Episode Transcript
Sasha: Welcome to the Heart of Advice Podcast, presented by eMoney. I’m Sasha Grabenstetter.
Connor: And I’m Connor Sung. We’re your eMoney experts. Today on the podcast, we have Eric Roberge. Eric is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™. He is the CEO of Beyond Your Hammock, an independent RIA with offices in Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts, serving clients locally and virtually across the entire U.S. He was named one of Investopedia’s Top 100 financial advisors, advisor LUMINARIES award winner for thought leadership, and a recipient of Wealth Management’s fastest-growing RIA awards. A columnist for Business Insider, Forbes, Kiplinger, and cohost of the podcast Beyond Finances alongside his wife, Kali. First off, Eric, welcome. Thank you for joining us.
Eric: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Connor: I just want to take a step back a little bit and talk about, number one, your innovative practice Beyond Your Hammock. It is, from what I understand, a fee-only financial planning and investment management firm, specifically with a niche of self-made millionaires in their 20’s to 30’s. I know we showcased a little bit about your practice in a case study we did a few years ago. And at the time, you had sextupled your AUM over a four-year period, which, again, commend you for huge amounts of growth there. But taking a step back, can you just tell us a little bit more about the firm, how it’s evolved, what things you’ve done to try and make financial planning a little bit more accessible?
Eric: Yeah. I mean, Beyond Your Hammock was first established for people in their 20s and 30s. We’ve evolved to work with more people in their 30s and 40s up to really 55 years old, with an average client age of 40. Forty-year-olds who are married, both working with kids is really where we’re focusing, people that are making about $500,000 in household income and have a lot of equity compensation through work, at least one of the spouses does. So there’s a lot of complexity, and we are trying to help people balance the desire to spend well today and to live extraordinarily while also being responsible about the future. And that’s a very delicate line. There’s a lot of nuance to it, and there are no black-and-white answers. So we really are very consultative in that entire conversation.
Sasha: That brings us to our next question. I would love to hear a little bit more about the problems that you’re trying to solve for your clients through financial planning, especially when they are highly compensated like you’re talking about?
Eric: Yeah. The big, big conversations. Right? Big decisions that people are making about where we, our family, should live for years to come and how that impacts our kids’ ability to access the right schooling and education. How do we afford that education? Is it public schools? Is it private school before high school? Is it a private college down the road? What about our careers? How do we balance having time for ourselves and our family with making it in the career world and really increasing our income to a place that we want to achieve the goals that we want to achieve from a career perspective—because all of our clients are very much go-getters and they want more because they’re competitive. They just engage in life. So there’s just a lot going on, and there’s a lot of balance to be had. And I don’t want people to be so caught up with the blinders on going in one direction and miss a major turning point that they would have otherwise caught if they weren’t so busy. So, we try to slow them down, think big picture, and just make sure that we’re helping them make those quality decisions.
Connor: With that average age, and we’re talking a little bit about their extremely high earnings. These are predominantly households that did not come from money. Right?
Eric: Yeah. That’s the other thing. Good point. They don’t come in with a bunch of inheritance. They didn’t just win the lottery. They’re using their cash flow to grow their own wealth and that comes with a lot of complications. And certainly, it comes with some mindset shifts, right? If you’re used to living a certain way and your money blueprint was a certain way because you learned it from your parents who may have had some money but didn’t have all the money and didn’t give it to you necessarily when you graduated from college, you need to think differently about how to use your money and what is acceptable and what you feel good about. And it could be different than what you grew up with.
Sasha: What are you focusing on with those clients? We’re talking about mindset shift. What is the most common thing you’re talking about with clients? I’d love to hear a little more.
Eric: Well, there’s everything from, “We don’t have much money, so we’re just going to use the money we have and spend it well.” Right? And when you don’t have a lot of money, you don’t think about how much money you should save because there’s not much room to save to begin with. So you’re just trying to live your life. But suddenly when you’re going from making $200,000 a year as a household to making $500,000 over a five-year period, which a lot of our clients are doing, especially when they get the equity comp and they start vesting over time, things drastically change.
