Financial Advisor and nVest Advisors CEO re-introduces the Money n30 Podcast with a talk about how a difficult upbringing motivated him to become a financial advisor.

Podcast Transcript:

I'd like to thank you for joining us today on this sort of reintroduction to the “Money n 30” podcast. My name is Jeremy Torgerson and I am the CEO of nVest Advisors LLC. We are a fee-only, fully fiduciary investment advisory firm based in a northern suburb of Denver Colorado called Brighton.

I began my financial practice in the great state of Texas at the very, very southern tip in Brownsville Texas. We actually lived in a small community named Los Fresnos, which is very close to South Padre Island (if anybody's familiar with it) and began our business in what is one of the most economically depressed areas of the country . That's a very weird place to do a financial advisory firm but it was important to me. I want to share today some of the story of why I started there, what my motivation is for being an advisor, and just give you the opportunity to hear a little bit more about what this firm does and what it believes in.

First off, a quick housekeeping note on our podcast. We are going to obviously improve the quality of the podcast as we go. I'm not going to be too worried about it though - I have a performance and theater background so I can improvise pretty well. I hope I can carry a conversation even if I'm just talking to myself and you’re listening but I wanted to let you know that as the podcast continues we will definitely improve the quality. So hang with us! We're going to listen to your feedback as listeners, I'm going to get feedback from some of the people who love me - my friends and family, but also I want to get the feedback of industry professionals about the content, and then attack some of my performance friends and get their input on technical issues as well.

But I wanted to give you a little bit of info about myself and I'll tell you a little bit about this firm and why it is very, very different than any other financial advisory practices that you're going to look at. So if you are in the market for either your first financial advisor, or maybe you have one and are not necessarily happy with what's going on, or just not sure if you want a second opinion, I encourage you to interview a whole lot of us before you make a decision. It's supposed to be a long-term relationship with your financial planner and that means that you’ve got to go on a few dates before you get professionally “married” (if I can use that weird figurative language).

Let me start with this: let me give you a little bit of history about the firm and then I'll go into my own background. nVest Advisors began as an independent company called Palo Alto Investments in 2011 in Brownsville, Texas, of all places.

I'm a Denver native and my firm is now back in Denver, Colorado after I relocated my family and my company three years ago, but I had been living in Texas for about a year before I became a financial advisor. My first three years in this business I was with Edward Jones Investments and we built a small office in the beautiful but tiny community called Los Fresnos. It's very close to South Padre Island, if you're familiar with the very southern tip of Texas.

After three years of being with a major firm (I had been a business owner previous to becoming a financial advisor - I’ll kind of share a little bit of that later in the podcast), it became clear to me that there was no good way to work for my clients if I also had to work for a company. There were always production quotas, there were incentives given to put you into a product that maybe might not have been the best fit for you but would send me on a trip somewhere in the world, and those kinds of things. That didn't sit right with me.