Hi, I’m Sean Shahkarami, I’m glad you’re here and I don’t believe in coincidences, so whether you know it or not there’s a bigger reason you’re reading this right now.

Over my life, I've realized most people don’t lose sleep over money itself.

They lose sleep over the questions money represents.

Questions like:

• What happens if life throws a curveball and I can’t work?
• How do I retire comfortably and with peace of mind?
• What happens to me, and the people I love, when I’m gone?

I help people answer those questions before they become emergencies.

My background is intentionally interdisciplinary.

I’m a CPA, a Robbins-Madanes certified coach, and I bring over 13 years of experience spanning:
	•	Corporate M&A
	•	Healthcare and mental health finance & operations
	•	Ministry and leadership development

That combination allows me to work with clients holistically and relationally, not transactionally.

My process is built across five integrated pillars:
	1.	Financial
	2.	Spiritual
	3.	Mental
	4.	Physical
	5.	Communal

Because real peace of mind doesn’t live in spreadsheets alone — it lives at the intersection of clarity, alignment, and action.

The people I work best with come from many backgrounds, but they tend to share common traits:

• Values- and faith-driven
• High integrity
• Builders — families, businesses, careers, or all three
• Long-term thinkers with a track record of follow-through
• Vision-oriented and impact-minded
• Open to guidance, coaching, and honest feedback
• Willing to take meaningful action rather than stay stuck in analysis

In other words, they’re not looking for quick fixes.
They’re ready to make aligned decisions.

If that sounds like you, or someone you care about, I’d be happy to connect and walk you through how I work.

The easiest way to start is simple:
Send me a direct message here on LinkedIn.

Sean Shahkarami

Re-introducing myself for all the new connections!

Hi, I’m Sean Shahkarami.

Over the years, I’ve realized that most people don’t struggle with money because they lack intelligence or work ethic.

They struggle because money sits at the intersection of risk, identity, responsibility, and legacy—and those questions rarely get addressed holistically.

Questions like:
• What happens if life throws a curveball and I can’t work?
• How do I build long-term peace of mind, not just short-term returns?
• What happens to the people I love when I’m gone?

I’m a CPA & coach, and I help values-driven builders make aligned decisions across money, life, and legacy.

My background spans corporate M&A, healthcare and mental health, leadership development, and ministry. That range shaped how I work today, integrated, relational, and holistic.

The people I work best with aren’t chasing quick fixes.
They’re long-term thinkers.
They value integrity.
They’re open to guidance.
And when they decide, they take action.

This isn’t for everyone—and that’s intentional.

If this resonates with you, or if you’re in a season where clarity matters more than complexity, I’m glad you’re here.

Sean K. Shahkarami, CPA, CFF, MAc

CPA & Certified RMT Business Coach | Helping Values-Driven Builders Make Aligned Decisions Across Money, Life & Legacy

Why do so many financial decisions feel heavier than they should?

It’s rarely because of a lack of intelligence or effort.

Most financial decisions sit at the intersection of risk, identity, responsibility, and legacy—and when those layers aren’t addressed together, even capable people feel stuck or reactive.

In my latest LinkedIn newsletter, I explore:
• Why avoidance is often psychological, not informational
• Why only a small percentage of people are truly ready to act at any given time
• The difference between reactive decision-making and aligned building
• Why peace of mind is built through clarity, not complexity

I wrote this for values-driven builders who care about making decisions that align money, life, and legacy—without pressure or quick fixes.

👉 Read the article here today!

If it resonates, feel free to share your thoughts or reach out.

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Why do so many of us delay the life God is inviting us into?

Not because we don’t love God.
Not because we lack faith.

Often, it’s because the next step feels heavier than the place we’re standing.

Fear dresses itself up as wisdom.

Waiting sounds spiritual.
Comfort feels safer than obedience.

I wrote today’s piece for The Overflowing Life as a quiet reflection on avoidance, readiness, and alignment—and how God’s invitation is rarely rushed, but always forward.

If you’re in a season of discernment…

If you feel like you’re standing at the edge of a step you already know you’re meant to take…

This one is for you.

 Link to article in the comments!

Freedom comes when you give up the moral high ground.

Rejection isn’t fun.
But it isn’t evil either.

It’s just part of life.
Part of business.
Part of sales.

The problem starts when we moralize it.

We turn “no” into judgment.
We turn outcomes into identity.
We turn disappointment into blame.

And suddenly we’re stuck—
not because of rejection,
but because of the meaning we attached to it.

Let it go.

Bless and release.
Move forward.

That’s freedom.


Where are you still holding onto the moral high ground—and paying for it with your peace?

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been asked to contribute to four different GoFundMe campaigns.

Each one came from a heartbreaking place—unexpected illness, sudden accidents, or the loss of a loved one.

