Aligning Your Numbers and Your Values w/Natalie and Dan Slagle

Well, what are you up to? What are you doing? What do you do in Portland? What? You're what you're seeing. You're Natalie and Dan, and you're married. Tell me about your. Tell me about who you are. Tell us the. Tell us the story real quick.

Dan, take it away. You want me to jump in? Okay. Yeah, absolutely. We are Natalie and Dan Slagle. We're a married couple. Professionally and personally, obviously intertwined. We own Fuze financial Planning. Financial planning firm really geared towards helping high income earning more millennial Gen X couples in terms of utilizing their resources to ultimately live the life they want. However, however that may play out, you.

Are a couple helping couples. Is that your brand? Is that. Is that how you identify it? Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

On the financial side of things.

Okay. What makes you good at that?

We professionally, we have a good background in finance. We have our education, certifications and then professional experience. And then personally, we started to understand that there's more to this whole game of personal finance than just the technical side, because we we found ourselves still arguing about money or thinking about it differently. And it's the same situation, but I think we should do it one way. Dan thinks we should do it another, and we're like, we're the experts and we're still not aligned here. There's let's pay attention to that discrepancy and work on it. And obviously to start, it was it was let's work on it for ourselves. And then we we both worked at different financial institutions. And then we kind of looked at each other one day and we were like, maybe we should do this for people directly.

And we should. We should be the, the, the, the company. We should start working for other people and and we should just do it the way we want to do it and the way we want to talk to other couples about it, while still bringing in all the technical aspects that come with taking care of your finances.

Madam Danny, have thoughts on that? Why are you good at this? Same, same.

I think Natalie nailed it. I think the one thing I'll add is we started to identify that. That we each came from different backgrounds in terms of how we were financially raised. And, and I think that's where we we. But heads a little bit early on in our marriage. And we thought again, to Natalie's point, if we're having these problems, it's likely many couples are and we're supposed to be the financial experts in the room. So it's giving really, you know, couples the space to have conversations around what was money like for you. Growing up and sharing some of those stories, because a lot of what we found in in working with our clients and even just communicating with the general public up to this point is typically you have different stories, different backgrounds, again, and how that intersects into actually managing the money as well. It can create a lot of tension.

Okay, I'll bite. Dan, what was money like for you growing up?

I love it, I love it. Money was you know, I grew up in a I would call it a middle class family. My dad was self-employed, spent most of his days. He was he sold various tire products. That was that was.

Like that. Go on cars and stuff.

Yeah. Yeah, like valve stems, air hoses. So he would drive around in his his van every day going to to different or different facilities and dropping off product. And then I recall many nights he would come home and he'd do a lot of the bookkeeping. My mom is a immigrated from from South Korea back in back in the 70s, and my mom worked as an accountant for the university system where where I grew up. So money for me, I think comfortably was middle class. I tended to get the things that I wanted when I asked for them, whether that was new sports equipment, a new gadget, whatever it may be, and the love language that my parents showed me was gift giving. And that's that's what I experienced a lot growing up. And I'll let you ask Natalie that question. You can you can see Zach where it where it where it turns different for both of us.

Well, I don't know. I mean, I got all kinds of questions about what you just said. Like one, for example, would be as someone who understood gift giving as a love language, did that as far as, you know, generate for you entitlement. Like, I get what I want or did it generate an appreciation of generosity or some some third thing or some other thing, like how did you make sense of that? Or how have you made sense of that?

Yeah, as I've gotten older, it's more speaks to the generosity aspect. You know, I think that's something that that has carried with me today, and that's my form of showing my affection to many of the people that are close to me. Is, is I'm I would like to toot my own horn and say I'm good at gift giving. It's something that I enjoy doing. So it's definitely played a role into what's what's important to me when it comes to finances.

Okay. All right. And then, Natalie, you have your story of how many made sense to you or how you made sense of money when you were growing up. What's that?

