Supporting Childfree Clients with Financial Planning and Beyond

Maddy Roche: Hello and welcome to XYPN Radio. My name is Maddy Roche and I'm a business coach for our XYPN members and the host of this podcast. Today, I'm welcoming Jay Zigmont and Bri Conn of Childfree Wealth® to the podcast. Jay is the founder of the firm and he launched his virtual practice in 2021 and welcomed Bri, his Chief Experience Officer, to the team in 2023.

Today we discuss all that goes into serving this underserved niche, from the flexibility that child free people's lives naturally involve, to the end of life planning that often burdens and worries them. As Jay shares, over 25 percent of the population is child free. Yet the financial planning systems and expectations in society aren't always set up to support them the best.

To help address this, Jay and Bri discuss the beautiful service model that they've built and the questions they ask and the support they provide to help their child free clients

begin to develop the best life for themselves. We also dive into the future of the firm and how they hope to be able to one day offer medical and financial power of attorney support to their clients, as well as other end of life services. They share about how their relationship with the media has helped drive new clients to their firm as well as their own books and podcasts. At the end of the episode we discuss the kind of tact and bedside manner one needs to have as they approach working with child free people. I suspect you're going to really enjoy this episode.

So without further ado, here's my interview with Jay and Bri.

 Hello, Childfree Wealth team! Welcome to XYPN Radio, it is so nice to see you both today. How are you? 

Jay Zigmont: Good. It's nice to join you.

Maddy Roche: . Jay, why don't you.

introduce yourself to our listeners and then we will invite Bri to do the same. 

Jay Zigmont: So I'm Jay Zigmont, I am the founder of Childfree Wealth. Been an XYPN member since July of 2021, so three years now. Firm is Childfree Wealth. We are dedicated to serving those, the 25 percent of the US that will never have kids. So we're not talking like child free for the weekend or like empty nest, but the people that don't have kids and never will. Also, because we're currently recording this during politics time.

It's the childless cat ladies that we proudly serve.

Maddy Roche: Noted. Bri would you please introduce yourself and your role at the firm? 

Bri Conn: Yeah, absolutely. My name is Bri Conn and I am the Chief Experience Officer here at Childfree Wealth and I've been with the firm since April of 2023. 

Maddy Roche: It's always so nice to have someone, Bri, in your role, be able to paint the picture of what it's like in terms of accountabilities and day to day experience of having someone in a Chief Experience role.

So, would you mind just explaining a little bit about what you do at the firm when it comes to your level of accountabilities and what you oversee? 

Bri Conn: Yeah, absolutely. I jokingly say that I am the grease, I go everywhere and I go and I see Hey, what's working for our clients, what's not working and what also is working and not working for our team members as well. How can we make sure that both our clients are having a good experience, but our teammates as well, because we always know if our teammates aren't happy and things are really struggling for them, it's probably not going to go well for the clients and that can be negatively reflected there. So instead, we really take and try to figure out all those things, make things gel well together and keep it running smoothly. 

Maddy Roche: Awesome. Jay, how big was the firm and how big is the firm, but how big was the firm when you decided you needed a Bri on your team? 

Jay Zigmont: Interestingly enough, Bri came to me first. We were like on Facebook, just hanging out. And she's I'm looking to get into this finance thing. I've been doing marketing. I don't know. And we talked for what? Three months Bri something like that.

Bri Conn: Yeah, I think we like originally connected probably in like November of 2022. And then, yeah, it was a while. 

Jay Zigmont: So she joined initially as a para-planner and studying to become a CFP® and it was very obvious she's got another set of skills. So I think that's the hard part. We're trying to look at things and say, okay, we serve child free folks, which are about 25 percent of the US and if you look at just child free millionaires, there's four plus million of them.

Our long term goal would be, we'd love to serve 1 percent of those, which would be 40,000 folks. How do we create that from the start? So I always love, diving into Kitces' stuff. And he's like, when should you do your first hire? When should you hire more? Yeah, I'm not following pretty much any of that because it's the question of how do you build for growth and somebody might look at what we're doing and say, no, you've got your top heavy, or you don't have enough of X, Y, or Z and we go, you might be right.

And part of it is we're trying to figure out how to serve a market that really there's very few others in it, and how do you become a what we're calling category creation, more than a niche. We're building something that doesn't exist. So if we do that, we have to have support, we have to be able to scale.

So we have Bria's a CXO and I just saw that's where her awesome skills are. We got Steph, who's our COO, which may sound weird. We're a smaller firm. We got five folks right now, not a huge firm as far as a hundred people. Why do you hire a COO and a CXO to start? I'm like, cause you make systems, you make processes, like Bri and Steph our COO just did a retreat,

I'm glad I wasn't there, to talk about HR policies, like the stuff that I don't want to deal with. How do you do that? How do you onboard people? How do you grow? And how do you do it in a sustainable basis. We're really trying, our goal was to take 2024 and use it for a foundational year.

Slow up a little bit, build a strong foundation so that we've got a new book, "The Childfree Guide to the Life of Money" coming out at the end of the year. OK, once that comes out, the publisher thinks they'll sell 10,000 copies in a year. Well, if they sell 10,000 copies, how many clients do we get?

How do we keep growing? How do we go from there?

