Gary Pinkerton improves the lives of his clients as a wealth strategist specializing in Family Banking, tax efficiency, Legacy and Estate Planning. He employs 30 years of ethical leadership gained at the US Naval Academy and honed as a nuclear attack submarine Commander as an experienced business owner, motivational speaker, and real estate investor – a humbling journey of discovering we follow God’s plan, not the one we made up.
Nuclear Submarine Commander
I commanded the USS Tucson, a Los Angeles class attack boat. Submarining is certainly a unique lifestyle. Being underwater without opening the hatch for 70 days is common. We produced our own water and air onboard and had over 30 years of nuclear fuel. We had spare parts and the ability to make more. With the exception of food or a very unique part, we could operate indefinitely.
In command of a submarine, you have a team of 150 people. It's an amazing group, the best of
the best in the military. While their enthusiasm may wane after long weeks at sea, they are patriotic, extremely smart American heroes. Truly an honor to serve and lead these wonderful people.
When I took over, the ship had just completed an almost two-year overhaul. It was fitted with the newest state-of-the-art systems. But the crew had to re-learn how to go to sea all over again and we failed many times. We eventually succeeded and deployed for 6 months to Asia. It was just incredible—a very difficult challenge at the beginning with a tremendous result at the end. It's something I'll never forget. I'm truly humbled and honored to have been given that opportunity, and fully acknowledge there was never a clearer example of God’s hand guiding
my life than in safely navigating the dozens of harrowing crises we encountered in that harsh deployed environment.
Refocusing Patriotism
As I finished that tour that brought many accolades and a path to making Admiral, my personal life was crumbling. I was married to a wonderful lady who had understandably grown weary of this life, and was a dad to two wonderful young boys who barely knew me. I saw the difference between wealth and legacy – Wealth is what you leave to someone. Far more important, Legacy is what you leave inside them. Reflecting on all I learned from my dad in those long hours on the farm, the legacy of experiences and lessons he’d left me, I realized how fortunate
I’d been. I needed to be around my kids much more and could not achieve that while climbing the ranks within the military.
I spent most of my last years as a Navy Captain in the Washington, DC area working in big government, leading a division for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon. It was another incredibly rewarding opportunity to work with the best of the best, and this time, across all the military Services. This experience also taught me something very important about myself: Senior military roles and big government life were not for me.
I realized that my love for America was not about nationalism, but rather our founding father’s ideas embodied in the constitution, its enduring focus on protecting the rights of individuals and their life, liberty, and property. I wanted to help sustain this 250-year-old experiment – a vision unique across the globe in the 1700s that an individual owns their body, their property and the results of their efforts in creating goods and services. That experiment was wildly successful and spread prosperity and hope around the world. But it is always at risk, never guaranteed and I realized patriotism to me meant protecting the ideals and freedoms of our republic.
I shifted my focus to helping business owners and entrepreneurs prosper by improving their finances and sharing their unique genius with the world. These were practices I saw and loved when I was a kid on the farm. Back then, there was no Amazon.com. Things we needed were made locally. Someone just started making it, and often, a thriving business was born. My dad and I made apple crates for orchards for a few years because they needed them, and we had trees, a sawmill, and were paid well to solve that challenge. I love that about America.
But DC taught me that when government grows, it takes on the traits of a living being – its goals become survival and to get bigger, not service to the people. That results in ever-increasing taxes that crushes the small business owner and steals agency and freedom from the very people who elected the government.
Funding a Personal Economy, A Foundation to Wealth
Protecting our Republic and the American dream comes down to people having the ability to, first, focus on what they're uniquely good at or interested in and, second, prosper from that. That is Agency, and strengthening the financial position of American families and their businesses keeps the power with them, not the government; elected officials work for the people providing rule of law to support them not control them. What does my business of high cash value life insurance have to do with that?
I help people build a personal economy where they've got control over how they use their resources and what they choose to do in life. A personal economy lays a foundation that enables you to invest in yourself and your business, which is far more important than investing in your 401K. To be successful long-term, you need reserves in a place that are protected and private, and you need to offset risks that typically cause many families and small businesses to fail, like inflation and high taxes.
