Next Generation Planner: December 2021
TJ Burkett, CFP®
Client Operations Manager, Keeler & Nadler Family Wealth
www.linkedin.com/in/tjburkett/
TJ Burkett is a recent career changer who joined the financial services industry in his mid-30s. His path to financial planning isn’t so much long as it is circuitous. In fact, it starts on an oval.
“My dream job was always to work in the sport of harness horse racing and work with standardbred horses. I grew up in southwest Michigan, and my father always had a couple of standardbred racehorses as a hobby. When I was in high school, my dad gave me one of the horses to train.”
Harness racing involves a driver pulled by a horse in a small cart called a sulky. In his junior year of high school, Burkett decided not to go out for football again, and focus on training horses and driving in races at county fairs around the state. His parents urged him to keep that as a hobby instead of trying to make it a career. He started in the pre-veterinary program at Michigan State, but realized it wasn’t the path for him.
“I still wanted to be involved in harness racing, so I switched my major to agricultural and natural resources communication. It was a mini-major for people involved in agriculture; people who would go to work for the Farm Bureau or work in communications in agriculture.”
His communications degree helped him get a job at a harness racing magazine based in Lexington, Kentucky, and then as the assistant editor of Hoof Beats Magazine, the official publication of the U.S. Trotting Association. For 10 years, he worked his “dream job.”
“I wanted to work in harness racing, and I actually had a career in harness racing, but I didn’t have to go out and knock ice out of water buckets in the morning or jog horses in the freezing cold or in the rain.”
Over the years, though, he recognized that the permanence of that dream job was threatened. He says that fewer horses are being bred for harness racing every year, with fewer races and fewer bets being placed.
“I looked around and I thought, I’m in my mid-30s and I need to work for 30 more years. I just didn’t think that there would be a magazine for me to edit for as long as I needed a job.”
Instead of thinking about what else he could do for 30 years, he started to ask himself, “what if I didn’t have to work 30 more years?”
“What if I could change my lifestyle and my family’s lifestyle, and focus on saving and investing? And perhaps if the magazine were to go under when I was 50 or 55, maybe I wouldn’t have to find another job that would have to support my family.”
Reframing the question that way led Burkett down the path to the FIRE movement. He started following financial experts and researching investment strategies and savings plans.
“The light went off in my head when I read that you don’t have to beat the market. You just have to make sure your allocations are good based on your age and your risk tolerance, and invest in mutual funds and ETFs. It’s not as complicated as you would think it was. When I realized that, I said, ‘Wow, this changes everything,’ because I’m not particularly invested in stock picking and knowing the Sharpe ratio on things. I’m really big into just getting your allocations right and setting it and forgetting it.”
Saving and investing became a hobby, so much so that his colleagues began asking him for help with their 401(k) allocations, and family members started gifting him subscriptions to financial magazines.
“I was reading an issue of Kiplinger’s magazine in early 2017, and I saw a quote from Mark Beaver [partner and senior financial adviser at Keeler & Nadler]. I saw that he was close by, so I looked him up.”
Burkett knew he wanted to go the independent RIA route instead of joining a broker-dealer. Beaver recommended that he get his CFP® designation and join the local FPA chapter to meet other advisers and begin networking.
“I was really impressed by how everybody was very receptive to talking to me. They were very open with their advice. I didn’t feel like there were a bunch of competitors in the room. I felt like everybody was kind of on the same team, and they were all there to learn and be better advisers.”
Through the NAPFA job board, he was hired by Kristen Moosmiller, who was breaking away to start her own firm, NorthAvenue, LLC.
“She said that she hired me because I had life experience. I wasn’t fresh out of school; she wanted somebody who was going to be comfortable talking to clients and being professional around clients and knew how an office works. . . . We sat knee to knee in front of her computer and she taught me how to be an adviser. It was a great experience.”
Over that time, Burkett achieved his education and experience requirements to be a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™. He also learned that the startup culture in a new advisory firm wasn’t a good fit for him. Despite the valuable experience he earned, he had two young children and wanted more balance between work and home. He reached out to Mark Beaver again. Keeler & Nadler was hiring, but Beaver warned him that it was for an operations position, not an advisory role.
“I did a lot of operations work at my old firm because it was needed with our staffing, and frankly, I kind of enjoyed it. That’s why I like working in operations now instead of being an adviser. When things come to me to do, it’s clear what needs to be done: open an IRA, roll over a 401(k). You do it, you see it through, keep track of it, and make sure it gets done. Whereas when you’re an adviser, it just felt like there were a lot of things that were still floating; you’d have discussions over and over with clients, [and] things would just hang out there for years even. That didn’t really jive with my personality because I like to get things done and knock them off my list.”
Burkett says that Beaver checks in with him often about whether he wants to use his newly minted CFP® designation as an adviser instead of in operations.
“I tell him every time, ‘I love what I’m doing now.’ I love the challenge, especially if I get complicated cases. I’m working on some estate cases right now that are a real complicated mess, and I just love working through them. I love getting on the phone with custodians or broker-dealers and going to bat for the client.”
Burkett encourages career changers and new planners to take advantage of the institutional knowledge in the financial planning community, as well as the wider educational resources that are available.
“I recommend that aspiring career changers find their local FPA chapter first. You might get bounced around a little bit, but you’ll eventually get to somebody who has experience helping career changers. They want to bring more people in both for FPA membership, and they want to have more people in the industry. We don’t have enough people in the industry. Read as much as you can. I started out by reading Money Magazine and Kiplinger’s, and since I made the career change, the Journal of Financial Planning. Start listening to podcasts. Several people told me to start reading and listening to Michael Kitces.”
He adds that his previous career endowed him with a vital skill that he brought with him to financial planning: diligent note taking.
“I am constantly using my note-taking skills, whether it’s on a phone call or just documenting things as they happen. I am a real stickler for full and complete documentation of things as they happen, just so I know who said what and when. It’s really come in handy several times.”
