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Larry Sprung

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Advisor Larry Sprung’s Not-So-Secret Marketing Weapon: Joy

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Larry Sprung, founder of Mitlin Financial, the only Carson Partners firm in the New York metro area, is notable for leading-edge branding and marketing campaigns for his practice.

Now he’s come up with a new wrinkle: not just emblazoning his firm’s slogan on shirts but amplifying it with a QR code that, with a smartphone, brings folks directly to his podcast, “Mitlin Money Mindset.”

“What did you do today that brought you joy?” is his trademarked slogan, and the question rarely fails to attract attention from passersby.

“People comment on it. They really love that phrase. They take pictures. We’ve had so much great feedback from this saying,” enthuses Sprung in an interview with ThinkAdvisor.

Another new promotional connection is Sprung’s book that incorporates the joyfulness theme: “Financial Planning Made Personal: How to Create Joy and the Mindset for Success” (Mitlin, April 2023).

All proceeds go to the Keith Milano Memorial Fund at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a fund created in memory of Sprung’s brother-in-law.

The book covers accumulating and preserving retirement savings in 205 pages.

In the interview, the certified financial planner, a 2022 ThinkAdvisor LUMINARIES award finalist for thought leadership and education, discusses how to motivate young people to start saving early for retirement.

Further, he cautions about making large investments in mutual funds, which will trigger “a challenge when [the investors] retire because all [that] income is going to be taxable,” as he notes.

Mitlin Financial serves 140 families with investable assets from $50,000 to over $5 million.

Notching 25 years in financial services, Sprung opened his own firm in 2004, in Hauppauge, New York, on Long Island, after working at Bank of America’s investment banking arm and at Salomon Smith Barney.

In the interview, he explains how providing a second opinion can mean acquiring new clients. His method: finding “some minor thing [in portfolios] that could lead to major improvement,” he says.

Another way Sprung expands his client base is through his branding and marketing strategies.

For example, he started gathering client testimonials only three months after the Securities and Exchange Commission’s revamped advertising and marketing rule, which permitted advisors to do so, went into effect in May 2022.

The firm now has about 15 Google client testimonials, which typically have brought in new clients.

ThinkAdvisor recently interviewed Sprung, who was speaking from his office in Hauppauge.

The question arose: What does he do that brings him joy? Answer: He retains multigenerational clients; for instance, one family that started with a couple he’d worked with for 23 years.

Even after the husband’s death seven years ago and the wife’s passing last December, their three sons remain Mitlin clients.

“Usually when Mom and Dad go, the kids scatter in all different directions,” Sprung says. “But all three brothers continue to work with me. That [type of] opportunity brings me a lot of joy.”

Here are excerpts from our conversation:

THINKADVISOR: The subtitle of your book, “Financial Planning Made Personal: How to Create Joy and the Mindset for Success,” shows that you consider feeling joyful an important component of life. But why did you trademark your slogan, “What did you do today that brought you joy?”

LARRY SPRUNG: It was a thought-provoking question, and we wanted to protect it as an asset of our organization. We trademarked it about a year or two ago. It started out as the tagline for my podcast.

I have it printed on many shirts. When I’m walking through the airport or around town, people comment on it. They take pictures.

They really love that phrase.

In fact, we’ve had so much great feedback on this saying that I ended up putting a [smartphone] QR code [for it] on the back of the shirts that takes you right to my podcast.

Has the slogan brought you any new business?

I don’t know if it has.

Well, indirectly, it could have.

Correct. Our branding and marketing have certainly brought us many new clients over the last 12 to 24 months.

In your book, you talk about giving second opinions, which you like to call “a discussion of minor adjustments.” Please explain.

If they have an advisor, most people are set up in a pretty good way. But we find that there are always some minor things that could lead to major improvement.

How do your second-opinion meetings come about?

From our existing client families, we get introductions — people who are kind of exploring. So we offer them the opportunity for a second opinion.

Also, there are people I meet through my daily activities that might say something about their investments or advisor.

I’ll take the opportunity to say, “We’ll be happy to offer a second opinion — to take a look at what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.”

We tell them that we can do a review, and if what we say makes sense, we can potentially work together. If it doesn’t, then we’ll part as friends.

