About
Max Matles is a CFP®and tax professional at Matles Wealth Management in Orange, California, where he helps manage over $300 million for clients.
Born in 1998, Max was drawn to a wide exploration of consciousness from an early age. He was led to practices such as meditation and extreme sports like highlining (walking on tightropes), rock climbing, and ultra-marathons, pursuits that tested both physical and mental limits.
As a result of many profound experiences, Max realized that our lives are a direct reflection of our minds. This realization inspired him to cultivate his inner world by living like a Buddhist monk and spending a year in relative isolation. For years, he contemplated becoming a monk, but was inspired by the book The Diamond Cutter, which tells the story of a monk whose teacher urges him to leave the monastery and bring compassion into the business world.
Eventually, Max returned to the world with a new sense of purpose, choosing finance as the place to apply these principles. Max’s path into finance started at birth. He grew up surrounded by the family business and officially entered the profession in 2019 after earning his first financial license. He completed his bachelor’s degree at Grand Canyon University in 2022, became a Certified Financial Planner in 2023, and earned his Enrolled Agent designation in 2024, a federal credential that allows him to represent taxpayers in court and file tax returns across all 50 states.
Outside of work, Max also has a deep appreciation for art, poetry, and writing books.
Max published his first book in 2021, a children’s book called “At School I love to Meditate”. He was inspired to help children during the global pandemic who were suffering from high rates of anxiety and depression, and was able to share the book with many schools across the United States.
Max also writes about how we can create a better future on Earth through transforming humanity’s relationship with money. This culminated into his first financial book “Fast Money Fast Times”, inspired by his insights into both traditional finance and cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Max became fascinated with Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in early high school. Later, while studying in college, he launched a small Bitcoin mining operation out of his dorm room, recruiting a few friends to help, taking advantage of what they referred to as “free” university electricity. Max convinced the boys that the high cost of college tuition was enough to justify mining for Bitcoin. With his encouragement, they set off on the mining experiment, equal parts hustle, curiosity, and mischief. The setup ran without issue until the school flagged an unusually high electric bill coming from a single dorm room and eventually shut the project down. New rules were put in place just for Max. Today, it’s a humorous story, but one that points to Max’s instinct for understanding systems and having a visionary nature for the future of finance.
In 2018, Max discovered Vipassana meditation and the teachings of the Buddha, which sparked a deep inner transformation. He developed a strong daily meditation practice and began to see the profound impact of a life devoted to cultivating inner peace. This inner transformation inspired max to consider the monastic path, but he ultimately found that serving others through financial planning offered a powerful way to live out those same monk-like principles. He now aims to live a life cultivating inner peace, serving others, and developing the mind, an alternative but parallel path to life as a monk, which he was divinely guided to by the universe.
As an expert in cryptocurrencies, traditional finance, and the testing of human limits, Max uses ancient wisdom as a lens to offer solutions for building a better world. His mission is to transform our collective relationship with money and share the joy of mindfulness in the process. In the end, he discovered that the most important lesson is that helping others find peace brings us closer to our own.