My experience with money growing up was middle class, so same as Dan. It was it was very much those extra things that we wanted. It was expected at an early age, as early as, let's see, fifth grade when I was 11, that's when I got my first babysitting gig and it was like, oh, you have the potential of making money now. Now we need to start separating. This is my parents talking to me that now we need to start separating what's Natalie's wants, because Natalie can take care of some of that. And what is Natalie's needs? We're going to take care of all of that. So I. You know, I was fortunate to have all of my needs taken care of, but the wants at an early age started to be separated.

And that responsibility fell onto me. And, you know, I've had a job ever since. I'm grateful for that experience. It's also, you know, when I'm hearing Dan and I've never asked or I've never heard someone ask that question the way you asked it, sack of, oh, gift giving or you were giving gifts. Is there a sense of entitlement there? And I was really intrigued, and I wanted to hear how Dan would answer, because I don't think it gave a sense of entitlement to Dan and I. I have benefited from Dan being a great gift giver. He is exceptional. I get very anxious when I have to give Dan a gift because it's never as good like he's exceptional.

But there's the thing that has come between us is again, this I have this anxiety of, you know, I think we I think we should really be paying attention to the numbers. Dan, I think we should be looking at the budget. I think we should. You know, I get this scarcity mindset. Okay. There's only, you know, we made this budget and we're we said we would spend 3000 this month and now we're at 2700. We can't spend more than $300. Dan and Dan's like we can. We're going to be just fine. So there's maybe not the sense of entitlement, but Dan has always been more secure in our finances. And you tell me where this comes from, and I know you're just learning about us, but I wonder if our experience is and and my wants needing to be taken care of by me first had me pay attention to these small little numbers at such a young age, and that's just kind of spiraled to how I still am today.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think we the, the, the thing about money that I think is so intriguing, particularly for a couple is it's it's brutal. It's a brutal topic because you can measure it because you can measure it. It's problematic. You know, you can't measure affection or attention or intimacy, but you can go, oh, 2700 means something, 3000 means something. And if it doesn't mean the same thing to a couple, then it can be really scary because you have to actually spend time together. That, I mean, I'll tell you my story and I don't mind telling you my wives, but my wife's my wife's story. I do make a joke sometimes that I have three wives. I have I have a 52 year old wife, I have a 23 year old wife, and I have a 19 year old wife, the other two of my daughters.

But you know everything I know about relational skills in a marriage I have to use with these two as well. So that's my that's my joke. But, you know, my family declared bankruptcy in high school. I also started working when I was about 13 years old. I had an actual job, you know, the kind you have to apply to the government to let you have a job as a teenager to work past, you know, I had that kind not babysitting, but I worked in a restaurant and I've worked ever since. Every I've worked the whole time. But I didn't know anything about money. Other than that, you had to work to have it. You had you had to be working to have money. And then my wife grew up on the outskirts of New York City and one of the wealthiest communities in America, and her parents were affluent. And she vacationed in, you know, Club Med and Vail and never wanted for anything.

Also didn't know anything about money, knew nothing because she never had to learn about it. So the two of us came into our marriage, you know, thinking, what are we supposed to do with this thing that, you know, she's like, there's always money. I'm like, there's never money. And we both didn't have any idea how many worked at all. So, you know, then you start to measure it and you go, oh, the thing that's on a spreadsheet, we looking at a spreadsheet, we see the exact same number, 2700, and it means wildly different things to each of us. How how have you learned to navigate that? How have you learned to make sense of that for yourselves? Maybe for your clients? I'm more interested in the two of you than I am in your clients. But like what? What have you learned?

Well, well, we have learned and we're I would say this is going to be in a journey that we're always unraveling together is communicating about it. I mean, I hate I wish it was something sexier or, you know, but like, dang it, we have to talk about it. Yeah. And and what happens is I think when we, when we first started to merge our lives together is and again, this is where the problem really stemmed is I think there was assumption that was going on assumption of of the decisions we were going to make financially, assumptions of what that meant to each person.