And this isn’t just an “average family” issue. Even public figures aren’t immune.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth most people don’t want to say out loud:

GoFundMe is not a financial plan.

Crowdfunding can help in a moment—but it was never meant to replace responsibility, preparation, or protection.

When we take ownership of protecting ourselves and our families, we aren’t just helping us.
We’re reducing the burden on others.
We’re strengthening the whole community.

That’s why I believe planning isn’t selfish.
It’s an act of responsibility—for the greater good.

If this resonates, reach out.
And if you know someone who needs to hear this, share it with them.

Daniel is one of the smartest people I know. And although I have left the “AI game”…. He’s right.

Translating Vision into Winning Strategies for Growth, Impact, and Legacy

Why can't software solve retail customer problems in 2026?  Because it's not meant to.

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Customer problems in 2026, from first principles:

1.) Producers (of goods, services, and content) have access to plentiful personal data, plus complex tools.  Think Facebook, Google, Series B startups, etc.
2.) Producers use their advantage to create complexity.  Complexity gives the upper hand to sellers.  Make something harder to understand, and you can make a higher profit from selling it.
3.) Producers can manufacture complexity faster than consumers can understand that complexity.
4.) In an effort to gain some reprieve, consumers __pay__ for simplicity and to escape complexity.

----

Pre-AI, we paid extra for better products.  Post-AI, we will pay extra for __simpler__ products.

Producers figured this out.  We pay money to avoid ads, to skip lines, to have ice cream delivered.  These are sellers of simplicity.  AI, however, stretches these principles to extremes.

Broadly, this pattern is everywhere.

1.) In 2025, it is much more difficult to order food at a kiosk than it used to be in the 90s.  In the 90s, you simply said to a cashier, "I'll have the #2 combo with a Coke."  Now, you must click many buttons yourself and probably consider your "points balance" with each retailer.

2.) Consider that nearly every store now puts consumers through a "checkout corral" tempting consumers with lots of cheap products before payment.  It's not just candy bars in the checkout line anymore.  It's now sometimes 50+ feet or more of clearance products and high-margin junk.

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This is end-state of capitalism in a post-AI society.  AI becomes a tool for arbitrage, a tool for constant attention-getting, for rent-seeking, for regulatory capture, and for the monetization of simplicity.

Complexity is introduced by producers because it benefits them.  Complexity cannot be easily reduced by consumers, not without payment.  Wild.

-------

More examples of assymetry:

Profit margin in gambling is UP, not down.  How is this possible?  Shouldn't AI spread information faster, and thus reduce the information advantage that a broker has?

AI increased the availability of information, but due to information assymetry, the benefit of additional information accretes mostly to gambling companies, not gamblers.

-------

The end of all of this?

People end up renting their lives from corporations.  Ownership isn't a thing anymore.  It becomes too complex to own anything.  There are too many risks, too much red tape, too much to think about.  You end up renting your life just to keep your head above water, because renting comes with the promise of simplicity in a world that is engineered for high complexity.

-------

What does this suggest to me?  To me, it suggests that companies selling  general-purpose AI agents that reduce consumer complexity will win major market share and consumer trust in 2026 and beyond.

Most people know what they should do long-term. Save more. Prepare earlier. Make decisions today that protect tomorrow. And yet… Many of us struggle t

Open article: Why Long-Term Planning Feels So Hard (and Why It’s Not Your Fault) by Sean K. Shahkarami, CPA, CFF, MAc • 3 min read

Why Long-Term Planning Feels So Hard (and Why It’s Not Your Fault)

Authorized IBC Practitioner | Teaching families and businesses to control their banking function

"Whole life insurance is always a bad deal."

I hear this regularly from business owners who listen to popular financial media. And I understand why it sounds convincing.

The comparison usually goes like this: buy cheap term insurance, invest the premium difference in mutual funds, and you'll come out ahead.

Here's what that comparison leaves out:

→ Term insurance expires. After 20-30 years, you have no coverage. If your health has changed, you may not qualify for new coverage at any price.

→ The "invest the difference" strategy assumes perfect discipline over decades. Most people don't execute it. Life gets in the way.

→ It completely ignores the banking function. A properly designed dividend-paying whole life policy from a mutual company creates a personal banking system. You can finance business equipment, vehicles, real estate — and recapture the interest you'd otherwise pay to a commercial bank.

As a business owner, the question worth asking isn't "whole life vs. term."

It's: do I want to control the banking function in my business and personal life, or continue outsourcing it?

— This is educational only and not meant to serve as financial advice.

**Edit: Gotta run — helping clients capitalize their first whole life policy. Will catch up on comments later.**

1 out of 4 people set financial related new year resolutions.

I actually find that statistic low.


I think more people would set and achieve their financial goals with better education and partnership.