I use insurance-based financial strategies and services to build a foundation for wealth. At the core, my team educates on the use of an insurance policy as a vehicle where you store emergency money, reserves for your businesses or properties, and cash for upcoming major expenses and investments, where it’s protected and can grow three or four times as fast as it would in a savings account, and without the impact of taxes.
This financial foundation, the life insurance benefit, privacy, protection, and tax-free wealth available through this strategy is amazing. And it is the best foundational savings vehicle I’ve found in my 2 decades in this industry for enabling agency and growing permanent wealth.
Gary’s Thought Leader Lessons & Strategies –Building a Family Legacy
Wealth is what you leave to others, Legacy is what you leave inside them.
All living things have a basic instinct to survive and focus the lessons they teach their young on the skills needed to ensure survival. However, to humans God adds a powerful and unique drive to prosper. This quality is the initiative to optimize and innovate far beyond mere survival, to “advance the football” with each generation
leaving the world a better place than they found it.
The challenge is that many entrepreneurs and business owners spend so much time building their business and amassing their fortune reach end of life without having taken the time to pass on the lessons that made them successful. That was me a decade ago– in 20 short years I’d gone from a negative net worth and not knowing what the military was to leading at some of the highest levels in the Navy and at the Pentagon with 100x
the wealth my father achieved. Yet my father taught me the work ethic and business skills of success and I had not done any of that for my boys to that point. It was a wakeup call, and I changed.
There are no shortcuts to passing on a legacy, you have to thoughtfully put on paper what you’re about and put in the time to teach and demonstrate those values to the next generation. If both parents work two jobs to make financial ends meet and don’t often spend time with each other or the children, then legacy is nearly impossible to achieve. So establishing agency, having the financial resources to live life on your terms, is a prerequisite to building a legacy.
I help clients first establish the foundation of savings and protection, then we move into assets that you directly control like your own career, business and real estate. The strategy is called building a Hierarchy of Wealth and is essential for creating lasting agency and generational wealth. Speculative stock market investments where I had all my money in 2010 and most Americans still do today has a very small role on this more certain path; it is taking lessons from wealthy families that have operated this way for centuries.
Trusting that God is by Your Side
The greatest lesson I’ve learned in life is to recognize the presence of God’s guiding hand in every challenge, setback and success I experience in life. At a young age I was wired to take credit for the wins. As I matured, I started taking credit for the losses too. Then after many experiences of bad judgement trying to do it alone, I realized this short time on earth is all in God’s hand and playing out as he intended; I’m simply a character in His movie and when I listen to His intent and take His path, we excel, and when I decide I know best and will do it with brute force, we fail. Perhaps that is what surrendering to God means – having the wisdom to realize you are not personally making this all happen, so start asking for guidance and listening.
My greatest advice to my 18-year-old self is simply to recognize I’m not alone. Acknowledge God’s presence and pay attention to the clues. I first got a glimpse of this when I was 16 and didn’t understand the message of this near death accident. Driving a tractor on a major highway one Saturday morning, I was hit by a commercial van who never saw me and didn’t hit his brakes. The police estimated he was traveling over 70 mph, I was going 15 mph. The impact put him through the van’s windshield, caused the tractor front wheels to come 5 feet off the ground and completely destroyed both vehicles. My tractor had no seatbelt, seatback, or cab. Yet I walked away without a scratch. I considered myself incredibly lucky and concocted a handful of coincidences to explain how that must have happened. As a proud scientist and engineer, I’ve explained away God’s hand in my life many times in that same way. If you do the same, I’d encourage you to acknowledge God’s will and your minority role in this movie of life. You will gain immediate peace, joy and success.
Contact wealth strategist, entrepreneur, motivational speaker, and real estate professional Gary Pinkerton to learn more about insurance-based financial strategies, reducing taxes, real estate, private banking, and alternative investments for guaranteeing a better future.
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