Brad Elman has been a financial professional in Los Altos for nearly 20 years. He has been a member of the Million Dollar Round Table for even longer, and last month the 89-year-old association of financial professionals named him divisional vice president of membership.
It is the third time Elman has been named a vice president of the Million Dollar Round Table, and this time he will be responsible for monitoring the qualifications of the organization’s nearly 50,000 members from 70 countries.
“This organization is leading the way globally,” he said. “We help people plan how to correctly use life insurance.”
He has met people from around the world and helped them develop best practices and build burgeoning life insurance industries in countries such as Russia, Poland and Vietnam. The annual meeting is simulcast in 16 languages.
“Having a cultural sensitivity makes the communication and interaction a lot more effective. It’s allowed me to learn more so that I can help my clients more,” he said, adding that it’s also “really fun.”
Planning for many futures
The “fun” is what Elman calls “a subset of my practice” – the professional life he attempts to balance with his family and the Los Altos community. What makes Elman unique is how the balancing act includes a sort of laboratory where he mixes and matches his interests.
According to Elman, his financial advising practice is mostly working with closely held businesses, or, as he puts it, “anything with ‘firm’ in the title.”
“Our practice has always been a business and estate insurance practice,” he said. “But after our son was born, I saw the need to help families like my own plan for a secure financial future.”
Elman’s younger son is developmentally disabled, and as a father, he realized that he needed to look decades into the future to plan for his family’s future. That was difficult to do in the early 1990s.
“There was very little awareness of how to do planning for families with children with special needs,” he recalled of the time. “As an adviser, I was aware of the importance of doing the planning, but there was not a lot of information available on what you should be doing and how you save money for your child later on. This came out of a professional realization that things needed to be done, and they needed to be done a little bit differently than traditional planning.”
Managing special needs
Elman explained the role of a financial adviser working alongside a young family with a special-needs child as helping them manage the care.
“It’s a challenging situation,” he said. “Depending on the nature of their child’s disability, they may or may not have a clear idea of what is going to happen in the future. The diagnoses for the types of things that people are challenged by have huge variance, and there is no way to know what the child’s needs are going to be.”
As an adviser, Elman helps families create a flexible plan that can accommodate a range of scenarios.
“Planning in advance,” he said, “is much easier than addressing it in real time.”
According to Elman, special-needs planning is a small market, but it is a huge part of his life.
“I feel it is important to do it, and I feel it is important for the same reasons that I’m drawn to the community for volunteer reasons,” he said. “I know how difficult it can be. I know the issues they deal with. It doesn’t leave a lot of energy or bandwidth to do good long-term planning.”
It is unclear if the last statement applies to Elman himself. He was coach for a Little League Challenger team, for baseball players with special needs, for 15 years. His team met Stanford University running back – and Heisman Trophy hopeful – Christian McCaffrey recently. Elman was also involved in a variety of extracurricular activities from physical fitness to Youth Drama For All.
“One of the things we discovered early on is that there were not a lot of programs for families with special needs,” he noted. “Now, there is a whole generation of younger kids coming through the programs.”
Elman has been able to combine as well as balance his family, his practice and his involvement in the city of Los Altos.
“I’ve got a wonderful practice,” he said. “I’m so lucky, and I have amazing clients.”
For more information on special-needs life insurance, visit lifeinsurancespecialneeds.com.
