Welcome back to Don’t Retire… Graduate! Today’s episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at the journey of a financial advisor, featuring a special guest from our own team: Joey Mills, who recently became a Certified Financial Planner™ and is on the path to becoming an associate advisor at BFG Financial Advisors.

I’m excited to introduce Joey, who joined us in 2022 after graduating from Towson University with a degree in Business Administration and a concentration in Financial Planning. Beyond his financial expertise, he’s also a baseball enthusiast who recently checked off a major personal goal: visiting every major league baseball stadium in the country—even though we still haven’t converted him from being a Yankees fan!

5 Key Takeaways:

1. The Value of Specialized Education: Joey Mills shared how Towson University’s financial planning concentration gave him both a solid foundation and the flexibility to shift from corporate finance to a more people-focused career.
2. Lifelong Learning Is Essential: Success as a financial advisor requires constant learning—both through formal education and by keeping up with ever-changing financial rules and best practices.
3. Mentorship and Community Matter: Having peers and mentors who’ve followed a similar career trajectory provides invaluable support, insight, and motivation for professional growth.
4. Behavioral Finance Is the Game-Changer: Understanding not just the numbers, but also the psychology behind money decisions—both in clients and oneself—is critical to effective advising.
5. Start Early, Communicate Often: Open family conversations about money and starting good financial habits early—like saving and living below your means—are powerful tools for long-term success.

Join us for this candid conversation as we demystify the career path of a financial advisor and share lessons that can help anyone on their own journey to financial freedom. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and share this episode with anyone who’s passionate about meaningful work, lifelong learning, and living with purpose!

This is Eric Brotman, the host of Don't Retire Graduate, the podcast that asks you what you want to be when you grow up so you can graduate into retirement with purpose and with passion. Welcome to our Diary of a Financial Advisor segment where we interview financial advisors about their professional journeys and their passion for helping others succeed. Today, I'm pleased to be joined by Joey mills. Joey joined BFG Financial Advisors in July 2022 as a financial planning assistant and is in the process of becoming an associate advisor. He graduated from Towson University in 2022 with a degree in Business administration and a concentration in financial planning, and he became a certified financial Planner practitioner in 2024. His claim to fame outside of the office is completing his goal of visiting every major league baseball field in the country, which he did this past season as and while he lives in Orioles country, we still haven't converted him from rooting for the Yankees other than being a Yankee fan. Joey, welcome to Diary of a Financial Advisor.

Thank you, Eric. It's good to be here finally. Happy to be on the show.

Yes. No, I. We. You know, the last episode we did was with Hannah Dennis and she mentioned that there's usually a line around the building. Everyone's so excited to do this, and so I, I know you had to wait your turn and I apologize for making you wait so long. We can do this as often as you'd like.

It has been a very long wait.

It has been a long wait. So let's. Let's start with what Dr. To the financial planning education at Towson, because you are, I believe, the first person to come out of Towson University to join us with that particular background. I mean, we have other. Other Towson alums here, but the. The financial planning concentration was relatively new. So how did you decide that's what you wanted to do?

Honestly, it came out of the blue. It was more so a presentation that the school presented. I had been a corporate finance major and then was presented the opportunity to go into the financial planning track and as I looked into it, discovered that being a financial advisor was more so what I truly wanted to be all along.

Corporate finance sounds boring.

Yes, absolutely.

And financial planning is not boring. In fact, every day is. Is different in a lot of ways. How has, how has your experience so far, the three years that you've spent not only getting the CFP designation but. But here, learning and so forth? How does it compare to what your expectations were going into the field? Is it. Is it what you expected or have there been some surprises?

I would Say, it's a lot of what I expected, but then again, every day brings something new, as you said. So just interactions with clients on a day to day basis can bring anything. You never know what, what you might get every day. So I mean, in that aspect, it's, there's definitely a lot of unknowns.

