History

When I was young many of my friends wanted to be astronauts, firemen even athletes or rock stars. I wanted to own my own business, a business that made footballs. Over the years the type of business I wanted to run has changed, but the fact that I wanted to own my own business hasn't.  As I progressed through life, various events, and how I perceived them had a significant impacted the type of business I wanted to operate.

When I was younger, Bethlehem Steel, the company that employed both of my parents, as well as my grandmother, went bankrupt.  This left my grandmother and my parents without the pension that they had been promised, and were depending on to survive in retirement. As a result, my grandmother who had already retired sought the help of an insurance salesman that ended up taking advantage of her by doing a number of things that were not in her interest, but his. This sapped her already strained nest egg even further. My parents also felt a dramatic impact that is still being felt to this day. Because they were depending on a pension they had not taken their 401(k) contributions as seriously as they would have had they known it would turn out to be their only source of retirement income, aside from that provided by the government.

This experience taught me that maybe I could help people manage and possibly avoid these types of problems as a career. Clearly if there were individuals out there who could not be trusted in this vital field, there must be room in the market for someone who genuinely had the interests of their client at heart. I realized that helping people save for a child’s college, prepare an adequate nest egg for retirement and plan for the unexpected events life sometimes throws our way would be an extremely fulfilling career. However, at this point in time I had no idea about how the industry operated.

Then in college I did an internship for a financial planning firm. During this internship, I learned that the only two career aspirations I had ever had, owning my own business and helping people with their finances, was exactly how this industry operated! I could have all of the freedoms of owning my own business and help people avoid the pitfalls that had such a devastating impact on my family. At that point in time I knew that I wanted to be a financial professional. Finally, I knew the name for what I wanted to be! The next step was to figure out how I was going to be successful in this business that I was constantly being told was extremely difficult to get started in.

As my senior year of college began, I realized that I needed to begin planning my next step if I was going to make this dream of mine a reality. I thought about what I could do to make my venture into this extremely difficult field more successful. I came to the conclusion that if I began my career as a subcontractor for a larger company I would be able to take advantage of the most cutting edge training programs available. Considering this, I accepted a position as a financial professional at one of the largest companies in the world. However, I didn’t realize that this phenomenal training would come with some unacceptably high costs.

Along with this fantastic training I was being provided also came the requirement that I would sell the products/services that this extremely large insurance company wanted me to sell. I quickly realized that this was unacceptable because I was starting to become the exact same person who had taken advantage of my grandmother several years earlier, contributing to my inspiration in getting into this business. Once I realized this, I knew that no amount of training would be sufficient to overwhelm the feeling I had that I was not doing what was in my clients’ best interest and as a result I was not fulfilling the reason I had gotten into this business in the first place.

 

I knew that the only way I would be able to act independently was to be independent, so I created Engel Wealth Management. With my own firm I finally have the freedom and capability to do what is in my clients’ best interest without regard to which product or service is the most profitable for a large insurance company to sell. Rather I can provide the products and services that add the most value to my clients’ financial situation.  It is my  deep-seated desire that I will be able to do exactly that for you.