When should you hire a financial advisor – and when don’t you need one?
In this episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, breaks down the real-life situations where having a thinking partner can help you make more informed decisions. While technology gives us endless financial calculators and online tools, Darryl explains why more informed financial decisions still happen in conversation – especially during emotionally charged life events.
Darryl walks through seven specific scenarios where professional financial guidance can help you avoid costly mistakes and gain clarity:
Episode highlights include:
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Why online calculators aren’t enough – and how personalized advice can help you and your spouse get aligned on your future.
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How poor financial decisions during divorce can cost six figures – and why strategy matters.
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Protecting against financial scams and providing a calm, steady voice during an emotional season.
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Why the skills that built your business won’t help you transition out, and how to avoid post-exit regret.
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Addressing burnout, student loans, retirement planning, and career decisions.
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Building discipline during high-earning years to create long-term stability.
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Navigating the “sandwich generation” with thoughtful planning, family conversations, and resource coordination.
If you or someone you love is going through one of these situations, Darryl shares how PAX offers specific consulting services – not just asset management – designed to help people navigate life’s most complex financial moments.
To learn more or start a conversation, visit PAXFinancialGroup.com and click “Connect With Us”.
Transcript:
Hey, it’s tricky to know when to hire an advisor and if you’ve got the right advisor. And in what circumstances. You know, you’ve got situations in life where you really need advice, and sometimes you don’t. You’re kind of in the middle of chaos. Like I always say, we’re either in chaos, post chaos, or pre chaos. It’s kind of good to have an advisor before you get into chaos. That way they know your situation. They know you, right?
This is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group and you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. If you’re looking for a show that is designed to keep you grounded, also thinking about money, not using a lot of numbers, something that you can really digest.
This is for you. It’s very practical and you have to forgive me. This is Mountain Cedar season in San Antonio, Texas. I live in between San Antonio and New Braunfels, kind of little bit, in Hill country area surrounded by, Mountain Cedar juniper trees that are turning orange. And it does affect my throat. So here I am producing.
So, forgive me if I sound a little deeper than normal, and maybe I clear my throat throughout the conversation today. I actually really wanted to, I was hesitant to even share this particular podcast because I thought it might feel like a sales pitch, but then when I put together the content, I go, no this is, people really need to hear this.
There are specific situations that you need to hire an advisor. Like, I’m telling you, we are in an isolated world right now and it’s going to get more isolated as your ChatGPT or Google becomes kind of our go to resource and it and it’s going to distract and it’s going to influence the way we make decisions, good financial decisions happen in conversation.
They just happen in conversation. It’s so true whether or not somebody says something right or wrong, getting us to critically think, getting those wheels turning happens in a dialog. And so, there’s situations where you need a thinking partner, specifically when it’s surrounded in money, because money is so emotional. And I’m going to talk about these situations.
There’s seven situations. The first one is when people hire us just for retirement advice. So, in our industry it’s really tricky in industry insight here. Many peers in the industry will only hire or will only take on a client if you have a lot of money. You may have money, but you may not have it ready to invest.
Maybe it’s tied up in a house, a business, or 401k, and so you’re like, I don’t have enough money to hire a financial advisor because all of them tell me that you have to have a million, at minimum. We have a specific service that is called a retirement consulting agreement, where you can hire us to help think through all of this stuff.
The standards for us are clear. We just don’t want to hire jerks. We just don’t want to engage with jerks or people that are difficult. We want good people that are trying to make the world a better place, that are thinking deeply about their money. That’s pretty much our standard. But you basically write us a check.
It’s not an insurmountable check. It’s with what we feel that is very fair and a reasonable relationship where we sit down with you, get you and your spouse on the same page. Don’t discount that. Navigating a retirement strategy independent of a spouse or having disconnects is extremely problematic, as you know, and it results in what we’ve talked about before.
Gray divorce. So in a part of our retirement consulting engagement where you just hire us to give you good retirement advice, we want to make sure you and your spouse are on the same page, and we have a process to uproot dialog and making sure what we say the non CFO spouse has a voice, but we’re also going to answer all the other important questions, stuff that you scratch your head about when you do the retirement calculations online.
You’re like, okay, did I get that inflation number right? Did I use the right projections? Am I being too conservative? Am I being too aggressive? When you plug in all these numbers online, you’re making life altering decisions that could be done with inputs that are inaccurate, improbable. And so, what we do is we wrestle through these things and answer questions.
Me and my spouse, are we on the same page? Are we even, like, thinking about this the right way? I mean, the reality is, is that when I stop working or if, let’s say I’m the spouse that’s going to retire, like, I need to be thinking, should I even reorganize the spice rack or the cabinet? That could be dangerous territory.
