By Matt Gagnon, CFA® | Financial Empowerment
My parents built something real.
Growing up in the 80s and 90s, my mom and dad ran their own real estate business — the kind built on showing up every day, working hard, and doing right by the people they served. My dad also owned rental properties on the side, not because it was a cool “side hustle”, but because he understood that real wealth comes from owning things that work for you while you sleep.
My parents came from small towns and modest means. Dad grew up in Hays, Kansas and Mom in Trinidad, Colorado. Together they built a thriving real estate business and were self-made millionaires by the time they turned 50. They realized the American Dream.
My dad taught me more about entrepreneurship than any business school ever could. Work hard. Take your time. Be honest. Take care of your family.
What he didn’t know — what almost nobody knew in 1999 — was how badly the financial services industry was about to fail him.
The Dot-Com Era Looked Like a Sure Thing
If you weren’t investing in the late 1990s, it was actually a lot like today’s markets. Now artificial intelligence is the big disruption that has everyone excited; back then it was the internet.
Internet companies — anything with “dot-com” in the name — were exploding. Stock prices were hitting eye watering heights. Everyone seemed to be getting rich. The news was relentless — this was the future, and the future was going up forever.
Sound familiar?
My dad had a financial advisor. Someone he trusted. Someone who was supposed to be looking out for him.
That advisor recommended hot stocks — the exciting names everyone was talking about. Tech companies with soaring valuations and little to no earnings. The kind of investments that felt thrilling in 1999 and catastrophic in 2001.
My dad started online trading, which was a new thing back then — sitting at your computer, watching tickers, placing orders yourself. It felt empowering. It felt like control. With the market going up every day, it felt like genius.
I was 20 years old at the time, working in restaurants and taking college classes trying to find my career path. I hadn’t yet gotten interested in finance and knew almost nothing about investing. I caught bits and pieces in conversations, and noticed him spending more time looking at stock charts on his computer, but it didn’t seem like a big deal. Dad was a sharp businessman, so I assumed this new stock trading hobby of his would work out.
He began trading on margin — borrowing against his portfolio to buy more stock. When the market is rising, margin amplifies your gains. When it falls, having a margin balance makes it easier for you to lose it all. And that’s exactly what happened to my dad.
When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, my parents lost over $400,000. In today’s dollars, that’s more than $800,000.
Gone.
The NASDAQ rose 86% in 1999 alone — then lost 78% of its value by October 2002, erasing $5 trillion in market wealth. Many investors who felt like geniuses in 1999 were devastated by 2002. Sources: Goldman Sachs Historical Moments; Wikipedia; Britannica Money; International Banker; StocksToTrade. NASDAQ index values are approximate historical figures.
What That Kind of Loss Actually Does to a Person
Our family didn’t go hungry. Our lifestyle wasn’t dramatically changed. My parents had built enough through their real estate business and rental properties that we were protected in ways a lot of families wouldn’t have been.
But it still left scars.
Dad worked his entire life to build that wealth. He’s the hardest working person I’ve ever met. He got up early, stayed late, missed vacations, shown up when it was hard — did everything he could to support his family. He trusted someone to steward what he’d earned. And that someone — whether through negligence, greed, or recklessness — failed him.
He and my mom eventually retired from selling real estate, but after the losses, my dad only half-retired. He kept managing the rental properties into his 60s because they had become his fallback plan rather than a “nice to have”. The retirement they’d imagined had quietly changed shape — not because of anything they did wrong, but because of terrible advice they never should have been given.
I don’t know exactly what it did to him mentally. My dad’s not the kind of man who shares everything openly. But losing $400,000 that you spent a lifetime earning doesn’t just sting financially. It shakes something deeper. It makes you question your judgment. It makes you wonder who you can trust.
That stays with a person.
What I Did About It
I started my career in finance in 2007. Not immediately because of what happened — but the memory was never far from my mind.
Over nearly two decades, I worked as an investment analyst and portfolio manager at firms including United Capital Financial Advisors and Avantax Wealth Management. I built asset allocation models used to invest billions in client retirement savings. I performed statistical analysis on investment strategies, designed portfolios for wealthy clients, and wrote recommendations that I presented to investment committees. I researched thousands of securities – stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, limited partnerships — and interviewed hundreds of Wall Street fund managers. I spent weeks producing 20-page memos on investment strategies that would be debated in boardrooms.
It was genuinely interesting work. I loved the craft of building portfolios. Along the way, I earned the CFA charter — the gold standard for investment analysis, requiring over 1,000 hours of professional study and a rigorous multi-year examination process as described below:
To earn the CFA charter, candidates must pass all three levels of the exam, which is considered to be one of the most rigorous in the investment profession; meet the work experience requirements of four years in the investment industry; sign a commitment to abide by the CFA Institute Code of Ethics and Standards of Professional Conduct; and become a member of CFA Institute. Fewer than one in five candidates who begin the program end up successfully earning the CFA charter.
Source: https://www.cfainstitute.org/about/press-room/2020/investment-professionals-worldwide-pass-level-1
After all of that study, after all of those years — the conclusion I arrived at was the same one Dave Ramsey has been teaching for decades:
Simple beats complex. Every time.
Low-cost, diversified, long-term investing consistently outperforms the hot stocks, the trading strategies, and the complicated products that advisors use to justify their existence. The most sophisticated analytical framework in the world leads you to the same place as common sense and patience.
