FIRST COMMAND FINANCIAL SERVICE

Business Services > Business Advisory Services

As a B-29 aircraft commander stationed on Guam during World War II, Lt. Col. Carroll Payne lost 24 of the 44 crew members in his four-aircraft flight. Acting as summary court officer, it was his responsibility to notify their families. In the course of carrying out this grim duty, he learned that, in addition to the tragedy of having lost a husband, a father or a son, these families had also lost a primary breadwinner. Having grown up with five siblings and no father on a sharecropper’s farm during the Great Depression, Lt. Col. Payne empathized with their plight.

In the years immediately following the war, Lt. Col. Payne was stationed at Eglin Field in the Florida Panhandle. Years later, he would recount how the officer’s club would fill up with military retirees toward the end of each month. They hung out playing poker and gin rummy, eating and drinking on credit because their retirement pay had run out.

As his own retirement from the military approached, Lt. Col. Payne reflected on the financial struggles he had witnessed and resolved to help other military families avoid a similar fate. He began planning and laying the groundwork for the company that would become First Command Financial Services, Inc.

Though there were, of course, numerous investment and financial services firms at that time, none of them were focused on working with military families with mostly modest incomes, or possessed any specialized knowledge of the military lifestyle or benefits. Lt. Col. Payne’s plan was to fill that void with a company that worked exclusively with service members and their families, and to hire and train veterans with a thorough understanding of military life and a desire to give back to the military community.

And so, in 1958, Lt. Col. Payne founded the United Services Planning Association (USPA). In the beginning, the fledgling company’s focus was on encouraging military families to regularly save and invest a portion of their income. USPA embraced and evangelized a simple but effective concept known as “Pay Yourself First.” Service members were encouraged to “put themselves at the top of their personal payroll” by investing a portion of their paycheck for the future and then figuring out how to live on what was left over. First Command Financial Advisors also championed dollar cost averaging1, an approach that involves investing an equal amount of money on a consistent basis, with the effect of buying more shares when prices are low and fewer shares when prices are high. Lt. Col. Payne’s objective was clear: he wanted to help military families accumulate a nest egg capable of supplementing their then-extremely-modest pension when they retired.

By the mid-1960s, the company had established a life insurance agency, the Independent Research Agency (IRA) and was offering comprehensive financial plans consisting of what were referred to as the “three cardinal cornerstones” – savings, investments and life insurance.

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