Maddy Roche: I can't wait to hear how that release of the book goes. There's a lot of XYPN members who are releasing books and I'm always interested in what the return on investment is in terms of clientele. So, I would love to be updated with that but how many clients are you serving on an ongoing basis?

Jay Zigmont: Right now we've only got about 40 on an ongoing basis. We have more that we have, we call it an academy. We're also doing something weird. We call a checkup. We're actually charging for our intro meetings and we have, our client number starts adding, when we start adding in hourly and all the other things. So we were putting it in different buckets.

Maddy Roche: Beautiful. Okay. when I think about a larger firm there, you've got more teammates than the typical XYPN advisor does and I think that's a beautiful thing to be able to ramp up into the growth that you're expecting to experience over the next couple of years. How large and how big do you want this firm to get? You dropped 40,000 clients. Is that realistic?

Jay Zigmont: Okay. So Bri can talk to this. So when I started at XY our Mastermind group, my answer was I'm going to get my 50 clients. Close up, just settle in and do my thing. And my Mastermind group keeps giving me a hard time about it now, because that's not where we're at. We keep moving the bar because the problem is once you realize there's this large underserved population, it's like, what do we set the number at and at what level do we service them?

So one of the things we're working on right now is. Okay, we've got a flat rate products, 10 grand a year. That's really for people with a million dollars or more. But there's all of these childfree folks that don't have that can't afford it. How do we serve them? And, I'll be honest, I don't have a clue what our final number will be.

It's going to be in the tens of thousands, even if we go to 40,000, that's 1 percent of the childfree millionaires out there. So like some mornings I wake up and go, that's a crazy number. And then there's other mornings I wake up and I'm like, Oh we haven't helped most of the people. Bri, can you? You've been on this roller coaster with me, it's been interesting.

Bri Conn: Yeah, it has been. And you say you didn't go out looking for me like I came to you. And it's true, like the day I asked for a job which I was just like, Hey can I have a job? I know that's probably not the wisest thing that most people do but I'm also like, if you don't ask you're not gonna know. What I asked for then and what I'm doing now are totally different things, but in the most beautiful way. And I've been able to really shape that role into something that I really enjoy and get excited about. But it does, there is a sense of I'll wake up and I'll be like well it's all fine. Like we can just take a few clients and it's great.

And then there are other days I'm like absolutely not. Nope. The dream of a few clients is long gone. We're past that now. No, let's keep growing and once you get into this growing stage and you go through and see what that's like to really get the foundation set for that, it is so fun and exhilarating for me. I'm like, okay, I could I can do this all day long so let's keep going until this isn't fun anymore 

Maddy Roche: Can you tell me a bit about the niche? I just want to lay the foundation for our listeners who maybe haven't realized that this is and can be a niche. 

Jay Zigmont: Yeah. So about 25 percent of the US are child free or permanently childless like terminology thing here. Child free tends to be people by choice. Childless tends to be not by choice. And it's not exact. everybody has their own terms. We let them pick what matters to them but we're talking about people that don't have kids and never will have kids.

The problem is, all of the CFP®, and Bri and I actually did this for a podcast. We actually went through every module in the CFP®. Is there any mention of being child free? It doesn't exist. All of the CFP® has the standard life plan. You go to school, you get married, you have kids, the American dream two and a half kids, little house, the white picket fence. But the challenge is

these folks have a completely different life, financial and estate plan that needs to be addressed. And it's not just pluck the kids out. And if you look at the statistics in the younger generation, so I know we're technically here in the XY world, but we go to the Z world. The Y and Z world are like, yeah, we're going to pause before we have kids.

They're like, it's not like a default choice to have kids anymore. It's like let me think about it. And what you're seeing is the younger crowd is going, no I'm out. And people often say to me, well they'll change their mind. I hate that one, but let's just go with it. Well, I've got people that I interviewed for my first book that at 21, we're getting sterilized.

We are not talking about people changing their mind. we're talking about people that either tried to have kids and didn't, in the "childless" or child free folks that have made a conscious choice not to have kids. And I think the challenge there is. Most of the systems all assume you're gonna have kids and there's other assumptions that hurt child free people.

Like for example, most financial planning software assumes you're married. A lot of our folks aren't. 32 percent of child free folks will never marry. It's all of these things that are built in besides tax changes and all that, that change finances and lives. Yeah.

Maddy Roche: Bri, from your experience being a Chief Experience Officer here, what do you witness as the differentiator between your clients, the clients at this firm, and the standard people that would seek financial planning? 

Bri Conn: Yeah, absolutely our clients change their minds about what they want to do in life a lot, because 

they have options. Yeah.

Exactly, they have so many options of what they can do and you know when you have kids, many people make conscious decisions surrounding their kids. Our clients don't have that. And so they can take in, if they want to pick up and move across the country or across the world, they can do that a lot easier than it might be for others. And if they want to take a job that pays less, but they enjoy more. They can do that. Or if they want to just leave work altogether for a while and take a sabbatical, they can do that. So it's a lot of things and a lot of anything like in life that requires a lot of flexibility, they tend to gravitate towards. And so it's very fun to see that. It also can create a little bit of challenge when you're planning because you're making a plan and you're going on there and then you get an email that says actually I'm going to do this instead. Or, Hey I got this new job or, Hey I got this. And so it very much requires agility and be able to adapt on your toes and just think fast when certain things come up and then say, OK I know you've got this idea. That's great, let's take a pause quick and just run through these questions and really go through and think about some things of other considerations we might want to put in place before we take that next step

Maddy Roche: And Jay, how have you changed your service model to support that kind of agility and flexibility that your clients crave and need? 

