Clients often tell W. Ray Stagner that, no matter what else happens, they want him to do one thing – protect the amount of their principal. In the process, he shields his clients with a solid retirement portfolio, ensuring that they don’t hit rock bottom. His firm provides income strategies, tax solutions, investment planning, long-term care strategies, estate preservation and securities services. Stagner Financial does more than protect principal, and does not require a set minimum to invest. 

“They (my clients) went through 08’, and feel that they don’t want to do that again,” said Stagner, a Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) and Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC), and the principal of Stagner Financial.

“We typically look for someone who has pretty much an open mind, and someone who is willing to go with the environment,” Stagner said. “Our environment is ever-changing right now … we have to change with it.”

“Developing unique solutions for each client is critical,” Stagner noted, “because of how fast the market can change. Those solutions are essential for bringing millennial investors into the fold as well, since many of them remain leery of the wealth management techniques that plunged their parents into debt during the crisis,” he added.

Stagner himself knows about watching parents go into debt. He chose to enter the finance industry in 1998 after watching his parents struggle with debt and money management issues during the 1970s and 80s. As a result, his firm prioritizes clients, offering a variety of products rather than being bound up as a vendor of one solution only.

“I built our firm on complete transparency,” Stagner said. “We offer everything to our clients and let them choose.”

He added of firms beholden to one product, “If all you have is a hammer, then every [problem] you have looks like a nail.”

The firm focuses on communicating with clients, reaching out to them whenever financial goals are not met, and Stagner said that he is “intentionally overstaffed,” so someone is there to pick up the phone when a client calls. Stagner Financial is built around helping people, not selling products.

“We don’t get into the product issues,” Stagner said. “If we can help someone every day, and pull the pressure off of them, that makes me happy.”

For more infoermation visit: www.stagnerfinancial.com