Those are little things that you got to think about. But really, we also answer the questions, how much do we need? How much do we save to get to that? Whatever that number is for us and where should we save it? Like real estate, Roth IRAs. And then, how should we invest it? And so, we’re going to answer all those questions.
We have about 40 people that hire us a year for just this retirement consulting service. So, the second way that people hire us and this is situational, but it happens, as you know, you’ve been around long enough. Divorce. We love marriage is very important to us. The sanctity of marriage is extremely important.
But divorce does happen. It’s overwhelming. And somebody who’s going through a divorce, It’s heavy. They feel guilt, shame, fear, anger, sadness, confusion. All while watching Gray’s Anatomy. Like, all at the same time. And it’s emotional. I want to say chaos, but it kind of is. It feels like I’m pointing fingers, but it’s a lot.
We’ve helped a lot of people navigate through divorce. The problem is that prior to us developing a system, we didn’t have a process. Now we have a very specific process to help people through divorces. And this was rooted in and I love my attorney friends. You know, I went to Saint Mary’s undergrad, went to law school at A&M through, they have a wealth management course.
Won’t get into that necessarily. Just my point is, I have a lot of friends, a lot of clients that are attorneys, but a lot of attorneys don’t know finance. So, they may split. They may give the wife the Roth IRA and the husband the traditional and not think anything of it. Those are two different assets. And so, we come in as financial advisors to help provide that financial rationale.
We do it in three different ways when it comes to divorces. So, if I say this, you may be going through divorce, you may have family members that are going through divorce. I had a friend that called me and said, I’m going through a divorce and I need your help. And they actually didn’t hire me. And they wanted to save money.
I found out later that it cost them over $100,000 in bad decisions. So, I don’t think this is a lot of money to hire us for divorce. I think the consequences of making bad decisions have a lot of zeros on them. So, we’ll help people with pre divorce planning, just kind of stress testing scenarios. Should I keep the house, should I sell it, we’ll help with the settlement decisions.
How you divide the assets. How do you get health insurance like you’re used to health insurance. We got to talk about that. Some of the tradeoffs of different scenarios. And we’ll even help. Like if you’ve already done the divorce, post divorce planning, you know. Okay, now what do we do? Do we reduce, do we pay down debt?
What are the long term goals? So if you have family members that are going through divorce, we’re absolutely have a process to help guide you through that. Another very emotional event that we have a specific service for is to help widows. Very similar emotions as divorce as we know, a lot of widows. It’s at age 60.
That’s kind of the average of when widowhood takes place, which is really young. That means that somebody has 30 or 40 years of life to navigate without their spouse. It’s very, very difficult. And so, we’ve got to make sure that we pin this thing down, have a voice of reason, because unfortunately, many of the con artists, they love widows.
Emotional, financial acumen is low. Not because they’re not intelligent, because they’ve relied on the spouse over the years. And so, what we do is become a voice of reason, oftentimes protecting the widow from con artists and really bad decisions. Haley does an incredible job here, by the way. Provide a calm, clarifying voice. That’s a steady thinking partner. And we collaborate. When we work with widows, we collaborate with the attorneys and CPAs and other insurance professionals just to make sure that we have a good strategy.
Really love what we do here for widows. The fourth area that we help is provide financial advice because we’re advice people. Business succession for business owners. You know, think about a business owner who has like a good business. I’m going to think of a construction company, you know, successful stands tall, nice truck.
Put their kids through college. People depending on him. I’m using him. Could be her, to make decisions like, this person’s learn how to make decisions that are intense. But here’s the thing. This and I’ve seen this so many times, the skills hear me out. The skills that got you to the top of the mountain are not the same skills that will get you down the mountain when you transition, when you retire.
We call this business pivot planning. It’s a specific succession planning service that our objective is to not have this post exit regret. Oftentimes it’s like you didn’t engage your voice of reason, not the financial advisor, the spouse. So again, we have a process where we get the spouse’s voice that is the voice of reason that knows things that we don’t know.
Engage them in this process so they can help us understand, hey, what is I’m going to say Joe Smith going to do when he retires. And she’s like, I don’t know. It’s going to drive me crazy. We got to navigate, what are you going to do? What’s the economic impact of playing golf every day? It may be fine, but let’s stress test things.
First of all, if you sell your business after taxes, is there going to be enough money left? Like, you don’t really even know that we’ve got to run numbers and what happens in them? Selling a business. This happens a lot with businesses selling to private equity. The business owners spend so much time negotiating price and terms that they’ve yet to connect the dots between what the economic impact is on their personal life.
And so, we spend time in the details there making sure that, yes, we understand the money part, but also understand this nuance thing that we just have to I mean, we have to talk about, you know, your identity and your purpose and what are you going to do? Because many, many business owners, the numbers high, I think it’s 80% of business owners have like this post exit regret.
