Zacc and Laura lay out the pattern of the Guided Path and give a preview for topics to be covered during this education journey.

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Intro: Welcome to The Financial Call. We are financial advisors on a mission to guide you through the financial planning everyone should have. Whether you're doing it yourself or working with a financial advisor, these episodes will help you break down complicated financial topics into practical, actionable steps.  Our mission is to guide motivated people to become financially successful. 

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Zacc: Welcome to The Financial Call. This episode is to help you understand The Guided Path. This is something we're really excited about. It's been a long time in the making. 

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Laura: It has been a lot of work. 

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Zacc: Yeah and surprisingly slow. We've run into so many different issues to get this. And maybe it's because we're too picky. I don't know. 

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Laura: Maybe, I think we're both a little bit of perfectionists, so we're trying to get it perfect. But we're excited just to move forward. It's not going to be perfect, I think people will find out as they listen to it. We are not podcast experts by any means, we're financial planners, but we just felt like there are no good places to find good financial information.

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Zacc: I guess also organized in a way that helps you walk through it, like baby step you through it. Because when I did the CFP, which is the certified financial planner designation, I remember loving the fact that it organized it. It kind of put a fence around what I needed to know. It was interesting because anything outside the fence if I didn't learn it in the CFP, yeah maybe it was useful, but it wasn't like, this is absolutely required to know as a financial planner day one. So I thought that was really helpful that it put a fence around it. And I think this is part of the reason why we're doing The Guided Path is to really put a fence around what are the most important topics for a retiree or someone preparing for retirement to understand.

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Laura: Exactly. And we've built it out so that no matter where you're at with your financial knowledge you can jump in at the beginning, learn the basics, and then build upon that. I think that's very helpful. I think a lot of people are intimidated by finances and feel like they don't know a lot about it. So I think we've made it easy for people to jump in and hopefully not feel intimidated.

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Zacc: Yeah. I think I mentioned this in another episode, but the first time I called Fidelity Investments, when I worked at an architectural firm, I was so embarrassed that the guy on the other line could see through me and know that I knew nothing about the mutual funds that I owned in the portfolio. I remember being so embarrassed. The reality was I went and worked at Fidelity and I realized that guy had been on the job for like two months, probably in that job in particular. So there's no reason to be embarrassed, but it happens anyway. And hopefully a podcast gives someone the opportunity to listen without actually conversing with anyone. They can just absorb the information at their own pace. 

Laura and I are wealth advisors with Capita Financial Network. This podcast is really a personal mission and a personal dream of ours to share financial planning information. I say this often, my personal goal is to deliver superior financial planning to as many households as possible and we do that through Capita Financial Network. We currently have about two thousand households. And this podcast is also to help push that mission to as many people as possible, whether they are Capita clients or not. That's the reason we do it. The reason I do it. 

But who we are. So we're both wealth advisors with Capita. We're going to go into that in a lot more detail in some coming episodes where we're having Shannon join us. She's the only person that's famous that works at Capita. We'll explain that a little bit more later. She actually has a lot of views on TikTok, which I don't even understand. But anyway, we'll go through that later. I think today we talk about how to go through The Guided Path. 

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Laura: We want to talk through how it's laid out and so you can know what to look forward to. So we have it broken out into eight different seasons.  We like to refer to seasons on Netflix. People get excited to binge-watch, that's the goal here. So we have eight different seasons. Each season has different episodes inside of them. They'll go through each topic, they'll start from the basics and then build upon it. So we'll go through everything in pretty good detail, but we wanted to list out the eight different seasons that we have. So first season income planning, next season, social security. And we have investing tax planning, estate planning, business owners, charitable giving and insurance. 

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Zacc: There's a little bit here that is, I would say Social Security and charitable giving are not necessarily foundational core financial planning topics, but they are specialties of ours. And so we found that just with how deep we go in both of those categories, that there was enough to create an entire season. Social Security is technically part of income planning. We had six episodes for income planning, but we also had six episodes for Social Security. So that's the reason for breaking that one out a little bit further. If you are younger, it still will be helpful for you to understand these topics, but you don't necessarily have to remember or focus too much on Social Security. This is interesting because Laura I feel like it goes basic to advanced within each season. 

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Laura: I agree. 

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Zacc: So it's not necessarily the first season is basic and then you'll end up at advanced by the last season. There's income planning and the first income planning episodes basic. But by the end of income planning, you'll have gotten into complexity and Social Security is the same way. We're going to give you the basics and how the benefits are calculated and then start to get into what I would call mid-level complexity with spousal strategies and divorce. And then really deep complexity for those who are affected by WEP, GPO penalties, and exactly how you calculate breakevens.  And hopefully that gives you an idea, same thing with investing basics and then stocks, and then bonds and funds, and then real estate options, futures, and private markets. So that gives you an idea of the scale we'll go. Basic to advanced within each season. So hopefully you can pick up whatever season you want and understand it from start to finish.

Now we have real jobs, so this is not going to come out probably as fast as some people want. Our plan is to release these episodes about every two weeks. So in a year or two from now, I'm sure it'll be great because all the episodes will be there and someone could binge watch like Laura said, as many seasons as they want. But I would say join the journey with us. We're going to put these out. We've already recorded the first season and we'll put them out every two weeks. And that gives us a little bit of a buffer so that if our real jobs take time, like right now the market's down a fair amount, there's some work to do there from a tax standpoint on trading and rebalance. And we need to not be recording an episode too much, or have too much pressure to do that during those times because clients come first. Anything you would add to this, Laura?

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Laura: Just that this is the basic information that will help people be successful in finance. You don't need to be an expert, but these things are very helpful to know what you should be doing now to be on the right track so you don't have to stress about it. 

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Zacc: And the cool part about this is you could share this with anybody. In fact, we would love it. if you would share this with anyone. Whether they eventually call us or not, doesn't matter. We're hoping that people just get put in a little bit better place. And frankly, I'm hoping that this information arms consumers with the right amount of knowledge to not fall victim to strange strategies that are either super expensive or too much of certain things, or are too much getting locked up into too much insurance, or too many private deals that they shouldn't have. I mean, the goal here is to protect you as well whether you ever talked to us in the future or not. I think these episodes will take care of you in a big way.

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Laura: Yeah, I agree. We're excited. 

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Zacc: Cool. Let's get after it. 

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