COVER STORY | 2026 YOUNG ADVISORS TO WATCH
Lillian Turner
Founder and Financial Life Planner / Daring Greatly Wealth / Scottsdale, Ariz.
Growing up, Lillian Turner had only a vague idea of what a financial planner does. Yet she found herself writing a 30-page business plan for a financial planning firm while still a senior in high school.
Turner was a member of DECA( the club that prepares students for careers in fields like marketing and finance) and she was tasked with writing an entrepreneurial plan.
“ The idea came to me out of nowhere,” she says.“ But I did a lot of research and really enjoyed the project.”
She attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she started out in accounting but ended up doing independent study on behavioral finance because there were no financial planning courses offered.
Her breakthrough came when she attended a career fair and eventually landed an internship in the compliance division at Robert W. Baird & Co., where she met a woman advisor, a career changer who was new to the firm and needed a part-time intern.“ She took a chance on me and that was really huge.”
Turner graduated from college in 2019 and worked for a couple of
smaller firms before launching her practice, Daring Greatly Wealth, in 2024. The name, she explains, was inspired by the speech“ Man in the Arena” given by former president Theodore Roosevelt in Paris in 1910.
She works with those underserved by the financial planning industry, focusing on educating and empowering clients who are at the beginning stages of their wealth-building journey. She also works with clients“ who live life on their own terms,” those who want something different from the traditional“ 9-to-5 until 65,” she says.
Turner gets her clients through social media sites such as Instagram, TikTok and Threads, as well as through friends and family. Also, as the 2026 president-elect of the Financial Planning Association’ s FPA NexGen, she gets referrals from planners.
Unlike many advisors who focus on maximizing return on investment, Turner says she focuses on maximizing clients’“ return on life.”“ People who just want to live life now, and so, it’ s how do we kind of balance saving for the future while also living life now.”
Turner says the days of heavily focusing on portfolio returns are over. Up-and-coming clients, heirs of the great wealth transfer,“ want education, they want autonomy, they want transparency on fees, and they want more of a holistic coaching approach.”
Daniel M. Yerger
President / MY Wealth Planners / Longmont, Colo.
Daniel M. Yerger wishes people would take more time when they are choosing a financial planner, because hopefully it will be a lifelong relationship that helps them fulfill their goals.
“ Too many people hire the first person they go to,” says Yerger, who views the relationship as a highly personal and long-lasting one.“ People are often too quick to trust someone.”
Yerger, founder and president of MY Wealth Planners, loves having an impact on his clients’ lives. He avoids the term“ financial advisor” because he feels it is too vague and unregulated.
Yerger served in the U. S. Army as a psychological operations specialist during Operation Enduring Freedom and graduated from Kansas State University with a PhD in personal financial planning. He said his Army experience taught him that any adversity is probably not as bad as it seems at the time, and he tries to pass this along to his clients.
“ In the Army you have a big impact on the world. When I got out I wanted to have a more direct impact on people’ s lives,” he says. He looked at different sectors of the financial world for a career, from banks to wirehouses to independent firms, but decided he wanted to serve his clients his way. That realization was the beginning of his independent practice, which he launched in 2019.
At the young age of 35, Yerger says he feels like a grizzled old veteran.
“ I do not want to do just investing for people, I want to do planning.” With 105 clients, and a four-person team, he feels he is involved with all of his clients, whom he is trying to guide to their optimum lives.
Yerger gets his clients to imagine— if money were not an object, what would they want to do? He has one retired couple who started creating ceramic artworks for community spaces.
Some of Yerger’ s clients end up taking sabbaticals to achieve personal goals.
One was afraid of being a burden to her daughter and“ no number [ of assets ] would have ever been enough for her. I showed her she was fine financially and need not have that concern,” he says.“ I want my clients to live their best lives.”
40 | FINANCIAL ADVISOR MAGAZINE | MAY / JUNE 2026 WWW. FA-MAG. COM