Megan Gorman: Mastering Taxes and Estate Planning for Wealthy Clients

This podcast is brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.

How do you scope out and deliver on a set of ultra-personalized services for families with tens of millions in assets while not getting bogged down in inefficiencies? Hi everyone, I'm business coach Steve Sandusky for Barron's Advisor, The Way Forward Podcast. My guest today is Megan Gorman. Megan is the founder and managing partner of Checkers Financial Management, which is a female-owned high-net-worth tax and financial planning firm based in San Francisco. In today's conversation, Megan shares how her background as an attorney combined with a passion for tax strategy has helped her navigate the complexities of wealth management for her wealthy clients. We delve into the business challenges of serving high-net-worth families, such as tailoring services that address both the technical and emotional aspects of wealth, executing on client promises, and building a team and scaling a firm. And stick around to the end as we touch on some key insights from her new book about how America's presidents handled their money and the advice Megan would give them. With that, here's my conversation with Megan Gorman.

Long story short, I'm an attorney by training. And I never practiced. I fell in love with tax when I was in law school and got recruited. I worked with a company called ACO, which was a division of Goldman Sachs for 12 years, briefly went to Bank of New York Mellon, and then launched my own firm in 2015. So here we are almost 10 years later. I work in the high net worth, ultra high net worth space. We work nationally, although our offices are in San Francisco and in Irvine. And I work with clients on all areas of their finances. So tax, estate planning, investing, and we do family office work.

I know there's no typical client, but what might be, say, an average net worth? What are some of the issues related to tax or estate planning that you're dealing with? And do you have a specific set of services that you offer to these people? Do you have a couple different programs that they can slide into, or, or is everyone sort of an N of 1 and you do something unique and personalized for each of them?

So I run a team of 18 people and we service our clients. How we typically work with clients is very holistically. And so right now, like a lot of advisors, we're dealing with the fact that the unified credit is scheduled to go down in 2026. So it's a lot of really intricate estate planning, right? We're talking about SLATs and all the fun things of moving things out of estates. In this interest rate environment, we're talking more about irrevocable life insurance trusts to help mitigate taxation and really just working to understand with clients what is important to them. Is it the income tax consequences or the estate tax consequences? Because never the two shall meet. You really can't get strategies that benefit both. I would also tell you the other thing that we're focused on is generational, working with different generations. I think it's really important as you work with clients, and in my case, I've worked with certain clients for 20 years. And so their kids are now adults. I often work with G1, Generation 1, and my colleagues will work with Generation 2. So when you think about the wealth bands that we're working with, I would tell you that we've got a very healthy practice in the $1 to $10 space that work with a lot of my other colleagues. And then really it has to be for, to work with me, you have to have a taxable estate. And what's interesting is that definition is changing, right? There's a lot of people who have asset bases in the $30 million range with under the current estate tax exemption, had a very small estate tax bill. And now as we start to propel ahead to 2026, they're looking at a larger estate tax bill. And then obviously we have family office clients that are north of $100 million.

So what happens if that unified credit does not sunset and it continues? How do you plan for that?

It's a tough thing, right? You've got the clients that are going to have an estate planning or estate tax issue regardless of what's going on. So it's how do we work the estate plan assuming that this elasticity is always there? Some of it is the SLAT, which is taking assets and moving them into a trust. And I typically do trusts in Delaware. And do we look to do discounting on the assets, right? Do we look to take, you know, the assets, put them in an LLC, get a discount for them, and then move it into the trust? So those types of strategies are always going to be around for those clients. We're always going to be doing them. I think the hardest group to work with right now is the $20 to $30 million space, because depending on what the law is will drive whether they need to do something. But a lot of them are starting to feel the pressure that they should act at some point, and that really they're looking at techniques like irrevocable life insurance trusts because you're healthier today than you are tomorrow. Some of it's playing into the idea of, okay, how much money do I actually want to make sure each of my children get? And how much do I want to do to things like charity and other things that are near and dear to my heart in estate planning? So again, it's a lot of deep discussions, a lot of understanding what's important, and also understanding the underlying assets. It, it, the assets liquid, are they illiquid? Are we dealing with real estate, single stock positions? And I'll tell you, in the past few years, I've had more clients with overseas properties than ever before. So that acts as another layer of complexity there. So it's a lot of, it's a lot of fun, a lot of problem solving, but it's not one size fits all. And just because something works for one client doesn't mean it, it works for another.

