“When did they let the children in here?!” my great-grandmother famously said. She was in her mid-nineties and the doctors and nurses attending her were all in or approaching their forties. As you get older, the young look younger. I’m only twenty seven and even I see this; high school students look younger each year.

Most of this is just a matter of perception. I don’t feel young at twenty seven, even though I am two decades younger than the generation above me.

Age is one of those short hands that consumers use to denote who has a mastery in a service industry field. If you are older, you must have been doing this a while, the logic goes, so you are more likely to be successful. However, being older does not make you good. And being young does not make you bad.

In the financial services industry, it is no wonder that clients expect an older adviser. According to a 2014 Financial Advisor magazine article , “The average age of financial advisors is 50.9 and 43 percent are over the age of 55.”

The same study group found in 2016 that “women represent just 14% of the total advisor and broker head count although about 28% of rookie advisors are female.”

That means more than 2 out of every 5 advisors are well past their mid-life crisis and a little more than 43 out of every 50 advisors are men. If you are looking at only new advisors, men are 18 of 25 of the new financial advisor hires.

Our firm is not like that.

Currently, all our wealth managers with the exception of our founder, David John Marotta, are under forty and female. In fact of our 11 team members, all but 2 are female and all but 2 are under forty. We are a statistical outlier: We are young; we are female.

We did not try to do this. In fact, at some point, I am sure this article will no longer be true. Our team will happily have male advisors on it and have aged into the norm.

But for now, we are not what you would expect from a financial advisor.

As a firm, Marotta Wealth Management has become known for our careful and analytical approach to investment management, financial planning, and wealth management alike. Each component of comprehensive wealth management is analyzed in depth before our practiced methodologies are accepted in the firm.

At this point, we are almost always casually interested in hiring another financial planner. Our most common hires are people who have no exposure to the commission-based side of the industry with little to no bad “experience” but a lot of education and passion.

As a result, the average age of our financial advisors will likely always stay young, and we will continue to be an outlier in that respect.

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