And if you continue just to spend everything you make, your lifestyle balloons, which feels great maybe in the moment, or not, depending on who you are and what your money blueprint is. But to be able to back off and say, well, we need some buffer room here. We need to start saving money so that we can not only live powerfully now, but also live powerfully when we’re 60 years old. That has to be a very intentional choice that you make.
Sasha: You said something about a blueprint. And so I want to ask you about that because it kind of sounds similar to me in my mind, like money scripts. So can we ask a little bit more about that?
Eric: Yeah. I mean, it’s very similar. I just use that as the catchall for what has been ingrained by your own experience when you were 5 years old based on what you witnessed your parents doing with money, how people talked about money, and just your overall experience of having or not having money and what that meant to you. Like, it’s different for everybody, and you can’t ignore it because it will be a driving force behind how you think about money and therefore how you use it.
Sasha: 100 percent. My background is really in financial wellness, Eric. So the idea of really understanding what the client history is, that money script, kind of what’s holding them back is important to me. So that’s why I wanted to dig into it. So thank you. I do want to just kind of pivot slightly because at eMoney, we’ve really been doing a lot of research on outcomes for tech-forward advisers versus tech-averse advisers, as outlined in our New Value Proposition for Advisors eBook. We would consider you a tech-forward advisor. You believe tech is important. So, to kind of piggyback off some of the things you’ve already said, do you have any stories of how tech made an impact for the client, given that illustration of that impact?
Eric: Yeah. I mean, I’ll just broadly talk about something and then get more specific with something different. But I think just generally speaking, something as simple and effective as we use a software called Knudge. And it’s basically just a reminder system, an accountability system to hold clients accountable to take the actions they need to take. And we have actions that come out of every single client meeting. So we give them their list of actions, and we put it in Knudge, and then it’s automated to remind them to do things. I was just talking to an advisor on LinkedIn today about the impact of how many more actions get done because we use that system to push those forward. And if they’re taking action, the plan is evolving. We’re moving forward. And there’s a compound effect of, if you get done 80 percent of the actions instead of 25 percent of the actions, the compound effect over 10 or 20 years is just exponential. And you won’t even be in the same ballpark if you’re not doing those things. Right? So using something like that to really push things forward versus doing it manually like we were before is huge.
But another more specific one, and it’s not just because we’re eMoney followers here, but using eMoney. I had a client. She was a W-2 employee and had a side business, and she wanted to go full-time with her business and be a business owner, dropping the W-2 income. And we were able to collect all of her data and put it into eMoney using the five-year cash flow screen, showing different iterations of well, if you make this much in the business, you only have to earn this much at your W-2, and here’s when you can switch over and be fully 100 percent business owner and drop your W-2 income completely. And here’s what you can spend. And then we said, if you make this much, you can spend maybe a little bit less. Or if you make this much, you can spend a little bit more. But overall, you’re going to be OK because you have this cash buffer here. And being able to dynamically show that on-screen and talk through things and have her visualize different scenarios that she had come up with, she got comfortable and was able to cut the cord. And she’s like, this was the best thing that has ever happened, really. Financial planning has really given me this new life to live. And that’s just the amazing stuff that comes from being dynamic and using technology to get that done.
Connor: You talked a little bit about Knudge and, obviously, a little bit about eMoney and some of the planning features. But as you think about all of the stuff that you use across your either client-facing or back-office technologies for the whole firm, what do you think is the most valuable piece of technology that you use?
Eric: I was actually just talking to my COO about this question specifically, and she’s like, funny enough, it’s the people. It isn’t technology. It’s the ability for us to sit down and listen to a client and let them share without being made to feel wrong about their feelings about certain things. And once they get all that out there, we can sort through it, and then we can apply what we know in the tech that we use to show certain things, be objective about it, but also take into account their feelings about the scenario. And then we can make a better decision about what they should be doing by blending spreadsheet and tech with feelings and emotions and then move forward. And undoubtedly, there’s no removing the human side of financial planning here no matter what tech there is to input. And I think that’s really important. I was at Fidelity yesterday, and I was looking at the place where they collect all of the technology that is just in the world, and they try to apply the technology to financial planning features and make these new products, and they put them on the shelf, and then business units can grab them and use them. And there’s so much out there, and it’s just amazing the amount of tech that is available. But it doesn’t matter what that tech looks like if the people using the tech don’t feel comfortable. And they’re really going to only feel comfortable when they’re associating with a human in some aspect of the process.
