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.

“Jeff Levine was different from the rest of the Kitces team in that he has an advisory firm affiliation, as I do,” said Kitces. “The fact that we had affiliations to different advisory firms created a challenge and an opportunity – we were in competition for business opportunities. That led to a decision and a process that started last year but culminated in a final decision this year – we needed to change platforms and find one that we could be aligned to.”

That initiated a search for a new firm that each advisor conducted separately. Both Kitces and Levine thought of Buckingham as a potential landing point individually, said Levine, and when the two met to discuss possible destination firms, Buckingham was at the top of both of their lists.

“At the end of the day, I’ll go wherever Michael wants to go – he’s Michael,” said Levine. “The fact that we were able to come to a decision together speaks volume about who Buckingham is as a firm and what they stand for. We both independently thought that Buckingham was the best place for us.”

The pair were already familiar with Buckingham’s leadership when they began looking to move to the same firm last year, said Kitces, who will remain in the Washington, D.C. area. “I’ve spoken for their conferences, and a lot of their advisors use the Kitces platform,” said Kitces. “Buckingham has a young leadership team, most of their team is in their 30s and 40s. I like a firm where the senior leadership is going to be around as long as I am.”

Buckingham’s scale and national scope also attracted Kitces and Levine, as it provides them a platform with greater reach than their previous firms.

Kitces said that another one of the main attractions of Buckingham was its willingness to consider and act upon academic financial planning research and an appreciation for the “nerdy” side of financial advice.

“Buckingham has very deliberately chosen,” said Kitces. “They have roots with CPA founders, and for the particular style of nerdy, tax-oriented strategies we produce and focus on at Kitces.com, a firm with deep tax and technical roots was a positive alignment.”

At their new firm, Kitces and Levine will deliver research and thought leadership to advisors in its RIA, Buckingham Strategic Wealth, and to those who do business with its turnkey asset management platform, Buckingham Strategic Partners.

Both men will help Buckingham develop and refine it’s financial planning approach. “We looked at this as an opportunity to not just get one future hall-of-famer, but two,” said Birenbaum. “We’re going to utilize their deep, technical planning expertise to develop strategies to train our advisors and to help us not just enhance our advisors’ capabilities, but also truly enhance client care.”

Buckingham has evolved from a one-location, St. Louis-area firm in 1994 to a nationwide firm with over 40 locations today, said Birenbaum. His hope is that Buckingham’s scale combined with the thought leadership of Kitces and Levine will create a “city upon the hill” for the financial advice industry.

Kitces and Levine will also assist Buckingham’s existing leadership with strategy and business development. “Being two of the most knowledgeable students of the industry, Jeff and Michael will play an active role in contextualizing the changes in the landscape today so we can plan business strategy around them,” said Justin Ferri, chairman of Buckingham Strategic Wealth. “They’ll also help us with business development and determining how we can make sure we’re investing in the right areas, and are utilizing our scope and reach to expand the business with the ultimate goal to maximize the positive impact we can have in the industry and for our clients.”

Kitces’ relationships with his entrepreneurial efforts, including Nerd’s Eye View at kitces.com, will continue unchanged, he said.

The news of the move comes amid increased market volatility and investor pessimism due to the coronavirus outbreak. Kitces noted that his move to Pinnacle, in 2008, also occurred during a volatile period for markets.

“I don’t have the market timing of a Peter Mallouk, who sold his firm a week before the coronavirus breakout, but difficult times like this are part of what highlights the importance of good firms with the right people, the right culture and the right focus,” said Kitces.