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The Arkansas Firm Specializing in Financial Planning: GenWealth Knows No Matter the Client’s Age, Now is the Time to Start

Worried you’re too old to start investing? Thinking you’re too young? No matter what your age, the financial experts at GenWealth Financial Advisors, an Arkansas firm with locations in Louisiana and Tennessee, want you to think again.

“It’s never too early to start investing, and it’s never a bad time to create wealth,” said John Shrewsbury, co-owner, financial advisor, and Retirement Income Certified Professional (RICPⓇ). “The process is also a lot easier than most people think.”

Unlike other financial advisors, the team at GenWealth prioritizes education, listening, and teamwork — three factors that consistently deliver excellent service to their clients.

Educating for financial success

“We view financial service as a public service,” said Janet Walker, co-owner of GenWealth Financial Advisors and RICP®. “Many people think financial advisors are in it to make money for themselves, but our purpose is to inform and teach. This approach creates a virtuous circle — we supply the knowledge, experience, and expertise to help people work toward their goals, and they pay it forward to help others. Everyone benefits.”

Without trusted advice and expert guidance, many people who are new to investing may make costly mistakes.

“The biggest mistake investors tend to make is allowing emotion to rule their decisions,” said Teresa Arrigo, financial advisor and RICP®. “When there’s a downturn in the market, they often get anxious and cash out, and only later realize the losses they incur from doing so. In these situations, investors will find that they actually have lost money, rather than made it. But if they had had a financial plan in place, they would have ridden the storm out and likely avoided long-term losses on their investments for retirement.”

According to Arrigo, having a financial plan can help mitigate stress and fear. As a result, investors who have one are less likely to sell at the wrong time.

“Our clients don’t usually call us in a panic,” she said. “They know their long-term plan has been prepared to weather these downturns. Our clients know they just need to keep calm and stay the course, because they trust the process.”

Financial strategy customized for your dreams

Active listening is another key aspect of GenWealth’s approach.

“Everyone has different hopes and dreams,” said Shrewsbury. “To figure out how to serve each individual best, we spend a lot of time asking them what they’d like their future to look like. Only when you truly understand what someone wants can you create a plan and strategy to help them toward that future.”

At GenWealth, financial plans are customized to meet the individual needs of every client. Each usually contains three “buckets” to maximize returns while limiting risk.

For clients’ first bucket, some of their funds are invested in conservative, low-risk assets. This pot of money often has a short time horizon, such as five years.

Clients’ second bucket takes on a moderate degree of risk. These funds have a longer time horizon, such as ten years.

The third bucket has the longest time horizon — 15 years, for example. This long-term outlook protects against losses even for higher-risk investments. Why? The longest bear markets in history have lasted less than two years and, on average, the market rebounds to pre-recession levels in 19 months. While this bucket may see a temporary dip, it can be counted on to recover over time.

Capital gains from the high-yield, higher-risk investments in the 15-year bucket are routinely transferred to the more conservative buckets. This offers clients an added layer of protection on their investments, guarding them until they are ready for retirement.

A Whole team at your back

While most financial advisors work as solitary individuals, GenWealth’s clients always meet with teams of at least two financial advisors.

“This means there’s always backup,” said Shrewsbury. “Plus, we find that collaboration helps teams work smarter. Our clients get the benefit of advice from people with different perspectives to cover every angle, because planning for retirement can be complex. The total is greater than the sum of the parts.”

While some investors may believe they don’t need expert advice, this can be another mistake. For instance, they can look up quality information online only to apply it to the wrong thing or under incorrect conditions. As a result, their investments may flounder, and they can fail to achieve their monetary goals.

“Even professional athletes need a coach,” said financial advisor Scott Inman, who served as a Razorback Sports Network football pre-game show host for 13 years. “Tiger Woods has a coach. Professional football players have a coach. Our role is similar. At GenWealth, we provide the experience, knowledge, and skills to set people up for success. We look out for you, give you the necessary feedback, and have your back.”

Getting started

While the idea of saving for retirement can evoke feelings of stress and anxiety, GenWealth’s financial advisors know how to address their clients’ fears and chart the right path to financial freedom. For people who don’t know how ready they are for retirement, the company offers a free 15-minute consultation meeting that can take place in-person, online, or over the phone.

As an added benefit, GenWealth is extremely flexible with the services they offer. Some clients pay a flat rate to get a custom-designed financial plan that they can implement themselves, whereas others may opt to pay either a small fee or a commission for extra assistance in implementing their plan. Whatever the case may be, GenWealth Financial Advisors find their fiduciary responsibility extremely important, meaning they are happy to accept compensation in whatever way best fits the individual.

“Our goal at GenWealth Financial Advisors is to help position individuals for retirement and wealth creation,” said Shrewsbury. “Long-term financial planning builds a solid foundation for the rest of your life.”
The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. Securities and advisory services offered through LPL Financial, A Registered Investment Advisor, Member FINRA/SIPC. Financial Planning offered through GenWealth Financial Advisors LLC, a Registered Investment Advisor, and a separate entity from LPL Financial. For residents of Louisiana, all advisory services offered through LPL Financial.

What You Need to Know About The Greendale Cinema

In the tiny town of Greendale, you’ll find one of the unique movie theaters in the world Greendale Cinema. You’d think it was just another luxury theater with curved screens, reclining seats, and a popcorn bar. But as soon as your movie plays on that big screen right before you. You’ll realize this is no ordinary cinema.

