Advisor focuses on getting ‘a return on life’

investmentnews.com:

For a CEO and founder of a money management company, Taylor Kovar sounds surprisingly  uninterested in money. As the leader of Kovar Wealth Management, it’s not that he doesn’t care about financial matters; it’s just that Kovar cares more about what money means, especially in marriages.  

“We’ve transitioned to being really focused on the family dynamic and really a return on life, rather than return on investment,” he said. “I don’t want to work with jerks. I want to work with people who want to be happy.”

Given Kovar’s personal history, it’s not hard to see where this philosophy comes from. He didn’t come from money. 

“I was raised dirt poor,” he said. “My blue-collar parents didn’t know anything about money, and didn’t teach me anything about money.”

But it’s amazing what love can do. For Kovar, it was falling in love with a girl – “the most beautiful girl I had ever seen,” he said – who was much smarter about money than he was. It inspired him to get out of debt and learn how to manage money and invest. He realized that, against all odds, he liked the subject matter.

And Kovar discovered he had some talent in it. He went to school for it and, after graduating at the height of the Great Recession, landed at Merrill Lynch. It didn’t take Kovar long to realize it wasn’t a good fit.  

“When I joined them, I realized they invest money differently from the way I like to invest money, and I couldn’t even work for people like my parents because they didn’t qualify for [Merrill Lynch’s] minimum threshold,” he said.

So Kovar struck out on his own, where he could implement his vision of wealth management. He emphasizes alternatives over traditional stock investments, focusing on private business, real estate, and timber.  

But