Jay Zigmont: So keep in mind, most child free folks want to die with zero and it's not like literally die with zero balance on the last check, but like passing money onto the next generation, it's not a priority. So if we had adopted a 1 percent AUM model, we'd have a built in conflict of interest with our clients. Our clients wanted to drive it down, the AUM model, you want the income to go up.

So we had to adopt a flat rate fee. Originally, it was a little more on the advice only now we're offering investment management, all in that flat fee. But that was intentional because of the clients we serve. The other thing is, we are deep in our clients lives. So the way we say it is we plan for their life first, then their finances, then their taxes.

And what that means is we meet with them pretty regularly. So our core clients, normally we meet with them every month. And somebody will say, well, that's crazy that's a lot. They don't want to meet that often. No, they do. Like seriously, like we got some that want to meet more than once a month if we've let them 

 that's because of those changes.

I literally got an email the other day, Hey I'm moving to Korea because I got a job offer. I'm like, all right. And by the time I answered it back, Oh no, that fell through I'm moving to Germany. I'm like, well how do you want me to do one? They're like, let's meet in between. And what happens is our clients have to have what is truly ongoing, comprehensive life and financial planning.

It can't just be, here's your investments, disappear. And we need to have different structures. We need to, the software needs to be changed. There's a whole lot of structural things that need to happen in order to serve this population.

Maddy Roche: Could you talk a little bit more about what's the first year experience like for a client that comes into the firm and what can they expect? 

Jay Zigmont: Sure. So the first step before you come in is actually a checkup. So we charge $500 for this and we essentially say, give us everything that's got a number on it. We're going to look at any like red, yellow, green, like what's working, what's not. And part of what we're doing is saying, what can you do by yourself?

What do you need help? Where does that fit? And at that point, we allow clients to be adults and you want to do it on your own? Awesome. You want help? Let us know. And we've really improved, embraced the learning approach. Our goal is for clients to understand this, learn it. Ideally, we'd love them to be able to do more by themselves.

So they take the checkup and we'll start with what are their priority areas. Now, normally what I find, is their life is the question. Like one of the big questions we ask child free folks is what do you want to be when you grow up? Which sounds silly, but a great question. What's the point?

What are we doing? Where am I going with my life? And I'll even pause some of the financial planning stuff until we figure out the life stuff. There's some, there's always like a housekeeping stuff. Yeah. I got to update your beneficiaries. We got to fill this form whatever, but how about we figure out your life first?

Then we'll work on the finances. In general in meetings our goal is to touch on three topics, one life topic, one financial and some housekeeping. That's guidelines. Our para-planners create a handoff for the planner saying, here's what we're going to talk about this meeting. I'll usually get one topic done.

And then the client's like, Oh yeah by the way, my mother's in the hospital and I'm going to have to figure out her long term care. And I'm like, All right let's throw this out. And and that's normal for us. It's, it's not the scripted, Hey, we're not like creating a giant financial plan, drop it on your desk.

We are there to be their thinking partner and their partner both in life, finances and also estate planning.

Maddy Roche: I want to get to estate planning because I know that's so important for this segment of the population. But Bri is a client, a child free client works with you, what kind of approach are you taking to suss out what they want in life? I imagine it's not an easy question or even a fair expectation to assume someone can walk in blindly to a session with you and then just like immediately have a good idea for what their goals in life are. What kind of process and practices or approaches are you at the firm taking? 

Bri Conn: Yeah we have a lot of just questions. Lots of questions about life. We use like the Kinder's three questions as a starting point. But going through and having them take time to think about it and also recognizing that the more they think about it the more things might change, you know I met with somebody and they were near retirement age traditional retirement age And could have retired yesterday if they wanted to, but they kept working because they felt they had to.

And I asked them, I said what do you want to do after retirement? What are you retiring to? What's life going to look like? And they had no idea. This is somebody who has lived a majority of their life out already and no idea what they want to do. And I said, has anybody ever asked you that? And they said no. I don't. Never had that question before. And so it's really hitting that first, first question that is oftentimes so missed because well, you'll get asked questions growing up of what do you want to be when you grow up or what do you want to do? But people always push you in a certain direction and have expectations for you. Very, few times is it truly, what do you want as a person? Not what do you and your parents or whoever has pushed you in that direction to want, what do you want? Going through thinking about that it takes a lot of trial and error to sometimes in sabbatical say hey you know just go do internships at different places and see what you like or take a job and try it out. You don't have to stay there forever. You can take and take chances. You know I'm a career changer and I started in marketing I loved marketing at the time. And then I got really, burnt out. And I was like, that's not what I want to do anymore and I moved into finance. It's having the freedom and flexibility to make those choices and change things along the way, because who knows what life is going to look like in five to 10 years

and the decisions you make today might not be the same for tomorrow it's really embracing that and not having it set in stone and saying this is the only option that you have going forward. 

Maddy Roche: Sounds like you all give a lot of permission to people. 

