a try, just find, maybe don't bootstrap the whole thing like I did, find some financial backing, you probably speed it up a little better and just find real smart, capable people to surround yourself with and you can get it done.
Cameron Howe
I love that idea. And we, I mean, we've launched a Investipal University to help equip individual investors with that knowledge. And we actually have had quite a few guests on our platform who are in the advisory space as well and talk a lot about financial education, financial literacy. I'm curious if you ever come across with your clients the need to and the want that we've had the conversation actually quite a few times where the modern investor now the modern individual is much better educated and they want to be educated by their advisor. Do you think there's a role to be had there with the financial advisors job to help educate their clients not only on you know what is a 401k but more of the investment philosophy. The investment philosophy that you're deploying for their accounts?
Travis Freeman
I think it depends. Some people, I just had a meeting this morning with some clients out in California. They're in their early 70s and they are so hands off and they didn't used to be. They used to be do-it-yourselfers. And they even said to me, Travis, you know, again, we're just so glad we're working with you guys because we don't have to worry about these things. All we do is worry about seeing you a year from now. Now, there's a lot that we're doing behind the scenes for them, tax planning and state planning, you know, in the meantime. Other clients though, they do ask what's changing in DC or what's changing federally, I should say, with tax law, right? Is there anything on the estate planning front that we should be aware of that for our family? What's going on with the market? So some people do look to us and expect us to educate them, especially on what's new or what's changed. And others, they just say, I'm paying you, I trust you, and I expect that you're doing those things. I just don't need to know all of that. So I guess the point of saying all that is that yes, financial professionals should be prepared and understand that there is an expectation for a part of their book of business, a part of their clientele to be able to provide that kind of education. Because if you don't, it's going to be met elsewhere.
Cameron Howe
I was wondering if you ever noticed a shift with the age demographics where, you know, that 70 year old client is probably more hands off. What we have heard is the, you know, the millennial individual, they'll come to the table with an advisor and say, here's three S&P 500 ETFs I want you to purchase for me. And these three ETFs are like the lowest MER. So they've already done their research on like costing, what they view as the best fit for them. And they're coming to their advisor with ideas. Do you, have you noticed that sort of shift with like a young, the, the younger clients you might service?
Travis Freeman
Occasionally we'll see that with some of the children of our clients because a lot of the folks I'm working with are ultra affluent or what we call ultra high net worth. Okay. So they're generally not coming to us with those types of requests. Sometimes the kids do though. And if somebody has read an article and they want to invest in a low cost ETF of some kind, do they really need the professional? Right. If their situation is real simple, they don't need any tax planning, no estate planning. They understand all their employer benefits really well at work. Maybe there isn't a whole lot of value yet, right? Maybe 10 years from now, their complications will change to the point there is more value. So that's my first thought. But in the type of clientele I work with, what's more common is they'll find a private investment, an apartment complex, a mining operation in some other country. And they'll say, hey, I have this white paper someone gave me. What do you think? And we got to read through this hundred page document, right? That that happens fairly often.
Cameron Howe
So you have to put on the VC hat and do some due diligence for them.
Travis Freeman
You got it. Yeah, that's fine. That is something that we have to do. And we're happy to do it. If number one, it protects them. And number two, sometimes we do find some interesting deals out there that we're interested in, put our own money in. And it just wasn't something advertised. It kind of flowed to us. And we think it's good enough that we put our own skin in the game.
Cameron Howe
Interesting. So with that said, you know, like over the next, there's the big, you know, wealth transfer that's occurring over the next decade, let's say with baby boomers passing over their wealth to their children who will naturally become your clients more and more. I'm curious to pick your brain a little bit on the wealth management industry overall and how you see the landscape shaping. You know, we're seeing a lot of, I mean, talks of AI. A trend towards independence. I'm curious, you know, what your take is on the industry and how it's going to end up evolving to service this new age of customer.
