Most business owners reach out to a financial advisor right after tax season, when the damage is already done. Jonathan Lopez sees two kinds of people after tax season each year: the ones blindsided by a bill they were not prepared for, and the ones who did the planning, created margin, and are now asking what to do with it. That gap between reactive and proactive is the territory Truvize Financial works in every day, and it turns out the gap is rarely about knowledge. It is almost always about something deeper.

Jonathan is a founding partner at Truvize Financial alongside Drew Harris, an El Paso advisory firm built on the conviction that good financial guidance starts with understanding why people think about money the way they do. He joined us again on the 323 Podcast this month, and the conversation went further than most financial meetings ever get.

The Two Questions That Reveal the Real Goal

Every new client relationship at Truvize begins with a two-part exercise. Jonathan poses the hypotheticals, and the gap between the answers tells him almost everything he needs to know.

First: you open your mailbox and discover you have won thirty million dollars. What do you do with it? People answer fast, because the answers are near the surface. Pay off the house. Buy the car. Take the trip. Help the parents.

Second: you have just come from the doctor, and you have three to five years left. What changes?

The list shifts immediately. Spend more time with the kids. Work less. Be more present in the community. 

Here is the thing Jonathan has observed across years of asking this question: no client has ever given the same answers to both.

That gap is the point. The first question surfaces what we have been conditioned to want. The second surfaces what we actually care about. His job is to help clients close that distance before circumstances do it for them. It is also, quietly, an invitation to examine whether the financial plan they are building is actually aimed at the life they want, or just at the life they assume they are supposed to want.

Here’s the question we should all be asking: Are your financial decisions aimed at what you said in question one, or what you meant in question two?

Proactive Financial Planning for Christian Business Owners in El Paso: Why the Psychology Comes First

Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money shaped how Jonathan and Drew approach clients. One of its core insights is that people experience money through the lens of their history. What feels safe, risky, generous, or irresponsible is often rooted in upbringing and lived experience. Risk tolerance is not a character flaw. It is history.

In El Paso, that context matters. Jonathan noted that the region’s predominantly Hispanic culture tends toward risk-aversion with the market, not out of stubbornness but out of lived experience. What looks like resistance to a financial strategy often turns out to be unfamiliarity, and education is as much a part of Truvize’s work as advising.

The deeper point is that the most sophisticated financial strategy in the world will not produce the results a client hopes for if the underlying psychology is left unexamined. You can build the perfect plan, but if the person does not understand why they are making the choices they are making, the plan falls apart under pressure. That is why Jonathan leads with the questions before he gets to the numbers.

He also mentioned something that applies far beyond El Paso: the United States is the wealthiest country in the world, yet around 54% of Americans report daily financial stress, compared to a 35% average in countries with significantly less wealth. The problem is not income. It is the absence of a clear definition of “enough”, and the relentless pressure of a culture that keeps moving the goalpost.

What ‘Enough’ Actually Looks Like When You Define It Yourself

Retirement, Jonathan noted, is a newer concept than most people realize. The 401k did not exist in the early 1970s. The Roth IRA was created in 1999. The image of retiring to a hammock on the beach is a cultural invention, and it does not map to the reality of how most driven people actually want to live.

Author, Jordan Raynor, writes, “God may call you to retire from the work you do for pay. But I guarantee you that he won’t call you to retire from ‘abounding in the work of the Lord.’”

Instead of starting with an arbitrary retirement date or retirement dollar goal, Truvize asks clients to describe a perfect day after they have hit their goal. What are they doing? Where are they? What does the schedule look like? That image becomes the target, and the financial plan works backward from it.

For many of the Christian business owners in our C12 community, that vision includes something specific: the freedom to give and serve without financial constraint. Like a local pastor who had been wise in his business years and now volunteers his time in ministry. That is not retirement. It is stewardship carried through to its intended destination.

Dave Ramsey’s oft-quoted line, that the borrower is slave to the lender, applies equally to lifestyle overhead. In Profit First, Mike Michalowicz makes a related argument: when operating costs are too high, financial pressure begins to dominate decision-making. Proactive planning creates margin, and margin is what makes generosity, patience, and long-term thinking possible.

The Bema Seat and the Weight of What We Were Given

Jonathan raises something that does not come up in most financial meetings: the Bema seat of Christ. The biblical picture of standing before Jesus and giving account for how we used our time, talent, and treasure. Not to earn our place, but as an act of stewardship rendered back to the one who gave it.

The framework applies to everyone he works with, believers and not. Jim Carrey’s often-repeated reflection, that he wished everyone could experience wealth and fame so they could see it is not the answer, is the secular version of the same truth. Without something bigger to aim at, the goalpost moves every time you get close.

For Christian business owners, the question is more specific. God put you in this position. The people closest to you in your business can see every day whether you are the salt of the earth or whether you are just another boss. The Bema seat is not an abstract accountability. It is worked out in payroll decisions, in how you treat vendors, in whether your employees’ families are better or worse for the fact that they work for you.

The Caring Matrix: Generosity Starts Closer Than You Think

C12 offers a practical framework for mapping out this concept called The Caring Matrix. It identifies the circles of people a business owner is responsible for, starting with employees at the center, extending to their families, then vendors and customers, then the broader community.

Jonathan has owned businesses outside of wealth management, and he knows how convicting daily interactions with employees can be. It is easy for a business owner to write a check to a disaster relief fund in a far-off country while the team standing in front of them does not have adequate benefits, does not have PTO, does not feel seen. That is not generosity. It’s distance.

The Caring Matrix does not tell you to stop giving broadly. It tells you to start close. The oxygen mask principle: you take care of your people first, and then you start working outward. And you can only do that consistently if the financial foundation is solid.

The connection back to proactive planning is direct. When you are reactive, every dollar of margin in April goes to taxes and overhead. When you are proactive, you decide where it goes. You can access The Caring Matrix available for download atC12Borderplex.com/resources for any business owner who wants a practical tool for thinking through how they care for the people in their orbit.

What would it look like to treat your employees as the first line of your generosity strategy, not as a cost center?

Additional Resources

The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. A clear-eyed look at why intelligent people make irrational financial decisions, and how upbringing and environment shape every money choice we make. One of the most useful frameworks available for understanding the gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it.

Profit First by Mike Michalowicz. A practical system for restructuring business finances so that profit is built in from the start, not hoped for at the end. Directly relevant to any business owner trying to create margin for generosity and mission.

Good to Great by Jim Collins. Collins’ research on disciplined thought and disciplined action maps directly onto the proactive vs. reactive leadership framework Jonathan described. The companies that made sustained leaps in performance were not smarter. They were more intentional.

Learn More About Jonathan Lopez

Jonathan Lopez is a founding partner atTruvize Financial, an El Paso advisory firm dedicated to helping clients build a proactive, purpose-driven approach to their financial lives. He and his partner Drew Harris are also regular contributors on 915 Talk.

The most important financial question is not how much you have. It is what you are building toward, and whether the plan you are working actually reflects that. Jonathan and Drew help clients answer both. Hear the full conversation at

The most important financial question is not how much you have. It is what you are building toward, and whether the plan you are working actually reflects that. Jonathan and Drew help clients answer both. Hear the full conversation at323podcast.com.