Welcome Dr. J To The Capstone Wealth Partners Team!

By Jason Slone

June 25, 2023

4 min READ

Dr. Jason Slone

Hello! It’s my pleasure to be the newest member of the wonderful team at Capstone Wealth Partners. For my first blog, let me tell you a little bit about me.

I was born and raised in the small town of Shelby, OH, and then went to the College of Wooster as a First-Generation college student, mostly, to be honest, to play baseball and avoid getting a real job. As a First-Gen college student, my family and I didn’t know a thing about how to pay for school so I cobbled together some savings from summer jobs, a merit scholarship from Wooster, and (of course) student loans. 

Among the summer jobs I had, I worked for two different Edward Jones financial advisors, and that’s where I first fell in love with personal finance. I actually planned to become a financial advisor after college, but those plans took a backseat when after graduation my best friend said, “hey, let’s drive to Key West and live on a boat!” That sounded great to me, so off to Key West I went. That was in the summer of 1995, though it sure seems like yesterday.

Eventually, between rum runners, I started thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up and I figured I had two choices: I could become a financial advisor as planned, or I could go to graduate school and become a professor. (Alright, I hear you: baseball player to professor seemed like a stretch play to me, too, but a little magic happened at Wooster along the way. Wooster is one of those famous “40 Colleges That Change Lives,” and though I certainly didn’t start college as what most people would think of as ‘college material,’ I ended up thriving, and after earning Honors on my Senior Thesis, I was encouraged by my faculty mentor to consider graduate school. 

Fast forward back to Key West and thinking life over: I decided to pursue becoming a professor and enrolled in graduate school at The Ohio State University (go Bucks!). 

After completing my MA in 1999 in the field of philosophy of religion (weird, I know, but hey – I enjoy big ideas!) I went on and earned a PhD in 2002 at Western Michigan University. Sadly, between my MA and PhD, I took out a lot of student loans to support myself, eventually racking up over $100,000 in loan principal and interest, which took me years to pay off. Ugh.

After earning my PhD, I taught as a Professor for 3 years at the University of Findlay in Ohio, and 3 more years at Webster University in St. Louis. I also was selected as the Hardigg Lecturer at Dartmouth during this time, in 2006, for the impact my first book made in my field.

By 2007, I had two young sons and teaching wasn’t paying the bills (diapers are expensive!) so I left higher ed and became an Edward Jones Financial Advisor in Columbus, OH. 

After two years as an Edward Jones FA (and not just any years, but 2008-2009, yikes), I was offered a unique professional opportunity to become the academic Dean of a new start-up college, supported by venture capital, that had as its mission trying to help solve the cost problem in higher education. We built an online “community college” that had 2+2 agreements with the flagship university in the top 50 metro cities in the US so that students could get a low-cost Associate’s degree online, while working, and then matriculating into their local flagship University (like Ohio State) and all credits would transfer. It was a great idea (I might be biased) and we thrived for several years. Eventually I was promoted to Associate Vice-President, but for complicated reasons our college was merged with another University and so I left for sunny Georgia to be an Associate Dean at Georgia Southern University near Savannah (yes, the sun and the beach played roles in my decision to take the job).

After 2 years as an Associate Dean, I stepped down from administration and went back to full-time teaching, in part to have more time with my now teen children.

In 2019, with two sons approaching college, I started a small independent financial advisor practice as a “side hustle.” And in an effort to figure out how to pay for my kids’ college, I trained myself up on college financial planning – and one of the things I quickly realized  is that I had done it all wrong! I hate to think of how much money I wasted on student loan payments that could’ve been spent on other things like funding my retirement or buying a beach house in Savannah!

Fortunately, I learned about college financial planning before my kids went to college and so they won’t make the same mistakes I made. My oldest son is now a Sophomore at Georgia Southern where he is majoring in Finance (the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree). I’m thrilled that he chose GSU because the price was right and he knew that it wasn’t wise to overspend on college and take on a pile of debt (for example, to attend an out-of-state public party school with a big time football program, aka “ESPN U”). My youngest son is now a Senior in high school and plans to attend GSU, also, for the same reason. Both will graduate with no debt!

Besides helping my own kids with college planning, I’ve worked since 2019 as an independent college financial consultant, starting with helping family and friends and then branching out from there. At the end of 2022, I had a productive chat with Joe and Ryan at Capstone Wealth Partners and we decided to partner together to expand CWP’s capacity and help more families. So here I am, in my dream job that combines my two loves of higher education and financial planning, and my 25+ years of combined experience in the two fields (NOTE: in addition to a PhD, I also hold the Certified College Financial Consultant (CCFC) designation, the highest in the industry). I used to hold the Series 7 and 66, which enabled me to sell securities, but I no longer hold those licenses because I do not sell financial products. In fact, this is one of the many things that attracted me to working with Capstone, they are a 100% fee-only firm and hold themselves to the highest fiduciary standards when it comes to giving advice to clients.

On a personal note, I still live in the Savannah, GA/Hilton Head, SC area with my fiancee, Krista (also a PhD, who teaches in the Department of English at GSU), our 3 kids, and our rescue dog Stella. When I’m not nerding out about things like the new Student Aid Index, merit aid metrics, the time value of money applied to student loan interest, and other college financial planning topics, you’ll find me playing my guitar, fishing, boating, and laying on the beach.

One last thing: feel free to call me “Dr. J” – all my students do!