You built the business. You landed the clients. You finally stopped worrying about a paycheck and started thinking in terms of profit, growth, and what comes next. Then the phone rings, and it is nothing you planned for. Justin Kunz has taken calls like that from clients. They are part of why he does this work the way he does.

Who He Is

Justin Kunz is a financial advisor with Cornerstone Financial Services, an affiliated practice of Northwestern Mutual, based in Raleigh. He works primarily with 1099 workers and business owners, the people who do not have a corporate HR department handling their health insurance, their retirement match, or their tax withholding for them.

Since starting his practice in 2024, Justin has built his book of business to more than 150 clients. In that time, he has qualified for Northwestern Mutual's Trailblazer Academy and Fastrack Academy, two awards that recognize top producers in the company's system within their first five years in the business.

His focus is straightforward: help people who work for themselves build real financial stability, not just around growth and investments, but around protection, taxes, and the blind spots that come with being your own safety net.

His Origin Story

Justin studied business and finance in college, and when his baseball career wrapped up, financial planning was the natural next step. He had already made connections with advisors at Northwestern Mutual, and after going through the interview process, starting his own practice was a decision that made sense for him and his wife.

What began as a career pivot has become a practice built specifically around the people other advisors sometimes overlook: 1099 workers, freelancers, and small business owners navigating income that does not come with a W2's built-in guardrails.

What He Does Today

Justin's work centers on the financial realities that come with self-employment. Moving from a W2 job to 1099 work means losing the corporate safety net: no health benefits, no retirement match, no automatic tax withholding, and often no guaranteed income. Budgeting gets harder. Retirement savings get neglected. And most people become underinsured without realizing it, simply because the coverage that used to come from an employer is gone.

Justin walks clients through how to rebuild that safety net themselves, using a three-bucket approach to money:

• Home Run Money | Reinvesting back into your own business. Justin points out there is no return the market can offer that compares to what reinvesting in your own business can provide.
• Aggressive Money | Money with market exposure, ideally spread across retirement accounts and non-qualified accounts and diversified across asset classes.
• Safe Money | Liquid funds business owners need to reinvest as opportunities arise, held in locations that are efficient from both a tax and growth perspective.

For the first 90 days of going 1099, Justin recommends two concrete steps: building toward six months of cash reserve to cover fixed personal expenses, and forming an LLC once income supports it, so that liability exposure stays with the business rather than personal assets. On taxes specifically, he tells clients to set aside 25 to 30 percent of every paycheck so there are no surprises at filing time. On emergency funds, he generally recommends three months of expenses for dual-income households and closer to six months for single-income households.

The Calls That Changed Everything

Ask Justin why protection matters as much as growth, and he does not reach for theory. He reaches for two clients.

The first was a married couple, both working, with two boys in high school and specific goals they were saving toward. After going through the planning process, Justin and the couple decided they both needed to increase their life insurance and begin investing in a non-qualified account for liquidity ahead of retirement. Ten months after onboarding them, Justin got a phone call: the wife had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given four months to live. Six months later, because of the planning they had done, her husband was able to pay off the remainder of their mortgage, take time away from work to grieve with his sons, and know their college education was already funded.

The second client was a single father with one son at home. During planning, Justin discovered a shortage in his retirement savings and a significant gap in life insurance coverage. He chose to increase his retirement savings but declined additional insurance, since it was not a priority for him at the time. He was a musician, and one night, driving home from a show, he fell asleep at the wheel and was killed instantly in a head-on collision. His $50,000 life insurance policy covered his final expenses and paid off his debt. His family started a GoFundMe to help fund his son's education and support the grandparents who would now raise him.

As Justin puts it, saving and investing is a crucial part of building long-term wealth. But none of it matters if you have not taken the proper precautions to protect your money and the people who depend on it.

Why Raleigh

Raleigh has long been a major tech hub, with Research Triangle Park sitting right in the middle of it. That brings a different kind of financial planning challenge: tech compensation packages built around bonuses, commission, stock options, and RSUs, all of which can get complicated fast and carry significant tax implications if they are not planned for correctly.

For Justin, that is part of what makes Raleigh clients distinct: the planning conversation is not just about saving a percentage of a paycheck. It is about understanding compensation structures that most financial advice was never built to address.

Work With Justin

Justin Kunz | Cornerstone Financial Services, an affiliated practice of Northwestern Mutual

Phone: 919-816-7392
Website: northwesternmutual.com/financial/advisor/justin-kunz
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/justin-kunz-751757177

If you are self-employed and have not had a real conversation about protecting what you are building, reach out to Justin.

Justin Kunz is a proud Best of Raleigh Partner. Follow @thebestofraleigh for more spotlights on the people, places, and businesses building this city's next chapter.