george grombacher 0:02
Helen, let’s get started with two truths and a lie.

Helen Stephens 0:06
Okay, well my first is that my first concert was 38 special. I met my husband at summer camp. And my last one is as an adult. I’ve lived in six different cities.

george grombacher 0:24
You did not meet your husband at summer camp. I did. Oh, darn it.

Helen Stephens 0:31
Which one was the live? The Lie was my first concert was 38 special. It was sticks that ages me, doesn’t it? Okay. Wow,

george grombacher 0:39
those are? Those are awesome shows. Have you ever seen 38 special? I have. Okay, nice. In my, in

Helen Stephens 0:47
my younger days, I used to be kind of a concert rat. I loved live music and going to whatever show I could. I could afford at the time. So yeah.

george grombacher 0:54
Who’s better sticks a 38. Special?

Helen Stephens 0:59
That is hard. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know. That’s really difficult. Yeah. A long time ago, probably probably, probably to me sticks because it was my first live show, right?

george grombacher 1:15
For sure. That’s a foundational formative experience. There’s no doubt about that. Sure was. For those of you not familiar with sticks, like Helen and I are, you should definitely Google them or search them and rock out. So awesome. Good. Well, Helen, what’s what’s top of mind for you right now?

Helen Stephens 1:39
Well, I mean, we’re here taping this during the holiday season. And and I think it’s really a challenging time for a lot of people. There’s just a lot of suffering in the world. And so it’s hard to ignore that. It’s on the news. It’s in the news that you read. And so I think it’s just heavy heart for people that are suffering. And I wake up every day with a huge attitude of gratitude. I just think starting your day with gratitude is a good way to it’s a good practice. But it is difficult to ignore all the things going on in our world right now. So not to be too heavy. But you know, that’s that’s really what’s top of mind is my heart hurts for people.

george grombacher 2:23
Yeah. Like as an empathetic person? It’s, it’d be weird if it didn’t be weird if you didn’t feel like oh, my goodness, there’s so much so many bad things going on right now. The Attitude of Gratitude? Does that help you balance it out? It helps you keep moving. How did you get into that habit?

Helen Stephens 2:46
Well, I think when you’re in the people business, you hear a lot of things both good and bad. And so you have to start compartmentalizing that to some degree. And of course, I’m a mother, I have three kids. So you also, you know, through that journey, I’ve just found that that practice helps me stay positive and helps me keep a good healthy dose of energy and so that I can bring a positive attitude every day, to both my my co workers as well as as to my clients.

george grombacher 3:16
If you’re walking around, like er moping around with your, you know, down in the dumps probably wouldn’t be quite as effective.

Helen Stephens 3:24
No, that’s, that’s not me at all. That’s not me at all. So

george grombacher 3:29
I like to think about our human superpowers, and certainly our perspective and the way that we choose to I don’t have any, I don’t have any control over what happens to me, I don’t have control of what’s happening overseas, the Middle East, right, but I have control over how I think, feel and respond to the circumstances in my life. And that’s helped me to kind of stay balanced. And certainly when we’re talking about stuff, like the markets, which I don’t know, if you control the markets or not, Helen, but there’s a lot that we don’t have control over when it comes to our money. That’s

Helen Stephens 3:59
right, I always say it’s not about, you know, what’s happening out there. It’s how we choose to respond to it. And that’s true, whether it’s our emotions, or our portfolio actions, etc.

george grombacher 4:14
And is that, is that do people get that? Or do you find that people are, are still like, what’s going to happen with the stock market? Where are we at? What, what, what can we expect? How do you, I don’t know if the term is manage expectations or set expectations.

Helen Stephens 4:31
That’s why I keep a magic wand on my desk. Because if I if I, you know, if I had that kind of control, I mean, I’d be rich, we’d all be rich. If we all had that kind of control or that kind of insight. There is no easy, easy lunch when it comes to investing. You know, the time in the market overall is more important than you know, jumping in and out. So just staying consistent and controlling As you can control, like we just said, are our big points that we, we teach our clients. And I think it’s a relieving and, and relaxing way to be an investor is to not just kind of tune out all the noise, I mean, stay stay to your allocation and things will turn out in the long run.

george grombacher 5:23
Which, which makes perfect sense.