Because the truth is financial goals are long term in nature and you’re not just fighting inflation, interest, and economic pressure…

You’re fighting biology. Our brains are designed to keep us alive, to survive. Not thrive.

My DMs are always open if you want to learn not just the math but the psychology of financial prosperity.

The good news of Jesus can be made complex, or joyfully simple:

God is FOR YOU!

Out of the 6 books I’ve read this year, Tony Robbins  was quoted and/or referenced in 5 of them.

So cool!

A traditional CPA looks at historical numbers.

When it comes to taxes, it's important for compliance and timely filing.

A CPA who works in planning is looking ahead.

When it comes to tax strategy, it's important because the goal is to remain compliant, efficient, and avoiding unnecessary taxes in the future.

Both are important, and both are different.

Remember, failure to plan is planning to fail.

It’s tax season. My family filed yesterday.

And it has little to do with being a “tax expert”

And way more to do with:

1. Having a plan
2. Implementing the plan 
3. Staying organized and sticking to the plan throughout the year

Remember failing to plan is planning to fail.

Happy to help you develop your plan.

Daniel Shanklin is the Director of AI and Technology at AIC Holdings, a Fort Worth-based Family Office.  He holds a patent in cloud algorithm interface design, a world record in aviation, writes software in 12 languages, and is a Deep AI and Machine Learning engineer.  Daniel has written software for more than 30 years, invented novel software systems, and is passionate about inventions that push AI beyond current boundaries.

He began his career as a hedge fund trader, building automated trading and reporting systems and financial models. For the past six years, Daniel has served as an AGI, AI, Machine Learning, SQL, Snowflake, Power BI, and cloud engineer and expert consultant.  He’s consulted in various industries, including entertainment, non-profit organizations, startups, finance, banking, real estate, healthcare, manufacturing, and agri-business. He has helped to contribute more than $200mm in enterprise value across various strategies.

Daniel has led engineering teams in designing novel AI and AGI technology, data quality products, statistical models, cloud data marts, distributed cloud systems, front-end analysis tools, and machine learning solutions. At age 7, Daniel became the youngest pilot to fly an airplane across the United States. He currently resides in the mountains of Boone, NC, and when he's not deep into AI, he's either playing piano, drums, guitar, harmonica, or whatever instrument he can get his hands on.  Daniel enjoys skiing with his two wonderful children.

Coded products and projects using:  AGI, LLMs, Multi-Agent Networks, Python, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, MS SQL Server, Azure SQL, Snowflake, React, C#, JavaScript, jQuery, Streamlit, PowerShell, Excel VBA, Power BI, Tableau, DAX, Power Query, VBScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, MySQL, node.js, and Google Sheets development.

Daniel Shanklin

AI today is a Porsche in a horse city.

125 years ago, streets were wide, with hitching posts for tying up your horse, dirt streets where shoed horses could grip their way down the road, pulling a buggy, cobblestones for pedestrian areas, and inlay tracks for street cars.  Even streetcars were often pulled by horses.

Now imagine you're driving a 2026 Porsche in 1901 San Francisco, weaving through cable cars, carriages, wagons, and pedestrians wandering in the street.

You might not even get that Porsche out of second gear, if you could move it at all.  It's hard to drive a Porsche through 1-3 inches of dirt laid down for a horse pulling a carriage.

----

AI isn't unreliable or a poor performer.  It's already smart enough to do most tasks.

It fails at many companies and in many initiatives because the infrastructure of today was built for humans, not for AI.

Human politics, cultural values, sales cycles, division of labor, management hierarchies, chains of custody, and accountability systems... all of these things were built pre-AI.  Without AI in mind.

AI cannot navigate that infrastructure cleanly.

----

At AIC, we throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.  To go 10x on productivity requires building a different city.

What we've found:  Teams that win in the post-AI world will repave the city that AI must drive through.  That means:

1.) Centralizing data instead of spreading it out across many SaaS apps
2.) Logging actions and interactions so that AI can study those logs, and improve itself.  Logging rationale, too.
3.) Setting up reinforcement and learning loops that help LLM memory systems learn (and also forget) over time.
4.) Multiple loss functions that aren't highly correlated.  This prevents the system from overfitting as it learns.
5.) Treating AI like the operating system, the AI harness like the kernel, the CLIs they control as the software, and the data they control as the file system.

---

That also gives us a North Star.

The Porsche isn't the problem.  The horse city is.

Our mandate is to work almost exclusively on the horse city problems: repaving the streets (data and infra), rewriting the traffic laws (processes, incentives, accountability), and instrumenting the whole environment so AI can run on pavement instead of dirt.

We don't focus much on tuning the Porsche (model choice, prompt tricks, marginal benchmark gains) until the city is repaved.

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