A man we will call David is a 53-year-old successful attorney with a high-powered law firm in the New Orleans area whose retirement planning had not kept up with his needs as his salary ballooned.
He has a wife and three children who depend on him. For his financial planning and pre-planning for retirement, he had been “throwing darts” at investment options and letting the details take care of themselves.
That’s when Renée Pastor, founder of the Pastor Financial Group in New Orleans, actively took over the planning and made sure the well-off family could educate the children at any school they desired and retire to a lifestyle they had come to expect.
Striking Out On Her Own
Pastor struck out on her own a year ago, leaving Raymond James, where she had spent much of her 30-year career, for Atlantic Capital. All of her clients came with her (Raymond James is still her custodian). Her aim was to work with pre-retirees, preparing them for the “third lives” they want.
“Helping people plan for retirement was an area of the financial business that I had wanted to pursue for years, but in order to do it full time and the way I wanted to, I had to become an independent advisor,” Pastor says. She is now a sole practitioner with $135 million in assets under management. “I wanted to manage clients’ 401(k) accounts and other retirement accounts while they were still working to make sure they could leave the workforce and move to a life they wanted.”
Many of her clients are now within three to five years of retirement and almost ready to take the next step. Pastor also has a fair share of younger clients, and she is glad she can help guide them through their careers.
Her client David was making a salary in the mid-six-figure range, and he and his family were more than comfortable. But the way he was investing on his own was haphazard, Pastor says.
When she took over actively managing the assets, she set up a self-directed brokerage account for his 401(k) and other retirement accounts and she began to make the investment decisions.
David is busy serving as a partner in his law firm right now, so he gave Pastor the authority to set up and manage his accounts as she sees fit. He now holds about 20 stocks from 10 different sectors of the market, and Pastor says she is going to add more investments outside his 401(k) in the near future.
Pastor also bought a 20-year term life insurance policy for the family to make sure his three children have money for their educations in case something happens to David. Pastor explained to him that as the sole breadwinner, if he had no protection in place, the family would not be able to maintain its lifestyle if anything happened to him. A 20-year policy was long enough to make sure the children could pay for private colleges, she says.
“David is one of my oldest clients, and we grew with him over the years, but at first we did not have active control of the accounts. More recently, we were able to take over the investments and insurance to make sure the family is safe financially,” Pastor says. “This shows the importance of growing with your clients. I now am reaching out to people in their 40s, so we plan for their high-earning years as their incomes grow and for the retirement years.