Chris Kowalik: Simplifying Retirement Education

In this episode of American Dreams, we sit down with Chris Kowalik, founder and CEO of ProFeds, to discuss her inspiring journey from serving as a Marine Corps Arabic linguist to becoming a leader in retirement education for federal employees. Chris shares her insights on simplifying complex government benefits, empowering federal workers to make informed financial decisions, and bridging the gap between federal employees and financial professionals.

 

Interview Transcript:

Alan Olsen

Welcome to American Dreams, I’m here today with Chris Kowalik, Chris welcome to today’s show. Thank you so much, Chris. I’m excited to have you today. You have very unique background, and for the listeners, why don’t we start with you know, going through your path in life, how’d you get to where you are today?

Chris Kowalik

Yeah, so I’m originally from Kansas City, and I grew up here. I was very lucky after time away from Kansas City to be able to move back last year, like I said, I grew up here, and so I graduated high school when I was 17. I joined the Marine Corps at that point, and I had the very distinct honor of being able to become an Arabic linguist and signals intelligence analyst in the Marine Corps. So essentially a translator helping to take that language and distill it down into usable Intel for our commanders. And then eventually my time in the Marine Corps came to an end, and I started the company that I have today.

Alan Olsen

What inspired you to move into the company that you started?

Chris Kowalik

So when I got out of the Marine Corps, I started working with a financial planning company who focused on serving those in the military. And I loved it, because I got to be around Marines and other service members all day long and help them to prepare for retirement, or whatever that future really looked like for them. And I loved the audience that I was with, but I also knew that there was another group that needed some help too, and that is the group of federal workers that really surrounds the Department of Defense and all these other organizations within the United States government, because those people have benefits just as complex as those in the military, that they Need some help as well.

Alan Olsen

When you’re looking at retirement today, there’s a lot of people just kind of trying to, with a certainty, predict the future. And how do you, how do you begin with the spectrum clients coming on and saying, you know, let’s, let’s get a good foundation in place.

Chris Kowalik

a lot of times it just starts with understanding the baseline of where they are and ultimately, what it is that they want. Not everybody wants a lot of money in retirement. What they want is for that money to support the lifestyle that they’re hoping for, so that they can enjoy their family and whether it’s travel, move to a new home, whatever that might look like for them, so helping them to kind of paint those pictures in their own head, and then putting the finances to work to make that happen. So

Alan Olsen

Chris, when you work with people, do you like to work with organizations or just on an individual basis?

Chris Kowalik

We really work with two different sides of the house. We work with federal employees directly. So we provide retirement training to the federal employees, and then we also work with financial professionals who have chosen to specialize their practice to work with this group. So there are a lot of really unique benefits and some complexities with those benefits that a financial professional without additional education than what they would normally have through their normal licensing, they wouldn’t know how to provide the best guidance for federal employees without that training. And so being able to pair the federal employees who have those complexities with the financial professionals who understand what those complexities are and how they play out in real life when it comes to money, being able to pair those two together really makes for a great pairing, because both sides understand that there’s complexity that they’re trying to solve.

Alan Olsen

So are you local or in the Overland Park or Kansas City area, or do you are you outside?

Chris Kowalik

We do have a financial professional here in the Kansas City area, but we are nationwide. In fact, I would say we’re worldwide. We do training in Germany, Korea as well, through federal agencies. So that’s that’s a neat aspect of the work that we get to do.

Alan Olsen

Oh my goodness, how do you tell me the inspiration behind getting this started?

Chris Kowalik

So when I was an Arabic linguist, I never thought in a million years that that would translate directly into the work that I’m doing right now, but if I look back at the work that I did, it was to take a language that most Marines didn’t understand and distill it down and simplify it into intel that our commanders on the air and land and sea could use to better inform our troops on the battlefield. And although today I don’t translate Arabic to English anymore, I translate complex government regulations to English so that people can really understand what they’re looking at. The end result is the same that we’re allowing Intel to inform impact if we can focus on that and say, what education do I need to have so that I better understand the decisions that I’m making, then people feel like they’re making those decisions from a place of confidence, instead of being scared making decisions. And frankly, if there’s one thing that I have learned in this whole process, it is that confused. People take no action. They just stand by for the default of whatever maybe the government has arranged for them with respect to their retirement planning, and that is by far the worst option, just to stand by and let retirement happen to you. I would much rather inform and empower people to feel like they’ve got the right education, the right information, so that they can make those better decisions.

