Darren Wurz:

A lot of people think it’s really hard to get to the million-dollar mark. It’s not.
Chris Dreyer:

When investing, attorneys should take special consideration.

Darren Wurz:

Succession planning begins from day one. Start thinking early on about how you want to position your brand as something that someone else will be able to purchase.
Chris Dreyer:

You’re listening to Personal Injury Mastermind, where we give you the tools you need to take your personal injury practice to the next level. Before we begin, here’s a disclaimer so none of you sue my butt off. Please know that this conversation is not intended to be recommendations for specific investment behavior and is intended for informational and educational purposes only. This is not a research report or investment advice, not to be relied upon for a basis of investment decisions. Investors are advised that past investment and performance is not guaranteed for future price performance. Before making any investment, you should carefully seek independent legal, tax, and regulatory advice. All right, let’s start the show.
Succession planning and proper investing can put you on the path to financial independence well before you’re ready to retire. With the help of a financial planner who understands the unique financial circumstances of attorneys, you can pursue your passions and walk away from your firm when you are ready. Today we talk with financial advisor Darren Wurz, author of The Lawyer Millionaire and host of The Lawyer Millionaire Podcast. He offers insights on how to set up your firm for succession early on, the right way to think about debt, how to incorporate real estate investing, and minimizing liability. I’m your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. We help elite personal injury attorneys dominate first-page rankings with search engine optimization.
Being at the forefront of marketing is all about understanding people, so let’s get to know our guest. Here’s Darren Wurz, financial advisor at Wurz Financial Services.

Darren Wurz:

I started my career as a teacher, actually, and that was my first passion. I’ve always enjoyed helping people, I think, and I think some of that carries over into being a financial advisor. I taught eighth and ninth-grade science for five years, but there was no way I could continue doing that until retirement. I have a lot of respect for teachers. It’s tough work. My dad has always been a financial advisor. Every time I would talk to him, he was like, “A lot of teachers have made great financial advisors. You should come into this business.” Finally, I started to listen, pay attention, and investigated a little bit more. I went back to school, got my master’s degree in financial planning, and decided to go ahead and make that transition. That’s really where it came from, the inspiration from my dad, and even before him, my grandfather was a financial advisor, too, so it runs in the family blood, I guess.
Chris Dreyer:

You’ve been investing since you’ve been a kid?

Darren Wurz:

Oh, yeah.
Chris Dreyer:

Can you speak to some of those lessons maybe that you spoke to your dad about early on?

Darren Wurz:

Oh, yeah. Definitely. I actually started investing in mutual funds in middle school, so that was fun. That was thanks to my dad. He introduced me to the whole idea, bought some mutual funds, got to see them grow, and experience what that was like. I got to see the bear market of the early 2000s. I got to see the great financial crisis and I got to experience those ups and downs and see that you got to be in it for the long term. You got to take the emotion out of it, be willing to go through those things, and not act impulsively, so that was all really good training ground for me.
The other thing, one of my dad’s lessons that he’s always taught me is always don’t bet against the government. It sounds strange, but the government will intervene when things look really terrible, and oftentimes those are the best times to invest because then that’s when those turnaround times come. You look at the pandemic. Things were falling off the page in February, March 2020, and then the government stepped in a really big, huge way, and we had an amazing turnaround in the stock market. That’s the kind of stuff that can happen.
Chris Dreyer:

The one thing I’ve noticed is the bonds right now, the short-term bonds have these incredibly high-interest rates and they have the better interest rates than the long-term bonds, so it’s like, are they basically saying the outlook for the future doesn’t look as good, and that’s why the short-term bonds are propped up right now? Since you mentioned the government and trust the government, what’s your thoughts in general on that?

