Into the familiar alphabet soup of financial services credentials such as CFP and RIA, David Ortiz can add an unusual designation: CTC, which stands for classically trained chef.

Ortiz has the advantage of having been tutored while growing up by a mother who was a trained chef, and by a famous Swiss pastry chef.

In addition to that pedigree, Ortiz attended the Wharton School of Economics.

He is managing partner of Financial Chef Asset Management LLC in Miami. Its tagline: Recipes for financial success.

Prospective and current clients meet Ortiz in his 24-foot long Mercedes Sprinter van, with both a kitchen and sitting area for business, to discuss investment options for retirement. He’ll bring the Sprinter to clients' office or home, or whatever location they want.

Ortiz focuses on advising baby boomers on financial planning for retirement, including which Medicare and Social Security options are best. Baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, total about 76 million Americans. Currently, he advises about 100 clients.

Depending on the time of day, Ortiz will offer biscotti or scones, with tea or coffee in the morning; he serves coffee and pastries at midday and a sit-down dinner at the close of business. He makes everything from scratch, including the pastries.

Ortiz, nearing 60, said combining food and financial advice happened almost by accident.

“When I first started in this business in 1996, I was taught that you have to find some way to get clients to like you, that people do business with you if they like and trust you.

“Invariably, I would sit down with a prospect, make chitchat, and whenever my background as a chef came up, I saw that it changed the tenor of the conversation and that most people were intrigued that I was a successful, classically trained chef. I did have pretty good career, I had a TV show before we had all those celebrity [cooking] shows, here in Miami, on public broadcasting back in 1983,’’ he said.

Ortiz, who is Cuban-American, was born in New York City and grew up watching his mother, a chef and cooking instructor, at work in various kosher hotels in the New York Catskills. When the summer season ended, the family relocated to Miami, where the hotels’ residents spent the winter.

At the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., Ortiz was mentored by a celebrated pastry chef, the Swiss-born Albert Kumin, who later became executive chef at Disney World in Orlando, where he hired Ortiz to be a pastry chef. With skills learned from Kumin, who was pastry chef for Jimmy Carter's family at the White House and at New York’s Tavern on the Green, Ortiz literally warmed up prospects.

“I made my own biscotti and would go to a meeting, setting up the cappuccino machine and have the biscotti fresh and warm, and they would say, “Oh my God, this is fantastic.’ I found that when talking about money, they would clam up, but food warmed them up,’’ he said.

Ortiz’s cooking skills became known in the Miami area through charities that auctioned off his custom-made meals, often dinners for eight that he prepared at the winning bidder’s home.

At this point, Ortiz came up with the idea of combining food and financial advice; he opened an office in the affluent Coral Gables, Fla., area. In the front was an office and meeting room, in the back was a full kitchen.

“After five to six years, I realized that business was limited because of all the traffic in Miami," he said. "If you weren’t within a comfortable driving distance of five to 10 minutes, you wouldn’t come for lunch with me. So, we decided to take the business mobile.

“I came up with the idea of using a high-end vehicle, which we have with the Mercedes Sprinter van, an RV by Airstream," he said. "I pick [clients] up, they come into the vehicle, or maybe I pull into their driveway, and they get in and we do a meeting, generally always over a meal, or coffee and pastry or cocktails.”

The van also has a monitor that can be used for presentations.

When it comes time to talk turkey, as it were, Ortiz says he has his own approach to advising clients on investing.

“We really focus on income distribution planning rather than accumulation strategies," Ortiz said. "Most people focus on having a big pot of money and when the market goes down 600 points, you are freaking out because those are your assets.

“What we do, is rather than looking at assets as a big pot, we segment your assets into buckets, and  each bucket has a five-year time horizon. We use the first two buckets to have no market risk, then whatever that does never makes it a bad time for you to retire because of the sequence of return risk.

“We put the equities in the long term bucket. It’s kind of like conveyor belts. One and two buckets are all income-producing instruments, and three, four and five have different target rates of return. Then there’s the legacy bucket, where the gyrations in the market won’t affect your daily life,’’ he said.