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MILLIONAIRES TURNING MILLENNIALS INTO

“They asked me if I had a pilot’s license, and I did not,” he said. “Then they asked me if I spoke a second language other than Spanish, and I did not. They asked me what my major was, and I said it was marketing. They said, ‘Everything that we do is about following money. So if you want to even try and have a shot at the job with us, you need to change majors to either finance or accounting.’”

Instead of further pursuing a DEA career, he changed his major to finance and began the internship that launched his career.

But starting out in the industry wasn’t easy for someone who hadn’t even graduated from college yet.

“It was very much go try and find your natural market or draw up your list of your target 200, things like that. And I was like, ‘Well, I’m 20 years old. There’s not really a natural market here.’”

Without a natural market to help him get started, Kuderna began cold-calling business owners to discuss employee health benefits to help get a foot in the door with that population. He also coldcalled CPAs “just to get in the know with some folks in the community.” But he didn’t have much luck in cold-calling with either group.

But he did begin to find success from attending networking events in his area — and he attended a lot of them.

“I did a ton of networking events, probably a couple of them a day — usually one for lunch, and then I’d go to a happy hour or something in the evening,” he said. “And I started to meet a lot of people in the area. It was a slow start those first couple of years. I was hardly staying afloat. I was living at home after I graduated from college.”

A passion for financial literacy

Those rough early years eventually passed when Kuderna discovered he had a talent and a passion for discussing financial literacy with the public.

“Where I really kind of hit the ground running was in putting together financial literacy talks — in particular, doing them at hospitals,” he said. “I created these financial education curricula to present to all the residents and fellows at teaching hospitals in the area, and that’s where my career really started to jump.”

Kuderna realized that newly minted medical professionals have a particular set of financial and insurance needs, and because he was about the same age as they were, he could position himself as a trusted source of advice.

“I was able to get in with them and kind of coach them,” he said. “I was right around their age, in my mid-20s, late 20s. I talked with them about their student loan concerns, kind of put them at ease there; talked a lot about disability insurance, which became a huge part of my practice.

I began to grow with them as they moved out of their residencies and began practicing and making money. Then I got licensed nationwide, and I expanded with them as they scattered all around the country.”

Kuderna continued to discuss financial issues in more hospitals. He earned his Certified Financial Planner designation in 2013, and he described that achievement as “giving me some credibility.”

Today, about 80% of Kuderna’s clients are dentists or physicians. He finds that one of their biggest issues is managing the massive student loan debt they carry after graduation.

“They come into the early years of their career feeling a sense of guilt that they’re

Millennial Millionaire: A Guide to Become a Millionaire by 30

He described the book as “kind of a crash course on finance for the young professional.”

“It was part memoir, and a lot of it was based on the conversations I have with young professionals,” he said. “I was able to blend my old passion of writing with my new passion of financial education and what I do as my day job. The good part about writing the book is that it was supposed to help my clients and it also got my name out there.”

Kuderna switched gears during the COVID-19 lockdown to write a fantasy novel, Anoroc, which is “corona” spelled backward. The book is a coming-of-age novel that tells the story of a young boy living in a world where people compete for scarce resources.

“During quarantine, I was able to free up so much of my schedule because I was doing all Zoom calls instead of traveling,” he said. “I thought, now I actually can write something that’s a total escape from constantly talking about COVID-19 and finance and all the stuff that was going on.” not planning for retirement,” he said. “What I try to do is draw up a game plan with their student loans and get them to calm down. We come up with a strategy on how to deal with them. It’s not different from if you got a $600,000 mortgage. It’s not like your whole life stops; it’s just that you continue living now with that monthly payment. When they become attending physicians and their incomes start to rise, that’s when we’re able to help them start investing in their retirement plans.”

Kuderna said that after his second book was published, people asked him whether he planned to write a sequel to Millennial Millionaire. “Certainly there were a lot of things that happened in the economy since I wrote my first book in 2016,” he said. The result was his newest book, What Should I Do With My Money? Economic Insights to Build Wealth Amid Chaos, which was published in February.

A crash course

By 2016, Kuderna decided to indulge his passion for writing and merge it with his interest in educating people about money. He wrote his first book,

He said that the book begins with the original meaning of the word “wealth,” which comes from an Old English word, “weal,” which means “well-being.”

“I write about wealth in the context of well-being, not just in a monetary sense. I think that guides all economic decisions and all financial decisions. Every person is trying to make decisions for their own well-being.”

Going back to the days when he considered working for the DEA, Kuderna said he read a book on the Central Intelligence Agency that said that when they train their spies, they tell them to “look for the MICE.”

“MICE stands for money, ideology, compromise and ego,” he said. “Those four motivators make human

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