Jake Murphy, FSCP - Financial Planner

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Jake Murphy, FSCP - Financial Planner Jake Murphy is a registered representative of and offers securities and investment advisory services through MML Investors Services, LLC. Member SIPC.

Helping healthcare professionals, business owners, and families make smarter decisions around cash flow, taxes, retirement, protection, and building more flexibility for the future. Supervisory Office: 201 King of Prussia Rd, Suite 501, Radnor, PA 19087. Tel:610-766-3000.

“Oh, so YOU sell life insurance?”She’d just asked the guy next to me that same question.I was out last week when the dre...
10/13/2026

“Oh, so YOU sell life insurance?”

She’d just asked the guy next to me that same question.

I was out last week when the dreaded “What do you do for work?” started making its rounds.

He said insurance. She guessed life insurance. He explained that he worked in commercial insurance.

Then she turned to me.

“I run a financial planning practice.”

“Oh, so YOU sell life insurance?” as she laughed.

I smiled and shrugged. “Yeah, sure. That’s definitely a part of it.”

And I’m proud to help people with that, too.

For a CRNA making $270,000, with a $520,000 mortgage and two kids in grade school. That paycheck is doing a lot of work.

What would your family need financially if they weren’t here to earn it anymore?

I understand the skepticism. People have been sold policies that didn’t fit their needs.

But insurance can be a small part of the work and still carry enormous consequences for a family.

So, yeah. That’s definitely a part of it.

I’m comfortable with that.

“Wait… you guys have a shared calendar?”I looked at Val like I had just discovered some secret relationship feature ever...
10/08/2026

“Wait… you guys have a shared calendar?”

I looked at Val like I had just discovered some secret relationship feature everyone else knew about.

Brendan Keane had mentioned the shared calendar he and his girlfriend use at their Summerween party last week.

Val immediately goes:
“Yeah, well, it’s because you have a Samsung.”

Yet again, somehow I’m the problem.

For the record, Samsung still clears Apple all day long.

Anyway, we downloaded TimeTree last night.

Within about 10 minutes my phone started getting hammered with notifications for weddings, dinners, school stuff, appointments, trips and everything else happening over the next few months.

Apparently I’m way busier than I realized.

I thought we were doing just fine with the occasional “Wait… when did you tell me about that?”

So I need to know:
Are Val and I actually the last engaged couple on earth to get a shared calendar?

A couple in their early 50s has about $460,000 saved for retirement and one of them still doesn’t know if she can afford...
10/07/2026

A couple in their early 50s has about $460,000 saved for retirement and one of them still doesn’t know if she can afford to go part time.

They’ve spent decades doing a lot of the right things.

They’ve consistently saved for retirement, avoided taking on much unnecessary debt and built a meaningful amount of equity in their home.

But one of the biggest questions they have has never really been answered:

“Can I work less?”

That decision has a lot less to do with hitting some arbitrary retirement number and a lot more to do with what happens when her paycheck gets smaller.

Once the mortgage disappears, how much does the household actually need each month?

How much will eventually come from Social Security, pensions and other retirement income?

Whatever is left is the amount their investments and continued work need to cover.

That’s the part they’ve never had mapped out.

They’ve spent years building the assets.

Now they need to know what those assets have already made possible.

A retirement plan tells you how much of your paycheck you can afford to give up.

10/06/2026

$500,000 doesn’t sound like an enormous retirement portfolio.

For one couple I work with, it may be more than enough for the job it actually needs to do.

Because once their mortgage is gone, they may barely need to touch it for regular monthly expenses.

Their retirement income picture looks roughly like this:

About $100,000/year coming in from Social Security, pensions and an annuity.

After estimated taxes, that’s around $6,500–$6,700/month.

Their current spending is roughly $7,800–$8,000/month.

But their mortgage is about $1,600/month and should be gone around the time they retire.

That brings regular spending closer to $6,200–$6,400/month.

Suddenly, the $500,000 portfolio has a very different job.

It doesn’t need to create their entire retirement paycheck.

It can help fund travel, larger purchases, unexpected expenses and give them flexibility when markets are down.

Now compare that with someone who has $1,000,000 invested but needs the portfolio to produce $70,000 or $80,000 every year just to live.

The bigger account doesn’t automatically mean the stronger retirement plan.

The amount your portfolio actually has to produce matters just as much as the amount sitting in it.

$25,000-$30,000 of part-time income can completely change when someone gets to leave full-time work.I’ve had a few conve...
10/05/2026

$25,000-$30,000 of part-time income can completely change when someone gets to leave full-time work.

I’ve had a few conversations lately with people approaching retirement who say some version of:

“I don’t need to stop working completely. I just don’t want to keep doing this full time.”

Take a 62 year old nurse who would be perfectly happy working two days a week instead of five.

Say she currently earns $120,000 and could still make about $30,000 working part time.

If her household needs $90,000 a year to live, the portfolio no longer has to replace a $120,000 salary.

It may only need to help cover a $60,000 gap before Social Security, pensions or other income start filling in more of the picture.

That’s a very different retirement problem.

And if the $30,000 from part-time work also covers travel and discretionary spending, she may be able to leave full-time work years earlier without feeling like every vacation is coming out of the portfolio.

