Ep. 1 Who We Are and Why are We Doing This? Welcome

As attorneys, we often overlook the financial intricacies of our own lives while zealously guarding the interests of our clients. That's where Todd Whatley and Ian Weiner step in on the Lawyer's Money Show, providing an essential roadmap to financial mastery for legal eagles. We blend our wealth of legal and financial acumen to navigate through the maze of financial planning and business optimization, ensuring you are as skilled in building your personal fortune as you are in constructing a winning case. We promise that by the end of our discussion, you'll have the tools to manage both a thriving law practice and a robust financial future.

This episode features a deep dive into the specific challenges and opportunities that come with the territory of legal financial planning. From the moment you unpack our insights on taxes and proactive planning, you'll understand the transformative impact of structured business planning on your practice's valuation and your personal wealth. With a focus on ending with a grand legacy rather than just a retirement plan, we lay out strategies that will lead to financial independence and time freedom. Todd and I don't just talk shop; we're here to mentor you through creating a cohesive alliance with advisors who can turn your professional success into a lasting financial legacy. For the full experience, and to continue your journey into economic mastery, visit our website after tuning in to this game-changing episode.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Lawyer's Money Show with your hosts, todd Wattley and Ian Weiner, where finance meets the legal profession. Here we dive deep into the economics of law practice, from managing your firm's finances to optimizing personal wealth strategies for legal professionals. Every episode we bring you insights, strategies and stories from leading experts to help you navigate the financial landscape of the legal world. Stay tuned as we uncover the tools and tactics needed to help lawyers make the right money moves so they can grow their career, manage their practice and optimize their wealth so they can focus on enjoying the life they've worked so hard to build. For more resources, visit us at wwwlawyerstotalplancom.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Hey there, this is the Lawyer's Total Plan Podcast, and this is our first one. It's in production, and so I am Todd Wattley and I am here, and I am here with my podcast partner, Ian Weiner.

Speaker 3: 0:59

Todd, this is fun. We do radio together all the time, and that's kind of evolved into what we're talking about now. So that's what we're going to cover in this show. Yeah, how did this come about, why are we doing this and what's going to happen?

Speaker 2: 1:13

Yeah, so Lawyer's Total Plan is a comprehensive business where we're going to talk to lawyers, look at lawyers and their practices and help them cover a whole lot of things, and so that's where we're going to start and basically I did this with my own practice. I was like, hey, there's really a genesis of this.

Speaker 2: 1:37

Yeah, it's you getting to know me better and me talking about my practice and you're like so what do you do about this? Yeah, sounds like it. Um, I don't know. What do you do about this? Um, I don't know, and I've been doing this for 25 years and it it pretty much made both of us realize if, after 25 years, I've ran a fairly successful practice. If I'm doing things wrong, probably there's things not doing it wrong.

Speaker 1: 2:07

I'm just not, I'm serving.

Speaker 2: 2:08

Yeah, opportunities for improvement, and if I needed that help I'm pretty sure there's people out there who do need that help and so I'm an attorney, I've been, you know, certified attorney. I'm very, you know, specific practice focused, um, but I think this applies to all attorneys. So that's kind of my background. Tell us what your background is.

Speaker 3: 2:33

So this is this is really fun for me because I've kind of just stumbled into this a little bit at least with this, this type of kind of niche as, as you would say, um, my background is in financial planning and really in helping folks retire is where I spend most of my time, transitioning from working to retirement and all of the challenges that are in that.

Speaker 3: 2:52

Okay, and when you say financial planning, you are a certified financial planner Okay, yep, um, and within a month or two, I'll be a certified exit planning advisor Okay, um. So I'm adding more and more specialty and designation. I work very closely with one now as SIPA, um, but as I think attorneys are like the good financial planners, we're always adding more education, more, um, you know, designations as we continue to specialize. So, um, that's where we're, we're, I'm coming from, um, but really kind of how we got here is the challenges with with retirement are more complex than they used to be.

