Why Union Families Are My Life's Work

A story about my father, my wife's family, and the retirement conversation that changed everything.

People sometimes ask me why so much of my practice is focused on union members and working families. It isn't a marketing angle, and it isn't something I picked because it sounded good. It's who I am. It's who my wife is. And it's the reason I do this work at all.

Let me tell you the story.

My Father, and the Package That Could Have Been Better

My father was a member of Local 472, a laborers' union, for more than 50 years. He spent his career doing the kind of work that built this country: hard, physical, honest work. And he did it with the pride that comes from carrying a union card. That pride was part of our household. It shaped how I saw work, how I saw fairness, and how I saw the value of standing together with people who have your back.

My father had to take an early retirement package because of a disability. It wasn't a decision he made on his own timeline. It was forced on him, and he had to make some of the biggest financial decisions of his life under circumstances no one would choose. At the time, I wasn't yet in the financial planning industry. I couldn't help him the way I help clients today. He ended up with a decent package, and he got by. But knowing what I know now (the questions I would have asked, the options I would have run, the strategies I would have brought to the table), I know it could have been better. I think about that often.

A Family Trade

My father wasn't the only union man in my family. My grandfather was one too, and so were my uncles. For my family, the union wasn't just a job. It was a trade, a community, and in many ways an identity passed from one generation to the next. Growing up, I understood before I could articulate it that a union isn't just about a paycheck. It's about people looking out for each other.

My Wife's Family: Ellis Island to the Skyline

My wife's family has an equally deep union history, in some ways an even more remarkable one. Her great-grandfather came through Ellis Island in the 1920s and became a mason. He spent his career helping build some of New York's most iconic landmarks, the kind of buildings people still look up at today without knowing the hands that built them.

His son, my wife's grandfather, followed him into the trade. He and his brothers ran a concrete construction company that hired only union labor, and he went on to retire well, a rare and hard-earned outcome that I know now doesn't happen by accident.

My wife's father carried the tradition forward in a different union, serving as a shop steward for Teamsters Local 282 and carrying his card for more than 60 years. Between her side of the family and mine, my wife and I are the product of four generations of union labor: laborers, masons, and Teamsters, all of whom believed in the same thing: that organizing together and standing behind your union gives working people a fighting chance at a secure life.

The Retirement Conversation I Could Finally Have

By the time my father-in-law was approaching retirement, I was already working in financial planning. He was preparing to take an annuity being offered through a local bank: the kind of option that sounds simple and safe on the surface, but that didn't actually fit his particular situation once you looked closely at the numbers.

I sat down with him, walked through what he actually had, what he actually needed, and what his options really were. We worked through it together, and he ended up choosing a different path, one built around his life, not a product someone was trying to sell him.

That conversation meant everything to me. It was the conversation I couldn't have with my own father a few years earlier. I couldn't change what happened to him. But I could make sure it happened differently for the next person in my family, and now, for the union families I work with every day.

Why This Is Personal

I became a Certified Trust and Fiduciary Advisor because I wanted the technical depth to actually help people navigate decisions like these: pensions, annuities, healthcare timelines, rollovers, estate plans. But the reason I point that expertise specifically toward union members and working families isn't technical at all. It's personal.

I've seen what it looks like when someone retires without the right guidance, and I've seen what it looks like when someone retires with it. I know which one I want for the people I work with.

Continuing the Legacy

Recently, I became an Associate Member of Amalgamated Local 426. It's a small thing on paper, but it means a great deal to me, another link connecting my work today to the generations of union men and women in my own family who came before me.

If your family's story sounds anything like mine, if you're a union member, a retiree, or the son or daughter of one trying to make sense of your options, I'd love to hear it. For me, that conversation is never just business. It's personal, every time.

Nuno T. Pereira, CTFA
President & Wealth Manager, Pereira Wealth Management
pereirawm.com  ·  877-997-7113  ·  nuno@pereirawm.com