So you're talking about some of the technical things that you're doing here. So when I hear family office, multifamily office, I think of things like bill paying and dealing with the landscapers and that sort of stuff. So do you get involved in some of those other things that go beyond taxes and estate planning?

Yeah, we have the full suite of services, right? And we try to tailor each of our client relationships to what the clients need. I have some clients that hire me and really I'm working with family dynamics and the estate planning strategy. Other clients hire me and we're doing everything from bill pay to running the investment portfolio, both the public and the private investments, cash flow management, employee benefits, you name it. And in particular, I tend to work with corporate executives executives. We work a lot with single stock positions. So 10(b)(5)(1) plans and how do you mitigate risk, right? Because single stocks are great for building wealth, right? So it's interesting and I love the fact that each of my clients are different. So a lot of times my clients know each other because I build my business by referral. And yet even though they know each other, what we're working on is completely different from what their friends are working on.

And do you outsource some of those things like bill pay? Do you do that in-house or do you have a third party that does some of that stuff? So what are you doing in-house versus versus what are you outsourcing and how do you determine what you do in-house versus outsource?

Yeah, we're pretty much a one-stop shop. So we do everything from the tax planning to the tax prep. We do the bill pay. We do have certain parts of bill pay structured to protect the client so that nothing can happen because that's a very highly fraught area. But really what we're trying to do is surround the client with services so that they really feel covered by us and that they really only have to call one person when they need something. And clients of mine, I have clients that I work with that I started with when they were worth $1 million 20 years ago and now are 9 figures, right? I'm always interested in the life cycle of wealth, right? And I love the fact that we can work with different groups depending on what their asset base is, because you're really trying to create value and a difference for people. And I'm always frustrated in the industry. They always ask you like, what's the minimum client you'll take? And I always am like, is there any meat on the bone? Do they want to get into the planning? Because the planning is the fun stuff. And that's where I feel I'm happy that as the firm has grown and we have other advisors besides myself, that we're able to go after the whole wealth segment.

We talk a lot in the profession about the client experience. And so tell me how you think of the client experience. What does that mean to you? What do you actually deliver under under that umbrella?

Yeah, look, my goal in a perfect client situation is you think of reaching out to us or being in contact with us whenever you're dealing with anything financial. And my goal for my team is that we're a little bit like French service when you're at a restaurant, right? Before you even have a chance to ask for the fork, we're handing it to you. So I like to think of it as a very holistic experience because the ability to feel covered and safe is a luxury. And I want to feel like we're that type of luxurious service. Now, when you get into the individual client relationships, I think things are dependent on the client, right? I've got some clients that they want to go out for lunch every time we meet, right? Very old school, proper steak meals, right? I have other clients where, you know, working with all the different family members and helping everybody. Is the service that they're looking for. And this is important, not just with me, but with all my colleagues. We're really interested in the people that we have as clients because a lot of our clients are self-made and they're fascinating, right? And this got into my book where I was trying to really understand after having a front row seat at how high earners and high net worth people make money to understand the different characteristics they have. And that's one of the things with client servicing. It's what is their definition definition of wealth? What is their definition of feeling covered?

And how do you train for that? Or how do you hire for that? So I think you mentioned you've got about 18 team members and you're dealing with mostly high net worth people. Everyone's a little bit unique. So how do you identify team members? How do you find advisors?

