Episodes

Tax Alpha Protocol · Part 4 You packed the truck, changed your address in Workday, and started working from a state with lower taxes. Your old state may still consider you a resident, and it has the cell tower records to argue the point. In Part 4 of the Tax Alpha Protocol series, CFP® David Chudyk and Cliff Morgan unpack state domicile: the rules that decide which state gets to tax your income, why remote workers keep getting caught in multi-state audits, and what a clean, defensible move actu...

“Do you spend an appropriate amount of money on your lifestyle?” It’s one of the first questions David Chudyk asks every new client. It sounds easy. It isn’t. And the most important word in it is appropriate. Underneath that question is the most important formula in personal finance: income minus expenses must be greater than zero. A fourth grader can do the math. Yet Goldman Sachs’ 2026 retirement survey found that more than a third of households earning over $500,000 a year say they live payc...

Most founders assume the tax bill on their exit gets settled at the closing table. By then, most of it is already locked in. The entity you chose years ago, when (or whether) equity moved into a trust, and how you respond when the buyer asks for a tax election all decide how much of that check you actually keep. In Part 3 of our six-part Tax Alpha Protocol series, wealth strategist Cliff Morgan, founder of Net Worth Accelerant, explains how irrevocable non-grantor trusts can hold equity ahead o...

You’re not eliminating tax, you’re moving it.” CFP® David Chudyk and Cliff Morgan of Net Worth Accelerant cover two topics this week. First, how families in states with their own lower estate tax thresholds can plan around them. Second, the real estate strategies high earners hear about most, and what has to be true before those strategies hold up. In this episode: Decoupled state estate taxes. Twelve jurisdictions, including New York, Massachusetts, Oregon and D.C., tax estates well below the ...

Knowing the math doesn't make you immune. Just ask Jax Crider. About four years ago, with a down market shrinking her income and a daughter born eight weeks early who spent 47 days in the NICU, Jax and her husband did the financially responsible thing: they listed their big house. Then somebody left the half-bath water running. For three and a half days. Nearly half a million dollars of damage later, the family was in a financial tailspin. David and Jax, a 24-year mortgage and financial service...

For fifteen years, the estate planning playbook said the same thing: get assets out of your estate before you die. That advice made sense when the exemption was $5 million. It makes a lot less sense now that it's $15 million per person and $30 million per married couple, and permanent. In the first episode of our six-part Tax Alpha Protocol series, David Chudyk, CFP®, is joined by wealth strategist Cliff Morgan, founder of Net Worth Accelerant. They break down what the One Big Beautiful Bill Ac...

Guest: Rain Bennett, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, keynote speaker, and author of The Chief Storytelling Officer This week's episode takes a detour from taxes and markets to talk about the invisible force behind every sale, every client relationship, and every business decision: storytelling. David sits down with Rain Bennett — two-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker and host of The Storytelling Lab podcast — to break down why "chief storytelling officer" has become one of the fastest-growing titles in co...

The Bonus Your Best Employee Doesn't Know They're Getting Every business owner has that one person. Not a partner, not family — just an employee who makes the whole place run. And every business owner has, at some point, faced the moment when that person gets a call from a recruiter. The instinct is to counter with a bigger number. The problem? A raise is just a number, and someone can always beat a number. What actually keeps a key employee in place is a reason to stay that a bigger paycheck ...

Every September, the insurance industry runs Life Insurance Awareness Month — and most of the advice sounds the same: buy term, protect your family, don't wait. That advice is correct. It's also, at best, half the story. Life insurance has two entirely different jobs depending on where you are in life. For a young parent with a mortgage and a new baby, it's the thing standing between "we'll be okay" and financial free-fall. For a business owner who's spent decades building something real, it's ...

73% of business owners who say they're ready to sell are missing at least one of the two numbers required to know if a sale will actually work. In this episode, David breaks down a new data study of 10,548 business owner assessments and lays out the Readiness 360 — the three questions every owner has to answer honestly before they sit across from a buyer. Are you personally ready to let go? Is your business actually ready to be sold? And does the math even work? What You'll Learn The two number...

Advanced Financial Basics Success is boring. That's not a knock — it's the whole point. The best tennis players in the world don't win with highlight-reel shots; they win by making almost every easy shot and missing almost nothing. Wealth-building works the same way. This week, David Chudyk, CFP®, breaks down BASICS — a six-letter framework covering the unglamorous, "advanced" fundamentals that actually move the needle for people who are already building real wealth. What BASICS Actually Stand...

Guest: Peyton Hoppes, ProVest Wealth Advisors (Spartanburg, SC) Episode Summary David sits down with longtime friend and fellow financial advisor Peyton Hoppes to talk shop. Peyton recently joined ProVest Wealth Advisors in Spartanburg, SC, where he and colleague Gabe are stepping in to take over the client relationships of a retiring advisor. The two dig into what they're seeing with clients day-to-day: how busy families in their "formation years" actually manage cash flow, the real diffe...

