Income Is the Goal

A NEW PERSPECTIVE

Financial Planning is Life Planning

Investing doesn’t work in a vacuum. It is important to consider people's life situation. The purpose of their money determines the strategy.

We use a metaphor of an apple tree and apples to explain how money works.

The tree symbolizes working capital, and the apple represents income. The reason you plant an apple tree is to get apples. All businesses invest money to generate income. That is the reason we invest our savings. Future spending. There are three basic functions for ‘money trees.’ Protect, Earn, Grow.

Protect

Capital preservation. The foundation that doesn't move.

Earn

Income-generating assets. The money that lets you stop working.

Grow

Long-term growth. The money that grows while you sleep.

Built on 92 Years of Proven Thinking

Not trends. Not what's popular. What has actually worked, through bear markets, recessions and upheaval.

1934 Benjamin Graham publishes Security Analysis.

Graham's revolutionary work introduces the concept of value investing and the margin of safety. He argues that investors should buy stocks trading below their intrinsic value. This becomes the foundation for a 92-year track record of success. Value investing is born.

1965–Present Warren Buffett proves it works.

Buffett becomes Graham's most famous student. Over six decades, he applies Graham's principles and produces returns that dramatically outpace the S&P 500. His Berkshire Hathaway compounds wealth at rates that prove value investing isn't luck — it's a tested, repeatable approach. Decades of outperformance.

2026+ Your employees learn to think like investors.

Income Is the Goal teaches the same principles Graham and Buffett have proven over 92 years. Not chasing trends, not market timing, not reacting to volatility. Just disciplined, long-term thinking about building income and protecting capital. Your employees get the playbook that has worked through every market condition.

How It Works

Schedule

We talk about your workforce and the best format for your company. We suggest a feasibility workshop of a few employees to test the value for them.

Deliver

A 45-minute in-person workshop with Q&A. On your schedule.

Follow-Up

What every employee takes home.

Sample workbook — click any page to enlarge

Download the sample workbook (PDF)

No Calls. Ever.

I do not receive an attendee list. I do not ask for names and I do not call anyone. My name and contact information are on the handouts. If an employee wants help, they must make the effort to step forward — and then it is their decision, made on their initiative.

What Makes This Workshop Different

"I spent forty years in the financial services industry. Every firm asked: what is your commission? Not once — not one time — did a firm ask: Do you make money for your client? Do you lower their risk? Do you help reduce their taxes? Do you protect what they have worked a lifetime to build?"

The gap between what Wall Street sells and what employees actually need — that's where the anxiety lives. The workshop Income Is the Goal was built to close that gap.

About the Guide

Dennis Zaderaka is an Investment Adviser Representative with Sequent Planning LLC and author of The Money Orchard: Money Making Money. He has spent forty years in financial services, and teaches people to understand money as a tool for living well, rather than as an end in itself.

Dennis@zaderaka.com
630.665.9964

Why the Money Orchard Exists

I spent forty years in the financial services industry. I am not an outsider with a complaint. I was inside it. This is an inside view of the creation of the wrap account and how it evolved into the fee account with model portfolios.

I knew Dick Schilffarth personally. He was on the E.F. Hutton team that built the wrap account, and in the industry he was known as the father of it. What I know about what the wrap account was, and what it was built to do, comes directly from him.

Hutton built it. Dick carried it everywhere else — out to the regional broker-dealers, and then to the independents. I worked at IAS, the firm he founded, and I watched the machinery up close.

So when I tell you what the wrap account was, I am not guessing and I am not theorizing. I knew the men who built it.

Here is what it was. For most of the industry's history, a broker was paid by commission — when the client bought or sold a stock or a bond. The bear market of 1973 and 1974 exposed the flaw in that. People stopped trading, and Wall Street's income stopped with them.

The wrap account solved it. One annual fee, a percentage of everything the client held, charged whether the client traded or not. Income became smooth and predictable. It was presented to clients as a breakthrough — an alignment of interests. We only do well when you do well. But they still charge the fee in a losing market. It was built to solve Wall Street's income problem, not the client's.

And there was a second feature, one taught plainly as a selling point to stockbrokers. The wrap account placed a professional money manager between the broker and the client's money. When results disappointed — and given enough time, results always disappoint someone — the broker did not have to be the one who had failed. He could replace the manager. Fire him, and keep the account.

Stop for a moment and think about what that arrangement does. The person who sold you the plan is never the person who has to answer for how it turned out.

Eventually the wrap account got a bad reputation, so the industry stopped calling it that. It is a fee account now. Same structure, same fee, new name. Cerulli reported in March 2025 that more than 72% of financial advisors are compensated through fee-based models. Nearly everybody has one.

When I was selling these accounts, the fee bought something. We wrote an investment policy statement. We searched for a manager and matched one to the client — tailored to their investment personality. The client had access to the manager. That was work, and the fee was the price of the work.

Look at what the same fee buys now. A commoditized model portfolio, built before anyone knew your name, assigned after a short questionnaire. The work left. The fee stayed.

So the question is not whether the fee is too high. It is simpler than that, and I cannot answer it for you: are you getting value for your money?

A client told me once: I want your advice, but I don't want to have to buy something in order to pay you. Some financial decisions have no product attached to them at all. So I began charging a fee for advice. The plan is yours — you can take the plan anywhere to put it into effect.

My book The Money Orchard is a different way to look at investing — a story about an apple orchard that explains capitalism and investing. The orchard trees symbolize working capital, and the apples stand for income. We plant apple trees to get apples. Managing an orchard or an investment portfolio requires the same skills of knowledge, patience, and time to produce the fruit you want.

It organizes a person's whole financial life — not into products to be sold, but into something that can be understood: trees that protect, trees that earn, trees that grow. An orchard, tended, so that a person's money finally matches the shape of the life they are actually living.

That is the whole of it. That is why the Money Orchard exists.

Americans' Worry About Running Out of Money

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