Typically we're growing people from within. But one of the things that's always catches my eyes when I'm hiring someone is I really love it when someone has had work in an industry like the restaurant business. Or they've worked at Starbucks, right? And the reason I think that those types of skills are so important when you're hiring is when you're in a client-facing business, you have to do it with grace, elegance, charm, and be smiling even if things are not going well, right? And the ability to do 10 different things at once is incredibly important, right? We could be working on a tax issue and tax payments for clients, and then the market's crashing., right? And you have to be able to move with that and run around and focus on the client in that sense. So I tend to grow people from within. It's a very intensive service that we offer. And I also, in some of the key roles, I've obviously brought in people from outside. So our chief investment strategist, I feel very lucky. She comes from a wealth of experience at different firms from Iconiq to Robertson Stephens to being in a hedge fund. For over 10 years. So it's really about finding the right mix of people. And then on the tax front, the tax world's an interesting world because you would think everybody can do every type of return. When you're in the tax world, you really specialize in a certain type of return. And so finding the people who can do the returns, who are comfortable with multi-state, with K-1s, I think that's incredibly important as well. And I want people to feel that they're part of something really, like, important in delivering the service to clients.

And your tax people, are they employees or do you work with a variety of, of outside people that might have certain specialties that wouldn't, uh, be efficient to staff full-time in-house?

No, we do it all in-house. Doing tax planning and tax returns, it creates a certain synergy with the client because the ability to do the planning and then make sure it's executed on the right way within the return, and then be able to make sure that A lot of times I know where all the bodies are, right? And so it's much easier if you're doing the return internally. Tax work is not easy. And if you think about it, the tax field is one of those fields where we're not getting more CPAs coming into the space. So finding expertise is always challenging. But the feedback we get from clients a lot of times is, I appreciate it being a one-stop shop. It makes my life easier. Because I don't have to manage all these different people. And I'm fortunate in the sense I've been doing this for 23 years. So I know a lot of people in the industry. And in building my firm, I've been fortunate in bringing in the right people at the right time.

As a leader of the firm, you founded the firm, you're still working with clients. How do you allocate your time among the different hats that you wear managing a firm of your size?

I think in growing a firm, and we're getting closer to a billion, which is the short-term goal, I think what you're focused on is always growing with the firm. So as much as I love a lot of the day-to-day aspects of running a firm, over the course of my career, I've had to also accept that my best skill set is with the client. That's the best thing I can bring to the firm. And so as time goes on, you're constantly evolving the firm and looking to your colleagues to take responsibility of different parts of the firm. So I'm very fortunate. I have a woman who runs our investment team, a gentleman who runs our tax team. I have this policy person on staff, and then I have a partner who helps run the business day to day. There are key parts of the business that I feel very strongly about staying involved with, and there are other parts where I've learned that I have to staff it out because again, when I'm in front of the client, that's the best thing that I do. And it's not easy when you're in this industry. And Steve, I know you are, you, you have to figure out there is that sort of point, that fork in the road where you have to decide, are you going to remain client facing? And it's hard because anyone in a client facing role knows you are working 24/7. Like my husband, we go on vacation, he can tell his team, you manage it. We go on vacation, I'm on the phone, I'm working, I'm doing that. And so it's a very different lifestyle and mindset. But what I found was that my passion is spending time with the clients and really enjoying them. And that's the problem solving that comes with complex estate and tax planning. And I look, don't get me wrong, I love the investing as well. But the problem solving stuff and really trying to get in there and getting the client to the right point, that's what I'm the best at. And we've made a decision as a firm that I will manage some stuff and I will focus on the client and other people will take control of other aspects of the business in order for us to put me forth to work with our most complex clients.

Roughly how many clients would you say you are the lead advisor for?

I am the lead advisor for 50 clients. And so how we work this is I have 2 planners that work very closely with me. In order to help with the follow-up. The follow-up is the hardest part, right? Anyone in this industry, anybody can do a great meeting, right? But the question is, can you actually execute on the great meeting? And so that's what's really key here. So it's like, get out of the meetings and how do we deliver on the promise that we've made to these clients? And how do we keep all the different balls in the air? Keeping good records, good notes, making sure that there's no letters to the clients. All of those things are really important. To create a very consistent experience. And I've always felt the biggest compliment a client can give me is they just say, look, we told our kids anything goes wrong, they just call you. We know you got this. And that's how it works. But I also think it's really important. When I first started 23 years ago, I never thought about succession planning, but now I'm like, okay, I get it. I'm a certain age and who is going to be behind me to help me as I keep going through this? Because I think I'm not the type of person to ever retire. I always want to be working with the clients, but I also constantly want to be evolving the firm. And I feel really strongly that as a female-owned firm, that, you know, staying independent, as hard as it is, is really important. One, because I think I want to be a place where people know women can succeed in finance. And, and two, the minute I feel if I was to leave the firm, all the things that I think that we've done to make our firm special, would fade away.