Bri Conn: Yeah, we do. Sometimes people just need that permission even, it feels weird to me to give permission to people because I'm like, you're an individual with a free mind and free spirit and you can do what you want. But also I understand what it's like to grow up where nope, you have certain expectations and sometimes that permission is really needed. 

Jay Zigmont: Sometimes the permission is a swift kick in the butt. I'm more that style. Okay, Bri and I have different styles on this but like our top, one of our top downloaded podcast episodes, I'll make you quit your job. So what happened was when we first started, Bri started writing down how many times I told somebody to quit their job. And I'm like, listen, if you're trying to die with zero, retirement is not your goal. You're doing a job that the money's going to your estate, which is not a priority. Stop, go quit and be a librarian or whatever you wanted to be. And people are like, I can't do that. I've studied forever to be a doctor or whatever.

And I'm like, are you happy? No. So what you're telling me is for 200 grand for that job, you're willing to be miserable. And they're like, well I didn't say that. I'm like, no you did. Let's figure out a plan to get you something else. And man, I'm amazed how many times people are like. You're right. I need a change.

And it's just the culture or the society, the life script says, you got to keep going up the ladder. You got to keep making more money. You got to save for retirement. You got to do all these good boy, good girl things. And I'm like, why? Pick your own path and go there.

Maddy Roche: I am grateful to have both of you on because you do have different approaches. I can tell just energetically from being on this podcast with you that you have different approaches, but I think you're bringing people to the same place, which is this realization that the script isn't always what should be followed for people that don't have children and have chosen not to have children.

Are you finding that people that are child free are able to achieve their financial goals faster or easier? Or what, are you witnessing among your clients that maybe they've not realized themselves? 

Jay Zigmont: So if you look at the research, Pew Research has put out a report and child free folks do have a little higher net worth, but not a lot. Like people think oh, if you don't have kids, like it's just magically everything's easy. It's No, like there are people that are broken child free too. I think what happens though, is because you have the flexibility, my wife got offered a job. We picked up the dog and the cat, went in the car and moved 1200 miles away. We can do that. that does allow some different options. One of the things that is interesting in the data, if you look at the peer research, they looked at income levels per month, median income levels, and the gender wage gap disappears with child free folks.

Instead of with parents, it's thousands of dollars with child free folks. It's hundreds of dollars between men and women. Like statistically, almost exactly the same. So you are seeing different. It's also probably why the vast majority of our followers, the vast majority of our clients are women, or if they're couples, the women are the leaders as far as finance.

That wasn't necessarily intentionally when I started it but that's just the community and the way it works. And we actually, I've only once had a single male. We've had single, a lot of single women, we call them soloists. Most of the couples, we lift lists in our wealth box by who reached out to us first.

That's a CFO spouse. It's usually the woman, like it's different. I think 80 percent women, something like that. 

Bri Conn: Yeah. It's 80, maybe close to 90 now. 

Yeah. 

Jay Zigmont: Yeah. Which, there's just differences in the community. It's not right or wrong. people say, well, it's easier to be child free. No it's different. It's not necessarily easier or harder.

Maddy Roche: How would you say, or what would you say to someone who is child free why they should be working with an advisor that really understands being child free? 

Jay Zigmont: So I had a client, they just became a client and they were breaking up with their advisor and they went to, ah, we can call them out here, went to Northwestern Mutual and said, hey I'm leaving. And they of course tried to save her just standard process. And I said to her, I said ask them how your plan is different because you're child free.

So she did. Here was their answer. Well, we have other child free clients. And I'm like, that's not an answer. That's saying I have a friend of a certain minority or whatever group, like it's not, you're not saying you know how to serve these folks. And what happens is it is a specialty. And when a lot of people have niches.

A lot of the niches are either marketing niches or trying to serve people of a certain group. In general, parents financial plans are pretty linear. The numbers change, but there's certain steps, there's certain structures. Two parents financial plans, not that much different. Two child free people's financial plans, nowhere near each other. Like completely out of that.

It's one of those things where when I started my first chapter of my book is, "Are We Weird?" When you look at child for people in the general population, yes we are weird within the child free population. No, we're very normal. It's just, these things and you need to find people that understand you.

You need to find people that understand your life. And it's not necessarily like you have to be child free to serve child free folks. No, but you need to understand the differences and also part is make sure they're system supported. Things like die with zero, a lot of systems don't support. I had a major company tell me it's impossible for them to tell people to die with zero because they think it's against their fiduciary duty.

And I'm like, well, if the client has a goal, yeah, but we can't do it. Well, when we pulled it apart, it was actually because they're funding model they're business model, their structures, their systems. Okay. But those are the biases that are built into the system that you get if you're child free and you go to quote unquote normal planner.

Maddy Roche: Bri, what are some of those other systems in place that you've witnessed or that you've embodied at the firm to help your clients achieve a better financial picture? 

