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On this episode of How To Money, Matt and Joel sit down with Philip Olson and Julia Lorenz-Olson, who are a married couple who not only own their own financial planning firm in Austin, Texas, but also write and produce videos for the PBS YouTube channel Two Cents, making personal finance and investment concepts engaging and easy to understand. They tell Matt and Joel how they met doing theatre, what got them into the professional financial world, and how they started to channel their creativity through their YouTube videos and it ended up becoming a second career. Plus, financial therapy is a thing, we all need more empathy around personal finance, and there are three types of financial advisors: How do you know which one is right for you?
It’s something of a leap to go from directing kids’ plays to managing multi-million dollar portfolios, but Philip did it successfully, working for several years at a big-box corporate firm. Julia also went from the black box to the bank, becoming a mortgage loan officer for awhile. But neither of them were very satisfied with their jobs. Philip’s firm compensated agents based on commission, so it was all about selling people products, even if what they really needed was just a bit of good advice. Julia was underwriting mortgages even when she realized that the borrowers really needed to work on their credit card debt instead. They both wanted to start helping people, so they started making personal finance advice videos in their living room.
They also decided to start their own financial planning firm, using their videos as a marketing tool. A couple years later, a friend of theirs, who had directed Julia in a production of Hamlet back in college, contacted them saying he loved their finance videos; he was currently working for PBS Digital, would they be interested in pitching a show? Now they’re about to shoot their hundredth episode, and some of their videos have over a million views. They've learned a lot doing them: They did an episode where they went to see a financial therapist, thinking they probably didn’t need one. But her advice turned out to be a game changer, helping them raise their rates at the firm and find tons of new clients. And they’re a fee-only fiduciary firm, Matt and Joel’s favorite kind – meaning they take a flat fee, so their advice isn’t geared towards selling you products for a fat commission. Instead, “if I tell you to pay off your student loans, or go to Cancun, or to invest, I get paid the same,” Philip says. Matt and Joel love what they hear, and you will too, on this episode of How To Money.
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