Tom Batterman

Tom Batterman is a retired fee-only fiduciary advisor based in Wisconsin, with time also spent in The Villages, Florida. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Wisconsin Law School, and he practiced law in the Wausau area in estate planning, tax, retirement planning, corporate organization, and real estate before moving into trust and financial advisory work.

In 1988, Tom organized Vigil Asset Management Group, the first non-bank corporate trustee established in Wisconsin since the early 1900s. He went on to serve as a founding member and later president of the Association of Independent Trust Companies (AITCO), and he helped develop a shared-infrastructure operating model that let independent trust companies compete with larger institutions on cost.

He later founded Financial Fiduciaries, LLC, where he built a specialty managing surplus investment funds for small mutual insurance companies, a niche known for its complex regulatory rules. Tom also lectured to financial planning students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and presented on fiduciary principles to a regional healthcare system's retiring staff.

Throughout his career, Tom never sold an investment product. He describes his approach to a case in point: a client's accountant once flagged a “loss” on paper that was actually the result of careful tax-loss harvesting during a year the client's portfolio outperformed the market. It's the kind of nuance, he says, that gets lost when advice and sales are tangled together.

Tom retired at the end of 2022. He now spends his time golfing, playing pickleball, enjoying his lake home in Eagle River, and volunteering his financial and organizational expertise on several community boards.