How To Redefine Military Retirement Benefits
Do You Have a WHY for Your Money?
Some people think that the way that you handle your money says a lot about you. But here at US VetWealth, we think that the way that we handle your money says a lot about us. Why? Because we are the only financial services firm in the country who focuses solely developing strategies to maximize your military pay and military retirement benefits.
If you have worked with traditional financial firms then you know that when it comes to financial advice, most people are focused on the obvious (they tell you to create a budget) and the very long term (they tell you to save for retirement). They don’t really have anything to say about what your money can do for you now, or three years from now, or five years from now. They tell you, with or without ever actually saying the words, to toe the line, accept the status quo, and be like everybody else. But we know that you’re NOT like everybody else.
You’re a veteran.
We understand that veterans are unique amongst Americans in that we have a passion for service running through our veins. That’s why we join the military. And that passion for service doesn’t go away when we transition back out of the military again. We know―because we’ve talked to so many of you―that far too many veterans are returning to the civilian world and trying to make themselves fit without having acquired a new mission for themselves. The majority of transitioning veterans are not happy. They’ve spent years following orders and sacrificing for the American people, only to keep following orders in the civilian world and continuing to sacrifice their own gifts and passions.
US VetWealth is a financial services firm created by a veteran for veterans. We are about opportunity, leadership, and service. There has never been a better opportunity in the history of the human race than being a veteran in the United States of America right now―if you have positioned your money correctly. We’re here to show you how.
Created By a Veteran for Veterans
My name is Scott R. Tucker. I graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2002. After tours in Iraq and Germany, I separated from the military in late 2008 and started a new career serving American military and DOD stationed in Stuttgart, Germany as a financial advisor.
When I left my uniform behind on September 10th, 2008, I had high hopes that this would be a way for me to continue a career of service. But I was wrong.
Lehman Brothers collapsed just five days later, and the financial industry imploded.
I had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do, so I forged on ahead. I took the required trainings, stopping just short of becoming a Certified Financial Planner (CPF). I learned the standard philosophy of my field, and how to follow the rules, and what the “right” things are to advise my clients with regards to their money, and I advised my clients to do those things. I didn’t know any better.
Fast forward two years, and I had burned through all of my savings. My girlfriend, a German soprano, had decided opera was a better option than my perceived potential at the time. I had few prospective business clients, and my mentors, who had over thirty years of experience in the industry, were as lost in the sauce as I was.
And then something happened with one of my clients that shook me out of my stupor of doing planning for regular military retirement benefits. She was a former Air Force officer turned government contractor. She was single, 38, and had already saved a whopping $750,000, mostly in retirement accounts. She frequently travelled, and she had recently fallen in love with Africa, spending a lot of time working with nonprofits and charitable organizations in Kenya and Ethiopia. She became more and more passionate about this work, and one day she asked me if I thought it would be okay for her to take $20,000 of her money and spend a year traveling in Africa. It was obviously something that she wanted to do, but I could see that the idea of quitting her job and actually doing something with her money was causing her some anxiety. Around this same time, I was becoming quite disillusioned with traditional military financial planning, so I advised her to go for it. I told her to use some of her money to go and enjoy the life that she wanted to have.
Then she fired me.
She wrote to my mentor accusing me of being in over my head, but things had suddenly clicked for me. I wasn’t in over my head, and I wasn’t being irresponsible as a financial advisor: everybody else was doing financial planning wrong. Because what is financial planning if not creating opportunity for yourself? And what’s the point of creating opportunity if you’re never going to TAKE an opportunity? What’s the point of saving and managing your money if you’re afraid of actually using it?
My experiences in Germany shaped the philosophy behind US VetWealth. Financial advisors are supposed to provide true value to their clients, but it was clear to me that in promoting the financial status quo of putting all your eggs in the retirement basket, I wasn’t helping anyone who had a passion they wanted to realize or a mission they wanted to accomplish beyond being prepared for retirement. I wasn’t even asking my clients these kinds of questions. I was working with military and veterans, but words like passion, leadership, and service were nowhere in our conversations.
And then I realized that those words were nowhere to be heard in the conversations I was having with myself, either. Everyone was so focused on their military retirement benefits that they missed the bigger picture.
Coupled with that, I had noticed that I wasn’t the only veteran struggling to find my place in post-military life. Budgets, retirement, and transition―these things are all about money, but no one else was tying all of these things together.
Our Perspective on Military Retirement Benefits
The standard transition process is to take a government-required class or two, learn how to translate your military experience into words that the civilian world can understand, and look for a job. Though it is a change of circumstances, and a financial change, not unlike retirement in some ways, few prepare for this change financially.
I created US VetWealth because I saw the opportunity that transition holds for veterans that no one else seemed to be seeing.
Veterans are provided with amazing taxpayer-funded benefits that few understand, let alone optimize. As a community, veterans are squandering taxpayer dollars, and we’re cheating ourselves by not keeping this money in our own financial portfolios or budgets. We are still operating on limited and outdated theories about how to leverage our finances in the present and the future. We’re being waylaid by the consequences of financial planning theories and military benefits programs developed in the 70s and 80s.
