Welcome to The Invested Counsel

Welcome to the first post of The Invested Counsel—thoughts about financial planning for young lawyers.

I’m Zach Zwillinger. I’m a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER®, and the founder of ZZ Planning, a flat-fee, comprehensive financial planning firm for lawyers in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. Before becoming a financial planner, I was a practicing litigator for more than 12 years. I live in New York with my wife and two daughters.

Since this is the first post, I am going to try to give you a sense of what to expect from The Invested Counsel.

What I hope you get out of The Invested Counsel

I think everyone needs a financial plan. You don’t necessarily need a written plan, or need to use specific software, or even hire a financial planner (though you may want one, and if you do, you should hire me). But you do need a plan for your money that is well-considered in light of all of the complexities of the law and the economy and your personal circumstances and everything else.

To do it right, it takes a lot of work. There is a lot to learn, and a lot to think about, when developing a financial plan. And it isn’t the sort of thing where you can just come up with a plan, and move on. It will be something you’ll be thinking about, and working on, for pretty much the rest of your life.

But it can be enormously rewarding, in ways that go far beyond having more money. This will likely become obvious, but I find financial planning utterly fascinating. The scope of the field is enormous. Some parts of it concern the global economy. And some parts of it concern what it means to live a good life. That breadth is one of the reasons I left the law to become a financial planner.

Moreover, you need a financial plan because money is important, and you want to have control over your money. Having control over your money can go a long way towards having control over your life.

The main goal of this newsletter is to help you deal with your money, whether or not you are a client of ZZ Planning. But I also hope to show how complex and important and interesting financial planning can be.

What I hope to get out of The Invested Counsel

In addition to being useful for you, I hope to get something out writing this newsletter too.

Convince you to become a client. This shouldn’t surprise you, but by writing this newsletter, I am trying to get clients. I want some of you to hire me to be your financial planner. And if you are a lawyer and are looking for a financial planner, you should hire me. I’m great.

If you want to talk, reach out and we’ll set up a meeting. I can talk over zoom, or in person in midtown Manhattan.

Enjoy writing this newsletter. I hope to keep writing this newsletter for a while. The only way I’m going to do that is if I enjoy doing it. As a result, the tone is going to be somewhat informal, and there may be some things that I find at least a little bit amusing. It will be funny to the same extent LaCroix is flavored. If you don’t enjoy it, you can stop reading.

The scope of The Invested Counsel

I have three guiding principles for this newsletter. To the extent that I stray from these principles, that’s because I am the unitary executive, and can do what I want.

Focus on young lawyers. My goal is to write this for a very specific audience—young lawyers. That’s because I am/was young, and I am/was a lawyer. Most of the financial planning advice that I’ll provide will apply generally to most people. But there will be some things that are specific to lawyers (e.g., the peculiarities of the possible legal career paths) that won’t necessarily speak to a more general audience. Also, since I’ll be writing with lawyers in mind, some things will make sense only to lawyers, or may only be of interest to lawyers.

Focus on financial planning. My focus will be writing posts that are useful or interesting from a financial planning perspective. Some will be pretty concrete (e.g., you should do this, or you should not do that, . . . ), and some may be more abstract or philosophical (e.g., how should you think about your money, your time, your career, . . .). But the common thread will generally be money and financial planning.

No AI. I am familiar with AI. I know it is important. But I don’t have much interest writing about AI, or thinking about AI any more than I need to. In any event, I think saw someone else writing about it somewhere.

***

That’s it for now. Have a wonderful week.