Everything you've been meaning to ask

I'm a wealth advisor based in Shreveport, Louisiana. I work exclusively with senior healthcare executives — CEOs, CFOs, and COOs of health systems and hospitals.

I grew up as the son of a health system CEO. I watched my father carry the weight of leading thousands of people, making impossible decisions, and navigating the complexity of healthcare leadership for decades. That gave me a front-row seat to both the professional demands and the personal financial complexity that come with running a health system.

I've been in wealth advisory for over 15 years. I started my career at Morgan Stanley before founding Montgomery Wealth Advisors in 2015. My largest clients are senior leaders at major health systems across the country.

Outside of work, I've been happily married for over 20 years. I have three daughters. We love to travel as a family, and we're deeply rooted in the idea of building generational wealth — not just money, but the kind of intentional life we want to create for ourselves and the people who come after us.

Because I grew up in it. I saw what the job takes. I watched my dad carry the weight of an entire organization home with him every night — the difficult decisions, the board dynamics, the constant pressure of being the person where the buck stops.

When I sit across from a hospital CEO, I'm not just seeing a high-net-worth client with a complex compensation package. I understand at a gut level that the reason their financial life might be disorganized isn't because they're careless or irresponsible. It's because they've been carrying the weight of an entire organization on their shoulders, and their own stuff always comes last.

That empathy can't be researched or faked. I lived it.

Fifteen years in wealth advisory. Started at Morgan Stanley, founded my own firm in 2015, and have focused exclusively on healthcare executives since. My largest clients are senior leaders at major health systems — both publicly traded and nonprofit.

I'll be honest with you: most financial advice is pretty universal. There are plenty of competent advisors out there who understand the mechanics of a 401(k) or a deferred compensation plan.

The difference isn't a proprietary investment formula. It's the relationship. It's having someone in your corner who genuinely understands your world, cares about your life beyond the spreadsheet, and isn't just trying to sell you a product. The commitment I make to every client is simple: outside of your family, there's not going to be anybody that cares about you more.

If you see that and you believe that, a lot of the other details become secondary.

Evidence-based, low-cost, grounded in decades of academic research. I use a dimensional approach and I believe it's the right way to invest.

But here's the thing — investment strategy is maybe number seven on the list of ten things that will actually determine your financial success. The financial plan, the tax coordination, the estate strategy, the insurance review, the retirement income design, and honestly the life design — those are where the real value lives. If I have a client who has strong feelings about a different investment approach but wants everything else done right, we can work with that.

I'm not interested in debating active versus passive at dinner parties. I'm interested in whether your entire financial life is coordinated and moving in the same direction.

Senior executives at the nation's largest health systems — both publicly traded and nonprofit. CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and other C-suite leaders navigating complex compensation structures, career transitions, and retirement planning.

My ideal client is typically 45 or older. There's something that happens around age 50 where executives suddenly realize they need to get their financial life organized. They've been so busy running hospitals that their own planning has taken a back seat for years, sometimes decades. That's usually when the call happens.

I primarily work on an assets under management basis. In some cases, there's a planning fee for upfront work depending on the complexity of the situation. It's straightforward and transparent.

I'll be direct: healthcare executives making the kind of income you're making are not typically fee-sensitive. You're trust-sensitive. You want to know that your advisor is worth their fee. That's a fair expectation, and one I take seriously.

The best answer is years ago. The second best answer is now.

I recently advised a young man taking a new job, and I told him to push hard on his starting salary because the compounding effect of an extra $5,000 a year is astronomical over a career. That same principle applies to financial planning. Every year you wait isn't just a year of missed returns — it's a year of missed coordination, missed tax savings, and missed opportunities that compound on each other.

And beyond the dollars, there's something else: the freedom you feel when you finally know you have a plan in place. That psychic weight of knowing you should have your financial life together but don't? It lifts. And that alone is worth starting today.

We're not going to talk about investments. Not at first.

I want to understand your life. What have you done your whole career? What's weighing on you? What would you do if you didn't have to work tomorrow? What are the dreams you've put on hold because you've been too busy running a hospital?

Most advisors start with the spreadsheet. I start with the question most people have never been asked: what do you actually want your life to look like? Then we reverse-engineer the financial plan to get you there.

I want you to leave that first conversation feeling like your whole worldview just shifted — in a good way. Like a new world just opened up and you cannot wait to get started.

You should expect someone who will coordinate your entire financial life — not just manage a portfolio. That means pulling together every account, every plan, every policy, every loose end, and getting them all moving in the same direction.

Most healthcare executives I work with come in with accounts at multiple custodians, an old 403(b) at a previous employer, maybe a small account they opened with a buddy years ago, some insurance products scattered around, and a drawer full of statements with no clear logins. None of the pieces are talking to each other.

My job is to change that. One advisor. One plan. Everything coordinated.

It's not that any single piece of your compensation is impossibly complicated. It's the sheer diversity of all the pieces at once.

A typical healthcare executive might have a 457(b), a 401(a), a 403(b), RSUs if they're at a publicly traded system, a SERP, and potentially access to multiple plans in overlapping scenarios. There are plenty of advisors who understand any one of those individually. But the advisor who understands how they all interact together — across multiple employers, multiple states, and a 30-year career that never sits still — that's rarer.

Your financial life isn't just complex. It's complex in a way that's specific to healthcare leadership.

It's not what you'd think. It's not a bad investment or a missed tax deduction.

