Why financial planning
For me it always came back to one thing. I want to help people.
For a while I thought that meant medicine. There was just one problem. I cannot handle the sight of blood or a needle to save my life, and I will happily admit I have hit the floor more than once getting blood drawn. Helping people was right. That particular way of doing it was very much not. But the reason behind it never went away. I still wanted my work to genuinely help someone.
Finance is where the rest of me lives. Investing was my way in, especially the patient, long term side of it, the idea that a few good decisions made early and then left alone can quietly reshape someone's future. The more I learned, the more I realized that is just one piece. What pulls me toward planning is how complete it is. It covers how a person saves, how they handle debt and taxes, how they protect their family, and how all of it fits into the life they actually want.
It also helps that I genuinely like people. I enjoy meeting someone new and talking with them, and planning runs on exactly that. It is where my interest in finance and my drive to help meet, and the work itself is sitting across from a real person, learning what matters to them, and building something around it.
That is the kind of helping that fits me, and it is what I want to build a career around.
Resume
Education, experience, and the skills I am building toward a planning career.
- Served members at the branch and processed daily transactions accurately and within compliance standards.
- Connected members with products and services that fit their needs, an early version of the consultative work I want to do as a planner.
- Handle customer service, cash management, and compliance in a fast paced retail setting.
- Built a multi tab retirement planning workbook in Excel that models contributions, investment growth, inflation, and drawdown for a sample client profile.
- Comfortable with core corporate finance and valuation methods, including time value of money, bond valuation, and discounted cash flow analysis with NPV and IRR.
- Studied investment vehicle mechanics in depth, including how ETFs and mutual funds differ in pricing, structure, and tax treatment.
- Working knowledge of personal financial planning topics such as retirement saving, Roth IRA strategy, and low cost index fund investing.
- Advanced applied artificial intelligence. I use AI tools daily to build, research, and solve real problems faster.
- Built multiple web and financial tool projects from the ground up, including the three calculators on this page.
- Run a small web design effort creating sites for local businesses.
Financial tools
Working tools I built while studying planning. Each one is an educational demonstration that uses simplified, hypothetical assumptions. None of it is financial advice.
Retirement projection
Adjust any input and the projection updates live. It models savings growing through your working years, then drawing down through retirement.
Employer match assumed at 50% of contributions up to 6% of salary. Projection runs to age 90.
Investment growth
Debt payoff
Contact
Happy to connect with anyone in the planning world. The best way to reach me is email or LinkedIn.