Ten thousand Americans turn 65 every day. Most of them will be offered one of two incomplete answers: a portfolio that can fall when they can least afford it, or an insurance product sold without a plan around it. Thomas B. Hamlin built the third answer. For 35 years he has insisted that retirement income and investment management belong in the same conversation, under the same roof, with the same person accountable for both.
That work is done by a Portland-based team that now also keeps a Florida office, opened in 2026, and that serves families in all 50 states, two of the three U.S. territories, and more than 20 countries. Distance is not the model. Presence is. Hamlin and his advisors are still on the phone — and on Zoom — with the people who hired them.
That insistence is why Somerset is the firm to watch in 2026. Not because it is the largest. Because it is one of the few independent platforms in the country that can place a guaranteed paycheck beside a fiduciary portfolio — and because Hamlin is wiring artificial intelligence through a lean team so that a firm of Somerset’s size can work with the precision of a house ten times larger.
“Peace of mind is the ultimate return on investment. Guaranteed income is the foundation of that peace.”
Thomas B. Hamlin
What “visionary” actually looks like in 2026
The word gets used loosely in financial services. Hamlin’s version is specific. He is not chasing the next product cycle. He is building for the decade when the largest generation in American history stops accumulating and starts drawing a paycheck from what they have already saved.
Somerset Wealth Strategies, Somerset Wealth Management, and Somerset Securities — the Somerset family of companies — run a dual-platform model that most firms still treat as a contradiction. On one side: a full suite of fixed annuities, fixed indexed annuities, registered index-linked annuities (RILAs), multi-year guaranteed annuities, and immediate income solutions, with access across hundreds of carriers. On the other: fee-based fiduciary wealth management. Wrapped around both is the planning work families actually need as they age — estate-planning life insurance, including survivorship life; income-planning life insurance, including flexible-premium universal life (FPUIL); long-term care; Medicare guidance; and trust and estate-planning services.
Together that mix lets a client take more equity risk where a buffer can absorb it, lock income where Social Security is not enough, protect a spouse and a legacy, and stop paying two uncoordinated firms to argue with each other.
The operating numbers behind the model are not theoretical. Across his career, with the Somerset team beside him, Thomas B. Hamlin has placed an estimated $1.5 billion in annuity premium alone — exclusive of every other asset class. Annuity production has historically run near $100 million in annual premium. The wealth-management arm is positioned to add approximately $50 million in new assets in 2026. Recurring advisory revenue has already crossed seven figures, with a five-year line of sight toward eight. Hamlin still personally produces more than two-thirds of firm revenue — which, in his view, is the only accountability that matters. Every process has to work for the advisor who is still on the phone, and on Zoom, with the client.
The work has been public for a long time. He has been quoted in more than 100 articles — The Wall Street Journal more than once, Barron’s, Registered Rep on assets under management. He has been consistently considered for the nation’s Top 100 advisor lists by Worth Magazine, Barron’s, and Investor’s Business Daily, and in 2010 Barron’s ranked him the No. 2 advisor in Oregon. He treats the clips the way he treats plaques: proof the work traveled. Not the reason it exists.
The lesson that built the firm
Thomas B. Hamlin entered the business in 1990 at Independent Advantage Financial in Los Angeles, selling annuities by newsletter before the internet existed. He had no industry experience. In a little more than a year he was the top producer among more than 30 associates. The firm had no interest in giving him equity. He left.
In 1994 he and his mentor, Jeff Oster, joined Prudential Securities. It looked like the institutional move. It became the education. The firm did not follow their advice on how to bring clients across. The former employer fought for the book. A year of conflict ended with Prudential paying to keep the relationships intact. Hamlin walked away with one rule he has never broken:
Never sign an agreement in which the client does not have the right to decide who they work with.
In May 1997 he affiliated with Raymond James, opened his own branch, and founded Somerset Wealth Strategies — named for the English county where his father was born. In 2012–2013 he separated from Raymond James, acquired Bay Colony Securities, a Boston broker-dealer with a 50-year history, and launched Somerset Wealth Management as a fee-based fiduciary RIA. Independence stopped being a slogan. It became the architecture.
