I grew up watching my family — who immigrated from China — struggle financially. Not for lack of ambition or discipline, but because the financial system never took the time to understand them.
Institutions treated them as transactions. Advisors saw a language barrier, not a family building something meaningful in a new country. That experience didn't just motivate me — it became the lens through which I built this practice.
I started in financial services in my late twenties — first with young families building their first plans, then with people approaching retirement. I got good quickly, and I learned the limits of doing it one household at a time. So I moved toward business owners and their retirement plans, on a simple thesis: improve one plan well, and you improve the financial lives of everyone it touches.
Over two decades, that work took me deeper than most advisors ever go — into advanced retirement structures, defined benefit and ESOP design, and the kind of business-owner planning that turns a company into lasting wealth. It also took me inside the machinery of the industry itself: building retirement products and infrastructure at institutional and platform scale, serving businesses across the country.
Five years ago, I made a deliberate choice. With a young family and a practice that demanded six and seven days a week, I stepped back, moved across the country, and rebuilt my life around being present first. The years since gave me something rare — the time to learn how the whole system actually works, and the conviction to build something better.
Today I run Juncture from Chicago, Illinois — intentionally small, entirely virtual, and built around the same questions I've spent my career answering. I'm also building the tools I always wished I had as an advisor, so that nothing falls through the cracks of a complex life. The wealth practice for people who are building something — by someone who is building too.