So 50 clients, do you think that is, given the complexity of the people that you're working with, is that about your max?

What I think, it comes in waves, right? Clients are always going through different things. Do you know, do I think I can take on more clients? Yes, I, but I have to staff it appropriately. That's the key part. And I think it's really right now is busy because of the fact that we're up against that deadline on the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, right? When you're in my role, we're trying to work with, I don't draft even though I'm an attorney, we're trying to work with the different attorneys to make sure our clients are going to be able to be in the queue to get this estate planning done by the deadline. Because I think if you're not working on it right now, you're not going to get it done by December 31st, 2025.

So I went to your website and I found something surprising, which is there's no pictures of team members, there's no names of team members. You're rightfully proud of this being a woman-owned firm, and I would have thought there'd be a lot of pictures of women on the website, but I see none of that.

I'm curious.

Oh, no, Steve, I don't think— Tell me a little bit about that.

I think it's a little bit more— most of our clients come to us by referral. And it's funny because in the industry, we're all striving to have the team look like our client base. And my client base is really diverse, and our team is diverse. And you're right, I haven't put it on the web. And I think it's more because The website is more of a landing page. I've always worked by personal referral, as have my colleagues. And so that's the thinking behind it. And it's worked for us, knock wood, for years. But yeah, it's also, I like being a little bit different than everybody else. And everybody has pictures on their webpage. So I don't know if over time that'll change. We, we've talked about it from time to time, but again, our priority, and when you are running a firm, you have to decide what you want to reinvest in. And I think the things that are front of mind is obviously people is incredibly important. And I think the other thing that's really important in our industry is technology and security, right? And people don't realize when you are running these businesses how much you spend in both categories. But again, I feel lucky because we invest in things like Adepar, which we use for performance reporting. So to me, I'd rather use my extra dollars in the business on things like that than in building up the website.

So you mentioned Adapar. I'd love to hear what else is in the tech stack.

It's really dull and boring. We use Lacerte for tax prep. There's really 3 main systems that tax people use, and we're using B&A. I've used B&A my whole career. And then a lot of our internal financial planning stuff is stuff that we've made because again, we're trying to do complex things. The reason we love Adapar so much is Addepar allows for complexity and the ability to work with family office type assets and assets that are private and so on. And I got to tell you, I am really focused on aesthetics and things like Addepar have very pretty, very elegant looking. And so those are the things that I'm focused on. And then I feel incredibly strongly about working in the office. So I know I'm like a salmon swimming upstream on this. When you're working with people's sensitive financial data, it's really important to be in the office and have them feel it's secure. So I love our offices, and I want clients to know that we actually have a place where we work, where we do your tax return, that we're not doing it in somebody's bedroom somewhere. That is actually happening at the office. And I know that's a weird way to look at it, but I think about it like if it was my tax return or my asset allocation or my planning, I want it to be in an office. And I think for younger people, being in the office is so healthy, collaborative. The most fun you have in your career sometimes is in your 20s when you're junior and you're going out for happy hours and you're making all the friends. As you rise in any industry, it gets a little bit more lonely and serious and not as much fun as it is when you're young. I remember that of my 20s, and I enjoyed that part of my job, and I want the people who work with me, my younger associates, to have that fun.

You mentioned referrals here a little bit earlier. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how do the referrals come about?