 

“The theater has a ceiling so high that when you’re sitting, you can’t even see it,” said Cathey Peters, a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has visited the theater since she was five years old. “You feel like you’re getting into your movie.”

 

The Greendale Cinema is just that: a real cinema. Unlike most theaters, this one is not owned by a private company. The University of Wisconsin-Madison owns it, and it is open to the public.

 

The theater isn’t just a place to see movies. It’s also a place where you can learn as much about film as you can before you go.

 

It was built in 1977 but was not opened to the public until 1978. It’s was added through additions in 1989 and 2004. It is the world’s largest single-screen cinema, with over 1,000 seats.

 

Known as the World’s Largest Screen, it is the giant curved screen in the world. Featuring 32 thousand square feet of screen. It’s not just big – it’s HUGE!

 

But although this may be one of the largest venues ever built, it has a humble origin. “This was all a massive experiment in economics,” said Jim Nelson, an archivist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries who spent 31 years working on The Greendale Cinema.

 

“No one had ever built a theater like this before, and they wanted to see it. If they could make something like this work,” explained Nelson. But creating the world’s giant screen was just the beginning.

 

“Once they design and build the screen, they had to build 32 thousand square feet of the curved surface in an air-conditioned room,” Nelson said. “It was a pretty tricky thing.

 

Building the Screen

 

The problem with building such a large curved surface was that they had to build it while keeping the temperature constant at 60 degrees. To make things easier, Nelson described the “Cinema Film Curves” used by the builders:

 

“They’d draw these curves on paper, and then you’d build three inches of foam over that. Then you’d snap these metal strips outside the foam,” said Nelson. “I’ve taken those strips off quite a few times because they were worn out.

 

“The metal strips look like skinny picket fences, and they’d go all the way around, and then you’d spray them orange,” he explained. “And then once the orange peel sprayed, you’d put another two layers of sheet metal on top of that.”

 

But getting a curved surface to stay curved posed another problem. “They found out pretty quickly that if they just built [the screen] up like an airplane hangar or a square box and left it open at the corners, it would sag.

 

What’s Behind the Curtain?

 

While the screen may seem like black fabric, it isn’t. It’s a fine mesh screen that lets light through. Even though you can see through it, the screen is solid.

 

“There are 16 thousand pounds of lifting wires running all the way around in a framework built into the ceiling,” explained Nelson. He notes that to ensure everything stays right where it is supposed to, they have to paint those wires and their support structure once every five years.

 

“But they don’t paint the screen,” Nelson said. “They have to wash that. And it takes two weeks to do an excellent job washing – so no one ever wants to do that.”

 

According to Nelson, the mesh is supposed to let 25% of the light through, but he believes it lets in less than 15%. That’s actually how a movie screen is supposed to work, but it doesn’t always work like that.

 

“What makes movies look good in contrast,” explained Nelson. “If you go to a theater that’s not air-conditioner and they’ve got the screen too bright, it’ll wash out the whole picture.”

 

So to make sure that the screen is washed correctly, they spray it down with a hose – once every two years. They do it by starting at one end of the screen, spraying until they reach the middle, then backtracking and moving over to the other end – an operation that takes about four hours.

 

Creating the Seats

 

Once The Cinema Film Frames were built, it was time to figure out how people would sit in the theater. “It was a big problem,” Nelson said. “You couldn’t build the seats into curves and make them work.”

 

“So what you do is you build them as seats set on a slope, and then you put a post about eight feet off the floor in front of it,” Nelson explained. “After that, you lower two rows of seats. Then, you position the post extremely high, and two people hold both rows.

 

After that, he continued, “all you have to do is have two guys on either side of that pole, which is eight feet off the ground, pull those seats down until they’re sitting at a slope. They are thus unable to see in front unless they stand up. And then there’s this curving ledge. It’s like a little bench.

 

Click your way through the theater.

 

To get the best experience in a theater, viewers should sit as close to the screen as possible. But that’s not always easy. “If you have a big screen, people are gonna sit further back,” Nelson explained. “We tried to build in this idea of ‘Let’s make people sit closer.’”

 

“It turns out that nobody likes to sit either close to or far from the screen, and they found out very quickly that it was a bad fit,” explained Nelson. “It just didn’t work.

 

“The solution they came up with is that all the seats go to the back of the theater. Then there are a bunch of them on each side, but only a few seats go all the way to the front,” he continues. “It gives this fun effect where you fit in with that curve.

 

The Dome

 

Unlike other theaters, the center of The Greendale Cinema built from a dome. “If you look at the center of the building, there’s a huge arch that goes up and connects to the two side walls,” said Nelson. “And then there are some curved surfaces under it.”

 

“But here’s how you can tell it’s a dome,” he explained. “There are those two side walls, which we’ll call the ‘straight walls.’ In between them, there are three different arches. The first one is a little higher, the second one is a little lower, and the third one is just as tall as the first two.

 

Bringing the Curves to Life

 

While the dome looks curve, it isn’t curve. It’s a perfectly straight surface with small curve features around the edges. “It just looks like two big bricks were glue together,” Nelson say. “But there are no big holes in it at all.”

 

According to Nelson, there was only one real problem getting the dome to stay in place – gravity.

 

Conclude-

 

The Big Reveal

On May 6, 2005, Greendale Cinema officially opened. This theater has ten screens and only shows new releases. The auditorium’s seating capacity range from 290 seats to 69 seats. According to the Greendale Cinema website, the theater is located in Greendale, Indiana.

 

“It has all these amazing curves, standing on this very firm foundation,” Nelson said. “It’s overbuilt, in a way.”