- What is a day in your CCMI life like?
- My day begins by helping my wife get our kids ready for school. After I give my hugs to the little ones, I have a short commute and usually arrive at work a little before 8 a.m. to check the investment markets and any major events of the day. Typically, I spend the first part of the morning answering client emails and questions from our team. Since client meetings are a complete team effort at CCMI, we are in regular communication with one another when preparing for, on average, two or three meetings per day. We often have internal meetings for our investment committee, for specific projects, to complete training or to discuss and implement process improvements. In between meetings I am generally reading articles, working on financial planning projects, returning phone calls or connecting with other professionals regarding client questions. Fortunately, I greatly enjoy the variety of things that come my way each day. Throughout the week there are additional roles that I have, such as managing CCMI’s budget, paying the bills and keeping our internal finances in order. My day usually ends around 5:30 p.m. so I can get home and see my kids for dinner, help with homework and put them to bed. It makes for a great work-life balance, which is important to me and is something we promote at CCMI for our team and our clients.
- Give us a little insight to your family. Kids? Dogs? Cats?
- My wife Alex and I have been married since 2006. Our daughter Elizabeth (“Lizzie”) is eight and is in the third grade at our local elementary school. Our son Jacob is five and is in kindergarten. They are lively and active kids and we love watching them grow each day. We also now have a fish named Flower, our first pet in the family, which was one of Lizzie’s recent birthday presents.
- What is your favorite part about CCMI?
- The people that come through our doors each day – our team and our clients – are the best part about CCMI. They make coming to work each day a lot of fun.
- What is your favorite Jersey Mike’s sandwich?
- Anyone who knows me will know that I love sandwiches of any kind. They are my favorite thing. At Jersey Mike’s, I always get the Italian meats, Mike’s way with pepperoncinis.
- What is your favorite charity/non-profit and why?
- I am currently a board member of Junior Achievement, which is an organization I have admired for many years for its focus on promoting financial literacy and life skills training for children. I have always been passionate about education and helping children, and what better way to combine the two along with my interest in promoting financial literacy. Previously, I was a founding board member of a local charter school that is now in its fifth year serving elementary school children in the Linda Vista area.
- What do you do on a typical day when you are not at the office?
- On the weekend I am generally with my family; they make me happiest and I love being involved with whatever they are doing. Whether it is cooking dinner in the evenings, going on a weekend adventure, playing catch in the backyard, playing with the kids in their rooms, or going to watch their games, I am generally in “dad” mode when I’m not at the office.
- Where did you go on your favorite vacation and where do you want to go next?
- My family goes to Hawaii every year in the spring and that is my favorite tradition. The North Shore of Oahu is a quiet, peaceful area that we all treasure each year. I’ve been fortunate to travel to many corners of the world already, with an amazing trip to Spain most recently. My next big trip will likely be to Italy since I’ve never been there with Alex, even though we’ve both been there separately.
- What is interesting about you that not many people know?
- I love photography. I don’t get much time for it other than to be creative with the camera on my phone, but looking through the lens and creating interesting outcomes is really fun for me. Also, I used to play a lot of volleyball and other sports, which I miss, but now I mostly try to get away for a round of golf or two each month. Sports and the pressure of competition are very exciting to me, so I’d like to get back to that somehow in the future.
- What is a piece of financial advice that you received either when you were younger or while at CCMI that you apply in your financial life today?
- As a novice investor in high school during the dot-com boom, I bought small balances of some of the hottest stocks of that era. I was amazed to see how quickly money could grow and how “easy” it could be. The lesson came when I went off to college and didn’t have as much time to pay attention to my small investments and I sort of forgot about them. A few years later, I logged into my Schwab account and realized that I had lost everything I’d previously earned, and then some. The first lesson I learned was that I need to pay attention to my money very regularly and not get too excited when values are up, or discouraged when they are down. While I had lost what I had earned during that early 2000s recession, I wished that I had something else of value to sell, like a bond, so that I could then buy more shares of what was down because I knew things would eventually recover. This taught me that I shouldn’t put all my money into a few stocks and that having the ability to rebalance every once in a while during this 3 or 4 year period would have allowed me to keep some of what was lost and would have positioned me nicely for the recovery that followed. A lesson I use to this day!
CCMI provides personalized fee-only financial planning and investment management services to business owners, professionals, individuals and families in San Diego and throughout the country. CCMI has a team of CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNERTM professionals who act as fiduciaries, which means our clients’ interests always come first.
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