And and that's when we were both wrong. And so what has what has helped is us pulling up the spreadsheets. I mean, we're financial planners. We're financial advisors like, we we love our spreadsheets and we pull it up and we go to a coffee shop. We go somewhere public for us going and talking about these things in a public setting where we can't get to elevated. That has worked so well to just sit with the numbers together, point, look at that same number together and just ask, how do you how do you feel about that? How do you feel about this decision? What's coming up for you that that has helped? And just recently, what was it, Dan, maybe a week or two ago, what we realized is every every time that conversation happens, I feel amazing.

Dan's like, I've been good, I've been good. This, you know, he's cool as a cucumber kind of guy. And I and I'm like, why aren't we doing this more often? So we finally put it, you know, we follow a calendar. Our calendar kind of like runs our lives, and we put it on the calendar as this monthly kind of date that at once a month, we're just going to go in, we're going to look at the numbers together and we're going to have a conversation. And we even laid out the the questions that we're going to ask each other. So it's just this methodical easy, like, let's just go in and do this check in.

Yeah. The thing that's wild about that is you're looking at the number. Let's say it's 2700. That's our number for the day. And then you have to decide what are we talking about. Because if you're talking about that number vis a vis February or March, that's different than talking about that number vis a vis retirement or college or, you know, and sometimes you're talking about the same number, but you're talking about it in a totally different context. So, yeah, learning how to communicate it and expose that question is really critical. And some people don't know that they're not doing that until they go, you know, one of them is going, we're going to be fine, because he's saying, we're going to be fine. We're gonna be able to retire. The other one's going, we're not gonna be fine.

We only have $300 left, and there's still 12 days left in the month. And that's a that that conversation is also misaligned because again, you can measure it time and money. You can measure, you know, everything else is this mystery that you have to actually discover.

So yeah, exactly. I think and even just, you know, this 27 it's just going to stick 2700. It could I feel like I see that as, oh my God, we've already spent $2,700. And Dan could see it as, oh, we still have $300.

To spend. We've only spent $2,700. Yeah.

It's just, I mean, and I maybe I was, I was trying to think, is this a half a glass, half full, half empty kind of thing and I'm the half empty dance, the half full, maybe a little. I don't.

Know, I don't know, I don't really like that kind of thinking in terms of empty, full in terms of the way that you might assign value to that. Like, are you is he a better person because he looks at things that full? Or are you a worse person because you look at things happened, that's where you get into trouble. I think you need people who can go, well, the good news is there's this. Well, the risky news is there's that, and we're looking at the exact same thing. And how do we now take that information and turn it into something like collaborative effort toward the thing we both want?

We like to always say with, you know, clients, even ourselves, the two things that don't lie, or your credit card statement and how you spend your time because you know the numbers are there, how you spend your dollars. It's it's true. In fact, at the end of the month, when you pull up your statement, that's that's a measure of what happened. And for us, in order to get aligned early on, I think we had a we had a really sit down and think hard about what what were our what our, our household values. Like what how how do we want to spend our time? How do we want to spend our resources? And that really allowed us to become more in aligned, in alignment to here's where our dollars should be going.

Our spending should be a reflection of obviously, the necessities. But any extra money, you know, for us, adventure is really important. Some of these experiences we get to have with our families so that and there's always I always like to say there's competing interests, right? Like if we go spend a family vacation with our daughter, well, that that means maybe we're not able to save as much for the whole year. Yeah. So it's going back to what what is truly important to you as a household. And again, obviously making sure you're taking care of your current self, your future self, but sprinkling in a lot of these desires that that you may have as a collective unit.

Yeah. How do you guys do that? How do you take care of yourselves, your future selves, independent of your jobs, independent of your practice? Like what do you what do you do when you clock out?

When we clock out, I think about.

Like, having.

A lot. Natalie, do you clock out? Do you clock out?

Natalie I do clock out. I think I'm actually. I'm I'm the I, I really love a good clock out. Okay? And I like to turn it off because when I'm on, I'm on. And then. Because when we go home, you know, our daughter, she's only 19 months, she's very young. And it's it's a demanding age. We can't just let her be independent. And so our, our days beyond work are spent just together. And this simple, this simple time of living. Right? So. So we wake up and one of us is working on breakfast while the other one is playing. And then we get home and one of us is working on dinner while the other person is playing. And we're certainly at that time of life where that's kind of our thing, and we both try to get out and have our fun and do our what, you know, whatever interests we have.

