Guiding People Towards Financial Wellness
For Tennessee resident Paul Fain, financial planning isn’t simply his career; it’s a calling. It’s something that has been a part of his life for decades. And that’s all because of his dad.
“My late father, P. Kemp Fain Jr., was the first student candidate for the Certified Financial Planner™, or CFP®, designation in 1972,” Fain explains. “He spent 20 years leading and promoting the financial planning profession.”
After Kemp completed his training, he founded Asset Planning Corporation, a company that would quickly become an important part of Fain’s life. The firm provides financial planning and investment management services for Tennessee residents throughout the generations. But it wasn’t always this exact line of work that Fain thought he’d end up in.
“I aspired to be a coach or a minister,” he says. “I volunteered in both arenas for decades, but since high school the family business was a constant in my life.”
He did every job imaginable at his father’s firm. He painted the building, mowed the grass, even filed, photo-copied and sent out mailings. But it wasn’t until after college when he officially joined the firm as an apprentice. “Here I am, 30 years later and ironically, two big elements of what I do every day are coaching and ministry,” he admits. “Personal financial planning and investing involve the whole person, mind and emotions.”
Ministry and emotional investment. It’s not something you always think about when you hear financial planning. But it’s such an important piece of the work and is what makes Asset Planning Corporation unique in how it approaches its services. “Financial planning is a helping profession, a noble calling.”
The scope of comprehensive financial advice encompasses many knowledge areas, such as developing a spending and savings plan, making housing decisions or education funding choices, or planning to and through retirement. It can involve effectively using insurance to protect a family’s financial security, making tax-smart decisions, even estate and senior care decisions. And this only scrapes the surface. There is so much involved in financial planning and investment management that impact daily life and the future. And families have to feel comfortable in those they are entrusting to guide them on that path.
It should come as no surprise then that trust, stability, connection, and purpose rest at the heart of Asset Planning Corporation’s work. “We are fiduciaries acting in the best interests of our clients,” Fain says. “It’s not a slogan; it is a way of being. We genuinely care for our clients.”
Fain and his team care about educating the 14-year-old daughter who is opening her first savings account while at the same time supporting the care for the 88-year-old senior with diminishing capacity. Every client is important. And they continue to show that care by staying on top of the latest financial education and trends.
Bottom line, there is always a lot of work to do at Asset Planning Corporation, not just for clients and the firm, but for the greater financial planning profession. “It’s an honor and a privilege to carry a torch that my father ignited almost 50 years ago,” Fain says. “We have a deep sense of gratitude that hundreds of human beings entrust us as their source of financial advice during the highs and lows of life and markets. The only constant in life is change, and the only certainty is uncertainty. We want to be there to help guide our neighbors through all of that.”
Asset Planning Corporation is a registered investment advisor.