And how about the, how about the educational piece of it? How about the, the knowledge base required to do what you're, what you're doing and what you're moving into doing? How do you keep up with all of that? Things change so fast.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, the numbers change every year, so you know, you have to stay on top of it. There's a lot of education that goes into it. Towson did a great job of setting that base knowledge with every single one of the classes that, whether that be retirement planning, education, planning, estate planning. But you know that just staying on top of it and continuing to, to educate yourself in every aspect is key.

Now you have the advantage, having arrived here a couple of years ago, of seeing some of your predecessors go through the process that you're going through. And I think back to when we, when we first started the firm 20, almost 25 years ago, and there was no track to run on. There was no career path. There was no example of this is how you do it. And now you have people that you can look at and say, I sort of want to do what he or she is doing. How, how has that been either motivational or challenging for you to see other people going through the, the type of thing that you're looking to do?

No, I think that's absolutely great. You know, there's multiple employees here, Cody, Manny, Kobe, that have all done the same track, I say, of, of being hired into the operations role and then progressing up to the advisor role and always just having them there to bounce ideas off of or just talk of what I'm going through. What I'm feeling is actually just a great support system.

So it's funny that you mentioned Cody and Manny and Kobe because they have a couple things in common. One, they've all been on this before. Two, they've all done webinars for bfg and I don't believe you've done your first webinar.

I have not, no.

So what we're going to need is we're going to need some suggestions in the YouTube chat box here for topics you would like to see Joey present on in a BFG webinar. If we get enough responses, we will be able to make that happen. I think. And you know, Kobe is going to be our finale for the year. I'm interviewing him in two weeks for the show and he just did his first webinar and I'm going to have some fun at his expense. So hopefully people will tune in because it was his first time. First time's scary, you know.

I know. And he made a couple key mistakes, so I gotta, gotta learn from that.

So in, in our, in our industry, there is a, there's a degree of knowledge based, finance based. You know, I like to refer to it as middle school math because believe it or not, this isn't calculus. Most of it is algebra at worst. Right. But then there's a lot of psychology, a lot of behavioral finance, a lot of understanding why people make decisions that they make or why some advice that's being rendered might be challenging to receive. How different has that been maybe than what your expectations were? Because this, you know, life isn't a spreadsheet, right? Life is much messier than that and can be much more challenging than that. So how is the psychology and the behavioral piece of, been surprising to you?

I think a lot of it comes back to just honestly realizing it, recognizing it in yourself. Because as you go through the CFP and you learn all the different biases, there's so many different opinions that can sway your idea of a matter. And just realizing that within yourself and then being able to project that onto the client and helping them learn the same way that you learned it is, is very important.

So do you come from a family that talked about money at the dinner table or where there was open conversation about financial affairs?

Yes. You do?

Yes. And how did that help shape you as a young person?

I mean, my dad was a postal employee. He was a postmaster for 35 years. And since I was a little kid, I don't know, probably eight or nine, he was talking to me about his TSP and his furs pension. And for the longest time I had absolutely no idea what any of that meant or what any of those words or letters could possibly mean. But as I got into the profession, I quickly understood what he had been talking about the whole time. And I think that is a key to where I come from of just. He was a big proponent of saving early and saving, often paying yourself first and then living below your means. So I think just going through that growing up in that family dynamic of, of saving for yourself really helped me in the long run.

I mean, that that is a really rare thing for, for people to talk with their kids about Money, it's an awkward thing. And, and it sounds like it was really not only informative, maybe less informative than, than, than habit forming for you, because, you know, you've now gotten into that same habit and can be on your own wealth building journey along the way. And like anything else, it's not linear, right? It's exponential. And so when you look at the, at the formulas, and again, I'll go back to algebra, you look at the formula for wealth building and it really is, it's, it's so impacted by time. Time is the exponent, time is the thing that multiplies all of this over and over again. And so starting early is a huge benefit. Have you found in working with maybe younger clients that some of them are thinking, oh, we got plenty of time, we don't have to worry about it yet, as opposed to having that same focus that you were fortunate to have when you were young?