But a lot of our time is just spent on how are we being our most present selves in such a finite time in our daughter's life? And what does it take 2:00 out so that when we're with her, we're truly with her? Like, what boundaries do we need to set so that we're not thinking about work? We're not thinking about financial stresses. We're not thinking about the macro stresses of the world right now. We are thinking about her. We're with her, and we're providing this joyful, this joyful environment as much as we can for an emotional 19 month old.

Yeah. Dan, do you have thoughts on that? Do you are you are you a good clock or router?

I've become better over, over time. You know, early, early on in our business it was nearly impossible. It felt nearly impossible to to clock out. And obviously having our daughter 19, 20 months ago, at this point, it has made it a lot easier to clock out because I don't I don't have the capacity to juggle, juggle it all when especially when when we're at home with her and and the the one thing that allows us to clock out is it's more so the, you know, the client base we, we work with. Mostly in a similar life stage as us. So there's a lot of, I would say, respect around schedules and calendars. So we're, we're we're pretty fortunate in that camp. But my my clocking out continues to to get better and better as the years go on.

You guys are in your early mid 30s. Yeah. So 30s people talk about same life as us. Your mid 30s. You got a one kid at home. Do you know if you're having more children. Do you have is that a is that a thing that you're thinking about or you're certain. Are you clear one way or the other or you don't have to tell me, but we can take it out. But like, there's no there's a there's a reason I want to know the answer to this question.

We are, I would say, if the decision was up to me and you said you have to decide right now, what's it going to be, Natalie? I would say yes. And I would be curious on what Dan's answer is.

Yes, we're done or yes, we're having more.

Yes, we're yes, we're having one more.

Okay.

And we, we're we're still in this phase of let's kind of let's see how all of this plays out. I, I'm, I'm a future think you know, I think about my future self a lot, which I think is why I ended up in this profession. And one of the reasons and I think about how when I'm in my 50s or I'm in my 60s, I know, you know, bringing a newborn into the world, that's a very it's a very challenging time.

But I think about my future self and how I'm not going to be remembering that or thinking I'm going to be thinking about how cool my children are and how much time I love spending with them. And I hope that they have a great relationship. I know that's, you know, wishful thinking, but you never know. And so I can't help but think, yes, it will make our lives, let's just call it like yes, parenting is more challenging, but I have this this immense sense of joy and love I have never experienced until having a child. And then my I feel like my my love for Dan exploded as well. And I don't want to lessen that. I would like to maybe experience it with one more being. Yeah, that is my answer. Dan, I would love to hear how you would like to respond to this.

Please tell all 8 billion people on the plane, okay, you're.

Do it. Let's do it. But before I give my my full answer, I'm going to deflect and say, when we first started dating, Natalie asked me the question, how many kids do you want to have?

And right away I did ask that.

And I said like four because she comes from a big family. So I kind of thought like, the number is going to get, you know, she it's up there. I think you turned around and you said you wanted six kids. And I was like, okay, let's do it. And and here we are, you know, 14, 15 years later since that conversation. And we have a lovely daughter. So numbers have changed over time. Now, with that being said, I, and I've told Natalie this, I am absolutely open to to a second child. I'm kind of like, you know, our daughter's 19, 20. So I'm like, okay, we got through. What's to be a hard phase? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're probably Zach looking at us like, oh, you haven't even gone through. You guys have.

So much to learn.

This is just what I say right now. What I say right now is at 52, I am. I am currently grappling with my belief that parenting young adults is harder than parenting young children. So I think about future you and the novelty that you're like, oh, I can't wait to be with my my older kids. And I'm like, they are really hard, you know? So yes, have little ones, have little ones and then sell them at like 16, you know. But this is the reason I ask this question is because I think there's, you know, given your, your point of view and the work that you're doing, there's a difference between families who know this is our family. We're a unit of three, we're working with three.