I think it's more the quality of the work is what draws us to get people to refer us. But what's interesting is I think it's because we're all very social with our clients, not like taking them out golfing or anything like that. It's more like we spend a lot of time with them. And I think we talk about a lot of things that don't get spoken about. So that makes it an easier entree. When someone wants to refer. And I think it's really important to thank the clients when they refer you, but it also means the pressure's on. And I tell my team that I'm like, okay, this client knows 6 of our other clients, right? So we got to be doing everything consistently. We have to be on the ball because they bring you the clients, but they can also move the clients. So you've got to just be aware of that. So we're not really intentional in that sense, but what is really important And I would tell anyone with an RIA, this is something to do is every year we do a strategic offsite where me and my other partners, we go away for 2.5 days. Each department presents and has a strategic plan. Every year we do want to grow our consulting business and our asset business and our tax business to make sure we're growing to be able to keep up. And I think we've hit a really nice momentum and we're having a lot of fun doing it. But those are some of the things that we made choices to spend money on that we think have made a difference on an annual basis.

And with that strategic offsite retreat, do you facilitate that? Do you bring in outside facilitator to run that? How does that work?

It's a great question, right? Because we've been back and forth on it. So far, we have self-facilitated it. However, what we've talked about is, do we start to bring someone in to help us? Have some of the more difficult discussions, right? When you decide to do these offsites, like the first year we were all nervous and we all had to present to each other and it forced us to look at the more complicated parts of the business. But as you get more accustomed to doing these strategic offsites, I think ultimately bringing in a facilitator for part of it will be really beneficial to us. And look, we have to be accountable to each other and it's actually a fun couple days away and we've gone to some fun places. We did Scottsdale last year. Wine country, Carmel Valley. And so this year, because we just opened an office in Irvine, we're gonna do it here in Newport Beach.

Yeah. And I would definitely encourage you to get a third-party facilitator. One of the reasons being that if you're facilitating it, let's just say you, Megan, is facilitating, you're not a participant then. You're putting your facilitator hat on. And so you're not one of the regular participants that can also have a voice. Now, obviously you do have a voice, but it's just, I think, much easier if you have that third-party out there that can run the thing for you, and then everyone can participate more as equals there. And you can just really concentrate on the business as opposed to, oh, I gotta be a good facilitator here. So I think that reason alone, among others, I think is a really strong reason why it really helps having a third party.

Yeah, I agree. And I think that's great advice and it's definitely something we're thinking about.

So one other thing here, pricing. Tell me, how do you price your services?

So clients work with us one of two ways and sometimes a combination of both. So some clients, when we start working with them, it's a consulting arrangement, right? And it's based on how many hours we believe we will spend on it. So sometimes I'll get clients where the assets are illiquid. It's a family business. They— everybody's tied together. They haven't done the estate planning to leverage to the next generation. And so that time I'm usually compensated on a consulting fee basis. And a lot of times also when we get clients for the first time, I like consulting because this is a little bit of a chemistry game. Like, you have to know you're going to like getting advice from me because if you don't like working with me or one of my colleagues, you need to be able to finish the relationship, right? I'm always amazed how people— and this would always shock me when I was at the big firms— people would move millions of dollars after meeting people once, which is unbelievable. So I do like to get to know people to understand how they take advice. Do they like me and my colleague? Do they want to work with us? So usually people start with this consulting. We do have an AUM fee. It's pretty standard across the board, right? It starts at 75 basis points for portfolios, $10 million and below. So it's competitively priced. And then our tax services are an add-on. So that is— and bill pay is an add-on. And that's because, again, when you think about which of your business segments are profitable or more profitable, clearly assets under management is going to be the most profitable part of your business. But tax has to be priced appropriately because of the level of expertise and this amount of software you have to have. Tax from SafeSend, because you've got to get the client's materials into you, although now we're using TaxCaddy, which is a really good software, to Lacerte, to all the security. Tax is a complex business. And so we're always trying to make sure that we're being fair on the tax front, but it's never going to be our most profitable business.

Let's dig into your book. I'd love to hear, is this your first book and what made you want to write a book here?

