I founded Cornerstone Financial Planning to help you discover your biggest WHY for creating your ideal life by pursuing financial freedom.

My why for financial freedom is simple – I want to spend as much time as possible creating and enjoying experiences with my family while making as much of a positive impact in this world as I possibly can.

This is my ideal life, and when I do the things that lead to spending time with my family or helping people out through real estate or financial planning, I feel good knowing that I’m living in alignment with my values. 

After identifying your Cornerstone Mission, your purpose, we’ll create a tailored, strategic roadmap that aligns with your values and objectives. As your guide, I’ll provide support and accountability throughout the process while you begin to experience what it’s like to live your ideal life now!

My wife, son, and I live in Colorado Springs, CO. We’ve been here for around a year and enjoy it so far. We moved here after spending nearly 4.5 travel-packed years in Germany, my last duty station on active duty with the Army.

Our own journey to create our ideal life brought us here. We are so fortunate to have done most of the right stuff: worked hard, got good educations, got good jobs, lived below our means, invested ~30-50% of our income, and lived debt-free, etc., but I had never considered doing anything outside of the normal full-time job setting until I discovered the financial independence (FI) community around 2015.

It was also around that time that my father-in-law passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 64. Receiving a windfall combined with experiencing the sorrow of losing someone who never retired and got to enjoy some things in life really pushed me to begin thinking deeper about the role of work in our lives and how to be an even better investor.

The FI community was so instrumental in helping shape my new views on life, work, spending money, and so on. And my passion for teaching and research led me to finally start a blog on personal finance and investing called Keep Inve$ting Simple, Stupid!, which is no longer active; trying to figure out what to do with all those great articles I wrote! 😉 But getting deep into the research on personal finance, financial literacy, and the factor investing strategy and then teaching those things at work over lunch, or through leading Financial Peace University classes through my church really ignited my passion to help people improve their financial lives, but even more so, their quality of life. 

Then, while I was on my second deployment to Afghanistan in 2019 there was a breakthrough that really changed my life. I remember the exact moment that it hit me that we had to do something different. I was on a chinook helicopter flying from Kabul to the eastern part of the country to a tiny little outpost while reading The Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins when it hit me, “What the heck am I doing here?!” At that time, my wife was pregnant and back in Germany by herself, and I had just had my request denied to return home early from deployment to be there when my son was born. 

At that moment, my entire perspective on life, priorities, work, money, and ambition all changed, and I knew that I had to do something different.

PS – Long story short, I made it home for the birth of our son! But I swore I’d never put myself in the position of not having control over my life in those big ways ever again.

Fortunately, we were already in a strong position to make such a transition. Over the next ~2.5 years, we began to talk about it and decided to take that big step away from my “safe” job, even after getting promoted to Major.

So in September 2021, I transitioned from active duty to the U.S. Army Reserves, where I continue to serve as a Physical Therapist and began transitioning careers from Physical Therapist to Financial Planner. 

If that’s something that resonates with you, I would love to talk it through with you. This wasn’t an easy decision, and the transition from that last paycheck to my first income as an entrepreneur took quite a while. But man, the journey has been so worth it, and I’ve loved every minute of the time that I now have at home and how normal it is to drop off and pick up my son from preschool and see him throughout the day. 

Since that time, I’ve completed the Chartered Financial Consultant (ChFC) program through the American College of Financial Services (I highly recommend their program!), passed the Certified Financial Planner® exam, and passed the Series 65 exam to be able to launch Cornerstone Financial Planning.

I am currently a Candidate for CFP® certification and working towards fulfilling the experience required to become a CFP® professional. I wanted to go all the way with the best certification and highest level of fiduciary standard available, and the CFP® Board provides that. 

I’m a proud member of the Fee-Only Network, XY Planning Network (even though I can’t be listed until I meet the experience requirement for the CFP® board), and am an Associate Member of NAPFA.

My wife and I have been married for 8 years. We met at work; we’re both Physical Therapists, and enjoyed working together. 

We enjoy hiking, traveling, and simply spending time outdoors and together. We prefer to travel to the mountains and beaches! Our favorite mountains so far are the Canadian Rockies (Banff, Lake Moraine, Jasper), the French Alps (Chamonix/Mont Blanc), The Swiss Alps (gotta check out Interlaken, Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald/Wengen/Murren, and Zermatt isn’t too bad either!), the Lofoten Islands of Norway (all of Norway is so beautiful!), and Slovenia (the Julien Alps).

Fortunately, our son loves the outdoors too, and I have the pleasure of hauling his scrawny little butt up and down so many mountains. On our last trip to Canada, we hiked 74 miles and climbed over 17,000 ft of elevation! 

But beaches are pretty awesome too! Our favorite beaches are Turks and Caicos’ Grace Bay Beach, Malta, and Crete, and perhaps the most beautiful beach/rock formation I’ve ever seen is Marinha Beach in the Algarve region of Portugal.

All the pics on this website are from our travels. We love documenting our trips with thousands and thousands… of pictures.

Aside from outdoor stuff, we enjoy serving our community with our church. When we were younger and more motivated prior to having a kid, we used to wake up early and go run together, and we’ve even both done 3 full marathons, including Boston. But these days, I call any workout a victory, and I celebrate with pizza! 

If you want to know anything else, even if it’s just travel-related, just ask! Thanks for stopping by,