Darren Wurz:

Well, that’s a very classic recessionary indicator when that happens. Typically, what that means, yeah, you’re right, is that investors are anticipating that things are going to deteriorate, and that’s because of what’s going on right now with inflation and the Federal Reserve increasing rates. Now, every time this happens, they say it’s different this time, and usually it’s not, so this is something we need to pay attention to. Now, recessions come in all shapes and sizes. We don’t know what the scope may be. It’s very likely that one will be happening, or maybe even is happening right now, but these are definitely things that we need to pay attention to.
While you mentioned bonds, for a long time, bonds were a very easy money-making instrument. You could depend on them reliably because interest rates have been falling since the 1980s on a long-term basis, and now, suddenly we have this environment where rates are rising. I think a lot of people are feeling so much more pain right now because they’re losing money on their bonds. When the rates go up, or when yields rise, the value of bonds falls, so that’s a very interesting dynamic where we have right now, stocks are falling in value, and bonds are falling in value, even though yes, now they are yielding more, and that is a nice thing.
Chris Dreyer:

Most of the audience listening are in the legal space. Walk me through, how did you come to specialize in working with attorneys?

Darren Wurz:

It wasn’t planned out this way. I started my business, and as I was reading and doing a lot of my own research, everything I was reading about was telling me that it’s important to specialize. My initial niche was people close to retirement who might really need and benefit from my services, really trying to plan for that transition into retirement, so I was going to all the networking events and luncheons and this and that and the other, and I met a lot of attorneys and many of them became clients.
My business started to grow, and I was looking through my client list, I saw that I had a lot of attorneys, and I had gotten to know them very well. As I surveyed the landscape, I didn’t see hardly any financial advisors that specialized in serving attorneys specifically. I see a lot of advisors that focus on business owners, retirees, maybe even doctors, but not very many focusing on the legal profession, and so I saw it as maybe a wide-open opportunity and decided to go for it. I started doing a lot of continuing ed programs through the local bar association and then we started doing that online and those were very successful and it worked, yeah.
Chris Dreyer:

I love that. I also love that you had these experiences and you went a little broad and then found that you had a segment here and pursued it further. A lot of times people ask me, “Hey, when should I niche? Or should I niche?” We’ll have these experiences and determine where there’s opportunity, what you have a passion for, where there’s purpose. How should attorneys think about investing? They’re a particular different industry because of the succession planning issues. For example, like me in the agency space, or SaaS, we could sell our business, right? But the succession planning for attorneys is a little bit more challenging. A lot of times, it’s tied to their name. What would you say let’s just do a couple of different avatars here? Let’s just say you got a new solo practitioner, you just opened his firm. What should he be considering he or she when investing for their future? Super broad.

Darren Wurz:

Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot to unpack here. Succession planning begins from day one. Start thinking early on about how you want to position your brand as something that someone else will be able to purchase. If I’m going to name my business Darren Wurz, Attorney at Law, it’s going to be very hard to sell that to somebody else, whereas if I name it something maybe a little bit more generic or something, not every jurisdiction allows trade names, but some do. If you can use a trade name, yeah, go for it because that’s going to be something that’s more sellable. You want to tie the clients to the identity of the firm more so than yourself and that will make that transition a lot easier. Start thinking early on about how you can position yourself, position your brand in such a way that it will be easier to sell later on. I mean, you can always rebrand, but that’s a challenge. That’s difficult and that’s a lot of work to go through, so if you can start off from day one on the right footing and think about, “One day, this is something I want to sell,” I think that’s the way to go there.
Yeah, this is big. You’ve got to invest from day one. I get it. You’re starting a business, it’s tough. There’s startup costs, and maybe you have student loans, maybe you have lots of things going on, but you’ve got to pay yourself and you’ve got to invest, even if it’s just a little bit, you’ve got to put some money into your investments because you’re going to be missing out on opportunities that you will never get again. The biggest thing that you have when it comes to your investments, the most valuable asset you have is time, it’s time in the market, and that really can’t be made up for. The compounding, that is a very powerful tool, and time is what makes it work, so you got to get that money working for you as early as possible. You may not be able to invest a lot, but it’s important to try and get that going even early on in a small way.
Chris Dreyer:

You’ve got these very polarizing figures in the investment space. You’ve got your Dave Ramsey and then you’ve got Rich Dad, Poor Dad, your Robert Kiyosaki, then you got Warren Buffett over there that everybody’s watching, right? Dave Ramsey’s saying, “No debt, no debt, no debt,” so on his side of the camp, he would probably choose to pay off the student loan, pay off your car, pay off your house before investing, and then you got Kiyosaki, who’s like, “Go nuts on the debt. You don’t pay taxes on debt. Get into real estate.” Then you got big Warren Buffett, he’s like, “You don’t need a financial planner, just invest in a VOO S&P index fund.” Where do you stand? Who do you trust? Because Dave Ramsey’s the number one podcast on Apple. There’s these very polarizing figures. Where do you stand?