It is my first book. And for anyone listening, it's called All the Presidents' Money and about how the men who governed America govern their money. And so I had this sort of idea of like, what's going on with the presidents financially? Like we all know once they get out today, they go write a book and they go speaking and they all make a ton of money. Right. But a lot of times that wasn't the case. And by the way, I know from working with wealthy people, just because you have a lot of money doesn't mean you don't have a lot of stress, anxiety issues that come with it. And what I really had seen my clients get wealthy over the 20-some years I've been doing this, and that they all would tell me their story and they would all bring up certain traits that they had that was their theory on why they thought they were successful. So it could have been I worked really hard and then I went to Europe to run this division, and then that let me come back to be CEO, and they all would end their stories with the same thing. They'd all say, and I was lucky. So I was really fascinated by this concept of luck, right? Because we talk about it like it just pops out of thin air. And one of the things I learned in studying the presidents and also studying this is that luck is really about consistency, being constant. And so if you think about the presidents and you want to think about who's been really consistent and lucky, I would take you to Jimmy Carter. We always think he's this peanut farmer who doesn't really have a lot, but what's really fascinating about Carter is he's actually quite a wealthy person and very good with money. And he was also very good with money because Rosalynn was good with money. She was an amazing bookkeeper. And I'm always struck by the fact when he was running against Jerry Ford, an article appeared in the paper about how Carter's net worth was huge compared to Jerry Ford. And then when I got into the oral histories at the Ford Library, turns out Jerry Ford, when he became president, had to ask when they paid because he had to make his mortgage payment. He was living paycheck to paycheck. So these little nuances and facts about them humanizes them. And I love the human side of wealth. I was one day with one of the kids. I say kids, they're in their 20s. And we were with a client and we left the client meeting and they said, wow, He's really worried about money and he's incredibly wealthy. And I was like, yes, of course we all worry about money. It is the common thread amongst all of us. Just because there's more zeros doesn't mean they're not stressed. Trust me, they are. And that's where the presidents interested me.

Yeah. And I'm interested in the similarities between the issues that the presidents face compared to the issues that, say, some of your high net worth clients face. So what might be some of the more common issues or mistakes that the presidents have made that might be similar or might mirror some of the mistakes that you see some of your clients making?

When you have means, it's all about the power of the pivot, right? If you can pivot, you can avoid pitfalls that can damage your wealth. When you work in money, you're really working in emotion, right? So one of the things over the course of doing this is a lot of people have what you call bag lady syndrome, right? I'm sure you've heard of it, Steve, numerous times where people have money, but they're terrified it's gonna disappear. And it was interesting because one of my favorite presidents Harry Truman. And most people believe that Harry Truman never had money. The truth of the matter is he didn't have money for most of his life. His father basically lost all the family's money when he was a teenager in the futures market, and Truman couldn't go to college. He took a job as a bank teller and had a number of failed businesses. And so later, as his life went on, when he became president, Congress finally gave the president a salary increase.. They went from $50,000 to $75,000 a year. And Congress also gave the president a $25,000 stipend that was tax-free and at the time didn't have to be accounted for. And so for the first time in his life, Truman was flush in cash and he ends up saving a lot of the money. And it also helps him that the White House was being renovated, so he didn't need to use the expense account. So ultimately Congress decided this money couldn't be tax-free and, and they needed an accounting for it. But he did a very good job of saving money. And there's this great letter that he wrote to his wife, Bess, near the end of his life, where he explains where the money is if he dies. Right. We all are always telling clients, right, you know, make sure people know your passwords or where things are. This was his sort of document locator. And he explains to her, look, when I die, you know, in this savings account, there's this. At the safe deposit box in town, there's this. And it equals about $750,000. And that's about $8 million in today's money. And he got a lot of bad press probably 5 or 6 years ago when these archives opened in the Truman Library. But when you realize someone's gone through so much trauma, they're very nervous about losing everything again. Harry Truman was a little bit of worried, like bag lady syndrome. He was worried about losing it all again. And I think that anxiety always stayed with him. So those are the types of things I saw with the presidents. The other thing I saw a lot, like, I'll give you a good example with LBJ in the '40s. LBJ is writing a friend and he's, I'm up at 2 a.m. worried about money. And then in the next paragraph, he's saying, by the way, I need to buy this suit. And the suit would be the equivalent of one of us buying a $4,000 suit today. So that whole, like, I know I should save and it's stressing me out, but yet I'm going to overspend. So these are the things that I saw. I saw a lot of the common things, but I also saw with presidents like Washington, Reagan, Hoover, the ones who were really good budgeters and were really able to be present with their money often were the ones who had greater comfort with it and did the best.