Connor: Yeah. We definitely feel passionate at eMoney that we are but a vehicle of enhancing, enabling the advice that you’re building inside of the relationships that you have with your clients. And I 100 percent agree that there’s no aspect of personalization or, like, true delivery of a financial plan just through technology because you won’t get the nuances that you’ll get from having a conversation with somebody and asking them, like, “Alright. What does this actually mean to you?” versus, “I know what it means one plus-one wise, but how does that actually apply to the way that I handle my finances or ultimately the way that my blueprint will look moving forward?”
I was curious, you did talk about doing some cash flow planning inside of eMoney. As far as the features and functionality go inside of financial planning tools, what do you feel like is the most impactful?
Eric: Are you talking about inside of eMoney? The financial planning tool that we use is essentially eMoney. We use Holistiplan too for taxes, but eMoney is the core piece of planning software that we use. So the five-year cash flow screen and the Decision Center are the two pieces we go back and forth on constantly. I tell clients, one of them, the five-year cash flow could look great, but the long-term might not if you’re not saving enough. And vice versa, you could look great in the long term, but you might have a bottleneck in your cash flow in the short term. That’s going to really cause some emotional impact if you’re not getting in front of that. So by using those two features, we’re allowing clients to see and visualize things that they otherwise would not be able to find tangible because it’s all just mental accounting and conversations in your head about numbers. And as you know, I mean, it’s really tough to do the math necessary and see the picture when you’re just talking about it.
Connor: I definitely agree. And it sounds like the client needs that you have are the generalized version, where you’re having people who are making decent household money together. And then they have some exponential growth inside of their household that the short-term cash flow is extremely important, but this more holistic view of their overall is going to be the most impactful guide to how we’re doing in the short-term decision making.
Eric: I tell clients too, with the five-year cash flow, showing the net income at the end of each year, the expected net income based on their expenses and their income and taking out taxes and benefits. That is the power. That’s the switch that people don’t get access to in real life if they’re not working with somebody who has this kind of system in place. Because if we can show, “Well, based on how you’re living right now, you have $100,000 that is unaccounted for. It’s not in your expenses that you’ve said you spend. You’re not saving it right now. What are you doing with it? How can we take advantage of that to not only save more for the future, but also increase your lifestyle now if you choose to?” So, to be able to ask somebody, “What do you want more of in your life right now? What could you cut out or do you want less of in your life?” Have that conversation for each spouse and let them answer individually and then combine as a family. And we have this flexibility with this net income that is just unused. That can dramatically change lives. And people don’t even realize what they can do for themselves, always thinking, “Well, in 10 years, I can do this,” or “In 20 years, I can do that.” No. You can do it tomorrow. We just have to adjust a little bit.
Connor: Yeah. I love that, the short-term benefits of financial planning. I think the stigma where it’s like, ‘Well, yeah, 30 years from now, I’ll retire.’ And I save a little bit, but getting a little bit more granular, I think, will help people. And, ultimately, I think it helps sell the shorter term and the need for financial planning. I do want to just circle back a little bit to the technology. And you talked about five-year cash flow. You talked about the Decision Center. You talked about Knudge, and you talked about Holistiplan. I mean, number one, it’s a handful of technologies. And you talked about the people, right, and making sure that the people are enabled across the firm in order to deliver that aspect of financial planning through the tech. But how are you as a firm keeping up with, new features, and releases, making sure that you and your teams are all using them in a somewhat standardized but personalized-to-the-client way?
