Title: Financial planning should start before you have assets | MoneyBadger
URL: https://moneybadger.us/blog/financial-planning-before-you-have-assets
Description: In February, I walked into an FDNY firehouse with two cups of coffee and a lot of questions.

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# Financial planning should start before you have assets

November 11, 2026 Dave Coles 3 min read

In February, I walked into an FDNY firehouse with two cups of coffee and a lot of questions. I was a Wharton student doing a research project. A firefighter welcomed me in and walked me through his overtime, pension, retirement options and side income.

There was a lot to put together. Each piece affected the others, and the decisions mattered to his life.

When I asked where he went for financial advice, he pointed to the older “oracles” in the firehouse. People who had been through it before. People he trusted.

That conversation has stayed with me.

We often talk about financial planning in the context of having money to invest. I keep thinking about all the decisions someone makes on the way there: how much overtime to work, what to do with the additional take-home pay, how to understand their benefits, how to prepare for retirement while also paying for life today.

Those decisions deserve thoughtful help while people are making them.

A firefighter can have a pension, variable overtime, debt, savings and a family goal they’re working toward. Their financial life is already complex. The amount sitting in an investment account tells us very little about how much help they could use putting it together.

And putting it together is the important part.

In one of our nurse walkthroughs, Christa wanted to understand how additional shifts could move her closer to a family vacation in Hawaii. That’s a real decision, attached to something she cares about. Making it useful means understanding what she would actually take home, what she already has committed, and how the extra work fits into her life.

I love that kind of question. It gives us something concrete to help someone work through.

It also makes the responsibility clear. We have to understand the details well enough to earn someone’s trust. Their profession, paycheck and benefits have to change the guidance we give them. Otherwise, we’re asking them to do the hard work of translating general advice into their own situation.

That’s a lot of what we’re learning as we build MoneyBadger.

People want help understanding how the pieces connect. They want to know what a decision means for them, and what they can reasonably do next. We’ve also learned that we have to make that next step much clearer. There’s work for us to do there.

My belief is that financial planning should begin with someone’s life as it is today. What comes in, what’s already spoken for, who depends on them, and what they hope to do. Then we can help them connect today’s choices with their near-term goals and longer-term future.

There are good people doing this work already. I’m grateful for the planners, coaches and trusted people in someone’s community who take the time to understand the whole picture. The opportunity I see is helping more people get that depth of understanding in a way they can access and keep using.

We’re starting with first responders because their work creates financial questions that deserve real attention. We can learn directly from them, build around the decisions they face, and test whether what we’ve built is useful.

We’re early. I have a lot of conviction about the need, and we have plenty left to learn about how to serve it well.

The question I want us to answer is simple: given your life and this paycheck, what can you do next to move toward something that matters to you?

I want people to have help answering that question while they’re building their financial future.

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