Ryan Landmark - Financial Planner

10/05/2026

Growing up, you were probably taught a simple rule:

The more money in your bank account, the better.
That's not wrong.
Having money is better than not having it.

But that rule leaves something out: opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost is what you give up by choosing one option over another.

Every dollar sitting in a checking account isn't just "safe."
It's also not doing anything else.

Here's a simple example:

Say you have $50,000 sitting in a checking account earning close to nothing, call it 0.5%.
After 10 years, that grows to about $52,500.

Now say that same $50,000 was invested instead, averaging 8% a year.
After 10 years, that grows to about $108,000.

Same starting amount.
Same 10 years.
A difference of roughly $55,000.

That's the opportunity cost of "playing it safe" with money you didn't actually need to keep liquid.

To be clear, this isn't an argument against having cash.
You need an emergency fund.
You need money set aside for near-term expenses.
Cash has a job, and it's a real one.

But beyond what you actually need on hand, letting excess cash sit there isn't neutral.
It has a cost.

It's just a quiet one, because you never see the number for what it didn't become.

The real question isn't "How much money do I have?"

It's "Is my money doing the job I actually need it to do?"

Hypothetical example for illustration only. Not a projection or guarantee of future results.

Cheers!

-Ryan

10/01/2026

Here’s one of the things many business owners tend to overlook.

Business owners may be able to protect themselves from the financial consequences of losing a key employee.

10/01/2026

Steven Pressfield wrote a book called "The War of Art" about a force he calls Resistance.

His point is simple:
Resistance is what keeps people from doing the work that actually matters to them.

Not with an outright "no."

With delay.
With "I'll get to it."
With "next month makes more sense."

Pressfield describes Resistance as insidious.

It doesn't announce itself.
It sounds reasonable.
It shows up as a good excuse instead of an obvious one.

I see the financial version of this constantly.

Nobody decides, "I'm never going to plan for retirement."
They just don't start this year.

Nobody decides, "I'm fine never having a will."
They just haven't gotten around to it.

Nobody decides, "I don't want to know if I'm on track."
They just keep putting off the conversation that would tell them.

That's the danger of inaction.

It rarely feels like a decision.
It feels like nothing happened.

But five or ten years later, "nothing happened" is exactly the problem.

The accounts never got consolidated.
The beneficiaries never got updated.
The plan never got built.

Not because of one bad decision.
Because of years of reasonable-sounding delay.

Here's the thing about Resistance:

It never goes away on its own.
It just waits for the next deadline to talk you out of.

The people who end up in the best position aren't the ones who never felt resistance.
They're the ones who acted anyway.

What's the one thing you've been meaning to do with your finances that keeps getting pushed to "later"?

That's probably the thing to start with.

Cheers!

-Ryan

09/30/2026

A prospective client reached out recently to prepare for retirement.
They had never worked with an advisor before.

When I pulled everything together, here's what I found:

About 20 IRAs.
Spread across different firms.
They thought you could only contribute to each account once, so each year they contributed, they opened a new one.

No asset location strategy.

No real asset allocation strategy either.

I could keep going…

And yet, somehow, they'd still managed to accumulate a couple million dollars! (Pays to invest large sums!)

So we got to work.

We organized the accounts.
Built a pre-retirement plan.
Mapped out Social Security and pension timing.
Built a cash flow plan.
Planned around capital gains.
Fixed the asset location.
Fixed the asset allocation. Etc.

By the end, they told me how confident they finally felt about their future.

Not hopeful.
Confident.

That's a different feeling.

I asked what had kept them from working with an advisor all those years.

Their answer was simple:
They didn't want to pay fees.

After going through this process and seeing what it actually did for their plan, that mindset is one they now regret.

Not because fees don't matter.
They do.

But because the cost of no plan was far higher than the cost of a good one.

20 accounts they couldn't track.
Years without a real strategy.
Millions of dollars sitting there with no plan behind it.

That's the real price of "I'll just do it myself."

Use their hindsight as your foresight.

If you're not confident making these decisions on your own, that's not a reason to avoid planning.

It's the reason to get help.

Cheers!

-Ryan

09/29/2026

Your social media feed isn't necessarily designed to inform you.

It's designed to make you feel something.

Because feeling is what keeps you scrolling.

So which feeling works faster - fear or happiness?

Fear.
It's not close.

A happy story gets a like.
A scary headline gets a share, a comment, and a reaction before you've even finished reading it.

That's not an accident.
That's the algorithm doing exactly what it was built to do.

Apply that to your money, and it gets dangerous fast.

"The market is about to crash."
"This is the biggest mistake investors are making right now."
"Experts are warning..."

Headlines like that aren't trying to inform you.
They're trying to trigger you.

And fear is a terrible advisor.

It makes people sell at the bottom.
It makes people abandon good plans for no reason other than a headline made their stomach drop.
It makes people trade their 20-year strategy for a 20-second reaction.

Here's the thing about noise:

It's loud, but it's rarely useful.

The people who build wealth over decades aren't the ones reacting to every headline.

They're the ones with a plan, and the discipline to stick with it when the internet is screaming at them to panic.

Before your next reaction, ask a simple question:

"Am I responding to information, or am I responding to a feeling someone designed me to have?"

That question alone will save you from a lot of bad decisions.

Cheers!

-Ryan

09/28/2026

Diversification gets criticized a lot.

Usually by someone who just made a killing on a single stock.

Here's what they don't post about:

The people who got killed doing the exact same thing.

Diversification isn't designed to make you the biggest winner in the room.

It's designed to keep you out of the room where people lose everything.

Concentrated bets can absolutely pay off.

Some people put everything into one stock, one sector, or one idea, and it works out.

You hear about those.

