Meet the Team: Zach Bennedsen
Yeske Buie is pleased to have Zach Bennedsen join our team as a Financial Planning Resident. Zach started with the team in July and has been going through Yeske Buie’s intensive training program nicknamed, Boot Camp. The emphasis on hard work is nothing new to Zach who was an active student at Virginia Tech. Zach graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Finance where he completed the CFP® Certification Education Track and also earned a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish. He served as Vice President of the University’s FPA Chapter in his senior year and was a member of the Spanish Honor Society. Prior to Yeske Buie, Zach served as an intern at SageBroadview Financial Planning in Morristown, New Jersey. His brief stay affirmed his love for financial planning and assured him he had found the right profession. He is captivated by the unique blend of personal skills and technical knowledge that financial planning requires. In this edition of Meet the Team, Zach shares moments from his time at Yeske Buie thus far as well as some goals he has as a Financial Planning Resident.
In your role as Financial Planning Resident, how do you assist Yeske Buie’s Clients?
As a Financial Planning Resident at Yeske Buie, my main role is to act as support for the rest of the Financial Planning team. I help create many of the reports that Clients see on their private pages, take notes during meetings, and generally help the team ensure the Client’s financial planning needs are met.
What has been the most impactful project you’ve accomplished or worked on thus far?
With the departure of Jen Hicks, the addition of two new residents, and Lauren Stansell’s move to the San Francisco office, Yeske Buie had to shuffle a lot of responsibilities around in the past few months. I worked on a project that helped us efficiently reassign this work based on the newest iteration of our team so we can be efficient in serving our Clients. We initially thought this project would take more than a week to complete, but I was able to manipulate excel in such a way that the whole project took a fraction of the time expected. I was particularly proud of my work on this project, as no one else on the team had come up with the idea I used to streamline our process. In the future, I hope to find more opportunities to make Yeske Buie more efficient in serving our Clients.
What aspect of Financial Planning intrigues you the most and why?
For me, it’s the blend of technical skills and interpersonal skills that are required to be a great Financial Planner. You need to be a problem solver while never forgetting that those problems belong to actual people. Being able to address both sides of this coin is what really intrigues me about the profession. At Yeske Buie, I think we do a great job at being aware of this. When you combine an emphasis on Evidence Based Financial Planning® with a worldview like Client Big, you are naturally and elegantly mixing the technical with the interpersonal.
What is your first memory of Financial Planning?
What first comes to mind is a Money Quotient exercise I recently completed, which asked about my first money memory. When I was around eight years old, I began saving for an electric guitar. After a couple months of saving, I grew impatient and decided to buy a different, cheaper guitar. This guitar turned out to be of . . . subpar quality, to put it nicely. I had to start saving all over again, and eventually purchased the guitar I had originally wanted. Through this experience I learned the value of saving towards your goals. That value doesn’t really change whether the thing you’re saving for is a guitar or your retirement nest egg. It’s all about forgoing present consumption for future reward.
What Yeske Buie worldview aligns with you most and why?
Currently, I have to go with Learn Big. Right now in my new role as a Financial Planning Resident at Yeske Buie, I am in a constant state of learning. Between training sessions, studying for the CFP® Exam, and adjusting to life in a new city, I’m being hit with information on all fronts. Not a day goes by where I don’t leave the office with a little more knowledge than I came in with.
What impact do you hope to make at Yeske Buie and in the Financial Planning profession?
I hope to graduate from Yeske Buie and leave behind a well-established Residency Program. While the program already has a strong base, it is still growing and changing. I am excited about the opportunity to help shape the program for future residents. In particular, I am excited about helping the next batch of residents grow. Russell, Cody, and Camille have been amazing resources thus far, and I hope to pay forward all of their help. As for myself as a professional, I hope that my time here prepares me for my next steps as a Financial Planner – whatever those might be!
What is one of your Live Big® goals?
Like many of the other members of the Yeske Buie staff, I absolutely love to travel. One of my Live Big goals is to visit every continent, save Antarctica. So far, I’m only at two (North America and Europe) but I’m hoping to travel to Chile or Argentina in the next couple of years. Additionally, I’d love to take a road trip across the United States, as there is so much of our country that I have yet to see.