E27 - You Don’t Have a Bad Advisor — You Have No Control

Most people think their financial advisor is supposed to make them wealthy.

But that’s not actually the game being played.

In this episode, we break down a hard truth:
 👉 You don’t have a bad advisor.
 👉 You’re just operating inside a system you don’t fully understand.

And that system was never designed to give you control.

We walk through:

• Why advisors get paid the way they do (and how that shapes decisions)
• The difference between performance vs. position
• Why growing your money doesn’t always mean gaining control
• What happens when markets drop or life forces a decision
• How to “follow the money” and see incentives clearly
• Why most financial plans are built backwards

This isn’t about blaming advisors.

It’s about understanding the structure so you can stop outsourcing your thinking.

Because at the end of the day:

Returns are rented. Control is owned.

🔑 KEY TAKEAWAYS

• You are not the product — your assets are
• Advisors are incentivized to keep money under management
• Performance ≠ control
• Most financial plans prioritize the “roof” (investments) before the foundation
• Market-based strategies can limit your options when you need flexibility most
• Financial success starts by understanding incentives and structure
• The goal isn’t better returns — it’s better positioning

Learn more at www.jadenzubal.com | Follow @jadenzubal | Join the *Before the Returns Weekly* newsletter

📩 Questions or ideas? Email: jadenzubal.wealth@gmail.com

⚖️ Disclaimer: This podcast is for educational purposes only. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice. Always consult with a qualified professional before making financial decisions.

