I have been in the financial industry for nearly 30 years. I learned the value of hard work as a child working in a family owned business that had multiple restaurants all over Western Washington. The family owned restaurants experienced some success early on but as I neared my high school graduation, the restaurants, for reasons I had yet to understand, began failing from over expansion. My father was required to liquidate all his assets and start from scratch when most people his age were starting to retire. I graduated from high school vowing never to let that happen to me or my future family.

I turned the pain I experienced into a motivating force, putting myself through college with an emphasis on business and finance. This resulted in my being the first member of my family to graduate from college with a Bachelors of Science in Accounting. College also brought me the introduction to my future wife, Kathy, which later brought me my son, Austin. For my family I am eternally grateful.

The Real World
Upon graduation I knew I wanted to help families so I became a CPA. At the time, the top tax bracket was nearly 50%. I could therefore make a meaningful impact on my clients’ lives by helping them save some of those taxes.

As I became a more experienced CPA, clients began wanting my objective advice on their daily financial decisions and investment nest eggs. They had “financial advisors” but wanted a second opinion as they knew I was an objective resource with nothing to sell.

My clients’ so-called “financial advisors” were really commission-based sales people with products to sell. They did not follow the plans I helped my clients devise. My clients and I kept wondering why their portfolios were not growing as fast as market returns, especially considering we were supposedly in the greatest bull market in the history of the stock market. When asked, my clients could never tell me how much they were paying in disclosed and hidden fees. I would get on the phone with their brokers and discuss diversification and they agreed to make changes. Yet I knew something was wrong when the clients would come back with statements reporting ugly losses. These losses were particularly ugly compared to market returns.

The final straw for me was year after year I saw the taxes my clients had to pay due to the large taxable dividends and capital gains that were created by the high turnover rate in their mutual funds.  My tax clients’ so called “financial advisors” had either no understanding or, worse, did not care about the tax implications.  These taxes were sometimes even paid when the investments value was down.  I had to do something…

Curtis To The Rescue…I thought
I became a Fee Based Registered Investment Advisor in Washington State to help my clients escape the problems of high cost, high taxed, low diversified portfolios created by either their former “financial advisors” or by do-it-yourself investors who relied on financial publications and 24-hour cable financial shows. I invested in significant education and training and I always learn from past mistakes. So I intuitively knew some of the problems my clients had could be fixed by better diversification (I thought I knew how) and reducing the costs of the investment. I did successfully figure out how to reduce the hidden costs by utilizing lower turnover funds. While I tried diversifying with the tools available, when the market crashed – although my clients’ portfolios did not lose as much – there were still some investment losses.

I felt my clients were still worrying too much about their portfolios. In retrospect, I understand their worry was natural when taking into account all the negative media: cable news, magazines, and talk radio. There had to be a better way yet….

I pride myself on never standing pat with my knowledge and continually try to help my clients by taking extensive training and coursework. However I admit I became frustrated by the training as it never seemed to bring anything new to the planning process. Pick the best managers…yeah right. Market time or change market sectors…sure that will give my clients peace of mind. Hire this third party manager or hedge fund…no way, not going to get caught in that trap.

All these traditional myths were only causing frustration for me and my clients. Then I discovered an audio CD that changed my life….

The Investor Coaching Process To The Rescue…True Peace of Mind
That audio CD introduced me to Abundance Technologies. A company based out of Cincinnati, OH, Abundance finally spoke to me about what I intuitively knew would work for true peace of mind investing but had, up until this point, no way of implementing fully for my clients. It made so much sense that that night I experienced for the first time true peace of mind for myself. I finally knew how to coach my clients so they too could experience that peace of mind.

Mark Matson founded Abundance in 1991. He is the country’s most influential ambassador in creating peace of mind for investors. Mark has gathered empirical data and proven that traditional financial advising myths do not work. I went through significant due diligence on Mark and his organization. I found that I was onto something when I found he was banned from speaking at traditional financial brokerage firms’ retreats and conventions.

Mark also introduced me to the concept of investor coaching: an incredible paradigm shift away from traditional financial planning and the typical investment and brokerage experience. Here the focus is on peace of mind and managing the human aspects of investing, which are by far the most important things. The goal is to educate the client up front and empower them to choose an investment philosophy and portfolio that makes sense to them; that will give them the greatest chance for real success. Luckily Mark saw my passion to help my clients and he opened his arms, letting me in his door and into the world of free market investing and the world of investor coaching.

I enrolled in his AdvisorUniversity, truly the premier organization in the country for training financial advisors to evolve into investor and wealth coaches. To this day I travel to Cincinnati quarterly for ongoing coaching from Mark. I am grateful and honored to be doing what I am doing with my personal mentor, coach and friend.

A Happy Ending
The happy ending to this story is that coaching is the solution to all the pain and problems that financial planners and brokers have caused. I am thrilled to have evolved as an Investor Coach. My clients can now turn off the cable TV financial channels, cancel their financial magazine subscriptions, hang up the phone on the brokers’ stock pick of the day and instead create wealth, balance, and peace of mind.

Sincerely,

Curtis Erickson