Bri Conn: Yeah. When we're putting things together, like what I said earlier freedom and flexibility, number one thing that needs to be available and in there for clients because if we don't have that, we're automatically missing the mark right away. And so, being able to be very adaptable, we're working on building systems and just materials for our team. So that way, Hey we're going into a meeting and we think we're talking about this today and they bring up something else. Okay, great. Well, we can adapt to that quickly and have materials available with questions. Because we all have days where our brain just falls out. And sometimes we're like, Hey we're, we know we're doing this, like this is what we're going through and then it gets thrown out and we're doing something else. We just need something to reference quick and just help us say, Hey, this is, these are the different things because oftentimes, if somebody comes and wants to talk to me about estate planning or insurance, I can listen to hundreds of podcasts from other things but it's so different when it comes to child free clients that if I'm just going off of memory and not taking the time to think about it and really figure out what it is for child free clients or haven't gone through that in a while I'm gonna need some help so having those things in place for our planners and team members, but also having materials For clients available after every meeting we give them resources and it might be podcasts might be books it might be just articles or other things that we've created so that they can get answers and just help and more support for what they need in their specific issues.

Maddy Roche: Beautiful. Jay, I'm wondering, it's fascinating about the percentage of women that you work with. Is there a deeper niche? Is there a sub niche in this niche that you feel like the firm is going to go after? 

Jay Zigmont: So, the argument is can 25 percent of the US be a niche and probably not like just can't. My long term hope is I'd like my planners to sub specialize So for example, one of the ones we really need sometime soon is somebody that's an expert in travel because our people travel all the time.

Like we've got, the editor for my book, she actually, her and her dog lived in a different Airbnb each month across the year. No home, just her and her dog. And the van life folks, we have a bunch of those. So there's these sub niches or whatever you want to call it.

What ends up happening is, we're trying to figure out how to build kind of communities within our clients. Whether it's like special interest groups, other things. I don't know why I have a lot of authors, I have a lot of, we call them soloists, the single women, we have a lot of couples where, they're taking turns. We call the garden and the rose between her who grows and who provides support. There's some themes. I think in the long run, we'll end up with, Oh, Bri's the expert on this but that takes time. I think. Bri and Steph have been working hard to make a process for this because my way of planning is more like improv, let's see where it goes.

And like one of our para planners the other day in the meeting was like, okay you've got this structure you want to lay out for the insurance meeting. That's great. I have never seen you do that with a client. And I'm like, you are a hundred percent correct. So as we start developing these sub niches, so and so is the expert in insurance or whatever it is. We can bring in the team, to help on that and hopefully get away from improv, but I don't know, we're going to be able to completely because of the nature of our clients.

Maddy Roche: I will share more than I usually share on a podcast about my personal life, but I am a child free woman and I plan to remain so. and I have a number of child free friends. And one of the things we all struggle with is picturing our futures and understanding what they could look like. And a lot of us don't Discuss the lack of kind of idols or leaders that we can look at in terms of what could our life look like and just hearing you say, Oh we may have an expert in travel in our firm. It's well, oh my gosh, we all want to travel, but boy it would be great to have someone that could actually look at our financial picture with that in mind. And I will compliment you because I have also followed you closely as you've launched your firm. your podcast is a fabulous resource. Your Portraits of Childfree Wealth is a beautiful resource that you sent me one time, which is story after story of child free people, and I found a number of your, from the Die to Zero to the Gardener and the Rose concepts to be deeply meaningful to picturing a future life. So I just want to applaud your ability to productize your own niche in a bit, in, offering specific things that do resonate with child free people. 

Jay Zigmont: Yeah. And we're going more in that direction. So I like wake up in the morning and I have this crisis every morning about like, how can we serve more child free people? And Bri's laughing at me cause she knows it. Like I've gone to her like, so Bri I have another idea. And she's oh boy, what was it this week?

We are going more down kind of the IP path, the creating content, maybe training other planners, other things, because we can't do it all. If you go, one of the things I love, you go to XYPN's, Find An Advisor, you can search by niche. And at one time I had done in this field, like LGBTQ+

they're about 8 percent of the population, but there's pages of advisors for them. I think there's like a hundred one time I looked. If you look at child free, there's three. Now that might've changed today. I didn't look, but we've got like huge need, but people aren't there. So part of what we're trying to do is we're using the book, the podcast, all that to get these concepts out.

I did an article for Kitces on child free financial planning, just to start talking about it. Kitces has an article on everything. I could not believe they don't have an article on this. There's an article about anything, but it's not there. And I think that's the challenge.

Yeah. when, somebody picks a niche of serving engineers, great niche, engineers have their own approach, there's a whole communication, I don't always work perfect with engineers, I'm good with that. But the financial plan itself doesn't change huge because they're engineers, they might want to talk more to the math, they might like some more team, but the plan itself doesn't. This is why it's not a niche, it's a category we're creating and that's the mindset shift we've had to do as a team. 

Maddy Roche: I'm really interested in some of the things you and I have talked about, Jay back when we met at FPA, Was it FPA national or.. 

Jay Zigmont: NAPFA I think 

Maddy Roche: Oh NAPFA yeah, pardon me. We had a nice long conversation, earlier this year just about some of the benefits that you're hoping to fold into your flat fee offering.

Would you or Bri be willing to paint the picture of what you hope to build? 

Jay Zigmont: Yeah. So let me tell you a little story. Cause this is an XYPN story. For about three years I've been trying to solve the question of, if you don't have next of kin, who makes your decisions for you? Who's your executor, medical power of attorney, financial of power attorney? And it's funny, I've been watching the XYPN Facebook group and almost every week somebody asks, Hey I got so and so, usually single women, elderly, they don't have any close family, who can make decisions for them?