You're a financial advisor. If you could become the financial advisor for any president in history, who would you want as your client and what are some of the things that you would be advising them on?

Oh, that's tough. And the reason it's tough is some of them have some really interesting situations. So I would tell you, I would have liked to have been Calvin Coolidge's advisor. And the reason is Calvin Coolidge, he was all about— he called himself thrifty. He was right. He was just almost— he was afraid to spend money. And he was an attorney that came from a family with money. But he and his parents— his father always had him on an allowance, but he worked in banking. And even though he worked in banking and on home loans, he was terrified to buy a house. He didn't buy his first house until he had finished the presidency. So I would have loved to have worked with Calvin Coolidge because I love real estate. And my clients always laugh because when they say they want to buy something, I'm like, oh yes, let's do real estate. I would have loved to have worked with Calvin Coolidge and got him to buy a house earlier in his life to have that wealth building. So to me, he would've been interesting on that. And the other person I would've liked to have worked with is on his estate planning would be Abraham Lincoln, because Lincoln was such a brilliant guy, taught himself money and failed a lot with money in the beginning, but was a saver when he was president. When he was president, because of the Civil War, the government had issued $140 million of treasury notes yielding about 7.1%. And he was saving in these notes and he always had these premonitions of death. He was an attorney and he didn't do an estate plan. So I would have loved to have done an estate plan and done it properly where we would have had the right trust set up to manage Mary Todd Lincoln because she was not very good with money. She spent like crazy. And as we all know, after he passes, she struggles for the rest of her life, whether it was due to mental illness or the trauma of watching her husband be murdered, and she only got the widow's share, the survivor's share of the estate, about one-third of the estate. And his estate was $85,000 or the equivalent of $2 million today.

You're the founder of an advisory firm. So let's say that you are starting a new advisory firm and you're going to staff it with ex-presidents. So who's going to be the CEO of your advisory firm? Who's going to be the chief investment officer? Who's going to be the chief client officer? Who's going to be the chief compliance officer? Who's going to be some of the key people that you're going to staff it with and why?

Okay. CEO. Oh, George Washington. Our first president was awesome. We think of him as so, like, stoic and older, but he was a total hustler. And he had— in the 1700s, most people were 5'7", 5'6", 5'7". Like, we all know James Madison was short. Washington was 6'2". He walked into a room and people just gravitated to him. He had that charisma. So I would have Washington as my CEO. I would have Herbert Hoover as my CFO because he was awesome with numbers. He was probably— he and Washington are neck and neck for our wealthiest presidents. And Hoover's story is great because he basically was an orphan and he created all of his wealth, including things like diamond mines that he owned in Asia. So I would have Washington as my CEO, Hoover as my CFO. My chief customer officer would probably be Ronald Reagan. Early in his life, his father was an alcoholic and he always saw the alcoholism as a disease, to his credit, even 100 years ago. But he ended up finding a lot of people in his life who helped him. His girlfriend's father was the one who first showed him college and helped him get in. He worked well with the studio heads. He ended up becoming very close with Lou Wasserman, the studio agent who helped connect him with SAG. And from SAG, he was able to leverage that into the GE Theater and get stock options and be consulting to GE. So he had a charisma and what looked like an ease with money, but that ease came with someone behind the scenes who was like, knew that budgeting was so important. You did not mess with Ronald Reagan when it came to budgeting. He was amazing with it, and it caused a lot of friction in his first marriage. In terms of Chief Compliance Officer, I probably— in thinking about these guys, I probably would have picked— I hate to say the same name again, but probably a Calvin Coolidge, right? And that's really because he was thrifty and he was into the details and being pure, which is always so funny because he was the vice president for Warren Harding. And we all know Warren Harding and the Teapot Dome scandal. But I think Coolidge would've been a great compliance officer.

We talk a lot these days about behavioral finance. And which president do you think could have benefited the most from someone who could advise them, who could guide them in the area of behavioral finance so that they might overcome some of the big behavioral biases that they had, perhaps through, uh, some traumatic early year experiences?