Helen Stephens 5:27
But I hear but Oh,

george grombacher 5:28
for sure, right? It’s, we’re just slammed, literally, literally figuratively slammed with messages and information. And people want our clicks and they want our subscriptions. And they want our attention. And it’s coming out as 24/7 on every single device. So it’s tough to tune that out. It’s

Helen Stephens 5:46
true. It’s true. But I think that’s why the clients that come to us so often are do it yourselfers that are tired. They’re just tired of trying to figure out what to do what to listen to, you know, if they turn on, you know, some some special finance channel, right? I mean, the sirens are blazing, and this guy’s got all the answers. And all the guests are telling you that it’s doom and gloom and that the markets are going to crash. You know, even a broken clock is right twice a day. So I think people come to us and choose to turn over that heavy responsibility, because they’re just tired of all of that.

george grombacher 6:34
That strikes me as a pretty mature thing to do. If I’ve been doing this myself, and then I get to the point of whatever it is, but now I’m ready to bring somebody else in.

Helen Stephens 6:46
Yes. And so, you know, I think they they feel like their portfolio is now tied to something there’s a reason and a purpose to it, because we’ve shown that they can meet whatever their dreams desires are. If if we can take these actions. And I think that’s a pretty, you know, now they have control over their process versus it controlling them. And so I like to think that that’s a good, good way to have peace of mind.

george grombacher 7:15
Yeah, for sure. I think that it’s almost a throw away that, you know, two heads are better than one or let’s get another set of eyes. But when we are on an island, and we are feeling like there’s this constant barrage of stuff coming our way. And I’m trying to make good sound logical decisions about things, just having somebody else say, hey, what you’re doing is pretty good. we’ve tweaked things here or there, I think we could really probably make a bigger difference.

Helen Stephens 7:46
I mean, people don’t know what they don’t know, right? Like, I’m not gonna go do surgery on somebody, I, that’s not my skill set. But I’m pretty gifted at crafting a good financial plan for somebody. So I just think people don’t always know what they don’t know. And there are, there are ways that we can save some taxes, there’s ways that we can meet some legacy objectives. So there’s a lot of things that we can do as planners to help strengthen the overall financial position for a family or a person.

george grombacher 8:22
When you start when you start thinking about and considering everything that goes into our personal finances, it’s an awful lot. And do you think that that can be demotivating? For people? Does that just kind of keep them stuck? Oh, my gosh, I’ve taxes on my 401k and legacy? I don’t even I’ve never thought about that. But I guess maybe I should.

Helen Stephens 8:43
Yeah, I I think people in general don’t realize all the tools that are in the toolbox. But more, what I find is that they’re so tired of being sold something. I mean, our industry really doesn’t have the highest confidence score. I mean, that’s the whole reason why our firm is a fee only firm. And I don’t think there there’s any firm out there that can say that they’re 100% conflict, free existence. But, you know, I think people come in so guarded, because they’re afraid that, you know, somebody’s going to try to sell them something. And they’ve had that happen before. That’s why they end up doing it themselves. And so I just think coming in and being able to relax and just think about your life and what you want it to mean in the end. is a is a pretty cool way to go and have that experience. And at the end, you’ve got a great plan. You’ve got a roadmap to get you from here to wherever it is that you’re trying to go. And nobody’s trying to sell you something. I mean, I just think that’s a pretty nice way of doing business.

george grombacher 9:56
That’s, that’s really, that’s peace of mind.

Helen Stephens 10:01
So we like to think,

george grombacher 10:04
again, we don’t have control of what’s going to happen. But we’ve laid out the steps. If I do these, if I execute this plan, I’ve really increased my odds of ending up where I want to be. Yes. Well said, regardless of whether I need my magic wand or my or my crystal ball, I that’s, that’s not needed. It’d be great. But I have it, it’s it’s not needed. Now keeping everybody is different, and they come with you, or they come to you with their experience and their biases and their knowledge level. How do you how do you gauge the help that people need?

Helen Stephens 10:49
Well, I mean, I think it just starts by asking the simple question, why are you here? I mean, our industry is really event driven. Nobody wakes up in the morning and says, I think I’m gonna go get a financial plan. It’s because somebody has is sick, somebody’s died. They get something from their employer that freaks them out. And they don’t know what it means. It’s very event driven. So we try to get to the core, excuse me of the event that drove somebody to come visit with us in the first place. And start unpacking from there. You know, until you get somebody talking, I don’t really in an appointment, I try not to talk. It’s really it’s really more about the person who’s come in to visit with us than it is about us. We don’t I mean, they’re there for a reason. And we want to be able to solve that for them. And if we can’t, we’re going to be very strong in finding the right people who can solve whatever it is it is going on with the person so or a family.

george grombacher 11:56
It is, it is in fact, an event driven business. There’s no doubt about that. So that’s a good question. What are you doing here? Alan? What brings you in today? And it’s is it normally, it’s while this thing happened?