Speaker 3: 3:29

Um, I mean, even in the last couple of years. The rules are changing, the laws are changing, it's more and more complex than it's ever been, and even folks who have done well, have saved well, um, who are highly educated lawyers, physicians um, this is not your area of expertise, and the things that you can miss that are simple things to me, cause I do it all the time can be extraordinarily costly Hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars in either lifetime income or taxes. Yeah, the stakes are high here.

Speaker 2: 4:00

Yeah, and so when you talk about exit planning, it's like, well, I'm not trying to sell my practice, I you know I'm I'm doing this and I want to do it. But talk about how keeping an eye toward exiting or or selling your practice can make a tremendous difference in how you run your practice today, even if you never sell it.

Speaker 3: 4:22

It's such an important thing. What? What I've noticed is that, um, attorneys great attorneys are really focused on the practice of law, and that's what's great about attorneys they take their business very seriously. Um, however, they're not taught how to operate a business most of the time, and so they don't teach us that in law school. I promise you know, and so that's something that, um, that that's really what we do, is we teach.

Speaker 2: 4:45

We teach attorneys how to run a business and how to think about their business and not just the business but them personally financial insurance, and so that's where you know, we want one team of people to come to attorneys and them trust us to say I need a team to make sure that everything in my life is as cared for and planned out and and conscious you know, conscientious as possible yeah.

Speaker 3: 5:16

Well, what we've, what, what I find is in the financial world, you know, the more successful you are or the longer that you're in business, you tend to accumulate different advisors, right. Whether that's a tax advisor, you know. If you're a business owner you probably have some kind of corporate counsel that you work with, or business attorney, a state planning attorney, insurance people, property and casualty liability life in some cases, you know. Then you got your investment advisor guy that you know every once in a while you send a little money from the SEP to them.

Speaker 3: 5:43

You know the tax tax professional banker state planning, and so what happens is, over time, whether you're in private practice, whether you work for a firm, you know you're accumulating these other professionals, but what we find is they don't, they don't work together and they don't, they don't communicate, yeah, and that is entirely suboptimal really. And so my practice has transformed from recognizing that problem and saying, okay, how can we sort of reverse engineer that? And so the model that I take with my clients attorneys or not is we, we create what's called an outsourced family office or a virtual family office, and quickly, a family office is.

Speaker 2: 6:25

It's something that's set up by really wealthy families, so most billionaires, yes, have a team of people that work strictly for them, that have an attorney, a financial advisor, tax person, a number of them. In some cases, you know sure, they're employed by the billionaire because they can afford that.

Speaker 3: 6:42

Yep, and so what they do is they only work for that family, thus family office. The challenge is for, for regular folks like you and I not millionaires, not billionaires, I mean really that starts to make sense around $150, $200 million of net worth because you're talking about payroll expenses of you know $2, $3 million a year because you have to. If you're gonna, if you're gonna hire someone, you're gonna hire the best and the best. Don't work for cheap. It's just the way it is. You give what you pay for, right. I mean we as attorneys. Attorneys know this. You know the most expensive thing you can do is hire the wrong attorney. Oh, sure, because then you got to hire the right one later, you know, and so that. So the problem is what we've found is okay, it's too expensive for average people. So we started to look at okay, how could we make this available to regular folks like you and I? And we do that by outsourcing, and so what we do is we help our clients build a team of professionals and specialists that work together, and so lawyers total plan is a version of this that is focused on working with attorneys, helping them build out their what we call their wealth team.

Speaker 3: 7:50

Okay, so this is your tax person, whether it's a CPA and EA tax attorney, fine. Your investment advisor, your financial planner sometimes they're different, they don't not always, but sometimes your insurance person, your banker, a real estate person, your estate planning attorney, your you know corporate counsel, and what we do is we make sure that they're all working together and looking at your, your entire financial picture together comprehensively and they're proactive. This is the big thing that I want to impress is being proactive rather than reactive. We want to be, we want to be ahead of stuff and we want to see stuff before it happens, so that you know that you're not missing out on anything.

