Chicago, Great Conversations & a Little Good Karma
A quick dispatch from an actually great work trip.
Once in a while I get home from a work trip feeling like I got back more than I gave. That’s exactly how I felt after a few days in Chicago.
I was there for the Morningstar Investment Conference. The sessions are always excellent, but for me the real value has always been the conversations in between—running into people I’ve only known through LinkedIn, grabbing coffee with colleagues I haven’t seen in twenty years, and being reminded why I love this work. (Hopefully I can meet members of Count Up’s Substack community in person one day, too).
That was true with Christine Benz, Morningstar’s Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning and host of The Long View podcast. We’ve moved in similar circles for years, but this was the first time we’d actually sat down together in over twenty years. (Christine frequently writes about the bucket strategy, a helpful framework for retirement planning).
Terry Savage joined us toward the end of our conversation. If you don’t know Terry, she’s a legend in the personal finance world and one of the smartest people I know. Definitely the smartest person in any room she walks into.
It struck all three of us that although we’d taken very different paths, we’d spent decades working toward the same mission: helping people make smarter financial decisions and connect with advice they can truly trust.
The next day I joined Terry on WGN Radio with host John Williams. (You can check it out here!) If you’ve ever listened to Terry and John together, you know they love to spar. John asks the questions listeners are actually thinking. Terry answers directly. I found myself right in the middle of it.
What I appreciated most was that John asked questions like: Who cares how a financial advisor gets paid? Why does fiduciary status matter? And does someone have to let an advisor manage their investments, or can they just get advice and handle their own investing?
We talked about how you don’t need a million-dollar portfolio to get outstanding advice. We talked about what great advice costs, what it looks like in real life. I’ve always felt a need to point out that mediocre advice can end up costing more through missed opportunities, unnecessary taxes, or cookie-cutter financial plans.
Then John opened the phone lines. Here’s where the karma comes in.
A handful of callers came on, and two simply wanted other listeners to know they’d found their advisor through Wealthramp and that it had been a game changer. I won’t pretend that didn’t make me proud.
On the way home, I found myself thinking less about the conference and more about Christine and Terry.
Three women with three different careers and three different platforms. Yet after all these years, we’d somehow ended up in exactly the same place.
We all believe people deserve better financial advice. We believe trust and ethics matter more than ever in the age of AI. And we believe that when people finally find the right advisor, it can genuinely change their lives.
Hearing those callers on WGN reminded me why that mission is worth fighting for.