Turning millennials into millionaires — With Bryan Kuderna

Bryan Kuderna was in college and trying to make up his mind about his future.
Should he continue as a marketing major? Pursue a career with the federal Drug Enforcement Administration? Switch majors to something more “practical,” such as accounting or finance?

Then there was his love of writing — maybe declare a minor in journalism?

Kuderna opted to change his major to finance and accepted an internship in a small financial services firm affiliated with Guardian. And he never looked back.

Today, Kuderna is founder of Kuderna Financial Team in Shrewsbury, N.J., and he is still a part of the financial services firm in which he started his career as a junior at the College of New Jersey. His love of writing inspired him to pen two books about wealth management as well as a fantasy novel and a long-running blog, Weekly Wealth Wisdom.

Growing up, Kuderna said, he was interested in law enforcement. But he also was interested in becoming a business owner. “I loved the idea of controlling your own destiny and being an entrepreneur,” he said. He also managed his college newspaper and found his passion for writing.

But it was an interview with the DEA that solidified his path to a financial services career.
“They asked me if I had a pilot’s license, and I did not,” he said. “Then they asked me if I spoke a second language other than Spanish, and I did not. They asked me what my major was, and I said it was marketing. They said, ‘Everything that we do is about following money. So if you want to even try and have a shot at the job with us, you need to change majors to either finance or accounting.’”

Instead of further pursuing a DEA career, he changed his major to finance and began the internship that launched his career.

But starting out in the industry wasn’t easy for someone who hadn’t even graduated from college yet.

“It was very much go try and find your natural market or draw up your list of your target 200, things like that. And I was like, ‘Well, I’m 20 years old. There’s not really a natural market here.’”

Without a natural market to help him get started, Kuderna began cold-calling business owners to discuss employee health benefits to help get a foot in the door with that population. He also cold-called CPAs “just to get in the know with some folks in the community.” But he didn’t have much luck in cold-calling with either group.

But he did begin to find success from attending networking events in his area — and he attended a lot of them.

“I did a ton of networking events, probably a couple of them a day — usually one for lunch, and then I’d go to a happy hour or something in the evening,” he said. “And I started to meet a lot of people in the area. It was a slow start those first couple of years. I was hardly staying afloat. I was living at home after I graduated from college.”

A passion for financial literacy

Those rough early years eventually passed when Kuderna discovered he had a talent and a passion for discussing financial literacy with the public.

“Where I really kind of hit the ground running was in putting together financial literacy talks — in particular, doing them at hospitals,” he said. “I created these financial education curricula to present to all the residents and fellows at teaching hospitals in the area, and that’s where my career really started to jump.”

Kuderna realized that newly minted medical professionals have a particular set of financial and insurance needs, and because he was about the same age as they were, he could position himself as a trusted source of advice.

“I was able to get in with them and kind of coach them,” he said. “I was right around their age, in my mid-20s, late 20s. I talked with them about their student loan concerns, kind of put them at ease there; talked a lot about disability insurance, which became a huge part of my practice. I began to grow with them as they moved out of their residencies and began practicing and making money. Then I got licensed nationwide, and I expanded with them as they scattered all around the country.”

Kuderna continued to discuss financial issues in more hospitals. He earned his Certified Financial Planner designation in 2013, and he described that achievement as “giving me some credibility.”

Today, about 80% of Kuderna’s clients are dentists or physicians. He finds that one of their biggest issues is managing the massive student loan debt they carry after graduation.
“They come into the early years of their career feeling a sense of guilt that they’re not planning for retirement,” he said. “What I try to do is draw up a game plan with their student loans and get them to calm down. We come up with a strategy on how to deal with them. It’s not different from if you got a $600,000 mortgage. It’s not like your whole life stops; it’s just that you continue living now with that monthly payment. When they become attending physicians and their incomes start to rise, that’s when we’re able to help them start investing in their retirement plans.”

A crash course

By 2016, Kuderna decided to indulge his passion for writing and merge it with his interest in educating people about money. He wrote his first book, Millennial Millionaire: A Guide to Become a Millionaire by 30.

He described the book as “kind of a crash course on finance for the young professional.”

“It was part memoir, and a lot of it was based on the conversations I have with young professionals,” he said. “I was able to blend my old passion of writing with my new passion of financial education and what I do as my day job. The good part about writing the book is that it was supposed to help my clients and it also got my name out there.”

Kuderna switched gears during the COVID-19 lockdown to write a fantasy novel, Anoroc, which is “corona” spelled backward. The book is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of a young boy living in a world where people compete for scarce resources.

“During quarantine, I was able to free up so much of my schedule because I was doing all Zoom calls instead of traveling,” he said. “I thought, now I actually can write something that’s a total escape from constantly talking about COVID-19 and finance and all the stuff that was going on.”

Kuderna said that after his second book was published, people asked him whether he planned to write a sequel to Millennial Millionaire. “Certainly there were a lot of things that happened in the economy since I wrote my first book in 2016,” he said. The result was his newest book, What Should I Do With My Money? Economic Insights to Build Wealth Amid Chaos, which was published in February.

He said that the book begins with the original meaning of the word “wealth,” which comes from an Old English word, “weal,” which means “well-being.”

“I write about wealth in the context of well-being, not just in a monetary sense. I think that guides all economic decisions and all financial decisions. Every person is trying to make decisions for their own well-being.”

Going back to the days when he considered working for the DEA, Kuderna said he read a book on the Central Intelligence Agency that said that when they train their spies, they tell them to “look for the MICE.”

“MICE stands for money, ideology, compromise and ego,” he said. “Those four motivators make human decision-making what it is. In my book, I took some of the most pressing issues today — from entitlements to education, environment, big tech, economic philosophies — and looked at them through the context of MICE. It’s not just money — money is involved in everything — but it’s also about the other elements that guide our decisions.

“I look at all these from a micro standpoint of you and your financial plan and then a macro standpoint of here’s the construct that we all live in and you how to achieve economic literacy, so you understand why things are the way they are and why a decision is right or wrong.”
Kuderna has expanded his reach into podcasting and blogging. He also has appeared as a financial commentator for several national media outlets.

“The podcast came first, in 2020. And the idea here is just giving little tidbits of financial literacy, 20-30 minutes on the basics. What is a Roth IRA? What are student loan repayment options? What is disability insurance? And that morphed into interviewing some big-name economists, professional athletes, business owners.”

The blog “became a supplement to the podcast,” he said. “Sometimes we address the podcast interviews or topics and elaborate on them.”

Kuderna ran his first marathon race in 2015, then followed it up by entering an Ironman competition in Quebec as a fundraiser for his local YMCA. Six years ago, he began practicing Brazilian jiujitsu. “It’s a good outlet not just for exercise but for learning a new skill that’s very complicated,” he said. “I made a lot of friends through it, and it became a kind of balance to my everyday workplace and family life.”

He plans to continue educating people about financial literacy.

“There’s financial literacy, which is about how do I manage my bank account or what retirement plan is right for me? But then there’s economic literacy, which I think has not attracted the attention it deserves.

“When you’re dealing with clients, educating them is one thing, but then motivating them to take action is a completely different thing. I think our job as advisors is to say, ‘This is the right thing to do. Now how do I motivate you so that you say you want to do this and stick to the plan and have that discipline?’”

Kuderna said most financial and economic issues “come back to the question of why should I do this?”

“What I try to explain in my books is, this is the world we live in, this is how we got here, this is what the future looks like. Once you understand that, then you understand the answers of why you need to save and why you need to be worried about taxes and why you need insurance.”

Susan Rupe is managing editor for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents' association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at [email protected].