Alan Olsen

Chris in the in the world of government retirement, would you say that your, your, your, your focus is more on training and educating or on the investing platforms? Great question.

Chris Kowalik

So our company focuses on the education, both to the federal employee and to the financial professionals. So the network of financial professionals that we have, they all operate their own practices. They all have their own planning philosophies. They utilize different products in different ways to solve different problems for people. And so we’re simply making that marriage possible, that connection possible, between the federal employees and the financial professionals who serve them.

Alan Olsen

Are you bringing investment products with that and showing that these types of investment products will help enable you to get to the next level?

Chris Kowalik

There are tons of different products and strategies out there. Sometimes it’s the investment platforms, which the government has their own investment platform, called the Thrift Savings Plan, that has its own complexities there, but helping people to really understand what the investment side looks like when you’re no longer contributing to those accounts, when you’re starting to utilize the money out of those accounts. That becomes really, really important for people to understand, because one overarching theme is that nobody ever wants to run out of money, because then the lifestyle, the retirement plan that they really had, goes away when there’s no more money to fund. What retirement should look like for somebody, the game really changes. And so there’s lots of different ways to solve that income problem, but that is at the forefront of the conversations that we’re having with federal employees

Alan Olsen

now, Chris, in the world of retirement, education and planning, you know, there’s been a lot of discussion about the future of social security, and am I gonna get it? Is a fun gonna run out? How should people plan, or what approach you like to use there?

Chris Kowalik

I’m always a fan of hope for the best, plan for the worst. And if, if people are really concerned about Social Security, we encourage them to take all the measures possible that they can really affect themselves. They can affect what’s going to happen in Social Security. That is something that is going to either happen or it’s not in the shape that it’s in right now, or maybe it takes on a different form in the future, as far as the payout or the age. But if people take matters into their own hands and realize that they have some control over what their finances are going to look like because of what they are personally doing to set themselves up for that success and take more of that control away from the government in this case. Now, of course, Social Security is a program that that the average American is able to receive as well as federal workers. And so we we definitely see this with federal employees as well. And frankly, Social Security is one of the three legs of the retirement plan that the Office of Personnel Management, the HR arm of the government, what they have created for the federal workforce. So it will be very interesting if social security changes drastically, what OPM does to maybe counteract that, if anything at all.

Alan Olsen

I’m just curious, do you travel in your job?

Chris Kowalik

I don’t travel as much now, but our team of trainers certainly are on the road all the time. They get to see all the luxurious airports and hotels out there, they don’t typically get to stay too long in these areas that we’re going out to trade, though.

Alan Olsen

How many trainers do you have in the organization?

Chris Kowalik

We’ve got four trainers now. We’re about ready to bring on a fifth, and that was really a big change in my business, when I was able to get some people out traveling and doing an amazing job with these audiences, because, as you know, it’s really tough to run and grow a business when you’re always out executing, and so I love that we have some really dedicated people out there delivering this message to help more and more peopl.e

Alan Olsen

Chris, if you were advising my organization, though, do do a walk through of how you would approach it, and do you want to meet with the employees? You want to stay at a high level? You know? What is the what is your typical approach?