Helen Stephens 12:11
Right? Well, people start examining their lives and think you know what, I’d like to quit work, but I don’t know that I can. You know, we’ve had a, you know, it’s all firms do. We’ve had a number of young professionals, good savers. You know, we said, what, why are you here with us, because I don’t want to become my parents. I want to be I don’t want to be living, you know, having to work when I’m 70. You know, we hear so many great stories, but you know, people are thinking and we want to help them however we can. So we serve, we serve young professionals, we also serve the emerging retiree people who want to step off, maybe retire early. And so we’ve got to help them be able to take the right steps not to pay all their money to Uncle Sam, try to mitigate some of those taxes and help them figure out how much they need to save in order to make that that goal a reality?

george grombacher 13:12
What are some of the things that you found? are standing in people’s way of doing that? Is it? Do they make big errors or mistakes on the different account types? Is it all behavioral? Is it a little bit of everything?

Helen Stephens 13:28
It’s a little bit of everything truthfully, I mean, for people that are my age, you know, we didn’t have the opportunity to have Roth or, you know, Roth Roth conversions at any income level are a relatively recent phenomenon, right. So being able to help people have that tax diversification is important. And that just varies by age, because different things are available today to young professionals that weren’t available when I was a young professional. And so it’s not a one size fits all strategy. Everybody’s unique, and that’s what makes my job so fun is that everybody’s so different that walks in the office. So it’s not like I can take the advice that I give to Susie and apply it to Bill. They’re all different.

george grombacher 14:22
I don’t mean to circle back to the magic wand and to to the media. I just, I know the mistakes that I made in my 20s Watching Fast Money on whatever channel that was and watching Cramer. I literally took financial advice from those shows and went and bought gold and just other nonsense and ended up losing a lot of money based on that. Yeah. Has that has that really conditioned people to think that you can know what’s going to happen?

Helen Stephens 14:55
Well, when I first started in this industry, we didn’t have On a date myself, we didn’t have real supercomputers the way that we do now. I mean, we had Bloomberg terminals, that people weren’t getting this barrage of information. And now, yes, I do think this 24/7 news cycle. And they listen to these talking heads, because they’re on a TV station, they’re just selling advertising. You know, if you take some of the old covers of some of the financial magazines that are out there fortune, or Forbes, or Money Magazine, and you look at the advice that was given, especially back in the tech boom, back in 2001, two, they were so wrong, they were all wrong. And it’s laughable if you go back and look at that advice today. But people still, I mean, it sells, it sells magazines, it sells advertising. And so they’re gonna keep doing it, because that’s how they make money. Oh, for sure. I mean, being a good investor is not a sexy proposition. You know, you don’t have you don’t have to have all this crazy investment stuff in your portfolio to do well over over time. It’s just you just don’t. And it’s the biggest fallacy out there.

george grombacher 16:17
And now we have however long it’s been around the the ability to go as individuals and buy and sell securities, I go buy socks, and go buy stocks and sell them. And I’ve been able to do that for I think my entire adult life. So probably since the 90s with E trade and stuff like that, but now we have a new breed of that, like Robin Hood, what do you think about that? What do you think about those platforms?

Helen Stephens 16:43
I wasn’t I wasn’t going to name them specifically. But they conditioned people through their app to trade more. That’s, that’s crazy. It’s just the gamification of of investing is is not not good. And furthermore, people don’t realize the difference in Robin Hood when when people are investing in let’s just say you decide that you’re going to buy Amazon and you buy a couple of shares today you buy a couple shares next week you buy a couple shares next month and at some point in time some of your shares may have a profit and some of your shares may have a loss and you want to tax loss harvest before the end of the year to be able to take that loss off on your taxes well guess what? You can’t specify your lots in Robin Hood. So it’s very difficult for people to do tax loss harvesting in an account with a firm like Robin Hood and I just think game of we are not playing a game we are we are building wealth to support us when we don’t want to work any This is not a game and so I’m not very high on them as you can tell I just I just don’t think it’s a very good practice and I think it’s it’s doing is teaching particularly young people bad bad investing skill

george grombacher 18:11
is there ever a time when when people when you’re comfortable with people buying and selling individual securities on their own?