I'm going to pick on our current president, Joe Biden. Right. Joe Biden prides himself as being middle-class Joe. But Joe Biden is a very good example of someone who makes frenetic financial decisions and it gets him bad press. But when you actually carve into a lot of his financial decisions, you see someone who's had trauma. And Steve, you and I know when you work with people who have had trauma, in his case, his wife and daughter were killed in a, in a massive car accident in the '70s, and his two sons were injured in that accident. When you work with someone who's gone through trauma, your main goal is to slow them down. And in Biden's case, he just became senator. He's now father to these two young boys, losing his wife and daughter in a traumatic way. He's not able to slow down. And I think for him, he would have been someone having a great financial therapist to say, okay, Joe, before we go and spend money on another house, Let's go through this. What are we trying to do here? What are we trying to recreate here? What's driving your behavior? And I think as you look at his portfolio or his life, you see him do things like borrow against his life insurance, things where he's making decisions in the short term to fund cash flow. And I think you'd want to work with him behaviorally to say, okay, Joe, we really need a cash reserve. And you've got this huge house in Wilmington, Delaware that you really can't afford. So we need to have a lot of dry powder. To be able to manage that. And I think with him, if you could slow him down and get him to take advice, you probably could get him to a better place. I think on some of the stuff he's gotten press on, and I don't want to get into politics because my book's non-political, but some of it is— I don't know how well he takes advice. We deal with a lot of times families making loans to other family members, and you and I, Steve, know you got to have the AFR rate, you got to have a note, you got to be able to report the interest. I could see him hearing, yeah, you can make a loan to a family member and not actually executing on all of the elements to protect himself. So he's someone who, if he had a really good, strong advisor, I think could help him.

So speaking of politics, let me wrap up with what could be a political question. Okay. But I think you'll enjoy answering it. If you could bring back any dead president that you think would be best positioned to deal with the issues and challenges that our country faces, that the world faces? Who do you think would be that president that would be best positioned to help deal with the challenges we face today?

I love this question. I think about it all the time. Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike was amazing. Okay. Just really interesting life story. He really learned how to keep his cards close to the chest. He was very good with risk, and he was a true patriot because he put country before self. And I think today, the fact that he would probably be in the middle of all this mess, right, and this divisiveness, he'd be in the middle, that he was fiscally responsible, that he understood world order. And by the way, the global order has been a mess for 10 years. So to have someone with his strength to come in there. I think he would have been amazing today, and I, I wish we had another Dwight Eisenhower. And then I would say second, the follow-up to that person, I would pick Jerry Ford. I always feel bad for Ford. He felt he finally learned the job and it got yanked away from him. And Ford was very smart. He was never afraid about going against the grain. We all know he got recruited for two football teams to play in the NFL, and he went the other direction and coached football and went to Yale Law. Right. So really interesting individual, unafraid to make tough choices. And again, very much in the middle. So I think both sides today would find him inoffensive and able to handle the challenges that are in front of us.

Well, Megan, as we wrap up here, is there any final thought, comment, observation you want to leave us with?

The book and the story of the presidents are really a story about the challenges we all face. The issues today are the same as they were over different parts of American history. And it's really the one difference is to some degree because of the affordability crisis we're in, it's the American dream going forward is becoming harder and harder to achieve. And so I don't want people to beat themselves up if it's harder to figure out how to pay for college or buy a house or invest. Because it is harder today than it was. And so that's what I would leave people with.

And of course, you can get the book at all your favorite bookstores. Do you happen to have a separate website just for the book, or—

I do. Check me out on All the President's Money, and I will be speaking at some of the presidential libraries over the next few months. So if you're into presidential libraries, come join me.

All right. That's all for today. Make sure you like and share this podcast through your favorite social platforms., and for more great podcasts, visit us at barons.com/podcast.

Take care and be safe. This podcast was brought to you by Wells Fargo Advisors. Looking for a firm your clients can't outgrow? Wells Fargo Advisors offers financial advisors full balance sheet solutions with wealth planning, investment products, banking, and lending that meet the needs of affluent to ultra-high net worth clients. Build your practice your way and on your schedule with independent and employee model options designed to meet your needs today and tomorrow. Learn more at joinwfadvisors.com.