David Dudding is a fee-only financial planner at 80/20 Wealth Management, LLC located in Louisville, KY.

When I was sixteen years old, my father let me sit at our kitchen table for a meeting with a salesman.  There weren’t too many people calling themselves financial planners or investment advisors back then, but this gentleman was making the pitch that you should ditch your whole life insurance policy and invest the savings in the stock market.  During the meeting, he showed us a prospectus for a mutual fund.  Inside was a chart that showed if you had spent $1,000 to buy shares in this fund in 1928, it would have grown to almost $1,000,000 in 1982.

Now I didn’t know anything about investing and even less about the impact of inflation over fifty years, but I was hooked.  I bought a subscription to Money magazine and set out to learn as much as I could about investing because I sure wanted to have $1,000,000 someday.

I bought my first mutual fund when I was 18 years old and I even passed the securities exam the same year.  I was the youngest registered representative in the firm and I was also the firm’s worst salesman.  After all, what 40-year-old wants to take investment advice from an 18-year-old college student?

So even though my first stint in the financial services industry was brief, my interest in investing never waned.  I went on to complete my education and work in other financial roles.  Along the way, I became an expert on the 401-k plans of my employers and counseled my colleagues on the importance of saving for the future, the power of compounding and the safety of diversification.  I eventually became a fiduciary on our retirement plans and saw how thousands of employees invested for their future.  

For the most part, our employees didn’t take full advantage of the employer plan and many of these employees are woefully unprepared to replace their paycheck when they are no longer willing or able to work.  

Because I started early and took advantage of my employers plans as well as Individual Retirement Accounts and eventually a Roth IRA, I was able to leave my corporate career as a Chief Financial Officer to establish 80/20 Wealth Management.  Our mission is to educate and motivate our clients to help them reach their financial goals.  We are members of the Garrett Planning Network.  We are fee only planners and are compensated by our clients on an hourly or project basis.  We don’t receive commissions and we don’t sell any products, just thoughtful and competent financial advice.