In the beginning of 2003, I was 20 years old and decided to take a break from college. I had an opportunity to learn investing from one of the top realtors in Arizona. She was an excellent teacher, and with her help I did very well. That was a great time to be in real estate because the stock market had dropped by more than 40% over the previous three years, and people were looking for new ways to grow their money.
At the time, the conventional wisdom was to leverage yourself to buy as much real estate as possible; I followed that advice.
By the time I was 24, I had around a million dollars in mortgages (way too much) in several different properties that I had intended to sell quickly including my own custom built $400,000 house. In 2006, the bottom fell out of the real estate market in Northwest Arizona. During the previous month there were bidding wars on houses, and during the next month nothing moved, nothing sold, and I still had a tremendous amount of money in mortgages.
I spent a year trying to unload my properties, and finally in 2007 my father convinced me to go back to school. He flew to Arizona and we drove cross country back to Connecticut where I moved from my 2,400 square foot custom home to my parent’s basement.
I will never forget feeling so powerless. After I felt I had “made it” on my own, I was going back to school, five years behind my peers.
When I graduated from UConn, I wanted to stay in investments but was understandably afraid of loss. I chose to work for an insurance company because the basic concept of insurance was transferring risk from the individual to the insurance company itself. I worked there for nearly three years but became frustrated when I realized that the only client I truly had was the insurance company. Everyone else was just a policy number. I couldn’t sleep at night knowing that my fiduciary obligation was not solely on the client, so I left.
I joined a retirement planning firm and stayed for nearly five and a half years. During my time there, I realized that I wanted to focus on creating custom plans for my clients that would better prepare them to live comfortably during their retirement years.
That is why I started Fuchs Financial with the encouragement of my wife Kristin, daughter Flora and son Logan.
My journey to this point has been unorthodox, but now I’m proud to serve families, individuals, and business owners all over Connecticut doing exactly what I love to do, which is to help people live out the retirement of their dreams. I hope that you will allow us to do the same for you!
