When clients of Kevin Startt, founder of Startt Planning, encounter medical or financial hardships, they know they are in the hands of an advisor who will not only act in their best interests, but who also understands very personally, exactly what they are going through, because he and his family have recently walked a similar path.

Startt openly discusses the life-changing problems that beset his family over the past few years – leukemia, Alzheimer’s, tragic death. Those tragedies, combined with witnessing firsthand how greed on a corporate level can erode the financial stability of a family, prompted him to make a late career change back to the retail side of finances. His goal was to use his 30 years of industry expertise to help others become prepared to weather life’s storms with proper planning, using personal experience as an example and scripture as a guide.

“As a firm with a foundation in faith, we are going to handle their money as a good steward on this earth,” Startt emphasized.

Startt sees his role as being a combination of advisor, educator and communicator. He defines himself as an “idea-maker,” valuing and encouraging communication to the degree that, under normal circumstances, he won’t meet with clients unless both spouses or all affected parties, are present during the decision-making process. “Getting everybody involved in the conversation is critical to our practice,” he added.

“Communication is where we’ve refined our skills in regard to really reaching out to people,” Startt said, explaining how his tactic of using visualization tools works to improve communication. “We use a lot of parables and object lessons. Like the Oreo cookie – making sure everybody knows there’s a top of the cookie and a bottom of the cookie.”

As an advocate of getting long term care protection in place before age 50, Startt said, “Most of the time, medical expenses will exceed social security benefits.” Waiting to get long term care insurance can be devastating if the person becomes uninsurable or premiums become higher than they can afford because they waited too long.

Another mistake he sees clients make is missing out on investment opportunities because of engrained fears about the safety of those products stemming from experiences in earlier generations, even though today’s circumstances are different from those when a parent or grandparent may have experienced a loss with that product.
“Financial literacy will always be a problem, but it’s an emotional problem rather than an actual problem,” Startt noted.

As an educator, he believes in empowering his clients to make the decisions they believe to be best for them. Startt even goes so far as to provide research and then let his clients choose whether to pay using a fee-based or commission-based model, depending on which choice they feel will be the most cost-effective over a market cycle.

For more information visit: www.starttplanning.com