How and Why I Started ATK Financial Prosperity

ATK’s beginning started late 2014, I just didn’t know it yet…

In 2014, Tara, my wife (fiancé at the time), and I moved to Florida. Tara got promoted to Retail District Manager, which came with a move. It was an adventure that ended up having a very profound effect on our future.

My employer at the time was flexible enough to let me keep my job and work remotely. That was 6 years before remote work became “normal” due to Covid, so I was ahead of the game!

Late 2014 was also when I read the book “The Millionaire Next Door”. That book changed how I viewed money. Up until then, I was on a mission to work hard, make as much as I could, so I can buy stuff. There isn’t technically anything wrong with that, but it wasn’t what I truly valued. But it took me until I read the book to dive deeper into what we truly value and how we can use money as a tool to get us that.

But first, let me take you back to 1998. That was the year my family and I moved from Bulgaria to the United States. I spoke zero English, but I can confirm that it is a lot easier to learn a language when you don’t have a choice and are exposed to it 24/7.

I have “The Simpsons” show to thank for the many English lessons it gave me. It was a show that was broadcasted in Bulgaria, so I found something familiar when we came here. I would have the subtitles on and any words that I didn’t know, I would write down and look them up in the dictionary. Whether Bart Simpson was a good teacher or not is up to debate. I did tell my English as a second language teacher “Spank you very much”, thinking that it was the cool way to say “Thank you”.

I was the first one to start understanding and speaking English. Because of that, I had the privilege of helping my parents with many adult tasks since they didn’t speak the language. As a 15 year old, I often pretended that I was my father when we had to call utility companies, credit card companies, banking institutions, talk to the landlord of the apartment we rented for almost 2 years, etc. I had a lot of exposure to money and personal finance things at a very young age.

I’ll never forget when we got our big furniture set using 12 months of interest-free financing. The issue was, we didn’t really know how it worked. It wasn’t explained to us. We thought that we didn’t have to make any payments for 12 months and can start paying it off after that. That was an expensive lesson we learned when we got the bill on month 13 with the whole balance plus all the accrued interest. But in a way, I am glad it happened. The mistake never occurred again. You live and you learn.

At the time, as a young teenager, I am sure I found it annoying that I had to do adult things. But all that knowledge will come full circle some years into the future. Everything always happens for a reason. We just might not realize it for a while.

In 2006, my parents split up. I was a sophomore in college, studying Finance. My brother was finishing up high school. A big reason why parents leave everything in their home country and come to the USA is to provide better opportunities for their kids. After the split, my brother and I would go with our mom. My mom would in no way jeopardize our ability to go to college, so she had to do what she had to do.

At the time, her first job was giving her overtime, and she also found a second job. So for almost two years, she was working 60-70 hour weeks, to ensure that we can continue to go to school and finish.

Since it was 2006 and everyone was buying homes, we decided that it made more sense to buy instead of rent. The mortgage of the property that we were interested in would be just as much as a rental.

I once again had to get involved in personal finances related to my parents. Because the divorce was not final yet and the previous home was in the process of being sold, my mom could not purchase and get a loan for another property. So we decided that I would attempt to qualify for a mortgage.

In hindsight, it is easy to think about how obvious the signals were that a big mortgage crash was going to impact the economy.

I had a part-time job at a grocery store. I have had the job since 16 years old and held it all the way through college graduation. In 2006, I was making about $10,000 a year, enough to help me with school expenses. We found a mortgage lender, explained the situation, and due to the creative nature of all home loans back then, somehow, I was qualified for a $180,000 mortgage loan, enough for us to purchase the townhouse we wanted.

It sounds crazy now, but now you know why the events during the Great Recession in 2008-2009 happened. It was an interesting time!

We moved in and the long hours my mom was working continued for a bit longer until I graduated college, got a job and my mom could go back to a normal schedule.