The biggest mistake is that none of the pieces are moving in the same direction. You've got good things going — a solid income, a deferred comp plan, a retirement account, maybe some equity — but nobody has pulled it all together into one coordinated plan. It's an organizational mess, and it's not because you're irresponsible. It's because you've been busy running a hospital.

My father was the most organized person I knew. Early adopter of Quicken, balanced the checkbook religiously. And even he had an annuity with one person, a financial product with another, and a main advisor somewhere else. All scattered. If an organized health system CEO can end up that way, anybody can.

This comes up constantly. Almost every executive I talk to says "I have life insurance" and what they mean is they have employer-provided group coverage.

That coverage is typically inexpensive and you should absolutely maximize whatever you can get — especially anything available without medical underwriting. But here's what most people don't realize: it's often not portable. When you leave that system — and in healthcare leadership, you will eventually leave — that coverage may not come with you. And if it is technically portable, the cost to convert it is often significantly higher than what you'd pay for a policy you own directly.

The bottom line: employer coverage is a benefit, not a plan. Don't confuse the two.

This is one of the most important and most overlooked questions in healthcare executive finance.

Your nonprofit 457(b) is a nonqualified deferred compensation plan. Unlike your 403(b), the assets remain part of the hospital's general assets. You are, legally, an unsecured creditor. During an acquisition, several things can happen: the plan might be assumed by the acquiring entity, the deal might trigger a mandatory distribution, or — if the acquiring system is for-profit — the tax rules change entirely because nonprofit 457(b) plans and Section 409A operate under completely different IRS rules.

Most critically, you typically have a 60-to-90-day window after separation to elect your distribution method. Miss it and the plan's default kicks in — which for most plans means a lump-sum distribution that lands your entire balance on one year's tax return.

If your system is in M&A talks, the planning window is now. Not after the deal closes.

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In most cases, yes. Rolling it into an IRA gives you a massive increase in flexibility — more investment options, more control, and better coordination with the rest of your financial plan.

The reason most executives leave it sitting there is that it's invested reasonably enough that they never feel urgency to deal with it. But "not urgent" doesn't mean "not important." An orphaned account at a former employer is a loose end, and loose ends add up.

There are exceptions, so it's worth reviewing your specific situation. But the default answer for most healthcare executives is: roll it over, consolidate, and get it working as part of a coordinated plan.

Healthcare executives move between systems more than most people realize. Each move creates a cascade of planning decisions that tend to fall through the cracks when you're focused on the new role.

The biggest issue is orphaned retirement accounts at former employers. But there's also the cost-of-living shift that catches people off guard. Your salary went up, but if you moved from a mid-sized town in Alabama to coastal Florida, your expenses increased significantly too. The math doesn't always work out the way you expect.

Then there are the new benefits to evaluate, the old benefits to unwind, potential multi-state tax implications, and new employment contract terms to negotiate. Each transition is a planning event, and having an advisor who understands the healthcare executive career arc makes a meaningful difference.

CFOs face a unique version of the healthcare executive planning challenge. They often have the deepest exposure to deferred compensation, the most complex tax situations, and the most detailed understanding of their own system's financial health — which can be both an advantage and a source of anxiety when it comes to their own 457(b) balance sitting in the hospital's general assets.

CFOs also tend to be the most analytically rigorous clients, which means they need an advisor who can go deep on the details but also pull them out of the spreadsheet to ask the bigger questions: What do you actually want your life to look like after this? What would you do with your time if you weren't running a health system's finances?

A Supplemental Executive Retirement Plan is an employer-funded retirement benefit designed to provide additional retirement income beyond what standard plans like a 403(b) or 401(a) can offer. They're common in healthcare executive compensation packages as both a retention tool and a way to provide competitive retirement benefits.

SERPs are nonqualified plans, which means they carry the same general creditor risk as a 457(b) — the assets aren't held in a protected trust. They also come with vesting schedules that tie you to the organization for a set number of years. Understanding your SERP's vesting timeline, payout structure, and how it interacts with your other retirement assets is essential to making informed decisions about career moves and retirement timing.

Start with the non-financial plan. Before we touch a single number, I want to know: what are you going to do with your time? You've spent decades leading people, making high-stakes decisions, carrying the weight of an entire organization. When that's gone, what fills the space?

Do you want to spend a month in Italy? Because maybe you have the resources to do it. So let's go. That's what it was all for.

Once we know what you're building toward, we work backward through the numbers: retirement income sources, tax optimization across your deferred comp distributions, Social Security timing, estate considerations, insurance review, and a realistic timeline that accounts for the fact that healthcare CEOs rarely retire on a clean schedule.

The financial plan exists to serve the life plan. Not the other way around.

Think in decades. Build for generations. Make decisions today for the people who come after you. And along the way, live the life you're building — don't just accumulate.

I believe in low time preference. That means I'm not chasing the next hot investment or optimizing for this quarter. I'm thinking about what your financial life looks like in 10, 20, 30 years — and what it means for your kids and their kids.

I used to serve on the board of my daughters' school. As board chair, I constantly reminded the board that we were making decisions for a group of children who didn't exist yet. That same thinking applies to wealth planning. The best financial decisions are the ones that compound across generations.

This one. Because the answers here tell you more about who I am, what I believe, and how I work than any brochure or credential ever could.

If you've read this far and you're thinking "this is my guy" — you're probably right. And if you're thinking "this isn't for me" — that's okay too. I'd rather you know upfront than waste both our time.

A conversation. No commitment, no sales pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation about where you are, where you want to go, and whether it makes sense to work together.

If it does, we'll build a plan. If it doesn't, you'll leave with clarity you didn't have before. Either way, you win.