Speaker 3: 8:33

The thing, the emotional thing, that we want our clients to never have to deal with is to find out that there was something they could have done to save money on taxes, to invest better to, you know, make more money, and they wish they would have known about it 10 years ago. Sure, we just want that to never happen. And so, when, when folks hire us, that's what they're hiring us for to make sure they don't miss anything. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 8:54

Yeah, when I work with clients, particularly doing estate planning, I so wish we could have the tax person, the financial person, their insurance person sitting at the same table so we could have one whole conversation and come together without feelings getting hurt. You know about? Wait a second, you're taking money from this investment and putting it into insurance. Wait, you're. You know that's not. You know there's a five. Yeah, there's almost no number one. Scheduling that many professionals to come together at one point in time is just dang near impossible. And even if we did get them together, I've seen it where they're very territorial don't, don't be stepping into my stuff, I won't step into your. It's no, no, no, no, no. We need to come together for the benefit of the client and that's between our conversations of saying this is what I've seen as an attorney. I've seen this as a problem. It's definitely. The issue in my life is, you know, getting all of my people together at one point is pretty much impossible.

Speaker 3: 9:58

And do they even know the other ones exist? No, in a lot of cases, right? No, and so the way that it ends up working is we act as kind of your, your personal CFO is the way we talk about it, you know. So you're the CEO, and then if you have a spouse, you and the spouse or the CES right.

Speaker 3: 10:17

You're making the decisions, you're charting the path, but you're you're handing off, you're delegating the financial side of that. This is what we want to do. How do we do it? And so there's two parts to that right. There's the, there's the vision and there's the implementation part. And you know there's. We have different levels of how involved we can get you know, but, but ideally, and what we, what we found that attorneys really understand, is the power of delegation. You know, because they that's that's their business.

Speaker 3: 10:48

People are delegating complex things to them so that they don't have to become experts in it, you know, and so if we're, if we're having conversations with all of your professionals, the team that we build together, you only have to be involved if it's absolutely critical.

Speaker 2: 11:02

Yeah, that's the key, peace of mind and time, time, yeah, time and peace of mind. I'm busy running my practice, coaching other attorneys, doing things, and I'm, you know, knowing that I have this taken care of. I just got my not even my CPA, but a person that's become my friend, who was my CPA. She got out of it due to health problems. Whatever.

Speaker 2: 11:27

She was talking with my bookkeeper, she called me. She's like Todd, you have a huge tax issue this year. And I'm like, wait, I thought my CPA was on top of that. She said, well, they're not. And I was just frustrated and mad and I've always kind of thought it was being taken care of, but I didn't know it was being taken care of. And, sure enough, this year, me not knowing that is going to cost me some money. She's scrambling now. She said, well, I'm going to try to get this fixed before the tax deadline, but this should have been done six months ago, eight months ago, a year ago. We should have been keeping track of this the entire time. But so many different people are doing their lane of stuff, things get missed and I don't have peace of mind that this is being taken care of and it's a process, right?

Speaker 3: 12:10

I mean, we've been. We've been working on this stuff for a little while now we're continuing to work on it. Taxes are always the biggest challenge in the process because we have to deal with the IRS and they just they're not efficient. I don't know that I'm really offending anyone when I say that. You know, like they just things don't happen on top. I think IRS agents would agree Probably.

Speaker 3: 12:30

Yeah, I mean you know, and so, but that's a, that's a perfect example of you have professionals, but they're not in the same page and then they're not proactive, right, you know. And so this is where we just think there's a better way here, and so we'll talk, we'll have episodes about the process, but what we want to be able to offer and you don't have to use every single piece of the services that we offer, right, but we want to, we want to be helpful here. We have expertise across, not only helping to build your practice the right way and being thoughtful about that, but also, okay, when you do decide to retire, whatever that looks like, you know, we're going to try to reframe retirement as financial independence. Sure, right, you're only doing what you want to do, when you want to do it, because you have saved. Well, but that that those things work together and they're optimized, yeah, yeah well, we've done that in my practice 25 years.