“Blessed are the risk takers, for without them nothing would ever be done.” Hamlin likes the Ray Kroc line. He also admits that if he had known in 1997 how brutal the regulatory weather would be, he might have paused. He did not pause.
On founding Somerset
Built like a Category 6 in a Category 4 industry
Thomas B. Hamlin has lived every major market event since 1987. The metaphor he uses for Somerset is the one that survives those cycles: the firm is built like a Category 6 structure in an industry of Category 4 buildings. Markets break. Rules tighten. Competitors copy a product and call it a strategy. The building is supposed to stand.
That is why the current mix is deliberate rather than fashionable. RILAs let a balanced investor move from a traditional 60/40 toward 70/30 or 75/25 while keeping a 10–20 percent downside buffer against the S&P 500 or Nasdaq 100. Multi-year guaranteed annuities can still lock 6.00 percent for five to seven years on the remaining sleeve — a better job, in many cases, than the bond allocation they replace. Immediate and lifetime-income annuities are, in Hamlin’s view, the only instrument that can turn savings into a paycheck that cannot be outlived. He will tell you, without shouting, that payouts remain 40–70 percent higher than they were in 2021, and that this window will not stay open indefinitely.
He has also simplified. After three decades that ran from nearly all annuities, to funds and life insurance, to alternatives and private placements, the operating brief is now Keep It Simple: annuities and fiduciary wealth management at the center, with estate and income life insurance, long-term care, Medicare, and trust work as the supporting architecture. More platforms are not better. Two coordinated platforms, fully staffed around a family’s real life, are.
A lean team that works like a larger firm
Hamlin’s leadership philosophy is unromantic and effective. He is owner, CEO, and still the top producer. He does not have a corporate calendar of meetings. He needs lieutenants who take a problem to the finish line and only pull him in when the decision is truly his. Each team member is a one-person army.
The tenure inside that model is the quiet proof. Andrew Murdoch, president and Hamlin’s senior lieutenant, has been with him 22 years. Advisor Derek Stamos, 14. Meg Odermatt, 13. Office manager Kristen Odermatt, 12. Compliance leader Meagan Sinniger, 11. Together with Thomas B. Hamlin they represent more than a century of shared institutional memory. His son, Brian Hamlin, joined the advisory team in 2023. In an industry that measures average advisor tenure in months, Somerset measures it in decades.
The public face of that same discipline sits with Greg Shaughnessy, who has led marketing for the Somerset family of companies and for AnnuityFYI.com for 22 years — working alongside his sister, Erin Shaughnessy MacDonald. Greg also oversees Conquering Retirement with AnnuityFYI, produced with Abby Walker. That is not a side project. It is how a lean firm talks to the country without a wirehouse advertising budget.
In 2026 the compliance bench was tested and held. Kenneth George, a longtime principal on the securities side, passed away on July 4. He was succeeded by his son, Chris George, who had already been working beside him for several years. Continuity, in this firm, is not a slogan written after a loss. It is the way the work was already being done. Leonard “Lenny” Barenboim was named Chief Compliance Officer of Somerset Securities earlier in the year, allowing Hamlin to step out of the day-to-day CCO seat and put full weight on strategy, advisor development, succession, and the firm’s national presence in retirement income. Barenboim works alongside Chris George and Meagan Sinniger, with outside securities counsel Scott Mullins.
AI as an operating system, not a brochure line
Most firms Hamlin’s size treat artificial intelligence as a homepage sentence. Somerset treats it as staff. Working with Geoff Woods, author of The AI-Driven Leader, the firm has been embedding AI into onboarding, analysis, portfolio review, communications, and internal process design. The stated goal is blunt: each team member should perform as if they were ten people. “Think Navy SEALs,” Thomas B. Hamlin says. “Lean, precise, highly effective.”
The point is not to replace the relationship. It is to protect it. Advisors who are not buried in administrative drag can still do the thing clients actually hire them for — sit with a family, on the phone or on Zoom, and decide together how much of a life’s work should be guaranteed and how much should stay at work in the market.