Like, man, I messed up. I think we can get in front of that. I know we can. If we can go through a process that’s called business pivot planning. So, people hire us for that. Okay. Five, six, seven. I’ve got three more, services that are specific for people who are going through stuff. This one is more people who are in a specific career.
These are nurses. I mean, you’ve been in the hospital for those nurses, you know a good one from a bad one, you know, if especially if you been in the hospital multiple days, you start to get to know your nurses. You feel and you like become endeared to some. They genuinely get in the business. They love people, they care for people, they’re servants, but they’re also exhausted.
And what happens with nurses is they’re working so much and oftentimes taking care of their family and kids that they may have set up their 401k plan, but they forgot to click the button or something and they’re contributions that they thought they were putting in, like five years later that’s not going in. And they’re just now looking at it or they put it in the wrong investments.
Maybe it wasn’t invested or they thought they were doing a Roth. They weren’t. There’s just all kinds of mistakes because they move so fast and there’s so much work to be done, and there’s a lot of stress and there’s a lot of burnout. We want to make sure that we take the nurses and pause them for a second and say, hey, let’s make sure we figure this thing out long term.
You’re going to eventually want to retire, and you’re also going to want to make sure that you don’t have burnout. So, we need to talk through the weightiness of student loan debt and what that looks like. And is there a game plan for that? And the potential of maybe getting advanced degrees to improve your career.
So, all of that has an economic impact. We love nurses. And so, we’ve worked with nurses over the years, many, many nurses. And so, we just want to make sure that we love on them the right way. So we created a specific program that people can hire us who are nurses that they don’t have to have a ton of money, but, we can provide some good value as a thank you partner.
Okay. The 6 one is realtors. So, realtors will hire us. I love realtors, and, you know, you may be a realtor. I guarantee you know realtors. I guarantee you have family members that are realtors. The thing about it is there’s various ego lifestyles in realtors, and, I want to just set aside that ego and just take the reality of what it is.
A lot of times you’re broke and it ebbs and flows. Sometimes you have good months, sometimes you have bad months. And having somebody walk alongside of you and give you that discipline to squirrel money away is really what you need. And it’s just because this is such a challenging thing, it’s hard for, some realtors have the discipline and I’ve worked with many realtors over the years.
What I want is realtors to wake up at age 60, 65 and have, yes, a portfolio of real estate, but also a portfolio of other investments. So, they can say, okay, now I’ve got options. I want to retire, I want to transition, I want to slow down. And it requires, I think, for us to help realtors well, it’s a matter of making sure that we as a thinking partner, help them adopt the discipline of paying taxes on time, squirreling money away for an emergency and for business expenses, and then finally thinking about their future selves. Just because life goes by so fast. And we hope that the role that we play allows realtors to do their job extremely well.
They have somebody that they’re working with like us, that’s helping them think through the long term future self. The last one, the seventh one that people will hire us for specifically for, like these are all specific services, like specific consulting services, not like writing, not like managing a bunch of money. Well we do, we manage a ton of money for people, and I think we do that well.
But these are times where people say, I just need you to do this for us. And this one is, gosh, this one is hard and it affects all of us. This is this is aging parents. So, the sandwich generations real. And so, we have designed a specific service to facilitate conversations with family members that say, dad’s aging.
We don’t know if he’s got enough money for care. And he’s starting to not remember things. He needs somebody to be there for him. And we don’t know if we have the bandwidth as parents to take care of dad, who’s maybe 80, 85 could be mom, a lot of times his mom and also take care of our kids.
And financially, I don’t know if we have the money to do it. We’re just barely, you know, paying bills already. Health insurance is crazy. I don’t know how we’re going to add another expense to our budget to take care of dad. We need to unpack all those things, and we need to do it in a very thoughtful way.
Caring way. We need to model out the cash flow for mom or dad who are aging and say, is there going to be enough? If not, what government programs are available? What community resources are available? Can we coordinate decisions carefully and thoughtfully between all family members? This is a very tricky one, but we have a specific service that helps families navigate these complexities that extend well beyond the financial piece, which the financial piece becomes an anchor for us to objectively navigate.
But there are the emotional pieces. So having a third party, a financial advisor that’s equipped and experienced, that’s really important. So those are I want to share those with you, because a lot of people think that, okay, I’m going to hire PAX, and I understand they manage money and we’ve done that for years. And I think like I said, I think we do it well.
But sometimes people just need to hire us for advice. And we’ve thought through that for you on how we can hire advice. And those are seven ways that you can hire us. And so, if you have those needs or if you have family members that are in those spaces, go to our website. There’s a Connect with Us Now button, and we can just have a conversation to see if it’s a good fit.
I appreciate you staying to the end. I want to continue to reinforce good money decisions happen in these conversations and as always, remember you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
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