Darren Wurz:

Well, I think that the concept of getting rid of debt is very appealing because debt is emotional and if you can separate the emotion from it, having debt is not a terrible thing. It’s not killing you. It feels like it’s killing you. It feels like a burden, so I understand that. But there’s debt that’s good. Now, this may be changing because we’ve been in a very low-interest rate environment, and if you have a three or 4% interest rate on your mortgage, don’t you dare pay it off early. Don’t you dare. You may never see that three or 4% interest rate ever again, or it’s going to be at least a very, very long time, and if inflation is running at 8%, you’re basically making money on that mortgage. I mean, if you think about it, you’re paying less an interest than the rate of inflation, so in a weird way, you’re kind of making money on that.
For me, a lot of it comes down to the interest rate. What’s the rate that I can earn on my investments versus what’s the rate that I’m paying in interest on my debt? If your debt has an interest rate below 7%, I wouldn’t be in a hurry because you can earn more than that in the long term in the market. The S&P’s long-term rate of return is going to be somewhere between eight and 10% historically. Now, of course, we don’t know. There could be an asteroid that hits Earth or something, it could change, but going back 200 years through World War I and World War II and the Cold War and the Great Depression and everything else, long term, you’ve averaged eight to 10%, so that’s a very interesting thing to look at. The world has been through some crazy things and we’ve still been able to make money and the world has continued on, so you got to have some faith in the investment world.
I would say it’s somewhere in between those two extremes. Look at the interest rate and think positively about debt. Debt is a tool. It is a form of leverage. Wealthy people think about debt as leverage, so if you think about it in that way, it’s a way to catapult you into a more wealthy space in a way that you couldn’t. Think about law school. If you had to put away all the money, you had to accumulate all the money you needed for law school before you could go to law school, it would never happen. Instead, you took out debt, most likely to pay for law school to launch yourself forward, to accelerate your career pathway, and so debt is a way of accelerating our wealth building and getting us to the next level a little bit faster.
Chris Dreyer:

Succession planning can look different to every firm owner. Darren explains how to think about the future when the goal is not a date for retirement, but for financial independence

Darren Wurz:

We usually start by creating a long-term financial plan for their own retirement, and oftentimes with attorneys, it may not be about a specific retirement date. This is interesting because it’s both ways. I meet some attorneys, they want to retire at a certain age. It’s like, “Okay, at this age, I’m done.” Others, they love what they do, they don’t really see themselves necessarily retiring completely in the traditional sense, so we think about it more in terms of, “Okay, when would you like to be at a place where you could walk away and be just fine?” We call that “financial independence.” When do you want to be financially independent so that you can practice if you want, retire if you want, do what you want?
What I find is that the succession planning and the retirement planning go hand in hand. It’s almost impossible to separate the two. They’re very, very closely tied together. If you own your own practice, we’re talking about the retirement planning, we’re talking about the succession planning, and then we’re factoring that in. What do we think you could maybe sell your law firm for? How do we factor that into the equation?
Let’s be honest, you’re more than likely not going to retire on the sale value of your firm alone. You’re going to need some additional assets. Law firms don’t sell, they don’t command a premium because there’s a lot of risks involved. Your audience of potential buyers is pretty limited. It’s just a more difficult type of business to sell, and for that reason, it doesn’t really command a very high premium. But that’s okay. If you could get a couple of hundred grand for your law firm, I don’t know anybody who’s against that. Extra money in your pocket? Yes, please. We factor that in from day one. It’s difficult to do the further you are out, but we try to think about what is it worth today potentially, and then what might it be worth down the road in the future? We can create a range of what it might be sellable for.
Then it’s putting things into place that are going to help us optimize getting you to that point where you are financially independent. What’s the most optimal decision we can make around every single financial decision, Social Security, your investments, whether you are using a Roth 401(k), or a traditional 401(k)? What kind of retirement plan do we need to set up that’s going to get you where you need to go? Just thinking about all of those different decisions that need to be made and trying to put them all together in the most optimal way.
Then, of course, we work with our clients on an ongoing basis, kind of as a personal CFO. We check in at least annually, usually a little bit more frequently, to update the plan, see how things are going. Are there any new tax things that we can take advantage of, any new changes that need to be made? What’s happening with tax laws? How can we optimize this a little bit more? How are we doing on our progress? Are we making enough progress towards our goals? Are we able to set aside a little bit more money? Then, of course, all along that time we’re managing the investments for our clients, too.
You mentioned Warren Buffett, the S&P 500. Yeah, that’s a great way to go. Just plop it in there and let it ride. We try to add some nuance to it and you can do it on your own just fine. The way we do it is we are active asset managers, so on an ongoing basis, we’re constantly looking for opportunities. What are some really hot spaces that we can get into? For instance, this year we have been big owners of energy. We’ve had energy in our clients’ portfolios, natural resources, and those have really actually been profitable this year. The stock market is down, but the energy sector, if you’ve invested in it, has actually kicked butt. We’re doing things like that. We’re looking for where are some unique opportunities that we can take advantage of.
Then, of course, risk management. Now, that may not be so important in the beginning, but as you get closer to retirement, it becomes more and more important if you’re thinking about retiring and 2008 happens just before you retire, or even what’s happening now, I mean, I’m having conversations with people about this right now. Their portfolio’s down 20 or 30% and they’re like, “Oh, okay. Well, we might need to wait to retire.” Do you really want to do that?
The other thing is having a big drop in the markets right after you retire, that changes the whole picture dramatically. It’s those first few years after retirement where it becomes so critical, especially if you’re pulling money out of your investments. In the investment world, we call that “sequence of returns risk.” It’s a very real thing. It changes the trajectory of things very dramatically. The risk management becomes extremely important and we have some tools that we use to try to limit the drawdown capacity, try to limit the amount that our portfolios can go down, and try to protect people from those major drawdowns. The fascinating thing is if you can miss some of the really big, nasty downturns, you actually can generate much higher returns. You don’t really have to do anything much fancier than that. I mean, imagine if you missed ’08.
Chris Dreyer:

Would those be puts? Is that the term for those?

Darren Wurz:

Well, you can. You can use puts to manage risk that way. For us, we keep it real simple. There are geared funds, they call them “geared funds” that can give you an inverse of an index. One we use gives us an inverse of the S&P 500, so it actually does the opposite of the S&P 500. We’ve used a fund that does that this year and we’ve been able to generate 30%+ returns using that fund, just profiting from the market going down, so we can use some strategic things like that to help us insulate. It’s not always about bonds. Sometimes it’s about cash, too. Usually during a downturn, bonds give you help, and this is not happening this year, at least not yet, so cash has actually been king in many ways for most of this year.
Chris Dreyer:

Where does real estate fit in? For example, a lot of the attorneys are looking to decrease their tax liability, maybe they got a big settlement, or maybe they need to set up some different methods of collateral for drawing against, you could do those T-bills, or permanent life insurance, and a variety of tactics to do that, but they need to take a draw because of cash flow where they’re not going to get a case settled for maybe three years. I guess two questions is, how do you approach tax liability? Then also, what mechanisms could you set up to maybe potentially help them from a borrowing perspective when cash flow’s slow? I mean, is that something that you advise on?