Sometimes we’ll just confirm that what they’re doing has put them in a good spot.

What are some investments in a portfolio that might need minor adjustments?

A lot of families do a great job of saving, but in many cases, they have a lot of funds in qualified money, especially IRA pretax money. That’s going to cause a challenge when they retire because then all that income is going to be taxable.

Sometimes they may be invested in mutual funds. If you’re in a high-income tax bracket and own mutual funds, there are a couple of things you have to be aware of.

Such as?

One is that the mutual fund basically dictates when there are going to be distributions [which will generate a taxable capital gain]. You have no control over that [timing]. They control how much the capital gain is going to be as well.

The second thing is that mutual funds will make distributions toward the end of the year, typically in the fourth quarter.

Consequently, we’ve seen families who made large investments into one or more mutual funds in September or October who, when they got their 1099s at the end of the year, found they had these huge taxable distributions in the form of capital gains — but maybe they’ve owned the fund for only two or three months.

How did that happen?

It doesn’t matter if they issue a capital gain in November and you bought the fund in January or October. You’re getting that capital gain even though you owned the fund for only, maybe, a month.

So you have to be very careful: If you’re going to purchase mutual funds, it’s important to know whether a capital gain is being distributed by that fund and when they normally distribute.

You don’t want to buy it and then a week later get hit with a capital gain.

[I’ll note that] we typically don’t use mutual funds; we use ETFs and individual securities, which are far more tax efficient than mutual funds.

You do say in your book: “Many times people in higher tax brackets are better off being in individual stocks and ETFs rather than mutual funds” because of mutual funds’ fees and expense ratios. Please elaborate on the expense ratio aspect.

People [invested in mutual funds often] don’t have a true sense of what their real cost is. [Clients] deserve to understand how they’re being charged and how much they’re being charged.

Please cite a real-life example.

We were working with a family that had assets at a large bank brokerage. When they saw our fee — which varies based on assets and the work we’re doing — they thought we were expensive. I asked what they were paying, and they said 1%.

But when we looked [closely] at the accounts they had, they were paying an advisory fee of 1% but on top of that, they had a portfolio of mutual funds where the average expense ratio was also 1%.

So they were paying [a total of] 2%. But that was never disclosed to them.

Families need to have full transparency and to understand [exactly] how much they’re paying.

“The more time you have before retirement when you begin planning, the better,” you write. How do you motivate people in their 20s to start saving for retirement? They’re likely not thinking that far ahead.

I talk about compound interest. It’s very important and very compelling.

When you’re in your 20s, you think you have no money to invest and decide to wait till your income is higher.

But that kind of rationale doesn’t work because when your income is higher, you may own a house, have a significant other and kids. So you have more pulls on that money.

But at age 20, if you start putting $1,000 a year in [a retirement account] and increase that a little bit through age 45, you’ll have two million bucks. We show people that.

The important piece is to start now because that compounding effect is going to be hugely beneficial.

We have some very young folks in their early to mid-20s that are pumping a lot of money into retirement accounts. They’re setting themselves up to have a very bright future.

What about people whose employers don’t offer a 401(k) plan?

They can set up a SIMPLE IRA or a Simplified Employee Pension Plan or use a traditional IRA and basically accomplish the same goal.

I think people look at things backwards: We pay everybody else, and whatever is left at the end of the month, is for us.

But we’re the most important person in our own lives, and we should be paying ourselves first — whether that’s putting money into a retirement plan and/or an emergency fund.

There should be a percentage of our income that we’re pulling out to pay ourselves first and then use the rest to pay bills.

What do you think of “cash stuffing” — a way to budget by putting cash in various envelopes assigned to categories, like “Rent,” “Groceries,” “Entertainment” and so on?

It’s an old method that has kind of resurfaced because TikTok shed light on it, and some influencers have been promoting it there. So it started trending among young folks.

It’s an OK methodology. I just don’t think most people have cash on hand these days to really follow it to a “T.”

But it’s viable. My father-in-law uses it in a modified way when he visits Las Vegas.

My final question: What did you do today that brought you joy?

I love talking about my book. So you made my day, Jane!

(Pictured: Larry Sprung)


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