Helen Stephens 18:20
Sure, I mean, we have clients who come in and they really enjoy that I mean, they enjoy the markets they don’t they don’t like the physiological and emotional feeling that they have when it’s their whole portfolio. But if they really enjoy that we say take some money keep going you know have enjoy it. And if this isn’t amount of money oh by the way, that your plan is going to be fine even if you lose it all. So if I call it their go to Vegas account, so if they want to have a go to Vegas account and go out and put their money on Lucky seven, go for it. If that brings them joy, super

george grombacher 19:06
last thing you want to do is take somebody’s joy away from them, Helen. That

Helen Stephens 19:10
is true. I am not. Regardless of what my children would say to you. I am not a fun soccer.

george grombacher 19:17
You say fun soccer. Yeah, your kids say you’re a fun soccer?

Helen Stephens 19:21
course they do. I’m their mom.

george grombacher 19:26
That’s awesome. That’s so funny like that. That’s right, kids. And if you’re not careful, there’s not going to be any fun left. So start listening on the first try. I’m going to start yelling at my kids listen on the first try. They they never do that. Alan do did they start doing that eventually minor. I have I’ve kids under the age of five.

Helen Stephens 19:47
No, I’m sorry, minor 2927 and 24. No. Sometimes I think it gets worse

george grombacher 19:55
down. So I stopped so I stopped saying that to them. No, okay, I’m gonna keep going, keep going, keep going. I love it for a while and people are ready for your difference making tip. What do you have for us?

Helen Stephens 20:12
Well, this is this is really interesting, but here to ask, then, you know, ongoing financial planning is really our purpose. And since the pandemic, regardless of income level, we’re seeing an increasing number of clients eating their wealth away. And this is coming through dining out where Uber Eats, or here we have favor. And I think our society has become conditioned to the fast food, Happy Meal experience of it’s got to be fast, easy and fun. And it’s overtaking budgets. And it’s impacting people’s ability to save or stay within budget. And so I just wish people would learn to cook. We know that health and wealth are intertwined, and especially as people age, and knowing what goes into your food is a healthier way to eat, which should translate into a healthier body for the long haul. So that’s my, that’s my takeaway piece of advice for today. It’s not like what is the hot security or what’s the hot stock, but I just wish people would would save some money, not have the $5 cup of coffee in the morning, not have the $20 meal at lunch, and not, you know, have their food delivered for dinner, that they would actually learn how to eat healthily at home, save some money for sure. And have healthier outcomes, because we know that bad health costs a lot of money. So it’s a win win.

george grombacher 21:47
Well, I think that that is great stuff that definitely gets Come on. I love it. I love it, Helen. It’s the truth. I remember reading about pre COVID. Whenever that was 100 years ago, how was the first time that Americans were eating more food away from home than than actually going to the grocery store? And obviously, well, I don’t know if it’s obvious or not. I’m sure that that shifted. I’d be curious to revisit where where we are today with that. But I have a sneaky suspicion that it’s probably way more Yeah,

Helen Stephens 22:19
it’s not good when we budget. When we show people what they’re what they’re actually spending. And we show them the percent of money that’s going to dining out. They’re stunned. And they can’t understand why they can’t save more money. Well, you know, it got to change what you’re doing. And as opposed to thinking of it as a chore, thinking of it as a joy in experience. I don’t know, buy buy a crock pot buy an air fryer. I mean, I’ve been working mom with three kids for most of my life, and we still manage to have dinner on the table at home. So

george grombacher 23:02
there you go sucking up more fun from people. How can I tell you I

Helen Stephens 23:05
know, I know, my secrets out. We

george grombacher 23:09
can get that magic wand and wave it and just create more more more money for people so they don’t have to stop changing their behaviors. They can just just go plant the money tree out back. And

Helen Stephens 23:20
so I wish it was that easy. Right? But it’s not.

george grombacher 23:23
It’s not? It’s not? Well, Helen, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you?

Helen Stephens 23:30
Well, they can go to our website, which is Aspen wealth. mgmt.com. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn. Excellent. Ask them wealth management.

george grombacher 23:45
Go to Aspen wealth mgmt.com and dig deeper into the things that Helen and I have been talking about today. Find them on Facebook as well. I’ll link all those in the notes of the show. Thanks again, Helen.

Helen Stephens 23:58
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

george grombacher 24:01
Finally, friendly reminder, Helen and I have been talking about today. Never going to be anybody more interested in your financial success than you are. act accordingly. Then