The Richest Corpse in the Graveyard If you ran out of money, when would it happen? For a growing number of retirees — paid-off home, pension, Social Security, a seven-figure portfolio sitting quietly in the background — the honest answer is probably never. And yet study after study shows this exact group is still the most hesitant to spend a dollar of it. In this episode, David uses a composite family — paid-off home, $3 million invested, pension and Social Security covering nearly all of thei...

Replay Episode — This one's a "blast from the past." David originally recorded this conversation in the last quarter of 2022, right in the middle of heavy recession fear and a rough year in the markets. He's bringing it back now because 2026 has had its own share of ups and downs, and the mindset underneath this conversation hasn't gone stale. Joining David is Mike DiJoseph of Vanguard's Investment Advisory Research Center, whose team studies why investors make the decisions they make — and how...

The Mid-Year Money Checkup: 9 Things to Check Before the Year Slips Away You change your oil every 5,000 miles or so. Nobody waits for the engine to seize up on the highway to think about it. Your finances deserve the same treatment — and we're right at the halfway point of the year, which is exactly the moment to pop the hood before a bunch of December deadlines sneak up on you. This episode is nine things, no long story, no single deep dive. Some apply if you're a business owner, some don't ...

I cut my own grass every week. I don't mind it — it's mindless, it's outside, I like the hour. Plenty of people I know, just as busy and just as capable, pay someone else to do theirs. Neither one of us is wrong. We just decided differently about where we want to spend that hour. Turns out we all make that same call, constantly, in every part of our lives — we just never name it out loud. This episode names it: the DIYer, the Partner, and the Delegator, and the honest question of which one you ...

Everyone's talking about the free $1,000 the government just dropped into Trump Accounts. Almost nobody's talking about the fine print — or the backdoor Roth IRA strategy hiding inside it. In this episode, David breaks down Trump Accounts, 529 plans, UGMA/UTMA custodial accounts, and custodial Roth IRAs side by side: what each one actually does, where the real catches are, and the one advanced move that could turn a modest Trump Account into a six-figure Roth IRA by your kid's mid-20s. The Numb...

On January 6th, 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt stood before Congress and outlined four essential freedoms that every human being deserves. He wasn't talking about money. He was talking about human dignity. But in this episode, CFP® and fiduciary advisor David Chudyk reveals what those four freedoms look like when applied to wealth — and why the people who are truly, genuinely financially free have quietly built their own version of all four. This isn't a debt payoff episode. This isn't ...

About This Episode Here's something that almost never gets talked about in personal finance: most people are both overpaying for insurance and dangerously underinsured — at the same time. In this episode, David Chudyk, CFP® breaks down exactly how that happens, which gaps most commonly cost people everything, and the four-step annual insurance audit every wealth-builder should be doing. What You'll Learn Why insurance gets ignored — and why the industry is designed to let it happen The four ...

Everyone's Buying SPCX. Here's What Smart Investors Actually Do. SpaceX (SPCX) just completed the largest IPO in history — $75 billion raised, debuting up 19% on day one, now trading over 40% above its IPO price. The hype is real. So are the risks most people aren't talking about. CFP® David Chudyk breaks down the bull case, the bear case, what happened when WeWork, Peloton, and Rivian met peak hype, and — most importantly — the only question that determines whether any hot stock belongs in yo...

You've spent years building your business. But what if you've already crossed the finish line — and nobody told you? Most business owners spend their entire careers trying to reach financial freedom. But there's a specific, calculable threshold — called The Freedom Point — where the net proceeds from selling your business would fund the rest of your life without financial worry. And the uncomfortable truth is: a lot of owners have already crossed it. They're still grinding, still taking on risk,...

Someone in your life is giving you financial advice right now. They're confident. They say it like it's gospel. And they might be completely wrong. Not because they're bad people — but because they're handing you a prescription without doing the diagnosis. And in financial planning, that's how people end up behind where they should be. In this episode, CFP® David Chudyk dismantles four of the most repeated pieces of financial advice in America — the kind you've heard so many times you stopped q...

Retirement planning is not about retirement. That's the provocation David opens with — and he means it. This episode isn't another checklist. It's a ground-up rethink of what the 5-to-10-year sprint before retirement actually demands: emotionally, philosophically, and financially. Starting with a question no financial podcast has the nerve to ask — is retirement even a biblical concept? — David works through everything from the psychology of stopping work to the hard mechanics of income portfol...

The IRS actually built a legal way for business owners to pay their kids, cut their tax bill, and start building generational wealth — all at the same time. Most business owners have no idea it exists. And the ones who do usually aren't doing it right. In this episode, David breaks down the Hire Your Kids strategy from top to bottom — including the part most people skip — and adds two more powerful moves to set your kids up for financial success long before they need it. What You'll Learn in T...