Here, a New-Orleans-based financial planner shares his experience of founding his own practice, and trying to achieve a work-life balance.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in an occasional series about Jude Boudreaux, CFP®, a 33-year-old financial planner in New Orleans, La. The series will follow him as he starts his own financial planning firm, Upperline Financial Planning, based on life planning principles and attempts to balance that work with his family, which includes his wife, Karen, and his 6-month old daughter, Lucy.  

As a 21-year old finance major at Loyola University in New Orleans, Jude Boudreaux envisioned a career in finance, perhaps as an analyst and ultimately a money manager at an asset management firm. But then he took a class in personal financial planning for professional financial planners that literally changed his career path and his life.

“It was a real revelation,” he says. “I took it as an elective, not expecting much, but it was amazing. I couldn’t believe someone would pay me or anyone else to do that because it sounded like such a wonderful thing. That’s what I knew I wanted to do.”

However, Boudreaux knew that as a 22-year old fresh-faced college graduate, he likely didn’t have enough life experience or experience period to be credible with clients, so he signed on for a job as a mutual fund analyst at Janus in September, 2000, just after the tech stock bubble burst. Notwithstanding the fact that it wasn’t the best time to sign up with a high-growth fund family, Boudreaux found that he “didn’t want that lifestyle, that is not what I wanted to have my life be about: flying 100,000 miles a year, working 90 hours a week.”

After five months he was laid off and moved back to New Orleans, and worked a couple of different jobs at financial services companies, trying to get his foot in the door towards his ultimate destination: doing financial planning. The worst one? “Cold calling new parents, trying to sell them insurance,” he recalls. “One night at 8:30 I called my wife crying. I didn’t know much as a 23-year-old about how new parents hate to be called on the phone at night when they are trying to get the baby to sleep, but I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

Some other jobs were better; he picked up some knowledge about compliance, about financial planning and learned something about how he might want to run his own practice once he got to that point, as well as how he wouldn’t want to run it.  He was able to earn his Certified Financial Planner® designation during that period.

Then, it happened. An older advisor who knew him from his work at Mass Mutual thought that Boudreaux might be the perfect person to bring into his practice, with the idea of passing it onto him when that advisor wanted to retire.

“It was perfect, it was absolutely everything that I had ever wanted,” he says. “I had the ability to do financial planning, to get paid a salary and get some experience. I worked there for five years; we rebranded the practice and did some good things. But it became apparent at a certain point that it was never going to be my vision of what a financial planning firm should be.”

The timing was right for Boudreaux to move on, because he and his wife discovered she was pregnant in January of 2010. He would set up a practice and stay home with the baby, at least for the first year. Boudreaux knew exactly the kind of practice he wanted to set up, and how he wanted to build it. He would focus on life planning, a concept that resonated for him and his wife in their lives and that he felt instinctively would work for the types of clients he wanted to work with.

Essentially, life planning is aligning a person’s life goals with their finances. This contrasts with a more traditional view of the role of financial advisors, who focus on numbers and sell products. Not only do life planners seek to align their client’s finances with their life goals, but they also actively help clients figure out what their goals are and the implications of those goals for their finances.

On a personal level, Boudreaux found it worked for him in terms of deciding how to spend his money. He puts it this way: “I used to always feel deprived because we weren’t going out to dinner as much as my friends or buying a lot of things. But through the life planning process, my wife Karen and I realized that travel is our big passion, so we aren’t depriving ourselves. That focus enabled us to do what we really want to do. So I tell my clients, ‘You have to say no to smaller expenses, so you can say a bigger yes to the things you really want to do, whether it’s good food, travel or whatever.’”

That’s what he loves about the life planning process: that’s so individual to each person, to each client, that he’ll have the ability to build a relationship with each one, to create the trust to ask those questions and get the real answers. This, too, plays into Boudreaux’s plans, which cap his practice at a total of 120 clients, as many as he can reasonably pay attention to with a decent support structure.

“I know I can really get to know those 120 people and their families and their kids and their passions,” he relates. “I can help them figure out what their passions are and how to manage their finances around them.”

He’s made a start: working at home, around his daughter’s schedule, he has six clients. His goal is 12 by the end of 2011, which will give him enough revenue for now. It’s not easy running his schedule around taking care of a toddler, he admits: “The only mistake I made so far is I over estimated the number of things I was going to be able to get done with my daughter around.”

But that problem will eventually solve itself as Lucy grows and moves into daycare part time. In the meantime, Boudreaux is building his life and practice the way he wants to, as so many are striving to do - especially younger, professionally trained planners.