How Capstone is helping the financial services industry solve families’ #1 financial concern—paying for college

By Joe Messinger, CFP®

December 8, 2017

2 min READ

As readers of our Capstone Wealth Partners blog, you know our mission — to end the student loan crisis one family at a time. We are continuously sharing information about paying for college with you, and we help families every day to implement their unique plan. It isn’t something we were originally looking for, but we have been humbled by the requests to speak and contribute our in sights at a number of national conferences and publications on this critical topic.

Most financial advisors get college funding advice and planning all wrong.

But, it’s not their fault. They were never taught how (or why) to plan in the best way possible. The world of college planning has been the victim of a lot of abuse from the insurance industry and needs to stop.

We were frustrated by the struggles the industry was facing in this area, and so Capstone College Partners was born. We are raising the bar in college funding advice by fundamentally changing our industry’s approach.

We help good advisors across the country learn how a fee-for-service, fiduciary approach is the way to truly help families nail college funding. We envision a future where all students graduate with manageable student loan debt without robbing mom and dad’s retirement. We are excited to be at the forefront of this movement.

Financial advisors will be the first to tell you they simply aren’t comfortable giving advice in this area.

Many large national firms actually forbid their advisors from dispensing this kind of advice! Here is the reality though, you wouldn’t buy a home without a realtor. So, why would you buy a college education costing us upwards of $250k per student without a college funding advisor that can ensure you don’t pay more for that education than is absolutely necessary?

Financial advisors are uniquely positioned to help guide families on this journey, yet they have never received the proper training to feel comfortable with the process. A thorough understanding of financial aid needs to include how colleges determine your eligibility for need based grants, merit based scholarships, subsidized student loans, work study programs as well as ensuring you get any and all state and federal tax credits and/or deductions.

We have learned how to properly guide families through this difficult process, and now we want to share that process with other like-minded advisors across the country. We empower financial advisors with the education and tools they need to truly help families make an informed college buying decision – just like we do every day for our private clients at Capstone Wealth Partners.

We’ve cracked the code…

…and developed a unique 6-step process that has helped hundreds of families across the country. Now, we want to make a bigger impact by teaching other financial advisors our innovative College Pre-Approval™ process…and change the way financial advisors approach college funding advice…so American families don’t suffer.

You may notice events in our calendar for financial advisors. We share those with you, so you too can be “in the-know” on our upcoming speaking engagements.