Buckingham Wealth Partners announced on Thursday a recruiting coup – the addition of two young nationally known financial planning thought-leaders to its team.
Michael Kitces will join the St. Louis-based Buckingham as head of planning strategy, while Jeffrey Levine will join as director of advanced planning.
“We want to be an enduring firm that can hold true to its roots and foundation, and yet still grow, progress and evolve,” said Adam Birenbaum, chairman and CEO of Buckingham Wealth Partners. “These are turbulent times, but it’s more important than ever to be investing in resources and solutions like this.”
Kitces most recently served, in his professional financial planning capacity, as partner and director of planning research at Columbia, Mo.-based Pinnacle Advisory Group – but he’s also well-known among advisors for his blog, Nerd’s Eye View, and for a series of entrepreneurial and network-building endeavors.
Kitces’ entrepreneurial efforts include the XY Planning Network, a coalition of advisors dedicated to serving members of generations X and Y; AdvicePay, a payments processing system for flat-fee advisors; fpPathfinder, which offers planning-oriented charts and checklists to help advisors make decisions; New Planner Recruiting, which helps firms recruit entry-level planners; and FA Bean Counters, a bookkeeping service for advisors.
Levine, in addition to producing a growing library of content for Kitces’ Nerd’s Eye View blog, previously served as CEO and director of financial planning at Blueprint Wealth Alliance, the Garden City, N.Y. planning firm he co-founded. He will be joined at Buckingham by Blueprint co-founder Patrick Kuster, where they will become the firm’s new Long Island location.
“It was an obvious choice for both of us,” said Levine. “Things like size and scale were important to us, as was research – and there were plenty of firms to choose from, but none that we could think of with the evidence-based approach that Buckingham employs.”
Both Kitces and Levine are frequently sought as keynote speakers at industry conferences, and are followed by advisors for their research and the continuing education credits they offer via Nerd’s Eye View.
According to a Buckingham press release, the pair collectively provided more than 20,000 hours of CFP continuing education credits to the advisor community in 2019 alone.
As they worked together on the Nerd’s Eye View blog over the years, Kitces and Levine recognized that the business development value of their work was diluted by the fact that they maintained separate planning relationships with separate firms.