Eric: Our team is naturally built to be sponges, to consume information. We love it. We love to grow. We love to learn. We love to expand our knowledge base and just look at new perspectives constantly. So, I mean, I’m always looking at the trade magazines, and with the emails that we get now, not obviously physical anymore. Reading Kitces, Michael Kitces, and his articles, XYPN, XY Planning Network does a great job of putting tech in front of us as well. I’m a member of XY Planning Network. And just trying to look at everything to see what might fit. And if something looks good that we have a gap for or we’re just looking to replace something, we’re going to do a demo, and we’re going to just talk through it as a team because everybody on the team is responsible for bringing things to the table. We can’t just sit back and think that our systems are all set up because they’re never done. So we always have to bring something to the table: What else can we do? How can we improve? How can we use technology to augment our services to be more efficient, to be more effective for clients and ourselves to give both of us, clients and advisors, more free time to do what it is that we love to do. So, whether it’s what we use right now, we use Grain as a meeting note taker, right, an AI note taker in our Zoom meetings. And that really helps to go back and see what people said very quickly in the transcripts to make sure that we’re capturing things correctly. And all of our meetings these days, I mean, they’re virtual. I have my office. People can come in if they want to, but nobody—since March, maybe one person has asked to come back in. I think, just based on lifestyle and just the busyness of people when you have, again, two people working with kids and you’re just kind of ripped in two pieces trying to figure everything out. You don’t want to commute anywhere if you don’t have to. So, the virtual nature, doing it in the morning or at lunch or after work—that’s how we get things done. And technology has hugely changed how we would otherwise run our business and hopefully makes things more efficient for clients.
Connor: Yeah. 100 percent. Alright. I am curious how that culminates. I love the culture aspect of having everybody kind of input and learn and continue to grow. And is that owners of specific pieces of technology? Is that a specific spot dedicated inside of team meetings where you’re talking about those things? Can you just talk a little bit about that?
Eric: So Kali, my wife, is the chief operations officer. She’s the chief content creator as well. So when it comes to those types of things, if any tech is related to operations, like, we use Hubly as a task manager inside of our systems, which is an overlay to Wealthbox, our CRM. She is involved in that. Or if it’s something that is AI-related, Max, our associate advisor, is super into learning about AI right now, and we have ChatGPT 4 to help us be more effective there. So he’s building GPTs in the background and trying to help us analyze things on a more efficient basis. We sent him out to FPA NorCal, which is one of the biggest FPA events. Certainly, the biggest regional event there is in the FPA, but I mean, it’s almost the size of national, really the national FPA conference. So he was out there for four days looking at things. I’m going to Future Proof in California in the fall to just continue to push the edge, push the envelope as far as cutting-edge information technology people. And it’s just natural for us to do this stuff. And, obviously, we’re going to gain a lot of information and bring it back and discuss it.
Sasha: When you talk about Future Proof, I think that that’s one of Connor’s favorite conferences to attend. So I have to, like, tease him just a tiny bit. I’m thinking about, if I was one of your clients, I’m thinking about all of your technology, which I think is just amazing, first off. But when we think about when an advisor is making impactful actions, they’re usually helping clients identify their values and their goals and connecting those together. So how does your practice approach this aspect of planning? I’d love to hear a little more.
Eric: I mean, one major piece is on every summary that we give clients, it’s written. And the first page is the action list of things I need to take care of, or we need to take care of. The second page is sort of a one-page financial plan-esque type of a thing, where we have charts on their cash and what cash is being used for, if they have any extra cash to invest or spend on something big. But right at the top of that page, there is a chart of values, the five family values that they’ve chosen for themselves to focus on now. And right next to that intentionally are the goals that they have, both short- and long-term, the biggest ones of the top five goals that they have. And that’s front and center every time we deliver back that summary so that they are always paying attention to the two, and we want to bring a focus to, “Are they aligned?” Right? “Are these goals here aligned with the values and vice versa?”