And it turns out in Arizona or California, you get a professional fiduciary to help you. In Georgia, there's one attorney that'll do it. If you're in the other states, you're out of luck. Like it just, it's one of those weird things. So I've been searching for this, searching for it. I tried talking to everybody.

I was in a Mastermind group and it was on scaling. We're talking, I'm like, so anyone have any ideas? And one of the members says, Hey me and my partner have been thinking about starting a trust company.

Guy is Robert Allen, he's we're in this group and I'm like let's talk. And Robert and I and his partner, John, we've been working on this for 18 months or so, and we hope by the end of the year to launch a product we're calling the Childfree Trust that is going to be able to be child free people's executor,

medical power of attorney and financial power of attorney. They will actually end up paying a fee for it. It'll be a monthly fee. We're working on making this accessible also so financial planners can offer it to their clients. And the trust company will have a 24/7 number. If my wife had gotten in a car crash,

who makes medical decisions for us? Who makes financial decisions for us? And who lets our dog out? these are hard questions if you don't have next of kin. And it's such an untapped area. And what it is, if you go to a trust company right now and say, hey, I want you to do this, they'll do the financial, no problem.

If you have about $5 million and if you want to take a percentage AUM. They won't touch the medical. Well, I need all three. And by the way, I need somebody to call my pet sitter to let my dog out. These are the types of thing. And especially because 32 percent of child free folks are soloist, no partner.

This is a huge issue. So we're going to be rolling this out. Hopefully beginning of the year. if you're listening to this and you think regulations of SEC or the state are challenging, you should see banking regulations. Okay. that's, I joke, but I swear banking regulations haven't had a new idea in a hundred years.

And that's probably not an exaggeration, but we're like, Hey let's do something different. And we're setting this up as a partnership. And frankly, wouldn't have been able to do it if it wasn't for XYPN and that Mastermind. We just happened to, I'll be honest, I've asked everybody about it.

So like every Mastermind, every group I've been in, luckily I found somebody, but like all of a sudden we're like, Oh this is a completely untapped need. Where we can do that for people.

Maddy Roche: I've actually heard from other advisors who work with single people, not necessarily child free, but single people,

that is a huge need and they wouldn't touch it with the 10 foot pole because they don't know how or they're not interested or it's just massively complex. Bri, I'd love like a real life example of clients that you work with or how you work with them around some of these concerns.

Because I share them, and what is advice in the meantime that you give or what have you seen work? What do you see as the stressor? 

Bri Conn: Yeah, absolutely. At the end of the day, we're hoping to have that solution for them, but in the meantime it really is, you have to find somebody who is a trusted friend or family. And unfortunately, as much as I'd like everybody to get their estate planning done yesterday. It doesn't always happen.

And sometimes just the daunting task of figuring out who to put there means that estate planning doesn't get done. And it just goes out there and it takes a while to do. And it's either not done or it is done and they've got somebody there. And a placeholder and that can be really good. And it really goes by the person. Some people feel a lot more comfortable asking friends or family to do it. Some people don't, it depends on relationships too, just what the relationship is with the person. And, not everybody has a close person that they can turn to and so it's really hard because if you don't have somebody you can ask in the meantime or have We have seen people go to trust companies but it like Jay said, it's that financial power of attorney and that's that executor. And so they really don't have anybody else they can put down in the meantime for the medical stuff.

So it's hard because there is no good answer right now. 

Jay Zigmont: If you don't put somebody down the state or the healthcare organization will make a decision for you. And I don't care which political leaning you have, I don't trust the government to make decisions because they don't know me. They don't have a clue what I want, and that's so hard.

And I was just reading a stat Trust & Will put out something like 58 percent of people have no will. And I wonder if that's part of it. Like I got to have the answer. We have a client in mid twenties, she's doing her paperwork. She's Hey I really want someone else to do this. And we finally came to the agreement that, all right, put your mom for now, but that's going the wrong direction.

Like you can't, you are your mom's executor, not the other way around normally. It's one of those things where people just. Either don't get it done or the other option is like, Oh I got a bunch of friends. So like we got people do the Golden Girls set up and we've got a whole bunch of friends, we'll help each other out. Works great for the first three of the friends. The last one left over, you're out of luck. Like you were all each other's people, but now you're not. And it's just, it's a broken system. And what we're finding I just was deep in stats. 25 percent of folks are estranged from their family in the US.

Okay. About 20 percent of folks live nowhere near a family member. And if you look at, LGBTQ+ and some of the other communities, there are communities with much higher percentages. Because of either the choices, the religion, the all the cultural things and child free folks fit into a lot of those areas.

And it's can I help others? Maybe. Do I want to be a burden on my friends? No. And the executor stuff I'm not as worried about, like when you're dead, like the government can take my stuff for all I care. I don't really care, but who's going to put me in a home. Who's going to make sure I get the care I want.

And I was on a podcast, somebody asked it this way, he said, his mom's in a home, she's 90 years old, she loves chips, they won't give her chips because of her diet. He's give her the damn chips. What's it going to do? Shorten her life by a couple months? Who cares? And his question was, who's going to make sure I get my chips?

And I'm like, that's a brilliant question. And there's no answer.

Maddy Roche: So eventually Childfree Wealth will be making decisions like that for your clients?

Jay Zigmont: So the way we're doing it is we've got the client relationship. We're doing a lot of technology enabled stuff but because remember our clients, they say, Hey we did this paperwork in New York, but we're going to spend the next six months in Montana. Like we've got to constantly do that. We're going to be collecting the information.