Yes, absolutely. And I think a lot of that comes back to, to also conversations I have with peers of my own age, friends, colleagues, anybody that, that I might run into. I feel like a lot of people are so stuck in the mindset of living your life now as compared to looking at the long term picture and trying to save for the future.

Can't you do both?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, you know, I, I, I think it's very sad when people take saving to the level of frugality where they don't live now at all. I also think it's very sad when people go on a spending bender and wind up, you know, in serious debt trouble or with serious problems. You know, I've heard it said that to be young and broke is an inconvenience and to be old and broke is a tragedy. And I think there's some truth to that. So how do you get people to, can you first of all get people to maybe see the light if, if, if we can be that, you know, if we can be that silly to talk about it that way or, or how do you get people to maybe come over to your side of that equation? Is that doable?

I believe so, yes, absolutely. I think a lot of it comes back to how you were raised and the, again, the biases that we talked about, what impacts you or what encourages you to save, how you look at money and how you differentiate what an expense or a savings budget might be. Mm, yeah, I think that you can absolutely overcome the idea of overspending and you know, so not enough people understand the idea of living below your means.

So like you, I Joined this industry very, very young. You know, I was 22 years old and I looked 13, 14. I looked really young. I still have some of the marketing materials from back in the day and they're fun to look at, actually. But a lot of times you're advising people who are 10, 20, 30, 50 years your senior, and that can be extremely challenging. Even if you're able to demonstrate competency. There's a tendency, I think, for people with a hairline like mine to question whether people with a hairline like yours know what they're talking about. How do you overcome that? Because I do think that is a real challenge of being a young professional in a field where experience and wisdom is so valued.

I think a lot of people do value that, that experience level and even question what a younger advisor might be able to offer them. But I think the knowledge and the education is where you can really stand out and prove to yourself that you do understand what you're talking about and just how you can differentiate yourself from, say, an older advisor.

Does it help to have a deep team where you're all working together and you've got. You can bring in the gray hairs if you need to?

Yep, absolutely.

All right, well, as one of the gray hairs, I appreciate that. I, I can't let you off the show without first asking you what you want to be when you grow up because you've never been on the show before and everybody has to come up with that. So. So, Joey, what do you want to be when you grow up?

You know, it's. It's hard to say. Not to be a financial advisor, but, you know, nothing short of every broughtman, that's for sure.

Oh, Lord. All right, well, listen, first of all, that's what you do, not what you want to be, you know, and I do think in this country we spend a lot of time thinking about who we are as what we do. So if, if you haven't given thought to, to really what you want to be, and I don't mean professionally, but, but it's, it's such a valuable exercise to sit and think about who do you want to be when you grow up? Like, what is that going to look like? And it's a changing thing. You don't decide today and then in 50 years wake them and go, see, I told you so. That's not how it works, at least not for me. So last, last question. Why are the Yankees awful all the time?

I mean, I wouldn't say all the time.

Most of the time we're talking about the your lifetime. They've been awful in your lifetime. I remember some good Yankee teams. You weren't around. That's.

That's true.

Joey, thanks for being on the show. I enjoyed the interview and hopefully you'll come back and and won't be won't be quite as as nervous for a first time.

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Eric.

I'd like to thank all of you for listening and watching today. If you enjoy our show, please subscribe so we can continue to be a part of your journey to financial freedom. We'll be back next week with another engaging guest and in two weeks with our next entry in the Diary of a Financial Advisor. We also have big news to share as we shared two weeks ago. Starting in January 2026, Diary of a Financial Advisor will be joining BFG University. We'll be bringing new episodes every other Thursday with current events in the economy, markets and the world. All designed to be timely, entertaining and informative. Go to bfguniversity.com for more information.

For now, this is your host, Eric Brotman reminding you don't retire. Graduate securities offered through Kestra Investment Services, llc. Kestra is member finra, sipc Investment Advisory Services offered through Kestra Advisory Services, llc. Kestra as an affiliate of Kestra is Kestra IS or Kestra as are not affiliated with Brotman Financial or any other entity discussed.