We tend to frame retirement as:

Work full time until one day you stop completely.

There’s a lot of room in between.

Your real retirement date is the day full-time work becomes optional.

09/17/2026

$75,000 in savings.
A $750 auto deductible.
A $1,000 homeowners deductible.

Wanting to find more cash flow to save for an early retirement.

Picture a mid-career couple with a ~$700,000 home who wants to put more toward retirement and create the option to stop working earlier. Their cash flow is already pretty efficient, so we start looking in places people don’t usually associate with retirement planning. Insurance is one of them.

Auto insurance shifts from a $750 deductible to a $2,000 one.

Potential savings: ~$780/year

Homeowners insurance goes from a $1,000 deductible to $2,500.

Potential savings: ~$245/year

Combined, that's roughly $1,000/year back into their cash flow.

What changes is that they agree to take on an additional $1,250 if there’s an auto claim and $1,500 if there’s a home claim. With $75,000 already sitting in cash, those are risks they're financially capable of absorbing.

Their deductibles simply hadn’t caught up with their balance sheet.

Now that ~$1,000/year can be redirected toward the retirement goal they actually care about.

My first 4 months in this business, I made $0.Literally nothing.I had no finance degree, no experience in the industry a...
09/16/2026

My first 4 months in this business, I made $0.

Literally nothing.

I had no finance degree, no experience in the industry and very little reason to feel like I belonged there. I felt like a fraud.

The playbook I was given was simple: write down 200 friends and family members and start calling them to set meetings.

They even gave me the scripts.

I still couldn’t do it.

Calling the buddy I talked fantasy football with yesterday and suddenly trying to have a financial conversation felt weird. So did calling a college friend I hadn’t spoken to in 3 years.

Or my aunt who had just asked me at Thanksgiving how the new job was going while I conveniently said nothing about meeting with her.

So I chose cold calling instead.

I figured I’d rather hear “no” from someone I’d never have to talk to again.

And I heard it. A lot.

Then about four months in, one of my friend’s dads happened to be talking to him about his finances.

My friend told him “You should talk to Jake. He just started doing this.”

He became the first person to trust me.

Fast forward a few years and now people I’ve never met reach out after reading my posts for months.

That still feels pretty crazy.

Careers can look obvious in hindsight.

Mine definitely didn’t during those first four months.

Apparently a family of four in Pennsylvania now needs $247,936/year to live “comfortably.”New Jersey: $295,110.Massachus...
09/15/2026

Apparently a family of four in Pennsylvania now needs $247,936/year to live “comfortably.”

New Jersey: $295,110.

Massachusetts: $329,555.

The map is based on the 50/30/20 rule:
50% needs
30% wants
20% saving

That sounds neat until you apply it to an actual household.

Take a family making $250,000 with two kids in daycare, a $4,500 mortgage and student loans.

Compare them with another family making the same $250,000 with no childcare costs, a paid-off car and a housing payment half the size.

Same income, completely different definition of “comfortable.”

And once income gets higher, rigid percentage rules get even less relevant.

Someone making $250,000 doesn’t automatically need to spend $75,000/year on “wants” just because a formula says 30%.

Your income matters.

But the life that income has to support matters a lot more.

09/03/2026

A nurse practitioner earned an extra $1,400 nearly every weekend.

She hadn’t made a single quarterly tax payment on it all year.

Since February, she had been working 16 weekend hours at an inpatient rehabilitation facility on top of her full-time job.

Most of the additional 1099 income went toward eliminating her student loans.

She had also saved 30% for taxes.

Whether that was enough depended on numbers she had never calculated.

Her W-2 withholding.

How much of her Social Security wage base had already been filled.

Her eligible business deductions.

And where the additional income placed the household within its tax bracket.

Her accountant hadn’t followed up, and she was already preparing to redirect the money from her student loans into retirement accounts.

Before investing it, we needed to determine how much of that money was actually available and whether future taxes should be covered through quarterly payments or additional W-2 withholding.

She paid off the student loans.

The next $1,400 weekend finally had a plan.

09/02/2026

A locum PA was receiving roughly $3,800 per month in tax-free housing stipends.

Her tax-home arrangement barely existed on paper.

She paid her mother $400 each month to maintain a room at the family home while working contracts in other states.

But there was no written lease, there was no clean record showing who received the money and she wasn’t tracking her assignments or trips home consistently

If the arrangement were ever questioned, explaining it would be easy.

Proving it would be much harder.

So before directing more money toward her student loans or investments, we focused on the documentation:

A written lease.

Electronic payments into an account owned by her mother.

Records of her contract dates and temporary assignments.

Receipts showing she was maintaining expenses in two places.

And a CPA reviewing whether the full arrangement supported the tax treatment.

Paying $400 a month toward a permanent home doesn’t automatically establish a tax home. The full facts still matter, including where you regularly work, whether the assignment is temporary and whether you are duplicating living expenses.

For this PA, more than $45,000 of annual stipends depended on getting those details right.

A valuable tax strategy becomes a lot less valuable when you can’t document why you qualified for it.

Address

30 S 17th Street, Suite 204
Philadelphia, PA
19103

Telephone

+14846634112

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