Personal Insights from Ben:

We take a great deal of care in learning about the personal background and financial goals of the clients we work with. As a part of this process, a question we often ask is, “Tell us about your first memory of money.” My first memory of money goes back to the lemonade stand I had when I was five years old. The house where I spent my childhood was situated in an oddity of city planning, the double cul-du-sac. One day, I decided to have a lemonade stand at the end of my parents’ driveway. Needless to say, it was not very successful being tucked away in the back of a cul-du-sac. Somewhere along the line, I decided to put the lemonade stand on my red wagon and move it to the nearby street corner and out of the cul-du-sac. With the increased car and foot traffic on an actual road coupled with the generosity of passersby and an overly enthusiastic five-year-old attitude, my revenues increased substantially. I tucked every dollar bill away into an old leather wallet my grandfather passed down to me. The wallet was so old all the dollar bills stored inside the folds came out smelling like an antique store. At the end of the summer, I had had put $144 into that wallet, a number I still remember. One day, I asked my parents to bring me to Hastings Family Service (the local food shelf), where I plopped on the counter the entire sum I had made that summer.

When I think about this first money memory, for me it’s reflecting on what I decided to do with it, and also about seeing money in action and experiencing the joy of hard work coming to fruition. With busy lives, we can all fall into thinking of money as strictly a financial, quantitative asset that we have worked hard to accumulate. While quantitative elements are of course, very important, part of the delight of working as a wealth advisor for me is experiencing the qualitative aspects of our approach to integrated wealth management. In looking at financial assets not only relative to their quantitative value, but as a tool to accomplish our goals in life, it helps our clients to experience the joy of seeing their money in action. And while I have grown and aged since my lemonade stand days, my enthusiastic attitude and passion in my approach to work has not.