Alex Murguia, Ph.D.
Hello, I’m Alex, and welcome to our site! Bio pages tend to be a bit boring so I will try and mix it up a bit for your reading pleasure. Here goes…
I graduated from George Washington University with a doctorate in Clinical Psychology. During this time, I focused my research efforts on psychometrics (fancy way of saying “I worked on surveys”) and was a research fellow for the National Institutes of Health. I created a questionnaire to assess how your health beliefs affect how you utilize medical services. It was well-received and set me up for an academic career.
Upon graduating, my research interests evolved to investments, and I sought a formal career in the financial industry. Staying true to my scientist-practitioner mindset, I joined McLean Asset Management and was able to publish a number of articles, and one went on to win a fancy award too! I also founded a financial planning software company to better serve the industry and our underlying clients.
Never one to sit still for very long, I became extremely disillusioned by the lack of assessment tools used in our profession that can help individuals determine their best path for retirement success. (This, by the way, is the largest understatement on this site.)
I took Wade’s framework for Retirement Income Planning (more on Wade later) and sought to quantify these concepts into a workable retirement income model. With the help of our Retirement Researcher community, we conducted a hugely successful investigation that delivered the RISA® right to your screen.
Wade Pfau, Ph.D., CFA, RICP®
Wade is a one-man think tank. Wade’s retirement income framework was the base that helped me build out the RISA®. He is the Professor of Retirement Income at The American College of Financial Services, a higher education institution for financial planners. He leads the curriculum for their Retirement Income Certified Professional designation (RICP®). He is also a partner with me at McLean Asset Management and Retirement Researcher.
He earned a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 2003 and became a CFA charter holder in 2011.
Wade regularly publishes his research on retirement income topics in leading peer-reviewed practitioner-based financial planning research journals.
He has won several awards, including:
Investment News
In 2016, Wade was named as one of the Innovators in the 2016 InvestmentNews’ Icons and Innovators list of titans in the financial advice industry.
Montgomery-Warchester
Two Montgomery-Warschauer Awards, which are awarded annually by the editors of the Journal of Financial Planning to “honor the paper that provided the most outstanding contribution for the betterment of the Journal’s readership in the preceding year.”
Montgomery-Warchester
Two Academic Thought Leadership Awards from the Retirement Management Journal.
Acadamy of Financial Services
The 2014 best paper award in retirement planning from the Academy of Financial Services.
Journal of Personal Finance
I was also named the fifth most prolific financial author of the last ten years, and the tenth most prolific of the last 30 years.
Trevor Alexander
Trevor has over 18 years designing and building software, ranging from large enterprises to small start-ups (3 of which were successfully acquired).
His roles has shifted through the years, from UI / UX Design, to Project Management and Product Management, to Director of Product, responsible for building and growing businesses.
Trevor’s able to leverage this diverse background to drive releases from inception to delivery, with a sharp focus on providing value through enjoyable experiences.
Tim Jodoin
Tim has a wealth of experience over his 20 year career that spans from Electronic Engineering to the cutting edge of Cloud Architecture and Enterprise App Development. Thus everything from building the physical chips to designing and deploying critical applications across every major cloud infrastructure.
Understanding technology so thoroughly has allowed him and his teams to achieve unparalleled milestones on scale, speed, reliability, and security.
This is especially true with the RISA Application, where he and his team has leveraged the latest technology advancements to build the next generation of FinTech software ready to perform at scale (and they’ve only just begun).
Maggie Fernandez
Maggie’s career began in education as an elementary school teacher and evolved as she became a school counselor and therapist, taking part in various projects to help improve the local community. She would serve the Boston and Miami-Dade Public Schools Systems for 26 years in these roles.
She leverages all that she’s learned through those experiences and is now enjoying working with financial professionals from all over the nation and linking them with the RISA so that they may help clients achieve the retirements they truly deserve in their older years.
“It is my honor to work alongside such an amazing team while helping others.”
Elizabeth Lopez
Elizabeth recently graduated from Manhattan College with a B.S. in Business Administration. Post graduation she has had the opportunity to work with incredible people from different industries with a focus on Marketing, Social Media, and CRM Management.