The trust company is actually gonna be the one literally doing the executive power of attorney based on the information we've collected, based on the paperwork we've done. We look to see if we can do it ourselves. And, we were even able, willing to take custody, all that the regulatory world just won't let you.

So what we're doing is the trust company is going to do it. And what we've arranged, remember a vast majority of our clients want to die with zero, if you're our client, you do run out of money, we're still going to make the decisions for you. So we're not going to leave you hanging. If you run out of money, which is a huge worry.

Forget about Medicaid and Social Security, like if you were at a trust company, they would say, bye, you don't have any assets anymore. Like we've got to be able to serve them. And that's, what we're going to be able to offer. Our hope and don't quote me on this, but this is coming out at the end of the year.

So check back with me in 6 or 12 months. We're hoping to be able to package that so that other planners can use that service too. It'll be through us, but we're trying to set up a monthly, subscription type service so that there will be a reasonable way for people to do it because it's just, it's a nightmare.

I started like playing with this idea and people are like, I need that for my client tomorrow. And I'm like, no but six months from now, maybe. Like when we talk about thousands of people, when you talk about 25 percent of the US or child free, 25 percent are estranged from their family, 32 percent are soloist. Millions of people need this type of service.

And it doesn't exist.

Maddy Roche: Incredible. Would you be open to sharing your fee structures? 

Jay Zigmont: Sure. So we charge 500 bucks for our checkup. That's a one time. It's one hour with the planner. It's about three to four hours behind the scenes for us looking through it. But our core product is 10 grand a year. That's it. It's fully inclusive, includes investment management, includes meetings monthly.

We're the quarterback of their financial team. We're probably for lack of better way to say it, we're closer to a multifamily office where we're doing a high level service. We're truly comprehensive. It's interesting. somebody challenged me in one of the groups, well you're spending a lot of time on your clients.

Yeah, we spent about 25 hours on average a year, but if you look at how many hours people spend, it's about 25 hours a year. That's normal. We're just charging flat fee and people will question. So we have a client with tens of millions of dollars. They're like, well you could be charging a whole lot more.

We could, but here's the thing. We charge a flat fee. Everybody is charged, pays the same fee. Our average client is 10 grand. Our max client is 10 grand. Our minimum, like it's very simple. And we don't have A B and C clients. We don't have Oh we'll kick these down the road. We don't have the ones we're hoping to get money.

It's simple.

Maddy Roche: Absolutely. I love the flat fee model. I find when advisors implement a flat fee model, they end up loving it a lot too. And to hear your comprehensive package here, especially where you will be going with it of course, likely the price, there's an additional price to that estate product that you're offering.

It's a really fair price point and kudos to you for remaining steady footed with it. Outside of that incredible product you're talking about in terms of the estate and being the executor of your clients medical and financial lives, where do you see the firm going in the next year?

What are the big internal to do's? Bri, I'll let you answer that first. 

Bri Conn: Yeah, there is a lot of, Jay mentioned earlier that Steph and I just had a nice little retreat going over HR policies So there are a lot of like back end things that are not super fun But are necessary and must be done before we can bring on more people and really just get a system. We're hoping to add other options where we can maybe just hit on specific areas that people have questions on if they don't need a whole comprehensive, ongoing thing consistently.

They just want to check in on certain areas at certain times. So adding some of those things in. But right now it's really getting all that groundwork so we can add those additional service options for clients. So hopefully we'll have those available in the beginning of next year or middle of next year.

It'd be great. 

Jay Zigmont: So the magic behind this, so if Bri's the grease Steph, our COO is the like system that works. So she is actually comes out of manufacturing the kind of Six Sigma Lean type work, the process that my brain just does not do. Okay. Like just does not exist. And, what ends up happening is we're looking at the next year and going, okay, how do we build tech that allows us to do this?

How do we build SAS systems to scale? And, she brought to us, cause she's done a lot of work with startups and MNA. She's look in the startup world, you get a startup model done, you get to X amount of clients, whatever that is. And then you go to the scaling phase. And in the scaling phase, you try to double.

And she's like okay, in an ideal world, we get to X amount of clients, and then let's double every six months after that. To some people listening here, that sounds absolutely crazy. I follow a lot of Kitces stuff and he says something like 20%, year over year growth is unsustainable. Our COO is like no.

In startup world, that's you suck. Like, we're looking at saying, okay, cool. Are we doubling every six months, every four months, every twelve months? We're on that type of startup phase. And to do that, we need heavy systems. We need technology. We're looking at, okay, what of the checkups and other things can we automate?

What packages can we offer? What month can we offer a lower price monthly entry, especially for the trust product, can we offer hourly and packages because I always have this like breaking heart thing. I grew up without money. I always want to serve the people without money, serving people with 10,000 they got to have a million dollars.

Like how do we serve both of those in a sustainable process? And grow where we're doubling every 6 or 12 months. And it's funny, Steph's even said to me sometimes yeah, you're sandbagging too much by thinking every six months, it might be every four or every three and my head just explodes.

And I'm like, that's not the way my brain works. That's what we're looking at is when you're looking at this large of a population that is underserved misrepresented or frankly getting bad advice. We're really in a blue ocean. Most other advisors are stealing from each other. We're not. Most of our clients that come to us don't have a financial planner to start because they weren't able to get any advice.