Darren Wurz:

Yeah. Okay, so a lot of good stuff here. It’s fascinating. Real estate investing is very popular among attorneys everywhere I go. That and pickleball. I don’t know what it is about pickleball, but it’s everywhere. Real estate can be a great way to maybe get some more tax deductions and it can be a nice alternative diversifying income stream. Great idea, setting up some additional streams of income, especially if you’re in a personal injury space, and you have extremely volatile income, creating some regularity, so it’s all about that. If your income is up and down, you very easily can find yourself in this credit card cycle. It’s damaging. It is very difficult to get out of because you’re just building up that credit card debt, so having some additional streams of income is a great idea, and you can also generate some tax deductions, which is really, really nice.
One of the most basic ways that we start with clients is let’s just set up a brokerage account. Let’s not worry about if it’s a retirement account or if it’s a Roth or it’s an IRA, let’s just set something up where you can start accumulating some money that you can use for whatever you need. That’s critical. You need to have that buffer. We don’t necessarily want to leave it in just in the bank, we want to invest it conservatively, but we want to generate some returns on it. We’ll start there and then if we want to get more sophisticated later on, we can deal with that around tax time.
That’s a lot of times the place I want to start with people, just building up some assets. The nice thing about a standard brokerage account, there’s no minimums or maximums or penalties that you have to worry about. Yeah, maybe you have some taxes you have to pay on dividends or capital gains, but those are going to be pretty minimal. We can even invest now in some things that might generate some extra income, maybe some corporate bonds, and then you can just take the dividends as an alternate income stream, or maybe other types of assets like MLPs or things like that, so there’s some opportunities there that we can explore.
Chris Dreyer:

Yeah. I love that advice about the brokerage account because of the liquidity it provides. The 401(k)s, personally, and this is just from my personal perspective, it just locks up your money. I understand the tax advantages, but for me especially, I’m a DI, so it’s harder to see that 20 years ahead in the future, and to be patient enough for that, so the brokerage account really appeals and that’s where those big capital gains hit. You take those hits when you draw those dividends or cash out, but I don’t know, I just like access to the money a little bit better.

Darren Wurz:

Absolutely. You can do some interesting things to keep that down, especially right now. We’ve had a year where the market’s down, end of the year is coming up. Start thinking about some tax-loss harvesting. Just wanted to throw that in there.
Chris Dreyer:

Yeah, that’s where the attorney’s listening would want to follow-up and ask about. I want to talk about your book. We’ve talked about it briefly. You wrote The Lawyer Millionaire. Congratulations.

Darren Wurz:

Thank you.
Chris Dreyer:

That’s a massive undertaking. What made you decide to write it? Tell us a little bit about the book.

Darren Wurz:

Yeah, so the book is The Lawyer Millionaire: The Complete Guide for Attorneys on Maximizing Wealth, Minimizing Taxes, and Retiring with Confidence. I wrote the book because I was looking for resources that would help me be a better advisor to my attorney clients and I didn’t find anything. I didn’t see any books. There were a couple of books out there written for attorneys specifically on financial planning and wealth building, but it was very generic stuff, there wasn’t anything real specific, or it was really retirement-focused, like a whole huge section on Medicare. I’m like, “That’s not really what my clients are looking for.” That’s it, there was nothing out there. There were no resources I found out there written specifically to attorneys on this topic.
I always wanted to write a book, I think that’s a great business-building tool, so I sat down, this was during the pandemic when there wasn’t much to do, and I started writing. Really, I just started at the beginning, and I’m like, “Okay, I’m just going to put all of my knowledge down on paper, and if you want a DIY your financial planning, this is a fantastic resource for you, if you want.”
A lot of attorneys are that way and that’s great. They’re widely read, they read a lot of materials, smart people, so they know how to figure things out and you can do a lot of it on your own. Then there’s others that are like, “I don’t even want to think about this. You handle this for me.” Those are some of the folks that I work with. Yeah, there wasn’t anything out there like it and I saw it as a wide-open space. I approached the American Bar Association about publishing it and when the manuscript was done, I came back to them and I said, “Hey, it’s done and it’s ready to go,” and they were all about it, so there we go.
Chris Dreyer:

The only investing books that I can think of are just super generic in terms of, you got the old-school books like Richest Man in Babylon, and certainly nothing specific for lawyers. You’ve got this section that I really liked on the time value of money, and you spoke briefly about it earlier in our conversation, but can you explain a little bit more about what this is?

