Peter Richon - Topics - Bio

My path into financial services is not really the traditional story. I actually got into financial and retirement planning because I had a love of music. And I can trace that love of music directly to where I am today, it's funny. One of my first memories after moving to North Carolina was calling up the local radio station and asking if I could introduce the next song.

And after a couple months of doing this, I would go back and just record me introducing the song. And I had a whole highlight reel of me being a DJ and introducing song after song on the radio station. Well, fast forward into my high school years, I was taking a lot of radio production, audio, video production classes. And in college I went to school and had a major in communications, media study and production. And by the time I graduated, I was actually running four talk radio stations. I had the love of music but ended up running talk stations. And in that capacity, I ended up hosting about eight hours a week of live talk programming with different financial advisors and financial firms around the triangle. And this went on for a number of years where every week for several hours I would sit and host the programs and pepper financial advisors with different questions on a variety of different subjects. And I came to a couple of realizations.

One is that in radio, you reach a certain plateau level where unless you're willing to jump around from New York to Chicago to LA, you're not going to have a whole lot of upward career mobility. And two, I actually really enjoyed and was very knowledgeable about the financial and retirement planning topics and subjects that I had been asking these advisors about for several years. And I really enjoyed it. And I actually recognized the fact that a lot of people did not understand their money and their financial decisions and how to plan appropriately for their financial future. And it was something that I could help and provide assistance with. So I actually approached one of the advisors that I was working with and told him that I would help him produce his program. And at the same time, I would get the additional education and become licensed to do the training and the classes and pass the tests to become a financial advisor. And over the next 10 years, I hosted and produced that radio program and had it at one point in time broadcast on over 100 stations across the country every week.

And at the same time, I had become a licensed financial and retirement planner and advisor. When the show was broadcast here in North Carolina, I would meet with and personally help to advise and assist any of the callers, savers and investors, individual planners, families who responded to the radio program asking for some assistance with their planning. And I would meet with them and I would help to try to define their goals and better understand them. I would try to help identify the strategies that could work to help them achieve those goals and also spot any potential red flags or holes that had been left unaddressed in their plan. And then I would design and help them implement plans to address those issues. So I'm hosting and running this radio program each week and then additionally during that time, I had the privilege and pleasure of getting to help assist in the planning of hundreds of families across North Carolina as they were transitioning from their working career toward retirement and making financial decisions that would impact and affect them for the duration of their lifetimes.

And I think that's really where the experience and all the years of hosting those radio programs and hearing from individuals who called into the shows or hearing advisors talk about various situations really was of benefit. Because I learned during that time that the decisions that we make early on in retirement typically have their ultimate impact and affect us much later in life and a lot of times we don't have that kind of vision. We don't have that foresight or we don't know things or we don't even know that we don't know things. And so we make decisions that sometimes are not in our best interest about how to go about spending our time and spending our money throughout retirement, especially in those early years. Some of those decisions are vitally important to the duration of our ability to enjoy retirement and to our security and our standard of living into our later years and even beyond for a married couple, some of those decisions really have their ultimate effects on our surviving spouse after our lifetime. And a lot of times people don't have the ability to make decisions with money that would impact them at the end of the month or at a year's time. So having to make a decision today that will have its effects throughout decades into the future can be something that is very challenging if you haven't thought through some of the scenarios that can occur over that period of time. If you haven't had exposure to those things firsthand and that's what that experience in radio and in meeting with so many savers and investors across North Carolina really taught me is that there are any number of varieties and infinite possibilities of what can happen. And so we have to plan for all of them and the plan has to work, whether we have an optimal situation or whether it seems like Murphy's Law is a direct story of our life experience and what can go wrong does always seem to go wrong to us. The plan still needs to work. So those are the type of plans that I try to put together that work under the optimal circumstances or the worst of situations and people don't really understand the amount of risk that they are taking, the amount that they're paying in fees, the intricacies of Social Security and how to maximize that as a source of financial and retirement security, how to translate and transition that lump sum that they've saved and accumulated into the foundation for that stability and dependability throughout retirement. People have a lot of questions about how to plan for income, how to plan for legacy, how to plan for medical and long term care expenses, any number of different issues and variables that we sometimes get overwhelmed with because we focus on these big ideas that are beyond our control. What's going on in Washington?

What's going on on Wall Street? What's going on in foreign wars in Asia or Europe or things that we cannot control? But if we step back and look at the financial decisions that we are making personally and individually, we can actually take steps in our own sphere of influence that can help to insulate and protect us against many of those variables. So our outcome is often determined by the level of control we take over the variables that can affect us. And there are many opportunities in our financial planning process and in our progress throughout life to take steps to better control those variables. So that's what we do at Rashan planning. We take a look holistically at the financial and the retirement planning picture. We take a look at it from the tax aspect.

We take a look at it from the estate aspect. We make sure to coordinate efforts with tax or legal professionals where necessary. And we really drill down on making that financial plan as solid as possible to eliminate as many variables as possible to identify what red flags or risks we are exposing ourselves and our plan to. And when we are making those plans, always examining the assumptions that they are based on. Every plan is going to be based on some amount of assumption.

But unfortunately, most people are planning based on assumptions that if they end up being wrong about what they are assuming, then their plan does not work as well as they thought that it would. We try to make those assumptions so that if we're wrong about those assumptions, we are in a better financial situation. We assume that taxes are going to go up into the future. We assume that the market is going to go down in the future. We assume that we're not going to get much, if any, growth on our money. We assume we're going to have health care expenses into the future. Under those circumstances, can we design a plan that still provides for our comfort, our stability throughout our financial future? And if so, we should have a pretty high level of financial confidence. And that's what we're trying to provide to for the savers and investors who have worked so hard to build to a place of financial success where they can stop trading their time for money. Walk away from that career, that paycheck, and do so with a high level of confidence that they're going to be able to maintain their comfort, maintain their standard of living throughout their lifetimes, and even be able to pass that same kind of confidence, that education, that ability onto their family members.