Today we’d like to introduce you to Russ Thornton.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I’m a financial advisor and began my career in the early 90s, fresh out of college. I went to Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, which is where I met my now wife, and we have lived in Atlanta since graduating from school. I started as a broker trainee at Merrill Lynch, where I spent 10 to 12 hours a day, five to six days a week, cold calling strangers and trying to find anyone that would allow me to get in my car and use a physical map to drive to their house and see if I could help them with their investments. A few years into my career I got very interested in financial planning and taking a more holistic approach than just helping people with their investments. After about a dozen years with Merrill Lynch I left and set up my own fee-only fiduciary advisory firm. It was just me. It was a one-person shop. What I quickly learned is I loved the flexibility, autonomy, and independence but I didn’t really relish the business of actually running a business on my own. After about two and a half years I combined my very small advisory business into a much larger advisory business called Wealthcare Capital Management. They were based in Richmond, Virginia at the time. This was around 2009 and I have been there ever since. As an advisor within the Wealthcare Capital Management universe I actually have my own practice and marketing brand, which is Wealthcare for Women. My interest and focus on serving women was born out of two things:
1. I just developed a natural market. I found myself getting introduced to and working with more women. These were women that are happily married but wanted to be very involved in their family finances. This also included single women who were never married, women that had gone through divorce, women that were widows and had lost their husbands. I found that my temperament and approach to listening, communicating, and giving advice seemed to lend itself very well to working with women.
2. That combined with a personal experience around the time I was graduating college (this again was back in the early 90s). My mom and dad were going through a divorce. I had a great childhood and great family life growing up but obviously once I was out of the house at college, their marriage was not going to last. My mother got a lot of alimony, a lot of assets, and a lot of child support for my two younger brothers, who were still living at home at the time. Fast forward to today; she is almost 80 years old and had to declare bankruptcy several years ago because of some questionable decisions she made but also the lack of any guidance or financial advice along the way that could have made a big big difference in her life. Having seen that first hand I have really taken it upon myself to prevent similar outcomes from befalling other women.Today I serve about 65 client families. Many are located in and around the Atlanta area; some are in other parts of Georgia; and some live in other parts of the country. I even have a client who is a Japanese citizen who lives in Tokyo.
My focus is on serving women and their families that are 55+ in age and that are approaching or already retired who want to use their financial resources to live their life deliberately and on purpose and beyond that. We try to address all financial areas, to include:
– taxes
– investments
– insurance
– estate planning
I don’t do or provide all those services but I work closely with my clients and other professionals to help make sure that their entire financial picture is addressed and working smoothly on their behalf.
I’m also an animal lover and my wife and I have fostered and adopted several dogs over the years. I’m also proud to serve on the board of trustees for the non-profit Georgia Eye Bank.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I’m fortunate to do work that I love and work that I find fulfilling and rewarding in that I get to help people recognize their potential to live better lives.
Having said that, no, it was not a smooth road. I have learned some hard lessons and probably taken the least direct route. There are some forks in the road along the way, but I count those as learning experiences.
For instance, I’m glad I left Merrill Lynch to start my own business, even though that’s not where I am today. It was a learning experience…
Beyond that I am grateful for all of the life lessons I learned both personally and professionally. I am thankful and consider myself blessed to be where I am today and in a position to help wonderful people and their families with their financial decision making
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your business?
As I’ve already shared I am a financial advisor. I work primarily with women and their families who are age 55+. More specifically I work most often with women between the ages of 55 and 75 who are interested in an ongoing relationship with an experienced advisor to help them transition into and successfully enter their retirement years.
Retirement is such a loaded word. It means very different things to different people but in simple terms I help my clients organize and align their finances to support a life that they want to live, both for themselves and for people and organizations that are important to them. I do this through helping them manage their investments and ongoing financial planning and then through a combination of other professionals and partners. I also help them with tax planning, estate planning, insurance needs. Really anything that impacts their lives directly or indirectly that has a financial component is in the scope of my services.
For the first half of my career I was very much a generalist and was happy to work with anyone that was interested in working with me. For the past 15 years or so I have been very much focused on serving women and their needs, again women that are approaching or already retired. That was the catalyst for developing my Wealthcare for Women brand.
I think I have done a pretty good job of further refining and evolving my brand, my messaging, my voice over the years. It is work that I am proud to offer and I find very fulfilling that I get to develop deep long-term relationships with my clients. I get to really understand who they are as people and understand what motivates them, what their values, their goals, their priorities are and then help them make more informed financial decisions that reflect those same values, goals and priorities.
I also write a weekly email newsletter about retirement planning for women which can be found here on Substack: https://wealthcare.substack.com/
How do you think about luck?
I consider myself a very lucky guy. I’m married to my best friend and we are going to celebrate 30 years of marriage here in just a few months. I am lucky to have a wonderful family that loves and cares about me and who I love and care about. I’m lucky to have a wonderful group of clients, many of whom I’ve worked with for twenty plus years, that again make my work very rewarding and fulfilling and meaningful in my life.
Having said that I feel overall I’m a lucky guy; however I do not rely on luck or factor it into my decision-making in any sense. I believe in hard work and preparation and critical thinking and I think a combination of those things will certainly increase your surface area for luck to work out favorably over time
Pricing:
- My client fees start at $15,000 per year
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.wealthcareforwomen.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/russthornton/
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/wealthcare-for-women-atlanta-2
- Other: https://wealthcare.substack.com/