Travis Freeman
Sure. I think I first think backwards a little bit to the time of when robo advisors were first coming out. And I remember being at a conference and the speaker came out and there were thousands of financial professionals at this conference. And the speaker said, look, I realize everyone's a little anxious about these things called the robo advisors and what they're going to do. But ultimately, that technology is good for everybody. It's good for someone that just wants a robo type of environment. If somebody still wants a professional to work with, that type of technology allowed them to augment some of their services and magnify the value that a person can provide. So ultimately, what do I think is going to happen in the future? The evolution of AI and other technologies that will speed up the processing time that professionals, people advisors have to spend creating value. I think it's going to allow the more difficult part of our industry to take more of a front and center stage. Investment management is becoming easier and easier to do, let's say across 10 different accounts with different complexity or tax wise. It used to be manual spreadsheet work. Today there's sophisticated software available to professionals. I think five years from now that type of software will be distilled down to the point that individual investors might be able to use it. So what value is a professional having if now they have the same type of investment grade software in their own hands that we had years ago only access to professionals, right? Tax planning is very much manual. There's some neat software that's out there, but it's just as much art as it is science. Estate planning strategies, still manual. I don't know that a software program anytime soon is gonna come up with some of these creative things that professionals and attorneys could come up with. And then there's the education, the hand-holding, the taking all these sophisticated pieces of the puzzle and putting it together. I think we're a long way from AI getting to that point, if ever. And I realize that's a strong statement for me to make, if ever, but the human side, the emotional side of what we do, AI is going to have a really hard time getting to that point. And that's the reason I don't see any of this technology as a threat. I actually get excited about what it means for people that use advisors and people that don't use advisors. It's going to help everybody.
Cameron Howe
Yeah, I view, to your point, the relationship aspect becoming more and more evident where your back office tasks can end up getting automated, which means the value add you're providing is really that comfort factor for your clients and being able to understand the extra context that a robot or like an AI would never be able to really get any granular or subjective insights into. But to your point, it's probably several years away until that really takes hold. But I do feel like, yeah, that, you know, the education piece, the really that client -centered approach is in my mind going to be, you know, the big selling factor for why people will end up going with a financial advisor in the future, one who can help arm them with the knowledge, with that peace of mind, which I don't think a Chad GBT will be able to provide.
Travis Freeman
Yeah, hard to have that human to human connection with that.
Cameron Howe
So with a book, is there any sort of highlights or main takeaways without kind of really diving or giving away too many secrets of it that any of our retail investor audience listening to, maybe someone who's on the younger side could end up taking away from beyond the getting started early on in life? Is there other sorts of little tidbits of information that you think would be beneficial for them to purchase the book and dive in deeper on?
Travis Freeman
Yeah. So The Fortune of Youth obviously has a bend towards time and how you spend that precious commodity of time. Because again, it's finite, whereas wealth is infinite. I would say that if somebody has never gone through and created a financial plan before, there's an entire chapter on creating a plan, either with a professional or doing it on your own. Why is that so important? I think it was Yogi Berra that said, if you don't know where you're heading, you might not get there. And if, picture this. So Cameron, picture that you were on a boat headed from, let's say, New York, and you want to go to London. And you point the boat exactly towards London when you leave harbor. Well, if you do that, and then you're busy keeping the boat maintained and clean the entire time. By the time you actually get toward the end of your journey, you might actually be in North Africa. Why is that? The tides are going to change. You're not always paying attention, right? And that's how many people go through life. It's not intentional planning. It's just sort of, I think I'll do this and I think I'll do this. And they're pointed in a general correct direction. But when you actually see the tactics that are being used to get there, they're not headed where they think they are. So I would encourage everybody to create some type of financial plan and project exactly where they're headed with the things you're doing today. Because I find, I mean, I do a lot of planning projections. When I do them for the first time for somebody, 90 to 95% of the time, they're not actually going where they thought they were. Some of them are way off course, and some of them are just a little off course. And the earlier that someone can go through that planning exercise, the easier it's going to be to take yourself to London. Because all of a sudden, you wind up and land in North Africa, it's going to be expensive and take a lot of time to get to London Harbour.
Cameron Howe
Whatever happened with that dentist, was he able to get that contract to London or did he have to work a few more years?
Travis Freeman
We didn't end up working together. I helped him with some things, but ultimately there wasn't much for me to do. I did go through a planning exercise with him. And if I suspect he is still working or he and his spouse made some significant changes to their lifestyle to just make it work with the wealth that they had. And if they would have gone through a planning exercise decades earlier, it actually would have been real easy to solve their woes. It would have been real easy, but they ran out of that precious commodity of time. Perfect example of starting a financial planner early on in life.
Cameron Howe
Got it. Well, Travis, I really appreciate you coming on today. We'll leave a link in our show notes to buy the book on Amazon. If anyone is interested in getting in contact with you, what's the best place they can find you?
Travis Freeman
Sure. Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm sure if you type in Travis Freeman, CFP into Google, it'll pull up all kinds of info about me. And again, there are easy ways to get in touch. But LinkedIn's a great, easy one. And yeah, any questions, throw them over. It'll be myself or a member of my team that reaches out and happy to help.
Cameron Howe
Okay, wonderful. Well, Travis, hopefully we can have you on again in the future.
Travis Freeman
All right. Sounds good. Appreciate it, Cameron.
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