Jim Barnash, CFP®

I'm a Chicago-area guy through and through — based in Vernon Hills and working with families across Chicagoland. I'm a graduate of DePaul University, and for years I taught the very curriculum that trains CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ professionals, at DePaul and W.R. Harper College. Teaching shaped how I advise. I don't just want you to follow my recommendations — I want you to understand them.

For more than three decades, I've sat across the table from people at every stage: the young family trying to get organized, the couple a few years from retirement, the business owner wondering what comes next. What I've learned is simple. The numbers matter, but trust matters more. Money is one of the most personal things in your life, so the person you choose to help with it should be someone you actually understand and enjoy working with.

After decades of building my own practice, I wasn't looking to change for the sake of change. I was looking for people who did this work the way I do — clients first, education over sales, relationships over transactions.

That's what I found at INVST. Joining wasn't about handing off what I'd built. It was about giving the families I serve more — a full team, deeper resources, and the same fiduciary commitment I've always stood on, now backed by a firm that shares it. Same Jim. More behind him.

I'm a teacher at heart, and I lead with questions, not products:

• What are you really trying to provide for, and protect?
• What keeps you up at night when it comes to money?
• If your paycheck stopped tomorrow — by choice or by surprise — would your plan hold?

One thing I'm known for: I teach clients to think about their money in three buckets — taxable, tax-deferred, and tax-free. Most people spend a lifetime filling those buckets without ever planning which one to draw from, or when. Getting that order right can mean keeping meaningfully more of what you've built. That's the kind of thinking a real plan is made of, and it's exactly the kind of thing I love to walk people through.

And one commitment sits underneath all of it: I'm a fiduciary, all of the time — bound to put your interests first, on every recommendation, every time.

My work centers on two kinds of households:

• Approaching or in retirement. People within about ten years of retiring who need to turn a lifetime of saving into income that lasts. Social Security timing, tax-efficient withdrawals, healthcare before and after Medicare — and the question underneath them all: “Am I going to be okay?”
• Building and protecting a household. Dual-income and single-earner families with strong income and a stack of financial pieces that don't yet connect. My job is to tie them into one plan — investments, taxes, insurance, and estate — so nothing falls through the cracks.

Across both, the throughline is coordination. I act as a kind of personal CFO — working alongside your CPA, your estate attorney, and INVST's specialists, including our INVST Protect team for insurance — so your whole financial life pulls in the same direction. The areas I focus on: retirement income planning, tax planning, investment management, estate and legacy coordination, and protection strategy.

I've always believed that good planning isn't about products — it's about clarity. It's helping you see the whole picture, understand your choices, and act with confidence instead of worry.

That's exactly what INVST is built to do. We don't sell you a piece; we build the whole plan and coordinate the experts around it. For me, INVST is the formalization of something I've practiced for three decades: your money should work for the life you want — not the other way around.

I follow the INVST methodology, tuned for the tax, income, and legacy decisions my clients face: