How I ended up at your kitchen table

I was always a connector, not a closer

I became a CPA because I loved being the advisor a business owner trusted, and building real relationships with small, family-owned companies. My managers were grinders. Keep your head down and work hard, they would say. But I was a connector, and the partners knew it. They handed me the owners to work with directly, the relationships that were supposed to come with a title I did not have yet. Sitting across a table from someone and solving a real problem, that was always the part I loved. The scorekeeping was not.

Residential real estate found me in 2002. By 2004 I was full-time with a top-producing RE/MAX team, on my own by 2005, and I am still with RE/MAX today. Over two decades I have lived every version of this business and sold several hundred homes. I survived the crash, selling REO in the years when the only goal was making it to the next one. Then I spent a long stretch trying to be everything to everyone, the exact noise I now help people see through. What never changed was the part I cared about: the person across the table, not the transaction.

A move at this stage touches everything

A move like this is never just a house sale. It interconnects nearly everything in your retirement: your money and liquidity, your health care and long-term-care plan, and the life the house has held for thirty years. For most people I sit with, the home is the first or second biggest asset they own. Older homeowners across the country are holding a record amount of it, roughly $14.6 trillion in home equity as of late 2025, and by almost every account it is one of the most underused resources in retirement.

Used wisely, that equity can do far more than pay for the next house. There are ways to put it to work that close gaps and lower risk: income that lasts, a cushion against the cost of care, a move that does not drain the accounts you will need later. I do not give that advice myself, and I never will. My work is to see where the gaps are and bring the right licensed people, a fiduciary advisor, an estate attorney, a lender who actually understands these tools, to the table at the right time.

Then it got personal

This past winter, it got personal. I sat down with my own mother and mother-in-law to help get their affairs in order, and watched each of them discover a long-term-care gap nobody had ever pointed out, and a tool that could have closed it. They were blown away.

That question stuck with me. It was the same sentence I had been hearing at kitchen tables for years. So I earned my Life and Health insurance license. Not to become a financial advisor, but to spot these gaps and bring the right licensed people to the table for the clients I already serve.

Do not wait for the crisis

If there is one thing I want you to take from my story, it is this. The hardest moves I see are the ones forced by a fall, a diagnosis, or a sudden loss, when the decision gets made in a panic, at the worst possible time. That is also when people lose the most. Research on older sellers bears it out: homes sold late and under pressure, often handed off as-is or straight to an investor, fetch noticeably less than they should.

Doing this early, on your own terms, is how you keep the time, the options, and the leverage. The best version of this move happens long before a health event makes it for you. That is the whole reason Next Chapter Group exists, to help you make a calm, well-planned decision while it is still yours to make.

Strip away the designations and the tools, and the work is simple. I make sure no one takes advantage of you, that the numbers are honest, and that you carry less of this than you thought you could. Call it a guide. I think of it as a protector.

Home-equity figures from the NRMLA and RiskSpan Reverse Mortgage Market Index, late 2025. Older-seller research from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.