Thomas B. Hamlin is equally blunt about experiments that fail. Entrepreneurs, he argues, have to fail fast and kill what is not working before it becomes a lifestyle. He is the last person paid. He hates wasting money. That combination — appetite for new tools, impatience with theater — is why the AI build is being treated as an operating system rather than a campaign.
Twenty-five years of teaching first
Ask Hamlin what the firm is for and he does not start with assets. He starts with the fact that the people he serves do not get a do-over. Pre-retirees and retirees cannot “start over” if a strategy was theater. That is why he talks about diversification as a moral constraint, not a slide: no single idea should be able to make or break a retirement. That is why he wants risks written down, signed, and understood. That is why he still works the hours of someone who has not decided the work is finished.
The culture sentence he uses with new clients is the one he uses with his own family: treat every retirement as if it belongs to someone you love. It is not a tagline he invented for a magazine. It is the filter that decides whether a recommendation ships. That standard has a source. Hamlin’s faith in Jesus Christ is not a private footnote. He and his partner, MacKenzie Stewart, are deeply involved in their church. They are raising five children inside that same commitment. And each year they give a significant share of the firm’s profits through Somerset Charitable — stewardship written where the ledger can see it.
AnnuityFYI is the public proof of that filter. Hamlin founded the independent education platform in 2000 and brought it back under the Somerset umbrella. In 2025 it marked 25 years of helping Americans identify and understand the top annuities in the country — without a proprietary product to protect and without a quota hiding inside the article. The Conquering Retirement with AnnuityFYI podcast, overseen by Greg Shaughnessy and produced with Abby Walker, extends that brief in public: plain language, listener questions, no sales theater. Consumers should be able to understand a contract before anyone asks them to sign it.
“If you’re looking for a team that prioritizes your peace of mind as much as your portfolio, we built this firm for you. Innovation is never for its own sake. It is always in service of the client.”
Thomas B. Hamlin, on who Somerset is for
What to watch next
The next five years at Somerset are not a mystery. The firm will keep its two platforms and refuse a third that does not earn its place. Recurring advisory revenue will be pushed from seven figures toward eight. The sales and service bench will deepen so the book is not a single-producer story forever. AI will keep moving from pilot to habit. Brian Hamlin and the existing lieutenants are the succession path in plain sight. The Florida office is the first physical marker that the national book now has a second home.
Thomas B. Hamlin does not claim to know every turn the industry will take. He claims something more useful: the firm is already shaped for the turns that matter. Rates will move. Regulations will tighten. Another shock will arrive that no model priced. Clients will still need a paycheck they cannot outlive, a portfolio that can grow, a plan for a spouse and an estate, and a human being who will pick up the phone — or join the Zoom.
That is the watch-list case for 2026. Not a man collecting plaques — though the record is there if anyone needs it. A Portland team, now with a Florida door as well, that spent 35 years making sure the people who trust them can sleep.
AT A GLANCE
- Founder & CEO, Somerset Wealth Strategies, Somerset Wealth Management, and Somerset Securities
- Portland / Lake Oswego headquarters · Florida office opened 2026 · Clients in all 50 states, two U.S. territories, and 20+ countries
- Industry start: 1990. Firm founded: 1997. Broker-dealer acquired: 2012–2013. AnnuityFYI founded 2000; 25th anniversary in 2025.
- Estimated $1.5 billion in annuity premium placed across the career, exclusive of other asset classes; ~$100 million in annual annuity premium; ~$50 million in expected new advisory AUM in 2026; seven-figure recurring revenue.
- Annuities and fiduciary wealth management at the core, with estate and income life insurance (survivorship / FPUIL), long-term care, Medicare, and trust and estate-planning services.
- Advisors Excel Hall of Fame; Marquis Who’s Who; host of Conquering Retirement with Annuity FYI. Quoted in more than 100 articles, including The Wall Street Journal (multiple times), Barron’s, and Registered Rep. Consistently considered for Top 100 advisor lists by Worth Magazine, Barron’s, and Investor’s Business Daily. Ranked the No. 2 advisor in Oregon by Barron’s in 2010.
- Web: SomersetWealthStrategies.com · AnnuityFYI.com