We're in an area completely untapped and we hope to be able to make a dent in it.

Maddy Roche: I think you are. That being said, where are most of your clients coming from? At 40 clients, we usually see internal referrals be one of the main lead sources. Is that true for you? 

Jay Zigmont: No. So, most of our number one source is actually press. Bri and I both do a lot of press I've done. Over the past two and a half, about 700 press hits, over the past two and a half years. I do 15 or 20 a month. We actually hired a PR firm for our book launch. So really it's been around book and press and what we find,

so on the same day, Market Watch and Wall Street Journal did a feature article on us. Market Watch called us the best new thing in retirement. Wall Street Journal was talking about this stuff. I had got a client. I got a call from a client and it's the only time I've got a phone call from a client.

Nobody ever calls me, but he calls me and he says, I read this Wall Street Journal article. I did not know this is me. I did not know I needed this service. Help me because people don't notice to Google child free financial planning. If you Google child free financial planning, we're like seven out of the top 10 hits, but there's 62 literally search volume for that across the year,

across the month. Sorry. So like we have to tell people, Hey by the way, you're special. We're here to get there. So press is a big push. We're using the book, the Child Free Guide to Life and Money as our big push. Where in a dream world, we'd get on like the New York Times bestseller list, something like that, where it's pushing.

The publisher thinks we'll sell 10,000 copies a year. Okay, cool. How do we convert those? But we have to do it. And the publisher said to us, how come there's no book on child free finances? And we're like, I dunno Well, let's put it together. But like it's completely untapped. The press has been our answer.

It's one of those things are, a lot of actually requests come through XY and other things, quoted other things. You gotta be on it, but the bonus is. CNBC's done three articles on us I think, two or three. We've been on, I've been on their shows twice. These are the things that then every time you get an influx of folks.

Yes, referrals. Love them. They'll keep going. Especially after we do the estate product when people are like solving this problem that nobody else can. But, they need to know the term child free and financial planning.

Maddy Roche: I think that's a great place to wrap this conversation up. This has been a total joy to interview the both of you, and I just want to applaud you and thank you for being on this show with us today. Any final words of wisdom to our listeners out there, whether they be child free themselves or whether they have some child free clients of their own. 

Bri Conn: Yeah. So, I think the most important thing is just being kind and understanding and realizing that things can change and change often being child free. And also another thing is never, Jay mentioned earlier, but never come with the attitude of, Oh they'll change their mind or anything like that, because it can be super disheartening to hear that as personal experience and also hearing that from clients as well.

It can really, put a dent in a relationship. And so being willing to learn and understand is so important. 

Maddy Roche: I'm so glad you said that Bri. I sense from just my own orbit and world that people assume I will change my mind. And I don't need to go too deep into that, but I appreciate you and your sentiment. Jay, how about you? 

Jay Zigmont: I'm going to give a little story because this is a great example of it. I think the awareness that child free people exist and how to work with them is probably the biggest thing we could do. And I was at the, Financial Therapy Association meeting. I'd done a presentation and the group stopped me after and sat down.

They said, Hey come ask me a question. I sat down at their table. They said, hey I got a question for you. I said, okay. They said, is it okay to ask your clients if they're child free? I was like, well that's a good question. And this is probably the most accepting group I've ever found. The Financial Therapy Association is like the place you go to get hugs.

Like it just absolutely is. Great question. Great meaning. And I said to them, I said, well do you ask your clients if they're LGBTQ+ and they said, no we let them self identify. We probably should do the same with the child free folks. So we talked for another moment or two, and we got a little deeper.

I said, okay, so let's say somebody self identifies as gay. Do you ever ask them why? And they're like, no I would never do that. I'm like, okay so for your child free clients, why whether it's their choice whatever, know it's different. And by the way, if you don't know how child free plans are different, you can always email me.

There's stuff we got written. Like you can do that, but it's just a matter of how to have that conversation and be accepting and not make the judgments. That is probably the most important thing for people to understand. Because if you're serving any type of alternative lifestyle group, it's like there's somebody at XY that does tiny houses.

A lot of child free folks, if you're serving, anybody's living a different life, you've probably got a higher percentage. You need to figure out how your systems, your language, your own biases are addressed to not turn these people off. The Hey we've got other child free clients is not an answer. You know the Hey well you'll change your mind is the worst answer. Like, how do you understand it's a different life, not better or worse, and just build some system structures such you're okay, comfortable having that conversation.

Maddy Roche: Great story. I encourage advisors to really evaluate the word why in their conversations with clients just generally. As a coach, I've really learned that why puts people on the defensive. It puts them in the space of needing to explain and come up with a response to something that isn't, as open as you want people to be.

It doesn't ask them to explore the new opportunities. It instead asks them to go, go back inward and spiral on their defenses. So asking why you want that even, is not always the most powerful question. There's a lot of different things. What could your life look like? Could be an equally as powerful if not more question to ask.

So, thank you for giving me the opportunity just to explain the, why question to begin with. On that note, I say we wrap this up listeners, I hope you've enjoyed this dialogue with Bri and Jay. You will certainly be hearing and seeing more of them as they continue to grow this firm. And thank you Bri and Jay for being here.