Helping You Make an Empowered Lifestyle Choice
by Melissa LaScaleia
In 1984, Chuck Fitzpatrick began working in the insurance business with his father. Shortly thereafter, he started his own small company, the Benefitz Group, which he organized around his values to offer an empowering, educational, and humanistic approach to helping people with their financial and life-planning needs.
Over the years, based on the feedback from his clients and their requests of him, Chuck began exploring the world of investment and financial planning, including trusts, wills, fixed annuities, and estate planning, which he incorporated into his company. His last addition was a mortgage branch of his company, which he and his son run in partnership with US Mortgage Corporation.
“My clients have led me all the way through this journey of life,” he says. “And today, the Benefitz Group is the name we use as an orientation for all the companies I own and services I provide. It’s a lot of work to cover so many fields, and hard to do. But it’s worth it, because I know I’m empowering people to do what’s best for them and get what they need.
Chuck likes to remind people that he’s not smarter than them, but what he does do is work very hard to get things right for the way they want things done.
“Investments and insurance are intangibles,” he says. “People can’t put their hands around them. And because they’re also a risk intolerant thing, it’s important to help people realize if they need this, or that, or none. Without them really getting the right questions—and it takes some years to really get the right questions—they aren’t being served as well as they could be. This is where my years of experience pay off.”
Chuck likes to measure people’s comfort with their choices around insurance and finances with a technique he calls the temperature gauge.
“I tell people their options and ask them to rank each option on a scale of 1-10 indicating their comfort level with that choice,” Chuck says. “With this, you get to someone’s heart— to what they can deal with and not be upset. The last thing you want is your money to control you. You’re supposed to be controlling it, and what it does and doesn’t do.
“Who wants to be in a position of going to bed at night wondering, ‘Am I going to have enough money to pay my bills ten years from now?’ That’s not where people need to be in their lives. That’s not how I advise.”
“I love working for myself and being independent of a large firm,” Chuck adds. “It allows me to be able to serve my clients better because I have more to offer than one company’s approach. Every company out there that I’ve worked for is a tool I can put in a tool box. When I elected to work for some top financial services, I did it to get knowledge of the best tools. And now, in my company and life, I can use the best tools from my box to serve others.”
Securities offered through Registered Representatives of Cambridge Investment Research Advisors, Inc., a broker-dealer, member FINRA/SIPC. Advisory services offered through Cambridge Investment Research, Inc., a Registered Investment Adviser. Benefit Financial Services and Cambridge are not affiliated
