How a $1.5B Wealth Manager Spends His Money

**Daniel Berk** (0:00)
Glenn Ullmann founded Ullmann Wealth Partners in October of 2002, which, as he pointed out to me, was almost exactly the day the market bottomed out from the dot-com crack. Today, the firm manages around a billion and a half dollars. He owned 100% of it. Now, he owns about 20 after selling equity to the partners who helped him build it. He left the Air Force at 29 with roughly $200,000 to his name. And he stopped worrying about money somewhere north of 20 million net worth. He and his wife spend about $30,000 to $40,000 a month. Let's call it $500,000 a year. And that's not including philanthropy. He owns a plane where he flies himself because as we already learned, he was in the Air Force, he loves flying planes. And he paid about $1.2 million for it. He loves to have fun and he keeps most of his liquid net worth in a surprising place that I think you're going to want to hear. This is Glenn Ullmann on Moneywise. I'm your host, Daniel Berk. Let's get right into it. Glenn, thank you so much for joining Moneywise today. How are you doing?

**Glenn Ullmann** (0:59)
Great to be with you, Daniel. I'm doing great.

**Daniel Berk** (1:01)
I'm excited to chat today and learn a little bit about what makes your unique perspective around money and some of the advisement that you do with ultra high net worth individuals unique to the show. Tell me about yourself. Tell me what it is that you do.

**Glenn Ullmann** (1:13)
Yeah, sure. I founded Ullmann Wealth Partners back in October of 2002 That was actually the day the market bottomed from the.com and 9-11 events. And we focused really on three things. We believe wealth management is managing investments and we manage about 1.5 billion of client assets. But that's really not enough. You can do a great job with investments, but not have bracketed a client's advance planning and professional relationships.
You know, I say, you know, you can have returns of 100% a year, but then if you don't have an umbrella policy and you've got your head down and you run, you've got your head down looking at your phone and you run into the back of a car with Melinda Gates in it and you do a lot of damage, it doesn't matter how well you've done because they're coming after your assets. So we believe in that wealth management is the investments plus the advance planning. How do we increase cash flow, decrease debt or applicable, decrease taxes, always applicable.
Wealth protection, how do we put a moat around a client's assets? Wealth transfer, how do we get those assets that a client or a family has built to the next generation and or charitable giving, a huge part of our practice, philanthropy. How do we both explain it, teach it, inculcate it, one of my dad's favorite words, and so that those who much has been given, there's great obligation in our communities. Then we make sure that our clients have the tools and data performance reporting online and make sure that they have the best in accountants, bankers, state planning attorneys, personal attorneys. So we wrap that whole thing around the client. That's essentially what I've been doing since the early 90s when I stopped flying in the Air Force, but I'm sure we'll get to that later.

**Daniel Berk** (3:09)
Well, it's a great segue because I am curious, given your history flying in the Air Force, what was money like in the household growing up that you ultimately enlisted in the military and then started this wealth business? I mean, that's a huge spectrum of things that you've done professionally.

**Glenn Ullmann** (3:27)
That's such an interesting question. I grew up north of New York City in the suburbs. My dad and my grandfather owned a plastics consulting company. So of course, I don't have a pen right in front of me, but if you were trying to make a million pens, you would contact my father and grandfather, and they would work as the middleman between you, the customer, wanting your million pens and manufacturers. So I grew up, as did my siblings, going with my dad and my grandfather to injection molding factories around the tri-state area. My grandfather was an amazing salesperson. I remember going to an injection molding plant with him, and their injection molding plants are loud. I mean, because you're stamping out plastic pieces from raw materials. And he had a Robin Egg Cadillac Seville.
And I always loved that car because it had like the indicator lights. You could, instead of it blinking inside like we do now, it was like on the hood, and they would blink. I just loved that car. I know it's not germane to our conversation, but in this car, my grandfather had more tchotchkes. And he knew in a factory of 100 people, I remember, he may not have, but I remember him knowing everybody's name.