The world has changed―radically―since then.
The financial guidance created and promulgated by Wall Street and K Street greed are doing us a disservice. They are bad for Veterans; they are bad for America. They are robbing veterans of the liberty they have sacrificed and fought for.
Is US VetWealth Right For You?
We are not your typical military financial advisors. We look are military pay and military retirement benefits differently.
Our number one priority is to only serve those whom we are meant to serve.
We are not hustling to get everyone signed up for our services, because not everyone is going to benefit from them. There are veterans for whom the traditional path is working. For those who have found happiness and fulfillment on that path, we say more power to you. But for those that haven’t…
- Have you gone along with the traditional financial advice and aren’t happy with your finances?
- Do you feel stuck in your life or your career?
- Do you have frustrated dreams that won’t go away, but you don’t know how to achieve them?
- Has traditional financial planning advice been so uninspiring to you that you haven’t taken any action on your financial future at all?
We know where you’ve been. But unlike traditional financial advisors, we also have a vision for where you could be. As veterans ourselves, we get the uncertainty of transition and the inadequacy of the government financial readiness programs and retirement briefings. We also get the uniqueness of military life and veterans benefits that most traditional financial planners in the civilian world don’t understand.
We don’t go trolling for clients because we don’t have to. We just put our message out there, and our ideal clients come to us because they know that we share a unique point of view about the world.
They see the same opportunities out there that we do, and they want to take advantage of them. They know that what they don’t know will affect their financial futures and they are not willing to accept the consequences of their ignorance. They are ready to abandon the poverty mindset in favor of a wealth and liberty mindset that will allow them to follow their passions and build the post-military lifestyle that they want and deserve to have. If this resonates with you, then you may be the kind of person who will benefit the most from our services.
If you are a veteran in the U.S. today, then count yourself among the most fortunate people in human history. There has never been a better time than now to use the liberty you’ve fought for to live a life of meaning, service, and leadership. It is possible to maximize your financial benefits so that you can enter post-military life with confidence, purpose, intent, and intention.
We can show you how.
A Vision for Veterans and the “New” Military Retirement Benefits
How do you see yourself as a veteran?
There are many perspectives on veterans today. To the government, veterans are just another employee. To civilian corporations, we are sometimes looked upon as a kind of charity case, an opportunity to make themselves look good by employing us. There are non-profits out there who see us as poor and needing a helping hand. And all too, often veterans facing transition see themselves only as unemployed.
US VetWealth sees veterans as one of the single greatest untapped resources that our country has. We recognize that veterans are leaders. They are mission-driven. They are instruments of change. Less than 1% of the American population serves their country in the military, and less than 1% of Americans in this country are truly wealthy; wealthy enough to serve others by introducing innovation, creating jobs, and shaping our future. We see the amazing potential for these two populations to overlap. To us it’s obvious: the 1% who serve deserve to be in that wealthy 1%. They have too much to offer to spend their working years grinding away like the rest of the masses.
Our goal is to show veterans how to manage their money in a way that will allow them to realize their dreams and become leaders in their fields.
We want to show veterans that the choice put to them by traditional military financial planning, that they can either use their money now or use their money later, for retirement, is short-sighted, narrow-minded, and wrong for today’s economy. We want to show veterans how to leverage all the benefits that come with their position so that they can truly have it all. We envision a world in which the veteran community has come together as a powerful force for change, a collective of highly talented and highly motivated individuals using money as what it is, a tool that allows them to do good in the world. In this way, the world gets better, and so do the lives of our country’s best resource.
Service is a two-way street. In serving others, your own life improves. You wake every day with a purpose and a sense of meaning. Your happiness grows, which benefits everyone that you come into contact with. In service, it is possible to experience true wealth, something that money alone can never provide to you.
My former client, with $750,000 in retirement accounts and thirty years remaining in which it could continually compound may have been financially comfortable, but she was not wealthy, because she wasn’t investing her time in a way that both satisfied her and served others. She had a lot of money, but at the end of the day she was still just one of the masses, grinding away at her day job, putting her life on hold for retirement.
What a waste.
How US VetWealth Works
If you think you might like to work with us, it’s easy to get started.
Simply start educating yourself about what’s possible. We lay it all out for you, and it’s free. We want to help you maximize your military retirement benefits and military pay.
You don’t have to pay a consultation fee to find out if our services will benefit you. We make everything that we know available online, free for the taking. Educate yourself with our videos, podcasts, books, and blogs.
Then, if you still want to know more, if a vision has started to form in your mind of the kind of future you could have and you’re motivated to make it happen, simply reach out to us. We will invite you to a virtual info session, similar to a webinar, in which we can tell you more about the services we offer and answer your questions.
A hallmark of our services is that we look beyond whatever financial instruments and account balances you may have; we take the time to really get to know YOU. Valuing our clients and partners as the individuals they are not only benefits them, it allows us to continually learn from them so that we can continually improve our ability to position their assets and current forms of income.
Ready to get started?