JOHN MOAKLER, CFP, CLU, Financial Planner & Bestselling Author, "Heal Thy Wealth®"
JOHN MOAKLER
Financial planning exclusively for Doctors, Dentists, and Business Owners. Speaker, bestselling author of Heal Thy Wealth®
"Helping Doctors, Dentists & Entrepreneurs Retire Healthier, Wealthier & Happier"
Financial Planner and best-selling Author, John Moakler, helps Doctors, Dentists and Business Owners retire healthier, wealthier and happier. His vision is that every medical professional and business owner in Canada will take as much care of their own financial health as they do of their patients, clients and customers.
As President and Senior Executive Financial Planner at Moakler Wealth Management, John has earned a stellar reputation for developing customized, targeted, written Financial Treatment Plans that lay out the steps needed to “heal” clients’ wealth. The healing aspect is so crucial to John’s approach that he used it to name his best-selling book: Heal Thy Wealth.
After obtaining a Bachelor of Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, John spent the next eighteen years working in the high-tech industry. After he successfully sold his software start-up to IBM for $76-million he turned to the financial services industry for some advice and guidance on how to manage and protect HIS wealth.
He was unimpressed with what he describes as, “Inadequate, cookie-cutter financial advice, conflicts of interest and lack of choice. A lot of people call themselves financial planners but most don’t have a clue about what they’re doing; a good grasp of the unique opportunities available to medical professionals and business owners; a strategy for real estate agents and developers and anyone else with a huge tax or estate planning problem; and, don’t recognize how much of their clients’ hard-earned money they have donated to the CRA.”
Rather than just complain about it, John went back to school in 2009 and achieved both his Certified Financial Planner® (CFP) and Chartered Life Underwriter (CLU) designations shortly thereafter. Since then he has refined and proven his approach including how business owners pay themselves. For example, John believes that, regardless of sector, business owners should try to avoid paying themselves a T4 salary. He is also passionate about managing risk by having the right insurance policies in place.
“My education opened my eyes to true financial planning. When people see what we do, especially our proprietary financial planning tools, they are blown away,” he adds. Clients like business owners Bobby and Carol often say, “John knows what he is talking about, delivers what he promises and knows us better than our accountant.”
Until they started working with John, Bobby and Carol were paying way too much in personal and corporate taxes. Although they had risk management products in place, they did not know if the coverage was adequate. Moreover, their accountant had recommended they prioritize paying down their mortgage to the detriment of planning and savings.
Among other things John corrected how Bobby and Carol were paying themselves which reduced their personal taxes and moved some of their personal expenses into the corporation. He also jettisoned the plan to rapidly pay down the mortgage – until John got involved the couple were paying thirty cents on the dollar in personal taxes to pay down a mortgage that was only costing them four cents on the dollar.
Clients Dr. Susan and John Smith were paying for nine different life, disability and critical illness insurance policies. John discovered that seven of these policies had design flaws. This resulted in overpaying premiums by $13,400 - over 15 years this resulted in a $215,000 overpayment!
John changed how and when the couple paid their policy premiums which resulted in savings of $13,400 annually and redesigned their key life insurance which freed up an extra $90,000 a year in cash flow. He also reduced the couple’s personal and corporate taxes by thousands of dollars each year by changing the way they paid themselves.
Clients Dr. Ravi and Julia Jones wanted to purchase rental real estate. Their accountant recommended the couple withdraw money personally from their corporation to do so. This meant that only sixty cents on the dollar was working on their behalf; taxes gobbled up the other forty cents. On John’s recommendation Dr. Ravi and Julia hired a new accountant and began purchasing rental real estate through a unique structure that gave them access to ninety-nine, rather than sixty cents on the dollar.
Amid the COVID 19 pandemic, John migrated his popular, information-rich MasterClass for Business Owners – along with his seminars for Doctors and Dentists - online. Clients and their friends and relatives are looking forward, post-pandemic, to resuming John’s popular dinner seminars, for which there is usually a long waiting list. The MasterClass – How You, As a Doctor, Dentist & Business Owner, Can Have a Guaranteed Paycheque, Protect You & Your Family And Live Your Dream Retirement – is available free of charge by clicking here.
Clients Dr. Bruce and his wife, Karen, attended one of John’s popular “Keeping The Cottage in The Family” seminars and liked what they heard. John followed his SMART Systematic Framework™ to create their written financial plan. This not only answered all of their questions about their current pension plans it led to the implementation of the SECURE Retirement Paycheque™. Finally, John followed the SPECIAL Future Formula™ to address the couple’s concerns about keeping the cottage in the family in the most tax-preferred way. “We calculated that we saved over $500,000 in estate taxes by implementing The Bulletproof Financial & Retirement Plan™,” Dr. Bruce says. Inasmuch as his work product is so time-consuming to produce John only brings on about 15-20 new clients each year.
“I’m not here to sell products. I am here to provide timely, relevant and targeted information,” the Wealth Advisor explains. “I am humbled to say it is a model that works and one that I license to other financial planners who also help THEIR clients retire healthier, wealthier and happier.” He markets the program under the banner of The Wealthy Entrepreneur®.
Up Close & Personal
John has received many awards in his career, including Financial Planner of the Year and the President’s Award for Financial Planning.
Industry colleagues often approach him to co-author financial planning articles for their professional associations. Please see linked example: https://www.oralhealthgroup.com/features/estate-planning-for-dentists/. Additionally, members of the media, including ABC, CBC’s The National, NBC and Morningstar consider John a subject matter expert and often ask him to comment on a wide variety of financial planning topics.
In terms of giving back, John is the current co-Chair of the Advocis membership committee and has refereed elite indoor volleyball matches in eight of the ten provinces. While refereeing sitting volleyball at the 2017 Invictus Games in Toronto, John had the honour of meeting Prince Harry. In his spare time, he enjoys gardening, travel, and shopping.
All three of his kids are university educated. His eldest daughter is Manager of Best Practices for Individual Insurance Operations at a large insurance company. His middle daughter is an OPP officer and his son is a gifted athlete who received a full scholarship for his undergraduate degree in Kentucky and is currently pursuing his Master’s degree in Ohio. “I’m so proud of them all. For getting such great educations and for creating such great careers. With some proper planning, my kids will retire healthier, wealthier and happier.”
The Wealth Advisor’s commitment to improving financial outcomes for high net worth individuals was inspired by his personal battle with cancer, osteosarcoma - the same cancer Terry Fox had. “Imagine how difficult it would have been to go through all of the chemotherapy, surgeries, appointments and recovery if I also had to worry about paying the bills. That’s my inspiration and the “why” that underpins everything I do.”
Check out his video, “I $urvived Cancer Financially. Can You?” https://youtu.be/Dne0Kjg8FIU
Suzen Fromstein is the author of Suits and Ladders, Ten Proven Ways to Keep Your Job Safe - with a few jokes thrown in. Suits and Ladders was an Amazon Best Selling Book in the Career Guides Category.
John Moakler, BMath, CFP, CLU, CSC
President & Senior Executive Financial Planner
john@moaklerwealthmanagement.com