Kris Barnebey of Downers Grove, Ill., is a living testament to Blaydes' work. She lost her 44-year-old husband to cancer last summer and has three children ranging from ages 9 to 14. "My husband passed away sooner than we expected and I was overwhelmed. I had no idea what I was doing. David helped with the finances and helped us find a lawyer. It was one less thing I had to worry about," she says.

"I recommended David to a friend of mine who is in the same situation I was, and she did not take my advice," Barnebey says. "Now she is constantly worried about her finances."

Blaydes does not make money from his presentations at the Wellness House, but he's quick to add that his firm, which has $200 million in assets under management, does make money from those who become clients. His fee averages 1% of AUM. He personally handles only minimum investments of $1 million or more, but others at the firm can handle anything above $100,000 in investments. Retirement Planners International has three financial advisors and four other employees, all of whom came to the firm with at least five years in the financial field before joining.

Blaydes is a member of Advantage Financial Group, a supervisory office within the National Planning Corporation, which is his broker-dealer. (Broker-dealers handle the supervision of groups of representatives through this middle-management arrangement.) Blaydes, a $1 million producer, was the firm's top producer in 2009.

Helping Those Out of Work
Though cancer patients have become an important part of his work in the past decade, the bulk of his firm's work is with people who have lost jobs, people who come to Blaydes through the outplacement firm Kensington International, an affiliate of Career Partners International. Kensington's managing partner is CEO of the Wellness House and that is how he made the original connection with the cancer resource center. Blaydes says he knows of no one else in the industry focusing on outplacement services to the same extent he has over the past 15 years. He has built a technology and business infrastructure that will allow him to expand his firm's outplacement planning nationally.

Though cancer patients and the unemployed would seem to have little in common, both types of clients typically want more stability than other investors, he says, and Blaydes tries to reduce the risk and dampen the volatility of their portfolios. He buys laddered bonds in one-year increments, so that 10% of the amount matures every year for ten years, offering a stable income to the investor that will not lose value, he says. He selects mutual funds for their risk-adjusted return, rather than returns alone, and taps the expertise of money managers to put the portfolios together.

"One person came in with a portfolio he had put together himself that was 30% emerging market funds," says Blaydes. "He had no idea of the risk associated with such a concentration. He just knew, at the time, that the category had substantial growth." Blaydes advised the client to considerably lessen his risk by changing his asset allocation.

Blaydes notes that the planning elements for cancer patients and the unemployed are the same: For his unemployed clients he does a financial plan, a retirement plan and estate planning, in that order. For cancer patients, he does the same things in reverse.
He also wields his skills on television with regular appearances on the Total Living Network's Money IQ television show hosted by Jim Gibson, who says, "I was looking for someone to help us do our job better, in part because so many baby boomers need financial advice.

"I selected an attorney and David Blaydes as our financial planner. There is a lot more to David than just his work with outplacement clients and cancer patients. People e-mail us questions about health-related money issues, about financial crises, and David knows a lot of things our viewers want to know, and he can explain it clearly in our six- to eight-minute segments."

Because of the clientele Blaydes deals with, financial planning is frequently secondary to emotional support, for which his college degree in business and psychology has come in handy. One of the companies he works with is the True Wealth Institute, which helps clients outline their personal missions and set goals before attempting financial planning.