How A Financial Security Professional Built His Nearly $2 Billion Practice

Name: Vincent D’Addona

Firm: Strategies for Wealth

Location: Lido Beach, New York

Total Value of Policies: $1.9 billion

Fintech Zoom Rankings: America’s Top Financial Security Professionals

Background: D’Addona, 64, studied biochemistry at Cornell where he also took business and economics courses before going into financial sales in the 1970s. It was a tough decade for markets and a difficult job market for someone looking to get into financial services, so D’Addona chose to get into the insurance business as “a temporary stomping ground” but “it just turned out I happen to be really good at it.”

He credits his background in studying science with an ability to evaluate empirical evidence. “When you study a hard science, you learn how to think and solve problems,” he adds. “That allows me to communicate with clients effectively.”

Investment Philosophy/Strategy: While his biggest practice is estate planning and life insurance, D’Addona says he likes to do “academic-based investing.”

“Everything we do is factor investing,” he says of his approach. “We know equities outperform fixed income, small outperforms large, value outperforms growth, profitable outperforms not-profitable and we know that momentum exists, those are all factors.”

His portfolio mix has that ethos embedded but also focuses deeply on rebalancing, a challenge when the market plunged last March and he had to calm down a panicking client to keep them from selling.

As for his major product, insurance, he sees life insurance as a fixed income equivalent that behaves similarly but without volatility. That being said he acknowledges that the death benefit is a huge part of life insurance as the only product of its kind.

Competitive Edge: Cultivating respect in his industry has been a major differentiator for D’Addona with the vast majority of his new clients coming from other professionals, such as accountants and attorneys.

“Above all, I know my trade really well. I know how to communicate estate planning and life insurance concepts in a way that business owners and real estate investors can understand,” he adds.

Best Advice: The best advice D’Addona had received and now passes on to younger colleagues is not to lie to managers. You can’t be coached if you are not being honest and the industry is full of willing mentors, he adds.

Biggest Challenge: The uncertainty around changes to the tax code has been a challenge for D’Addona and his clients. “Nobody knows what the estate tax law or the income tax law is going to look like,” he says amidst competing proposals from various factions of Congress and the White House. While it is easy to focus on the current uncertainty, he says that every time there are changes to the tax code, there is a period of limbo.

This uncertainty is also an advantage, according to D’Addona, because those with previous experience in these environments can lean on that knowledge to plan ahead. He is a bit pessimistic about the impending tax changes because he feels many of the proposals are too burdensome of business owners as, in his view, many politicians don’t know what it takes to run a business.

Mentors: In a speech he gave when he was inducted into the National Association of Estate Planners and Counselors hall of fame, D’Addona preached the importance of mentorship. Early in his career at The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, William Broadbent was a mentor. More recently, he says estate planning attorney Richard Oshins has been helpful. He also mentioned his colleagues Ron Rosbruch and Jerry Harnick as significant influences.

Lessons Learned: In a career spanning four decades, D’Addona has learned that “if you are not continuing to grow and develop, you end up festering and dying.” This has led him to spend his career learning “what’s next” from business transition issues to dealing with senior citizens.

“You can’t sit on your laurels and think you know it all, you’ve got to always be growing and developing in order to continue to provide value to the people that you care about,” he says.

Biggest Client Misunderstanding: Clients still have trouble understanding the life insurance product and its application. He also thinks that life expectancy is misunderstood as many of the metrics already factor in shorter life spans from past generations when current and future generations are set to live longer.

Investment Outlook: While no one knows when the next 20% correction may hit the stock market, D’Addona stresses that the next 100% move will inevitably be upwards. He avoids doing market timing, track record investing or security selections, saying those types of strategies are gambling and speculating.

“It’s physically impossible to know what tomorrow is going to bring in the market because it’s the news that changes markets and we don’t know what the news will be,” D’Addona says. “You have to be invested for the long term and manage risk so you don’t have a heart attack if your account goes up and down, which is what it does.”

What Keeps You Up at Night: D’Addona is kept up by the many hats he wears from president of a trade organization which is currently in the midst of a merger, too part-owner of a fintech company along with his work at Strategies for Wealth.

Favorite Book/Movie: A self-described socialist when he got out of college, the book “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand changed how D’Addona viewed the world and led to his veneration for individualism and capitalism.