Darren Wurz:

It’s the idea that you earn money on your money you’re earning. Okay, so let’s use an example. Let’s say you invest $10,000 and you earn a 10% rate of return, so you earn a thousand dollars, okay? The next year, let’s say you have another 10% return, but instead of earning a thousand dollars, you’re going to earn money on the 10,000 plus the 1,000 that you earned. Yeah, 1100, so instead of a thousand, you’re going to earn 1100. Then that just keeps accumulating over time. It’s amazing.
A lot of people think it’s really hard to get to the million-dollar mark. It’s not. If you start early enough, and I give some examples in the book of certain timeframes and how much you would need to invest on a monthly basis, if you’re putting a thousand dollars a month away, you can get to the million-dollar mark over a span of a certain amount of time. That’s the fascinating thing. It’s just the accumulation of those earnings on top of earnings, what we call “compound growth.” That’s the time value of money. It has a value. It’s a very just powerful, insanely powerful tool that you can use and harness.
Chris Dreyer:

Another thing that you talk about is minimizing liability risk. In previous conversations on this podcast, we’ve had overfunded life insurance, we’ve talked about that. What should every attorney and firm owner be doing in terms of minimizing liability risk in terms of their financial future? I guess every situation’s a bit different.

Darren Wurz:

Definitely you want to make sure that you’ve got liability protection professionally. That’s important. I talk a little bit about that and about property insurance. Make sure that your liability amounts are where they should be, especially as you’re accumulating money, your wealth is getting bigger and bigger and you do want to protect it and you may even want to think about an umbrella policy that can just provide an additional layer of liability protection for yourself. But on the other hand, we don’t want to go too crazy with insurance because you can insure everything and it’ll cost you an arm and a leg.
I think that there is a balance. When it comes to life insurance. There are some uses for cash value, but I’m really not generally a fan of cash-value life insurance unless it specifically provides a benefit to you in your own circumstances just because it’s so expensive, and I am just such a fan of investing, so I am leery of detracting money from our investments. There are so many things that compete for your money. Everything’s competing for your money, and there’s only one place you can put money that is for you, and that’s your investments. You’re investing in yourself that way. It’s a little bit of a balance. We have to insure against risk appropriately and effectively. I think disability insurance is important for attorneys, but if you get the platinum most valuable insurance policy on everything that you own and everything that happens, it’s very expensive. At the end of the day, it comes down to your risk tolerance. How much risk are you willing to endure? Can you self-insure some of these risks? If you insure against every single risk, it just becomes a very costly thing.
Chris Dreyer:

For those listening that want to take control of their financial future and get in touch and speak to you to see if you’re the right fit, how can people get in touch with you?

Darren Wurz:

Yeah, the easiest way to get in touch with me is just head on over to thelawyermillionaire.com. That’ll take you to our website. You can learn more about the book, you can learn more about the podcast, too, The Lawyer Millionaire, and you can even book an appointment with me right on that page. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, there’s a link to my calendar, and you can set up a meeting right there. Yeah, I’d love to talk with you.
Chris Dreyer:

With the right support, it is possible to reach your financial goals. I’d like to thank Darren Wurz from Wurz Financial Services for sharing his story with us, and I hope you gained some valuable insights from the conversation. You’ve been listening to Personal Injury Mastermind. I’m Chris Dreyer. If you liked this episode, leave us a review. We’d love to hear from our listeners. I’ll catch you on next week’s PIMM with another incredible guest and all the strategies you need to master personal injury marketing.
Just a reminder, this conversation is not intended to be recommendations for specific investment behavior, and it’s intended for informational and educational purposes only. This is not research report or investment advice and not to be relied upon for the basis of investment decisions. Investors are advised that past investment performance is not guaranteed for future price performance. Before making any investment, you should carefully seek independent legal, tax, and regulatory advice. And I’m out.