Robert W. Tull, Jr.
From the Orange Couch

I’m Ashley Albertson, your Client Service Associate at Tull Financial Group and the host of our new series From the Orange Couch. We wanted to bring this series to you as a way to address some commonly asked questions – whether it be about financial literacy, tax planning, investment management and more. We have here our resident expert, Robin Tull, CEO and Founder of Tull Financial Group, with more than 35 years of experience in the industry. He wanted to bring his vast knowledge to you all in order to answer those questions. And so today, I have a couple for him.

Question one: how did you get started with Tull Financial Group, and what did you seek to accomplish with those services?

0:43
Before we do that, this is pretty cool with From The Orange Couch. It’s a great idea. I think it’s a super idea to do this because we do get a lot of questions.

How I got started, Ashley? My family. Seeing my mother and father always helping people – loaning their cars out, having people over for dinner — it was just always the culture of my family. Financial services really provided that opportunity to help people – to work to serve people. As the profession grew, the fiduciary idea of working for the client and not for a company is really what I enjoyed. Then, of course, our mission has been to improve lives through sound financial planning, and that’s what we do every day.

1:27
That’s great.

Experience is a great teacher, but what advice would you give your younger self?

1:33
My younger self. I think the issue would always be to have a plan and, with that plan, develop some really good habits. We hear a lot about habits today.

One of those habits is saving early. I used to do workshops when I first started. At that workshop, I’d encourage, if you’re in your 30s, the idea of saving for the future. The difficulty factor is like carrying a marble in your pocket – it’s not very hard. But as you get into your 40s, you have to set aside a little bit more and the difficulty factor is more like a softball. Not as easy as a marble, but you could still do it. And then, if you wait too long in life, that difficulty factor becomes like carrying a bowling ball. You really have to put a lot aside to catch up for those years.

So I think developing good habits of saving early and saving often and using that law of compounding that we hear about, where you can double your money over time through interest.

There are many misconceptions about money. I can save for retirement later. Does a high salary mean financial security? More money, more happiness. What would you say is the way we should be seeing money?

2:48
I think with money, the first thing is to get control of your emotions. Emotions can really mess a financial plan up. I often tell people if you don’t want to be the average investor who seems to not to reach their goals, avoid fear, avoid greed, and you’ll do pretty well in life when it comes to investing. In managing emotions, I think that also comes to how you invest your money. It’s very important to have a good allocation – the proper allocation.

3:21
Absolutely. You talked about managing emotions. How does one do that?

3:26
I think we always can have storms in life. I mean, we saw them with Covid. We saw that with the Great Recession. All of those things — they do happen, and you really need to set up your allocation. How much is in stocks? How much is in bonds? How much is in cash? You need to do that in advance before those storms of life do hit. You’ll find that the emotions will be greatly reduced, and you won’t be making decisions based on any rash action.

3:54
That makes sense. Any final thoughts, Robin?

3:56
I think the idea with investing is… there’s a study that came out from Vanguard a few years ago and the idea was to find a financial advisor. Find a fiduciary. Somebody you can trust because there’s so many things involved with financial planning today that it’s important to have an advisor. Whether you use Tull Financial Group or some other, find somebody who’s a fiduciary. That has Certified Financial Planners (CFP) there. Engage them and use their expertise. You’ll find out that you will improve your life through sound financial planning.

Of course. Thank you, Robin. With that being said, we want to know what questions you all have. After this video, if you want to leave a comment, we’d love to be able to address those in the future. I think next month, we’ll talk about retirement planning, so stay tuned!

4:45
Look forward to it.