How a $1.5B Wealth Manager Spends His Money

We're still surprised people did this but... 50+ founders worth $10M to $4B reveal their personal finances. Here it is: https://joinhampton.com/mw-wr

Why do we do this? Because if you're an aspirational person or someone who runs a business and is making money, it's incredibly challenging to figure out what to do. Information is impossible to find — and that's what we put together: the net worth reveal and why we do this podcast, Moneywise.

He manages $1.5 billion for other people — and still tracks his own spending in a paper checkbook.

Glenn Ullmann is a former Air Force pilot who left the military at 29 with a couple hundred thousand dollars, cold-called 200 strangers a day out of a Ponte Vedra phone book, and built Ullmann Wealth Partners into a $1.5 billion RIA that has never had a down year — including 2008. He stopped worrying about money somewhere north of $20 million. Now 63, he spends $30–40K a month, flies his own $1.25M Cirrus, gives more to charity than he can deduct, and still shows up to the office every day.

This episode gets into the tension between saving and actually living: why Glenn tells clients with health issues to fly private before their kids do it with the inheritance, how a $10M portfolio pays you $300K a year in "rent" whether markets are up or down, and why he thinks stocks are a bad word. We also cover how he gave up 80% of his own firm to keep his partners, the paper ledger that runs his life, the client who started at $100 a month and now takes the best trips on earth, and why he'd tell a 20-year-old to study English or history instead of finance.

Also, this podcast is made by Hampton, which is a community for founders doing on average $20 million a year in revenue. We saw a lot of these money conversations happening privately behind closed doors and we thought, "What the heck, let's make it public." If you are a founder, apply here: http://joinhampton.com/mw

Timestamps:

01:46 — Who Glenn is, what Ullmann Wealth Partners does, and why "returns don't matter if you rear-end Melinda Gates without an umbrella policy"

04:16 — Growing up in his grandfather's plastics business, the Robin's-egg Cadillac, and the gold coin that says "your friendship means more to me than a pot of gold"

06:26 — A Morgan Stanley account at 14, paper route money, and his first stock: Sears Roebuck

07:44 — Nobody from his high school went to the military. He went to the Air Force Academy three days after graduation: "the best thing I ever did, other than marrying my spouse"

11:50 — The Cirrus G7, the parachute that lowers the whole plane, and the button his wife can push if Glenn stops functioning mid-flight