About
Dreamfield Planning Group is the culmination of many years working at the craft of financial planning. The name represents the faith I have in this discipline and my efforts in the service of others. A lot of financial firms use phrases like "Wealth Management" or "Financial Group" in their titles, but I wanted to emphasize first and foremost that my focus is on financial planning.
I enjoy the teaching and interactive aspects of the job, where clients are invited to engage in the plan creation, input, and design processes. One of my greatest strengths lies in making complex subject matter easy to comprehend, which means some of the best tools in my kit are analogies, stories, and other illustrative ways to help clients understand. In the final analysis, most financial advisors genuinely want to help their clients, but having a "fee only" distinction means I have already removed myself from any potential conflicts when it comes to objective advice on finances versus selling products like insurance or mutual funds.
Matthew R. Hodges, CFP®, CFA
I began my career in the financial services industry nearly ten years ago. Prior to founding Dreamfield Planning Group, I served as an associate wealth management advisor at Sconset Wealth Management—an advisory practice nested in the downtown Boston office of Northwestern Mutual—where I developed financial plans and managed investment assets. In a preceding role in the same office, I led an internal business unit providing investment consulting services to multiple financial advisors representing more than $200 million of assets under management (AUM).
Previous to that, I served as an associate financial advisor at a Foxborough, Massachusetts financial planning practice and as a research analyst at a Cambridge, Massachusetts public policy research firm. I hold a Bachelor of Arts in History from Hendrix College and a Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University. I am both a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ and a CFA Charterholder.
I have lived for many years in Milton, Massachusetts with my wife Allie and our son Ben. In my spare time, I enjoy travel, reading, playing guitar, and taking long walks with the family dogs, Pedey and Louie.
Why a bobblehead naming you as the "Fifth Beatle”?
Great question! I have wonderful colleagues with whom I worked at my previous wealth management firm. When I left to start Dreamfield Planning Group, they commissioned the bobblehead as a parting gift. The reference is a nod to past conversations with planning clients (with whom we always sought to involve in the planning process).
In those conversations, I would reference the legendary Beatles recording engineer George Martin, who worked with the band throughout the 1960s at Abbey Road Studios in London. Martin was classically trained in music and therefore could provide his own orchestral arrangements and string accompaniments to some of the Beatles' most well known songs, including "Yesterday," "Eleanor Rigby," "A Day in the Life," and “Strawberry Fields Forever." Because his work was so integral to their sound, Martin was their sound he was thereafter known to the world as the "Fifth Beatle"... and it is in that spirit that we as financial planners always want our clients engaged!