Transcript

E27

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I'm gonna say something that a lot of people within the insurance space won't say. You don't have a bad financial advisor. You're just playing a game that you don't understand. And the problem is, the rules of that game were never designed to give you control. They were designed to keep your money inside of a system. So even when things are going well, your net worth is up, and your accounts are growing, you still feel stuck. Because you don't actually control anything. And here's the part most people miss. Your advisor might be doing their job perfectly, and still not helping you build the life you actually want. After this episode, you're going to see financial advice completely different. Now, this is not advice. This is about understanding how the system actually works so you can think for yourself. Hello and welcome to another episode of Before the Returns. I'm your host, Jaden Zuball, and today we will talk about the financial system, financial advisors, what they might be doing well for you, and still not actually solving your problems with. So with that, let's jump into it. So recently, I've been spending time with different coaches and trying to figure out some different approaches to how I do things. I think it's a really healthy thing to do as an entrepreneur, as an individual, as an investor. It's good to have influence from other perspectives and other ideas involved in your world. Now, something that kind of clicked for me, though, is I was going through these different coaching calls and operating with multiple different individuals and companies. Through all of that, I learned, or I had this epiphany that it's not that people are making bad decisions in a lot of cases. They're just operating inside of systems that they don't really understand. And let me share what I mean by that. Well, sometimes when you hire a coach or you think you're hiring a coach, you might be really signing up for a system, and systems aren't bad, but if you're signing up for a system that you don't understand, you may not get the full benefit of it. So on one particular call that I was on recently, I could feel the game being played. I could feel the the context of what was happening and the direction that I was being led down. And while I have no qualms with sales and being pushed into something that we think is a good fit for somebody, because you know, I understand sales. I've spent a lot of time in that world myself. I think what's most important to understand for people is that we need to know what is the ultimate product? Like what is the customer for the company that we're working with? And what is their system designed to actually do for us? So tie that into your financial advisor. And here's what I think many people miss when working with a financial advisor. I would argue that you are not the product, your assets are. What do I mean by that? Well, if you put a million dollars with a financial advisor, they get paid according to what they call assets under management, meaning that million dollars is what they're now managing for you. So they get a percentage of that each year. They get that percentage regardless of whether your money goes up or down. They get it simply because the money is there under management. So the goal, the target is in that case to keep the money under management. Right? One of the ways they can keep the money under management is by hopefully growing that money for you so that you're happy. Because if you're happy, you'll keep it there longer. But in some cases, it doesn't work out that way. And when the market goes down and somebody calls them and says, hey, I want to shift my money, well, the conversation is always time in the market beats timing the market. If they can convince you to stay and hold the position, they keep the assets under management, and the party moves on. They still get their paycheck, everything is fine. I'm not saying this is good or bad. I don't necessarily think that's a bad system. But it's important that you understand the system because the incentive there is to keep the money under management. So this isn't a system built around you controlling your money. This is a system built around the advisor controlling the money, because as long as they control the money, that's what controls their paycheck. Okay, again, this is not an attack on financial advisors. I don't think that space is a bad space. I don't think that the way that advisors get paid is necessarily a bad thing. I just think that we need to understand that very clearly when we go into it. Because your financial advisor is not managing your life, they're managing a bucket of money. Okay? So they're managing this bucket of money, and their goal is to grow that money. Doesn't always work that way. Hopefully, most of the time it does. But again, the intent is keep the money here, keep it growing in this bucket, because that's what's that's what's tied to the paycheck. So watch what happens when the market drops 30%, or you lose income, or a deal shows up that you want to invest in. In those scenarios, you call your advisor and you say, Hey, I need money for XYZ. Well, depending on the advisor you're talking to, first thing they're gonna understand is that by you removing that money, it impacts their paycheck. So there's not an incentive there to tell you, yes, remove this money. However, a good advisor will still walk you through the options, help you understand what you can and cannot do and what the risk of each scenario is and what the outcomes of those scenarios will be. Because in the end, when you're working in, call it a typical financial strategy market-based approach, you take the risk, they create and they hold the structure. So let's talk about a simple model for a moment. We'll talk about performance versus position. Performance is how fast the car goes, right? Am I driving a Toyota Corolla or am I driving a Ferrari? Position is whether you have the keys or not. So it doesn't matter how fast the car goes if you can't start it. So in financial planning, performance is equal to your advisor because different advisors might perform differently. They're going to give you different outcomes. Some are better than others, right? But ultimately, it's like jumping in a Toyota Corolla, jumping in a van, in a tank, in a Ferrari, right? There's all these little differences out there in performance. But what you need is position. You need the keys to be able to control the outcomes that you actually get. Because if we're just focused on speed, we're missing the part of do we actually control the vehicle or not? And here's why I think that advice might fail for us in life. Meaning the advice of throw your money in the market, give the control over, hand the keys over to the advisor, and let them run the car for you. So we have a financial foundation. Our financial foundation is made up of control, liquidity, and things that transfer risk away from us and on to somebody else. Above that, we might have the framing of our home. Well, in a financial aspect, the framing might equal the cash flow. So money coming into your life that enables your lifestyle. It enables you to do the things that you want to do on a day-to-day basis. It also enables you to grow and build wealth. Without cash flow, we have nothing. We don't have a start. We've got to at least have a start to build wealth. Now, the roof of this house will be our investments. These are all the extras, the things that we're adding to as we go along. You don't put the roof of the house on first. You have to first build the foundation, build the walls, roof comes next. And in a lot of cases, financial advisors might be building you a roof on top of dirt. We forgot the foundation and we forgot the walls. So let's talk a real world example. I have a client who recently, within the last few months we spoke, a little over a year ago, she had about$800,000 in a particular brokerage account. She has a couple different accounts, a few things going on. In this one that we're talking about today, there was about$800,000. Fast forward nine months later, the account had dropped to a little over$600,000. Now, we were making some decisions on some things she wanted to do, and we ended up deciding to let that sit for a minute. We spoke a month later, it had dropped again. Now, in her case, this wasn't the end of the world because she has time. So time is on her side here. She's got about 10 years before she needs to be able to use that money for anything. And because we've got time, we don't have to take quick action on that. We don't have to move the money around. But there's a big sense of loss that she's now experiencing that she has to hang on to for the next at least a couple of years to recover from that moment. And it means she can't do anything else with that money. There is some lost opportunity there of some other things that she may have wanted to do. Again, the reason this didn't become a devastating issue is because time is still playing its role. We still have time to recover. We don't have that in every scenario. So these type of conversations be can become scenario dependent. But in the end, the way I look at that is for me personally, I don't want to put myself in that position ever. I don't want to be in a position where I have no choice but to wait out a correction or to weigh out this lost opportunity that I'm now experiencing. And that's why I don't want to hand the keys over to my financial advisor, even if my financial advisor knows what they're doing and they can do a great job. So something that I really firmly believe is if we want to understand financial success or how to create it for ourselves, something I would offer up as a way for you to think about this is a very simple, simple statement. But follow the money. Okay, what do I mean by follow the money? Whenever you go to make an investment, whenever you go to put money into anything, whether it's a brokerage account, buying real estate, a syndication, somebody else's business, whatever you decide you want to put money into, follow the money. Who gets paid? How do they get paid? What's the incentive? Why are they doing what they're doing? Again, keep in mind it's not bad for people to get paid. If they're adding real value to the picture, they should get paid. And in some you know, scenarios, they should get paid very well because they're adding value and you're making more money because of it. But you still want to understand how they get paid. What is the incentive for them to, what is the thing that they should do for you in order for them to get paid, and make sure that aligns with your goals. So again, this is not about firing your financial advisor. It's just simply about understanding the game that is being played so that you can stop outsourcing your thinking. Because control beats returns. So if this episode resonated with you, go back and watch the episode on financial pressure, because that's where most people make these type of decisions wrong. And as always, like, share, and subscribe, and we'll talk to you on the next episode.