Money for Real Life

Ask Alex DelCollo what she does and the answer will not begin with markets or products. It begins with the person across the table, the life they are trying to build, and the questions no spreadsheet can answer on its own. Money, in her telling, is a tool. The point is the life it builds.

The path to that conviction was, by her own account, a little roundabout. “I tell my dad all the time he was right. I should have listened to him,” she says, laughing. A softball scholarship to Goldey-Beacom, Delaware’s business college, sat on the table; she turned it down for the University of Delaware and a very different major. “I still did business classes and got my certificate in business while pursuing health behavior,” she says. “I then went on to get my master’s degree in health behavior as well.”

The pivot to finance was, appropriately, a lesson in behavior. A close family friend had joined Diamond State Financial Group while Alex was still pursuing her master’s degree. She became one of his very first clients. After years of convincing, Alex took the leap and joined the DSFG family. “Behavior is behavior is behavior,” she says. “It’s very helpful today with how people psychologically see and deal with money.”

Before she moved to the advisor’s side of the table, DelCollo spent more than a decade inside the nonprofit world. It taught her, she says, how financial decisions made quietly inside an organization can enlarge or narrow its mission. That mission-first perspective remains at the center of her practice today.

It also gave her a keen ear for the doubt that keeps most people on the sidelines. “One of the biggest things that makes people uncertain,” she says, “is that they just don’t know what they don’t know. And they don’t know how to find the answer to the questions they do have.” Her remedy is decidedly unfashionable: education, patience, and plain English.

Jargon, she warns, is a red flag. “If you’re talking to somebody and they’re throwing around too much jargon, that’s a red flag to me,” she says. “As a financial professional, that’s my fault if you can’t understand what I’m saying. I haven’t done a good job explaining it.” Hand five advisors the same scenario, she notes, and you can get five different answers. Her aim is to give the client one they can defend, and follow, on their own.

For readers who want to do their homework before ever sitting down with an advisor, her advice is refreshingly analog. Sit in on an educational session in the community. “It gives you a level of familiarity with some of these topics before you go talk to somebody, so that you don’t feel so overwhelmed by some of the jargony things that could be thrown out.” Diamond State runs its own; other firms do as well. Choose the room, she suggests, and let the vocabulary get comfortable.

Nonprofits

Her practice runs in three deliberately overlapping lanes. The first is with 501(c) organizations, churches, religious institutions, community nonprofits, helping them build the financial stability and sustainability that lets a mission actually be carried out. “That’s a big specialty of mine,” she says.

Business Owners

The second is business owners, whose lives, as she points out, do not look like a W-2. Tax strategy so they are not overpaying. Retirement plans that do not leave them over-reliant on the business itself. Succession planning for the day they want to step back. DelCollo speaks from experience: she has owned two businesses of her own. “There is a big difference between working on your business and working in your business,” she says. “If you just want to do the job, that’s fine. But if you want to grow a business that can run without you, that’s entirely different.”

Pre-Retirees & Retirees

The third lane is the pre-retiree and retiree, roughly age fifty and up, at the moment a working life pivots. “Helping people get ready to turn off their income and turn on that investment income,” is how she frames it. Many of her business-owner clients arrive in that same window, which is why the three lanes overlap on purpose.

If there is a thread that ties her three lanes together, it is a quiet conviction that the American reluctance to talk about money is itself the problem. Families of generational wealth teach the subject early, she notes; everyone else was told not to bring it up at all. “For so long, what were we taught? Don’t talk about money,” she says. “But we need to talk about it more.”

It is a message aimed as much at new business owners as at nervous twenty-somethings and readers on the near side of retirement. Most of us, she suggests, get so absorbed in the passion of the project, the lights, the storefront, the logo, that we neglect the plainer question of what happens if no one walks through the door. Prioritizing, she says, is a service in itself. “Helping people prioritize so that they can achieve their ultimate goal is another big piece here.”

It is a fitting mandate for the magazine’s new Finance Section. DelCollo’s columns for City to Coast will run in that spirit: the quiet decisions that compound over decades, told plainly, without jargon, and with an eye on the life being built.

Off Duty

City to Coast · The Finance Section

Alex DelCollo

Financial Editor

CPFA^® · CAP^® · Series 7 · Series 66

Alex DelCollo, CPFA®, CAP®, Series 7, Series 66, is Financial Editor of City to Coast Magazine and a Financial Advisor with Diamond State Financial Group.

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