Because if they’re not, there’s something off. I mean, dig a little deeper to make sure that we are focusing on the right things and not just doing what we think we need to do because we’re a certain demographic or a certain age or whatever. And so that’s always a conversation to make sure that people are staying in line with what they value and they’re focusing on their priorities. And it’s never settled either, because your values from five years ago are going to be completely different than they are in 10 years. So, we need to just have that conversation as much as reasonable to stay current so that the plan stays current, and you feel like it’s supporting you and your life and not just supporting something that was out of date.
Sasha: So, I love the alignment model. I love really just having that discussion with clients, not that I do, but I hear that advisors do, when they have that conversation with clients, making sure their values and goals align. My husband’s a financial planner, and so we have this conversation quite often actually about, “Do our goals and our values align?” I would love to actually hear any specific questions. That’s what our listeners really love to hear, specific questions that reveal the core of a client’s values, goals.
Eric: I think I’d mentioned these briefly before, but just, “What do you want more of in your life?” And “What would you like to cut out that you do currently?” I think that is an opening, very broad opening, but allows people to talk through things and voice maybe thoughts that they have had piecemeal but never have expressed, and they learn from those types of things. And we can just dig in more by asking why, “And why is that the case? Is it something that is there a sense of FOMO here, and what is that? Is it true that you feel this way?” Like, “Are the numbers behind your feeling true? Are the laws and regulations actually aligned with what you’re thinking, or are there mistakes that you’re making? Are there pieces of misinformation that you’re using that are generating these feelings?” Because that’s easy. We just get that out of the way and ground ourselves in reality, but then layer on the true feelings and thoughts that people have.
And I don’t have like, some advisors have this whole session that is just focused on values. I just feel like it’s just natural to have that as part of the overall conversation constantly, and it just fits in with our structure and in the way that we do our business, the way that we listen, the way that we ask questions. And until a client, I mean, so step back. I’m just thinking of when I’m talking to a client and I see. I’m on video, but I can sense, like, something is between the lines or they’re not saying? I’m going to call it out. I’ll say, “Hey, I just noticed that you flinched or you like, shrugged. What’s that about?” Like, was there something in that that you didn’t say that you should say here? And that’s amazing because people know I’m paying attention, but also it gives them the freedom to say something that they might have been afraid to say in front of their spouse or to a planner because it might reveal something that is vulnerable to them. And again, it’s a safe place. We all want to make sure that we’re connecting effectively in the planning that we do.
Sasha: Sounds like with a lot of your clients, you’re really building that vulnerability. I love the “What do you want more of” and “What do you want to cut out?” I think I might ask my spouse that question tonight. But those are good questions to really get to know the heart of your clients. So thank you.
Connor: I’m trying to figure out, Eric, you’ve leaned a lot on some of the more behavioral aspects of financial planning, and as Sasha and I have talked about, we 100 percent agree that that’s, it leads to motivation, action. It gives you something to point back to, that level of alignment or, I’m sure in many cases, misalignment. So when you first started the firm, you were serving 20- to 30-year-olds. Can you just talk a little bit about what you were offering them and how it’s evolved to what you’re offering clients now and the approach that you take?
Eric: Yeah. I mean, it’s a natural evolution because when I started my firm, I was 33. Now I’m 44. Right? So I am now older. My life has gone from being a single person with not much income and a fledgling business to a really established business with a team and I have a wife and a child and we own a house. There are a lot of things that make things much more complex. And that complexity can be a good thing, but it also can be very challenging and stressful. And so the planning that we’ve done has evolved with our own evolution. I’ve always been pretty open about expressing how I’m doing things to my clients to say, “Here’s the theory, and here is either another client’s experience, remaining nameless, but here’s the experience they had,” or “Here’s what I did. And here’s a mistake that I made or here’s the opportunity that I realized out of that,” and that’s just a natural thing. I will say that I was a little bit more hesitant to share things before I really dug in and did a lot of growth, training and development on myself, and reflection on myself in my late 20s. I like to say that I went through a quarter-life crisis at age 25. And hopefully, I will miss the midlife crisis, which is right in the forefront. But I’ve done a lot of work on myself, and that has made me a better person because I peeled off the layers that have clouded my vision of who I am and certainly the way that I can express myself and get involved with my clients with more emotional perspective.