And you're like, we're there commits 3 or 4 or maybe 7 or 8 like that's, you know, but when you get to the other side of like, nope, we're done. Maybe you've had your vasectomy or maybe you've like whatever, you know, there's something that clicks in that becomes more clear and more certain about how you're even, how your relationship with money changes, but also time and energy and whatever else.

And, you know, square footage, you can start to sell your crib and repurpose that room and turn it into something else. And so I'm always curious when I'm, when I'm onboarding couples about your age, when, you know, what do they know about their family unit? Is it is it established or is it still in process? Because the process of growing a family is different than the process of raising a family, and that is going to have consequences on those things that you can measure time, money, square footage, you know, that sort of thing. So that's why I was interested to know kind of where your heads were at. By the way, my wife, when I first met her, she was like, I want to have four boys. And I was like, I want to have zero boys. I will have as many girls as you want, but I am not going to. So we had two girls.

I was delighted, so happy. She was like, do we want a third? I was like, if we could guarantee it was a girl then perhaps. But absent that guarantee, I'd like to call it good. So that's what we did. We called it we called it good Apps at the guarantee. So. Well.

Now I can't. Now I'm curious, why did you not want a boy?

I mean, this is my. This is all my trauma, right? Like I have a problematic relationship with my dad. I grew up with only a brother. So to me, the answer to all my trauma was not having boys. So it was having girls. Instead. It just triggered a different version of my trauma. And now I'm grappling with that. So yeah. Yeah, it. Well, now I have three, now I have three wives and I don't know what to do.

Right. Yeah, yeah.

Well, it's funny you bring this up sack because we just moved, as I was explaining before, we just moved and we, we went from one rental home to a to another rental home. And moving is expensive. You pay by the hour. And we moved all of my daughters, our daughters, newborn stuff, you know, the the all the newborn equipment. And I can't get rid of it until we make the final decision. Yeah. And to me, it's also like, well, we have to have another baby because someone has to use this. We can't be wasteful.

It's just $85 worth of moving expenses, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

It makes sense in my head. And then, you know, my brain. I don't know if again, this is my mama brain or my futuristic brain, but I think about the financials of two daycare costs. I think about, okay, I'm going to have to take 3 to 4 months off of work. And because we're we own our business. And, you know, Dan and I are like the two people at the top. That's a that's a really big impact on the business. And, and so that that that question I appreciate because it really does just kind of fester in my mind that when we do get to a point of knowing clarity, that that's going to feel good on some of these things.

Yeah, yeah.

So, Dan, do you have the same thing? Do you have the future you thing going on? Like what is what's future you like.

Do you tell your.

Future you will thank you for this other thing.

Like I always say, just like the commercials verbatim. You know, this is something I have grappled with over the struggled with, I'll call it over the last few years. My, my mom passed away two years ago and at 75. And, you know, I think that also put into a little bit of perspective of why I'm not so worried about the numbers sometimes as Natalie, because I have seen it in our previous line of work within this industry where you get to a point where someone retires and within a few years they pass away, you know, and so and I think that's something our clients struggle with as well. So future me, I've never really thought past like future me was always, you know, have a child, have a family. And I haven't really thought about myself transparently, probably past the age 5055. I'll call it.

Okay. Yeah. That's intriguing. Yeah, we don't know. I mean, lately I've been telling my kids exactly that, which is I don't know how long this story is. I don't know if we're just. I mean, this this is we're only 20 years into. I mean, I have been in relationship with my parents longer as an adult than I was as a child. I had 18 years with them as a child, and now I've been in a relationship with them, my mom and stepdad. But for, you know, 20, 30, 35 years as an adult, so something like that. But so it's like we think we put all this energy into parenting when we're younger. And most of my parenting or most of my being in relationship with my children is going to be when they're also adults.

So that's where I'm kind of like, okay, but now what is my job like now? What are we supposed to do? It's not quite it's not quite a financial decision, but it is, because how much of that how much of mine is theirs? And what do I tell them? I said, I told the both. I said, you don't have a sugar daddy, but you have a stevia daddy, so I'm not gonna leave him under a bridge or anything. But yeah, everything, it's all variable, right? And I think the more we get anxious about today, you know, the more like the anxiety is today. So I was actually thinking about something you said a little bit earlier. Natalie. Where?

