I was born in Southern California just north of Los Angeles…the City of Angels and a place that gets 350 days of sunny and 75 degree weather.  My parents were struggling with the increasing costs of living, broken relationships with their parents, and dad fighting almost 2 hours of traffic each way, they decided to move us across the country to not-so-sunny Toledo, Ohio.

My dad is the hardest working guy I know.  Despite his best efforts as a tool and die craftsman working for an automotive supplier, times were tough.  He was always working off shifts and weekends and frequently furloughed. There were times I’d get off the school bus and someone from church had left a bag of groceries on our door step.  We had a Santa come from church because we didn’t have money for Christmas presents. As you can imagine, as a young child that did not impact me too significantly at the moment because I just thought that’s how life is…I didn’t know any better!

I will never forget the day, even though I don’t know the date, that my relationship with money changed forever. It was in the fall of 1995. I was 12 years old and my friends were all going to a movie at the Fox Theater at the old Woodville Mall on the east side (which is now gone and transformed into a parking lot). I asked my dad if I could have $3.25 to catch the matinee that Saturday with my other idiot friends to see the newly released Ace Ventura – When Nature Calls.

He didn’t have it.

It was not the fact that dad didn’t have the money that bothered me. That was not new. It was the look in his eyes. I remember he opened his wallet to show me and he was tearing up when he said, “I don’t have anything to give you, Scotty.” (He and my mom are the only two people on earth that call me Scotty).

On that day I knew I would have a different relationship with money. My dad was (and is) the hardest working guy I know. He missed a lot of my childhood doing what he needed to do to provide for our basic needs. It blew my young mind that he didn’t have any money for a small discretionary activity. In my heart of hearts, I knew he deserved better than that. I hated that for him. There are greater tragedies in life than having to skip a movie with one’s friends, but it was the circumstances surrounding the event that really bothered me.

Coming out of my childhood, I was resolved that money would not be an issue for my family. I was committed to working as hard as my dad did, harder if required, but providing a stable and thriving financial environment for my family was a mission I would not fail at. Period.  That drive started when I was 13 and I started taking any job in the community I could: landscaping, bailing straw, gutting chickens….it didn’t matter what it was as long as it paid.

As fate would have it, I got my first job at age 15 at that same Fox Theater for a bit, then started to valet at Inverness Club in Toledo. While working there, I met many wealthy, generous and kind people there as I ran their cars back and forth. I was surprised how my notions of “rich people” melted away as I got to know some of the members and could see how warm they were (and are).  In fact, as far as my memory goes, joining this golf club was one of the earliest goals I ever had for myself.

By the time I was 19, I was working at UPS to fund my debt-free engineering degree from the University of Toledo. I didn’t think I actually wanted to be an engineer, but I figured if I was going to pay for my own degree and I was good at math, I may as well get a hard degree in hopes it would open some doors for me. My eventual wife (The Blessed Saint Andrea) and I were dating, I was still broke as heck, but I had all the optimism in the world.

Then 9/11 happened. Like every other American, my world changed that day. By the afternoon of 9/11, I didn’t know where, how, or when, but I knew someday I would be wearing a US Armed Forces uniform in a foreign country. Fast forward a few years and Andrea and I were newlywed, I was wrapping up my engineering degree and getting ready to ship out to boot camp. What a wedding present!

In the upcoming years, I launched my civilian career and concurrently pursued a military career, aggressively “climbing the ladder” in both. Between boot camp, officer school, infantry school and a deployment to Afghanistan where I received the Bronze Star (for service) and Combat Infantryman’s Badge, I had spent three of the seven years somewhere else but home. Somehow between all that time away we managed to bring four beautiful daughters into the world, too (God bless all military spouses like my wife Andrea!).

After concurrently climbing the military and corporate ladder for 10 years, I came to the conclusion that the fulfillment I gained from my career was drawn from leading and impacting individuals, not from delivering on corporate objectives and executing military missions. I felt a stirring sense that something needed to change. The year 2009 was the pivotal year that laid the foundation for that change.

Three events shaped the future of my career. My second daughter, Victoria, was born and I felt a burning desire to get more detailed financial plans crafted for my family. That led to the firing of the second financial advisor our family had when I learned I could not trust him to do REAL financial planning.

The third was another pivotal moment with my dad, the hardest working man I know. It was like a repeat of the Empty Wallet incident of 1997. He and I were talking about activities the girls would soon begin, and I asked him about retirement. You see, dad missed a lot of my activities when I was growing up to provide for us. He did the best he could. He was looking forward to retiring in 2015 and that brought great excitement as I remember thinking that he’d be able to attend my kids’ activities regularly.

Well, I would say dad had a less than stellar advisor and plan to guide him through the Great Recession. I don’t know all the details, but I do know that when he and I talked in 2009 about his retirement plans, he got that same look in his eyes from 1997 as he said, “Scotty, this recession was really bad for us. Really bad. I’m not sure when I am going to retire.” This time, I was PISSED. I felt so angry FOR HIM.

For the second time in my life, I could not reconcile how such a hard-working man was experiencing this. He did not deserve it. He and my mom had been through a lot from their childhoods ‘til that point, and it really upset me to think that he was having to extend his career because some advisor was not providing him and my mom with the planning and leadership required. Between the two advisors I had fired and hearing this story from my dad, I felt like God had “given me new orders” for my career. It was the only other time in my life other than when I joined the military that I felt this sense of “Here I am, send me” which I could not ignore.’

Despite that feeling, it was not time to start yet.  I had to focus on my service first.  All this while I had been growing in my military career.  Starting out enlisting as a private, getting selected for officer school, then ultimately branching infantry and on my across the pond for a combat deployment to Afghanistan.

This was truly an experience that shaped me in many ways.  Refining my planning, attention to detail, and leadership abilities under tough conditions.

After leading patrols and base closure operations, I was on my way home. We did not bring everyone home.

I think of the men who lost their lives there everyday.  I returned in a very reflective state on where I was going next with my life and career.  In my heart of hearts, the feeling of knowing that every day is a gift weighed on my heavier than ever.

This ultimately led me to the advisory business where I can work intimately with successful American families and focus my energies on doing well for them. I take great joy in helping them craft detailed, easy to understand financial and retirement plans, and I work with them to determine how to retire with confidence, not be a burden on their kids, not get killed in taxes, and ultimately pass the torch on to the next generation. It’s my passion to help them protect what they’ve built, cut through the noise of confusing news, remove the emotion from their decision making and eliminate the biased advice that comes from product pushing salesman – the wolves in sheep’s clothing of this industry.

In the midst of growing a thriving family and thriving advisory practice, the next major call of our lives came…this time for both of us – “Here we are….send us!”  God had put it on our hearts to adopt.  We started the process during the pandemic which slowed things down but fast forward a couple years and were flying our family across the globe to stay in Budapest for 2 months to adopt three young girls who were abandoned in 2018.