Sasha: I just have to say, I respect the work because sometimes, we call that “inside work” in therapy, we call that the self of the therapist, just really kind of digging into who we are. So, I really appreciate that. But it also sounds like those things that you’ve learned about yourself, you have applied.
I do want to really ask you about this though because I’ve been wondering about it. How did you get involved with writing? When you Google your name, which is a sentence that sounds silly, but when you Google your name, a lot of things come up. So I’m just wondering, how did you get really involved with that, especially as a busy financial advisor, with a wife, kids, those kind of things?
Eric: Well, it started way back when I first became an advisor, and I resisted the normal brokerage type of environment where you’d have to send out mailers and cold call people following up on those mailers and just trying to sell whatever you could to them to make it. I hated that. And so I found this book. It was Never Cold Call Again. And this is, like, 2008. So, this is when online newsletters were just kind of coming out. Facebook was just coming out. And the whole idea was to create content that people would consume and come to you because they liked what you said. And so that started the process.
I started a blog. Back then, even though it wasn’t connected to the advisory group that I was working with, I was allowed to, through compliance, have my own blog that was talking to people that were a little bit younger, like my age, that weren’t good clients for the firm, but just allowed me to get out when I was getting out. And then when I started my business, I realized that I wasn’t making any money, and so I needed to figure out different income streams to help support my life. And one of them was a waiter, that had no connection to financial planning.
But another one, there’s a company, I don’t know if they’re still in existence or not, called Blueleaf, and I connected with them because they were in Cambridge. And I was able to write blogs, and they were paying me, like, $200 a blog post for them. And so I started to write that way, and I could get exposure in the industry and also make money. I realized, like, if I continue to do this, it’s a long game. But the more content that I get out there, the more of a presence I’m going to have on the Internet, which tries to send people back to me. And so it just evolved from there. Then I went to Money.com, and I had some articles, and they were getting a lot of traction. Like, 150,000 people went to this one article and drove 1,000 people to my website and a bunch of them signed up for my newsletter. I was like, there’s something here.
I got access to Forbes and Kiplinger and Business Insider and just at this point, I’ve joined forces with my wife in 2018, and she was a marketer. She had a business that was helping advisors with their online content strategy. So she is my content creator now too. So we work together to create the content for all these places. And again, it’s just a compound effect that is really helpful with SEO for us to continue to bring on new clients because they found us on the Internet.
Sasha: Well, it gives you one, it gives you a lot of credibility because, obviously, people can see Eric knows what he’s talking about. He’s written lots of articles about this, but I think that’s also awesome that you get to work with your wife on this. So kudos. I like that a lot.
Eric: That’s a long time in the making. Very challenging, but very gratifying in the end.
Connor: It is cool. Well, I guess just to I want to commend you as well. There’s a lot of stuff. Right? Financial advisor, educator, writer, family man. You do a lot of things. Again, I’m in awe of the amount of stuff that can be completed when there is an alignment of goals and values. And I think for you, you’re on the right path. And, again, I wish you the best in avoiding the midlife crisis or getting in front of that midlife crisis. But I did want to close this out just by asking, how would you define the heart of advice when it comes to financial planning?
Eric: That again, it’s people. The heart of advice is people, and people are never going to be removed from the financial planning process. You need a client and you need an advisor to really make it as impactful as possible. And we can use the technology to augment all the services that we provide and maybe save some time here and there and be more effective or efficient. But in the end, it’s the connection, it’s the relationships that we have with our clients that are going to drive the change that we want to see in them, and therefore make everybody more wealthy in more ways than just financial planning.
Sasha: Eric, thank you for being on the podcast today. We hope that our listeners enjoyed.
Disclaimer: Please be advised that this podcast contains purely educational information, and nothing discussed may be construed as legal, tax or financial advice. Please consult a financial advisor for any financial investment or money management questions. All views or opinions represented in this podcast are solely the opinion of the speaker, and do not represent those of eMoney Advisor, LLC, or any of its affiliates.