Like, if you are either running a business together or you're worried about finances, is it okay? And in fact, is it even wise to clock out and to create boundaries around these kinds of conversations? Like, are you allowed to stop thinking about the things that are worrying you or that are important to you? Is that a thing that you you get to do? Because what happens if you're not paying attention to this important thing? Is it going to be okay without your attention that how have you navigated that? Or how do you help people navigate that? Yeah.

Yeah, I think about like for us clocking out, it has gotten to be more okay, as our business has also just gotten to establish itself, our relationships with our clients. You know, there's just more time there, there's more trust there. And we also have an employee now that supports us heavily. And so we have, you know, the more we we pour into her and build her up, there's just there's just the trust aspects that everything will be okay, even if that means we have to clock out. And I think last year we got the first just real life experiences when, you know, you send your kid to daycare for the first time and they get sick. And, you know, I remember kind of growing up in this industry and just having seen all these young parents having to having to not show up kind of unexpectedly because their kids were sick.

And I was like, wow, man, kids get sick all the time. I remember thinking that. And now now living it. I'm I'm just I'm really, you know, I, I feel so incredibly, incredibly grateful. We started our business journey when we did because this was six years ago. So we had five years to kind of build it up and build our processes and, and build up Dan and professional and personal boundaries and learn. Dan and I had five years to learn from each other on. Okay, Natalie, really like I really do need to check out. Dan doesn't need it as much and we've learned. How can we still respect and honor our individual choices in that and be okay that they're different to now being at this point where, you know, being in our mid 30s and growing a family, it it feels like we have no choice but to let go a little bit and trust that everything is going to be okay.

Yeah, yeah. Dan, what can you tell me about what you yourself have learned about like the different roles, right. That husband, business partner, you know, friends like how have you made sense of that as you have built this business and alongside Natalie what's the what are the takeaways as not just. Well, as partners, I mean literally partners kind of in all things like what do you what do you know about that? Let me let me frame that question a little bit, because I think one thing that a lot of couples get and Covid affected this, but then it's coming back now. But they got a chance to miss each other, right. Like they would go to work. She would go to her work, he would go to his work, or they would go to their separate offices or whatever, and they would come back at the end of day and go, I missed you.

How were things? How did that go? And so when people are living their 40 hour week life together and then the rest of their life together, yeah, that piece got removed again. Covid did that to almost everybody. But like those people who are working in business together, how have you how have you created. You know, I don't want to say intimacy, but I kind of that's kind of what I mean. How have you gotten a chance to soothe that, that part of the equation?

That's something that we continue to work on. One of the biggest changes we made was, again, both of us were working from home. We we got an office space where one of us will stay home and work, and the other person goes into the office space by our daughter's daycare, and we're separating locations so we can we can have that feeling, right? Like it's a really nice feeling, rather than like going to separate bedrooms to send your daughter and your partner off and give each of them a kiss and say, have a great day, I'll talk to you later. Even though we may check in during the day and then having the same feeling when they come back home. And that feeling.

Let me interject for literally up until this January, we have worked together in the same house, and in the last month we have been in, we actually we're now in a co-working space and this week we're we're working together because my mom's in town, so we're trying to give her space at the house. But just like this is a really recent thing. So when you were talking about the sack, I was like, oh my God, he knows. He knows that this this was an area for us that we really needed to work. And so I just wanted to emphasize this is very recent that we've started to create this separation from each other.

Yeah. And how's it going?

We we love it up to this point. Absolutely. Yeah. We're we're we're not giving up the space. That's for sure.

Yeah yeah yeah. Right on.