Her working so many hours, just to get by tarnished my relationship with money. I was upset that someone had to work so much and have nothing to show for it. I had a chip on my shoulder and my goal was to buy stuff so I can show others what I have. That was my definition of success.

My wife and I met right before I graduated college. In less than two years, we bought our first house. A house that was too big, too expensive, and not what we needed. But we had something big to show. We made it! But our appearance of success was only on the outside. People could see our big house but didn’t know what was happening on the inside. On the inside, we were living paycheck to paycheck, couldn’t really afford furniture, and overall, it was a stressful situation.

That went on for about five years. For some reason, even though our incomes were going up (slowly), we weren’t getting ahead. The money was always gone. We never really knew where our was all going. What came in, came out. There was no financial discipline in place, no plan, no strategy. At least we didn’t get into high amounts of credit card debt. The lesson I learned as a teenager with the furniture left a lasting scar.

We finally make our way back to 2014.

We moved to Florida and after reading “The Millionaire Next Door”, my mind shifted. I started looking at money as a tool. A tool to give us flexibility, options, and security.

We started doing things differently. We didn’t go with the biggest and most expensive house we could get approved for. We started valuing experiences more than stuff.

I created a financial plan. I say “I” because Tara didn’t have much interest in the financial stuff and the spreadsheets. She was behind the idea of our vision but did not want to do much with managing the plan itself. It does take work and it is not everyone’s cup of tea, but the benefits far outweigh the effort. Personal financial health impacts our overall well-being.

The vision was that we would focus on doing stuff we enjoy, such as vacations and visiting family back in Illinois, and minimize things that didn’t bring us long-term value. But I still made sure to buy technology gadgets. I love new tech.

As part of the vision, I hoped to have the opportunity to start my own company someday. I didn’t know what that company would be at the time. I just wanted to have the option.

So in 2021, we reached one of our first major financial milestones. We reached a point where we no longer needed to put money towards our retirement. With semi-conservative growth of our investments, we would have more than enough to retire in our early 60s. That gave us stability, flexibility and options.

My wife reminded me of what I said in 2014. I had forgotten that once we get to this point, I would consider starting my own business. I still didn’t know what that business would be, but in early 2022, it became very clear.

Her parents were retiring. Not by choice, but they were 64 and 65, and were somewhat forced to pull the trigger.

They knew that I have been around finance and investments for 14 years with my job, so they came to me to help them organize their finances and see if they are ready.

Now, in a perfect world, something like this should be done many years before retirement, preferably decades in advance.

 So we spent a whole weekend going through their finances. Let’s just say that I aged 5 years in 2 days. It was that bad. (don’t worry, they gave me full permission to share their story. They would want others to know the benefits of proactive planning. They wish they did.)

It was a horrible situation, with no turning back. Retirement was happening, whether we liked it or not. 401K completely mismanaged, credit card debt, mortgage on the house, personal loans, no emergency savings, no cash savings, no budget. The 401K’s balance is low enough that we would not use much of it other than medical expenses during retirement. Long Term Health Care costs are astronomical and something that should be planned for well in advance.

They were lucky though. Since they worked for the government for a long time, they had a pension. If they didn’t have that pension, I honestly don’t know how they would have retired. Social Security alone is just supplemental income, combined with their 401K balance would not have been enough to sustain their debt payments, let alone regular expenses.

That experience gave me the sign. I knew what I wanted to do. I want to help people avoid such a situation, especially since most of us will not have a pension. The majority of the savings for retirement falls on us as individuals. Not the company you work for, not the government.

Leveraging my 14 years in Financial Services (12 years dealing with financial reporting for large, multi-billion dollar portfolios, and two years at an international insurance company), it was an easy transition to make from a technical skills perspective.

So in mid 2022, I started my journey to establish and register a financial advisory firm with the State of Illinois. Thanks to technology, I am able to serve clients throughout the United States.

The benefits of financial planning are life changing, but I will save that for another blog post.

Thank you for reading. I know it was a long blog post! Future posts will be a lot shorter.