You don't hear as much about the ones who did the same thing and it didn't.

Survivorship bias makes concentrated wins look a lot more common than they are.

A diversified portfolio will rarely be the best-performing thing you own in any given year.

It also won't be the worst.

That's the point.

You give up the chance at the extreme high.

In exchange, you avoid the extreme low.

For most people building long-term wealth, that tradeoff isn't a compromise.

It's the strategy.

Because the investor who never blows up their account is the one who's still investing 20 years from now.

The investor chasing the next single-stock jackpot isn't always so lucky.

You don't need to make a killing.

And you sure don’t want to get killed.

Cheers!

-Ryan

09/25/2026

It's Faithful Friday!

I met with someone this week who said something that stuck with me.

They said, "I feel almost guilty looking at this. I know some people are just trying to make it to the next paycheck."

That’s interesting…

Because they're right.

If you're in a position where it makes sense to sit down with a financial advisor, that's not something to feel guilty about.

It's something to be thankful for.

It means you have income beyond your bills.

It means you have decisions to make instead of just gaps to fill.

It means you're not just surviving. You're building.

That's not everyone's reality.

"Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God's will for you in Christ Jesus." (1 Thessalonians 5:18, NIV)

Not just the easy circumstances.

All of them.

Even the ones that come with a little tension, like wondering whether you're doing enough with what you've been given.

That tension is a privilege most people in history never had.

So if you're in a season where planning feels like the next step instead of just getting by, that's worth pausing on.

Be thankful for it.

Then be a good steward of it.

Not because you earned every bit of it alone.

Because you didn't.

Cheers!

-Ryan

09/24/2026

There are a lot of account types out there.

These are some of the most common investment accounts people have:

1. 401(k) - Roth or Traditional

This is usually your workplace account.

Traditional: you contribute pre-tax, it grows tax-deferred, and you pay ordinary income tax when you withdraw it in retirement.

Roth: you contribute after-tax, it grows tax-free, and qualified withdrawals in retirement are tax-free too.

If your employer offers a match, that's often the first place your savings should go.

2. IRA - Roth or Traditional

Same basic tax treatment as a 401(k), but it's not tied to an employer.

You open it yourself, and you control the investment options or give someone else permission to do so on your behalf (someone like me).

Contribution limits are lower than a 401(k), and Roth IRAs have income limits on who can contribute directly.

This is often used alongside a 401(k), not instead of it.

3. Non-qualified brokerage account

This is your everyday investment account.

No tax advantages going in or coming out.

You pay taxes on dividends and interest as they happen, and capital gains tax when you sell.

But there's a tradeoff:

No contribution limits.

No withdrawal restrictions.

No penalties for taking money out early.

That flexibility makes it useful for goals that don't fit neatly into retirement accounts.

Here's the bigger point:

None of these accounts are good or bad on their own.

They're tools.

The real question is how they work together.

How much goes into each one.

In what order you draw from them later.

And how that affects your taxes over your lifetime (and after!)

That's where a plan matters more than the account type itself.

Cheers!

-Ryan

09/23/2026

A recent study covered by Barron's found that only about 2% of social media "finfluencers" appear to have qualifications relevant to the advice they're giving.

Two percent.
That's wild.

I follow several finfluencers, and all of them are qualified, like me.

So it's easy for me to assume that's the norm.
It isn't.

And here's the thing:

Because this is my world, I can usually tell within seconds whether someone is qualified.

But most people scrolling through their feed can't.

And why would they?

The person on the screen is confident.
The video is polished.
The advice sounds reasonable.

Most people have no reason to think, "I should check whether this person is qualified to say that."

That's a big gap.

The same study found that most of the content had no disclaimers, and nearly 3 in 10 videos were flat-out misleading.

So before you act on financial advice from anyone online, ask a few simple questions:

1. Do they clearly state their credentials?
Most people who have them show them. Like the “CFP®” after my name.

2. Can you verify them?
FINRA BrokerCheck and the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site are free and take about two minutes to search someone’s name. The CFP Board has a free “Verify a CFP® Professional” tool as well.

3. Are they promising results?
Be cautious with “guaranteed.” Some products carry contractual guarantees, but no one can guarantee investment returns.

4. Is it general education, or is it advice for you?
A video can't know your taxes, your goals, or your risk tolerance, etc.

Educational content can be a great starting point.

Plenty of qualified people share helpful information online.

But before you act on it, make sure the person giving it has the training, experience, and regulatory accountability.

Your money is too important to take advice from someone just because they're good on camera.

Cheers!

-Ryan

09/22/2026

Your financial plan should look different depending on where you are in life.

Not slightly different.
Very different.

There are two major phases:

Accumulation.
Decumulation.

Accumulation is when you're building.
You're working, earning, and saving.
Time is on your side.
A market drop can actually help, because you're buying more at lower prices.

The big questions sound like this:

How much should I be saving?
Am I on track?
Am I taking enough risk to reach my goals?

Decumulation is when you're drawing it down.
Now the paycheck stops, and your portfolio has to become one.

The questions change completely:

How much can I safely spend?
Which accounts should I pull from first?
What happens if the market falls early in retirement?
How do I make sure this lasts as long as I do?

Same money.
Completely different job.

In accumulation, the main goal is growth.
In decumulation, growth still matters, but so do income, taxes, and risk.

Because a market drop early in retirement, while you're withdrawing, can do far more damage than the same drop at 35.

That's why a plan that worked perfectly for the first 30 years of your career can be the wrong plan for the next 30.

The mistake I see most often is people carrying an accumulation mindset into decumulation.

They're still focused on the account balance.
When the real question is:
"How much income can this reliably produce?"

Know which phase you're in.

Then plan for that one.

Cheers!

-Ryan