Meet your advisor
Max Makhnyk, CFP®
Founder, Averton Wealth
I believe everyone deserves to feel confident in the decisions that shape their financial future.
Having spent almost my entire life in Spokane, building Averton Wealth here was a natural choice. Even in a region of over half a million people, this remains a tight-knit community where I regularly bump into clients around town. Deep local roots mean everything to me, and serving the people of this area is the heart of my practice.
I became a financial planner to help people make sense of complex choices without the big fancy words or the condescension. My goal is simple: translate complicated financial strategies into everyday English so you feel capable, clear, and in control.
A firm that is allowed to give fiduciary advice is not the same as a firm that cannot do anything else.
I spent five years doing retirement planning inside a credit union. Good work, good people, and clients I still think about. But the structure around me was built for a different business than the one I wanted to be in, and after a while that stops being a small thing.
Averton Wealth is one person on purpose. I answer the phone, I do the analysis, and I am the one you are calling about when you call. I do not plan to grow past the number of households where that stays true.
Plans fail on the scenarios nobody modeled.
The base case is easy. Markets return something reasonable, both of you stay healthy, spending holds roughly steady, and the plan works. Almost every plan works in the base case. That is not information.
What I want to know is what happens when one of you dies at 71, when a parent needs care for four years, when the market drops 30% in the eighteen months after you stop working, or when a child needs help you were not planning to give. Some of those you can plan around and some you can only prepare for. Knowing which is which in advance is most of the value.
A handful of them are also the decisions that only get made once.
Background
I was an electrical engineer first.
The useful part of that background is not the math. It is the habit of drawing the whole system before touching any single component, because in a system with feedback loops the obvious fix in one place creates the problem somewhere else.
Retirement finances behave exactly that way. A Roth conversion is a tax decision, and a Medicare premium decision two years out, and a decision about how much of your Social Security becomes taxable, and an estate decision, and it interacts with capital gains. People get into trouble optimizing one of those in isolation and finding out about the other four in April.
The part engineering did not teach me is that a plan has to make sense to the person living inside it. A technically optimal plan its owner will not follow is worse than a decent one they will.
Outside the office
The best client relationships start with knowing each other as people.
When I am not reviewing retirement projections, this is where you will find me.
Hiking
My wife and I hike in the mountains and look for new trails together, anything from one mile to ten, and the hillier the better. Having children has made it more of a project.
The Oregon coast
Since 2016 we have made an annual trip to the Oregon coast. In my opinion it is one of the most beautiful places on earth. If you want recommendations, ask me. I have plenty.
Snowboarding
My love for snowboarding goes back to my teens. The views from the top and the wind on the way down are hard to beat, and I have not yet found a reason to stop.
Work with Max
Let’s have a conversation.
Thirty minutes, at no cost. No pressure and no pitch, just an honest discussion about your situation and whether this is the right fit.
Schedule a Free Conversation