Speaker 2: 13:26

I've built and sold one and then started another one from scratch, basically, and going through this process with Ian and our team has been very enlightening, has, you know? Showed me things that I've done incorrectly, showed, showed me things I could do better and I have implemented those and it has made such a positive impact on my practice. I was like we've got to take this to other people and so I am in the process of stepping out. You know there are attorneys in my office who do a lot of the day to day things and so I've joined this team as the attorney to say, yes, I know what you're going through, I've been through it, and to be the face of this to attorneys to say please, let us help you. And I've been through this process and I can tell you exactly firsthand experience how, after 25 years, I was not doing things the best way possible and how I changed things and it's made a tremendous difference in my practice.

Speaker 3: 14:27

Well it's, and I appreciate the, the candor and the transparency there because these are it's hard to have a business that you have, you've started and you've built very personal.

Speaker 2: 14:38

You have to put your ego on the shelf and say OK, tell me how I can do better.

Speaker 3: 14:43

It's just about optimizing right. It is like you know, I mean we'll talk more and more about exiting and selling the business, if that's, if that's what the right path is for somebody, you know. But I mean if we, if we have the ability to work with someone three to five years before they're going to sell their business, whether it's an attorney or not, in any industry, what? A difference you can, we can, I mean we can double, triple the valuation of the company.

Speaker 2: 15:08

That's huge. Individual results may vary, but typically but, but to double.

Speaker 3: 15:14

I'm comfortable saying that because most, most business owners, you know they're like OK, I'm going to sell in six months. And as an advisor to business owners it's like OK, you can sell in six months for pennies on the dollar or we can make sure there's actually something to sell.

Speaker 3: 15:30

Give us two more years and we can make this a whole lot better, and so if we start with the end in mind and work backwards and build systems and processes and build something that that can be sold, there can be a better outcome than just walking the door, walking away and farming out your, your clients. When you're ready to go, sit on the beach.

Speaker 2: 15:51

I'm here where I practiced, there was a, an odor attorney who primarily did a state planning and he literally died sitting at his desk and the state bar came in and just farmed out all of his cases and locked the door. So the stuff and was done, when that could have been a carry out, you know, could have been sold by his family for a whole lot more money. Yeah.

Speaker 3: 16:17

And for some folks that may not be meaningful to them, right, but for others it may be really meaningful you can, very meaningful to your family, yeah, a legacy, so we want to take all of those things into consideration, you know, and really help folks to think about their practice as a business, regardless of the size, and operate it like a business, and what that ends up allowing is allows for more time. Freedom, allows for you to focus on what matters the most to you and what you want to do. Peace of mind, peace of mind, peace of mind. You know, underpaying on taxes is nice would be romanized you know, paying less in taxes is a positive benefit I found.

Speaker 3: 16:59

You know, you can either do you think that you're better at spending your money or the government. You know I mean we joke. But if you, if you think it's the government, we can help you donate to the Treasury General.

Speaker 2: 17:10

Fund.

Speaker 3: 17:10

Absolutely, you can definitely pay as many taxes as you want, but this is this is why we're doing this, this is why the approach, and so I'm excited about this. Todd, I appreciate your candor and your leadership here.

Speaker 2: 17:23

So you can get in touch with us by going to our website, lawyerstotalplancom. So, yes, just go to LawyersTotalPlancom. You can get some good information there, getting contact us with us. We would love to talk to you. Let's just chat up front, see what's going on and we'll develop a plan for you.

Speaker 3: 17:44

I love it. It's exciting. Well, stay tuned, subscribe, follow us, share this with your friends and see you on the next episode. Thanks, 9-1-1.

Speaker 1: 18:18

Until next time, keep striving for excellence in both law and finance.