Welcome back to the 151st episode of Financial Advisor Success Podcast!
My guest on today’s podcast is Luna Jaffe. Luna is the founder of Lunaria Financial, an advisory firm in Portland, Oregon that oversees nearly $55 million of assets under management for 100 client households.
What’s unique about Luna, though, is that in an effort to solve the challenge of building an advisory practice that ends out with minimums too high to work with everyone, she launched the Sacred Money Studios & Prosperity Pie Shoppe, an actual pie shop across the street from her advisory firm office that offers low-cost financial education programs on budgeting and what Luna calls her Wild Money process.
In this episode, we talk in-depth about what Luna has learned in trying to expand the reach of financial education through a retail store. Why she ultimately decided to charge a standalone fee for each money class instead of an ongoing membership fee, the budgeting philosophy in the Wild Money process she teaches that she has found resonates with those seeking help with their finances, and the real-world challenges that come with opening up a retail store that has to manage retail employees.
We also talk about Luna’s own advisory firm. Her unique year-long financial planning process that can run up to 18 meetings by incrementally helping clients implement changes step by step along the way, the exercises she uses from mind mapping to vision cards she created to having clients write a love letter to their money, how Luna integrates the eMoney Advisor portal into her somewhat non-traditional process, why the firm uses the You Need a Budget, YNAB tool to help clients actually change their spending behaviors and the flat fee structure that Luna adopted to ensure she is properly compensated for her time-intensive planning process.
And be certain to listen to the end, where Luna shares why despite the retail challenges, she hopes to ultimately take on investors and expand the reach of Sacred Money Studios, the additional challenge she faced when she decided to break away from Edward Jones to start her own independent firm, and why her biggest tip to other advisors is the importance of finding a mentor, not just one who will listen to you, but one who will pull you forward into what you can really become.
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