I mean, even just like you were saying, Zach, it's I feel like we kiss each other more because we're saying, like, we we, you know, you don't you don't kiss each other in the hallway when you go to your separate rooms. Say bye. Okay. Have a have a good time on your computer ten feet away from me. But, I mean, at least maybe we should have been. You tell me. But, like, we really weren't. And now it's it's, you know, we, like one of us will pick up our daughter, the person who's going to the office, and. And then it's like we kiss each other, and then we kiss our daughter, and she kisses us. And it's just this. It's this little kiss circle. And I'm like, this never happened. And how it does and it.

Well.

Even even at our office, even at our office space, we've been able to like, like this past week when Natalie's mom has been in town, we've been able to go into the common room or the kitchen and have lunch together. Yeah, we didn't really do that at home a lot. We didn't go to our dining room and and eat. I'm one who's always like, I rushed through my meal and I want to get on to the next thing. And Natalie, you're like, let's just chill. And getting a separate space outside of our home has allowed us to just, I feel like, be more intentional, have more intentional time with each other.

Yeah, I, I totally feel that I was the other day, I accidentally had like a half an hour show up in my calendar, like I had a free half hour and I was like, what did I do wrong? Like, what's wrong? Why do I? Why do I have nothing to do right now? Because I'm always just like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, fill it all up. So I get the idea of like, moving from one thing to next, and you got to slow down. You got to slow down long enough to kiss your wife. If that's the main takeaway of this podcast, and then let's do it, or long enough to kiss your partner. Hey, do I have to live in Portland to work with you if I want to? If I'm intrigued and I want to learn more about your business and I want help with my finances, what's the best way to find out who you guys are and how to work with you?

Go to our website, Fuze Financial. You can click on our link. We have two free consultations to anyone. We'll talk to anybody and we can work with essentially anyone in in the US we work with clients all over the US and and we love that dynamic.

But ideally not ideally. But it seems like you hinted that maybe your ideal client is about your age, about your stage of life. You know, trying to figure out how to make sense of this process of navigating the story that old you inherited on behalf of the story that future you wants to tell.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

You can have that. You can keep that as your marketing material. You can display that.

We're taking it. Yeah. I'll just add to that, you know, we used to work in the industry where we have, you know, you're serving an older client base. And I think for us why we have such a younger client base attracting more couples our age is the fact that there's, like, there's so many life events happening in your late 30s, your 40s, and there's a lot of financial potential, financial implications of the decisions you make. And and that was really the, the I call it the jumping point of starting our business and being able to help people navigate those decisions.

Well, I'm into it. And, you know, at 52, what I would say is if you have the if you're on the fence, dear listener, about whether or not to invest in getting some clarity and wisdom around your finances, do it at 32. Do it at 22, but do it at 32. Do it at 42. Don't wait till 52. And yeah, I actually am really grateful that you have a little bit of a niche in this way, because those of us who are on the other side of the kind of the developmental curve, I wouldn't trust us right now. The world is a crazy place. I want to put it in the hands of the young people who are having, like, who have some new perspective and optimism. So I'm all about it. Why did you call it fuze?

It's the phonetic spelling of the word fuze. Fuze. Okay. And we wanted something to emulate the the connection of two individual entities. So you think about like welding and you put two individual things together. And it's still very obvious that it's two individuals. But it is one thing. And so we wanted to honor and respect that. It is it is two individual people with different stories, different backgrounds. And so how do we create a financial plan that respects and honors both of those individuals?

Your business is for couples you're part of. What you're trying to do is help families, not just individuals. I'm assuming you could help an individual, but you are. You're here talking to couples. Yeah.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, we certainly have handful of individuals because they they gravitated towards what we're doing. But, you know, our specialty is working with couples and knowing how to talk about money with couples.

Cool. Well, I'm glad to know of you as a resource. I know, I mean, I have plenty of folks coming through my practice who for whom? This is an area of growth opportunity, and I'd be happy to point people in your direction. But you said it was. Tell me again. The website.

Fuze Financial. Financial.

Fi financial. Very cool. Well, I have loved talking to you. Thank you so much for coming on Marriage Radio. And yeah, let's stay in touch. Let's be friends. And if I'm in Portland, I'll let you know. If you're in Seattle, you come see me.

That'd be great. Thank you.

Zach. Thanks, Zach.