Chris Kowalik

Great question. So the idea. Idea of the education that we provide. Let’s start with that, because that’s really where the story begins for federal employees. I knew when I started pro feds, that if I was going to make the meaningful transformation in the lives of federal employees that I really wanted to that it had to start with education, but it couldn’t end there. That’s not enough education without action, I think is futile. And so we created our flagship program, which is the Fed impact retirement workshop, and that is a place that federal employees can go to to get the education about how the benefits work, and start to see some of those consequences that they’re going to have as they make different decisions, one of the options that they have following that workshop is to be able to meet with that financial professional and start to see some of their their numbers in action. One of the challenges, of course, in a big classroom setting is we can’t address all of the individual concerns of every single person in that room. So these meetings offer an opportunity for someone to get a little bit of one on one help and feel like their individual questions are being addressed. So once that workshop happens, they’re able to meet with that financial professional to develop a Fed Impact Report. And the purpose of this report is to set that baseline of if you take no further action, what does retirement look like for you with respect to all of your government benefits? And it’s through that conversation, or that series of conversations that that financial professional is having with the federal employee that they’re able to identify maybe some gaps that they realize they need to address, and if they don’t, they’re going to be left with whatever the government has prepared for them. And so it’s it’s nice to know that we’ve got a mechanism for marrying up those two audiences, the federal employees who desperately need some clarity on their benefits, and those financial professionals that not only understand the benefits themselves, but though the breadth of all of the options that are available out in the private sector. And here’s the best part, I don’t think feds have to choose one or the other. They don’t just choose government benefits or just choose Private Sector options. They get to have a mixture of both. And so if the financial professional is showing up to that conversation, believing that there are really great parts of these government benefits, part of their job is to help that federal employee to capture those amazing parts, and at the same time having some permission from that employee to speak up to say, Hey, listen, I don’t think that this particular part of the government benefit solves the problem that you described to me that you have, or the real want or need that you or your family have in retirement and and so being able to have that honest conversation makes those gaps a little bit more obvious to employees, so that then they can start to take the action to solve it.

Alan Olsen

What would you say? The never win problem is that people struggle with as they look at retirement.

Chris Kowalik

You know, a lot of it is, it’s, it’s kind of twofold. The first is they’re afraid to get started in the planning process. And I know that because most of the time when people come to our retirement workshops on their evaluation form, they write some version of I sure wish I would have had this a long time ago, right? And so what I love about that is they’re going back to their office and they’re telling those younger people that have a lot more runway until retirement to get started. Don’t wait until the end to start to make those decisions. But the other end of that is when we are working with someone who’s really close to retirement, we’re in a little bit more of a damage control mode at that point, like a lot of the decisions have already been made. Do you have all of your money in taxable accounts? Is it all tax free? Is there some mixture? Do you have other types of accounts? What about the insurance? Is there permanent insurance? Is there temporary insurance? Is it enough? All those, those questions are very legitimate. But when you’re looking at the at the end of someone’s career, right before they step into retirement, that’s a really hard time to solve those problems, and so we really encourage people to get in sooner. And I’ve got a mantra that it’s never too early, too late or too often to plan and if, if federal employees, and frankly, anyone else listening, even if you’re not a federal worker, knowing that Getting started is is kind of that hardest part, but once you do it, you can, you can really see a lot of great impact over the years.

Alan Olsen

It seems that although you’re you’re specialized in the federal employee sector, really retirement planning is your same concepts could be used at Universal.

Chris Kowalik

Actually it’s pretty universal. You’re right. That’s exactly the word that I would use. Because these are, these are average people that want to go out and live a great retirement their their needs are not all that unusual, or unlike most of the people that need retirement planning out there in the private community. And so it’s just we start the conversation in a different place, because we’ve got to get those benefits really clear. If we don’t, then the federal employee, unfortunately, is kind of of the mindset, hey, listen, the government’s going to take great care of me. It’ll all be fine. It’s been fine up to this point. I think it’ll be fine in the future. And I’m not a fan of that, that that idea that federal employees have, because I think it leaves them in a really vulnerable spot to be given whatever the government has created for them, instead of them having some ownership of their own financial future to get the retirement that they want. So Chris,

Alan Olsen

I’m sure you get the question, Chris, where can I go to read more information about what you’re teaching me here?

Chris Kowalik

For the financial professionals who might be listening, if it’s if it’s exciting to you, to think about working with federal employees as kind of a really specialized group of people that you could help. They can visit profeds.com that is the site that we have to explain the work we do with financial professionals. But if we have any federal employees listening, if they’re curious, how do I get started with some training and maybe even getting some help from one of these financial professionals, they can go to fed impact.com that is the site that we have. We have all of our workshops, webinars, podcasts, articles, all the things that federal employees can go look at and start to really get the juices flowing with respect to what it is that they’re trying to solve, so that they feel really good stepping into those workshops knowing that they have a list of items that they want to get kind of ticked off and and feeling good about their progress.

Alan Olsen

Well Chris, this has been privileged having you with us today on American Dreams.