My dad didn’t need a brilliant advisor. He needed an honest one.
Why I Left Institutional Finance to Work With You
For most of my career, I worked with large pools of capital — serving nationwide financial services firms with billion-dollar investment programs and investment committees rather than the individual families who owned the assets.
The intellectual work was fascinating. But I started feeling the distance between what I was doing and who it was actually helping.
We would debate minor portfolio changes for months at a time. When you’re managing large programs like that, any change must be done carefully of course. But the bureaucracy began to wear on me.
Big pools of capital aren’t people. Financial services firms don’t lie awake at night wondering if they’ll be able to retire, or worry about whether they saved enough to put their kids through college.
People do.
I had spent years learning how to manage money at an institutional level — the same rigor, the same discipline, the same analytical frameworks used by the largest investment firms in the world. And it struck me that most individual investors — hardworking people like my parents — never get access to that level of thinking. They get a salesperson with a nice suit and a commission structure.
I wanted to change that.
The Sunday Morning That Changed Everything
During the pandemic, I started writing. Not investment memos — personal finance ideas. Notes about staying out of debt, getting started investing, and building wealth. I’d gone through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University around this time and found it genuinely life-changing. I’d struggled with debt myself as a young professional, and Dave’s Baby Steps gave me a framework that actually worked.
Dave’s philosophy is extraordinary for getting out of debt and building the foundation. Once you’ve paid off debt and start investing, though — the guidance gets thinner. That’s exactly where my 15+ years of institutional investment expertise picks up. I thought I might have something useful to say.
I turned those pandemic notes into a WordPress blog in August 2021.
In 2022 I became deeply dissatisfied with my job. I was over 40 and not where I wanted to be. I nearly joined a planning firm in a combined analyst / advisor role, but the offer fell through. I considered doing advisory work on the side. I kept writing.
During all of this, I found a church I loved and started attending regularly. I committed to reading the Bible cover to cover and stuck with it. My faith, which had always been part of my life, became more central. I spent daily time in God’s word, prayer, and journaling.
One Sunday morning in 2023, the pastor said something simple: “If you feel God put it on your heart to start a business, raise your hand.”
My hand went up.
I resigned from Avantax in April 2023. They offered me a severance package — a few months’ pay — and I used a big chunk of it to pay the registration fees and set up Financial Empowerment as an RIA.
Faith, Money, and Why It Matters
As a Christian, my faith shapes how I run this business in a practical way.
The Bible has a great deal to say about money — its proper place in our lives, stewardship, honesty, and abundance. One of my favorite passages is the parable of the three servants, which illustrates how God expects us to steward – and grow – the resources He blesses us with.
God loves us and wants ABUNDANCE for us, not poverty.
I believe that managing someone’s life savings is a sacred responsibility. The people who trust me with their financial futures are trusting me with something they worked for, sacrificed for, and built their lives around.
That’s not a transaction. That’s a partnership.
It’s also why the Ramsey philosophy resonates so deeply with me. Dave doesn’t separate financial wisdom from values — and neither do I. The principles that make you financially healthy are often the same ones that make you a person of integrity: live within your means, avoid unnecessary risk, be patient, be honest, think long-term.
I am not here to sell you anything. I am here to serve you. There’s a difference — and I take it seriously.
Why I Started Financial Empowerment
Financial Empowerment exists because hardworking people deserve better than what the financial industry typically offers them.
Business owners. Professionals. DIY investors who are doing well but wonder if they’re missing something. People who built something real and deserve someone who will protect it with the same care they used to build it.
People who are told their finances are too complicated to understand — when the truth is that someone benefits from keeping them confused.
People who are one bad advisor away from losing what they spent a lifetime earning. The way my dad almost did.
As an Investment Advisor Representative and a CFA charterholder, I am legally and ethically required to act in your best interest at all times. Not when it’s convenient. Not when it aligns with my compensation. Always.
No commissions. No hot stocks. No complexity theater.
Just clear, honest advice — applied with institutional rigor and delivered in plain English. The kind of advice my dad deserved and didn’t get.
This is more than a business to me. Every client I serve is, in some small way, a chance to make right what went wrong for my family 25 years ago. And if I can help enough families build genuine financial security, I believe that makes a real difference in the world.
That’s worth getting up for every day.
Here’s to You, Dad
My dad is fine.
He’s going strong in his 80s, enjoying the fruits of a blessed life. Over the course of his life he generated multiple times the wealth lost in 2000-2001. He and my mom are self-made millionaires, the dream that many of us aspire to.
We all have setbacks in life, and I pray I’m half as fortunate and blessed as my dad has been, and continues to be.
If you’re reading this dad, thank you for all that you’ve taught me over the years. I love you.
If You’re Reading This
If you’re looking for a financial advisor and you’re not sure who to trust — I understand that feeling better than most.
Regardless of whether you work with me or someone else, find an advisor who is a fiduciary, who explains their fees without hesitation, and who makes your money make sense to you in plain English.
If you’d like to find out whether Financial Empowerment is the right fit, the first step is a free 30-minute call. No pitch. No pressure. Just a conversation.
Schedule your free call here.
Matt Gagnon, CFA® is the founder of Financial Empowerment, a fee-based financial planning and investment management firm in Plano, TX. He is a Dave Ramsey SmartVestor Pro.
