How I Became a Financial Educator

October 10, 2013

For the past week, each of us has been writing about our careers as financial educators and how we got here. My interest in personal finance started at a really young age when my father, who was a stockbroker at the time, gave me the “Dean Witter Guide to Personal Investing” in the 4^th grade and I actually read it. (Linda, you’re not the only finance geek.) I can’t say that I understood all of it but I got the importance of saving as much of my measly allowance as I could and starting the magic of compound interest as early as possible.

I went to NYU intending to study journalism but the prospect of ending up as a reporter covering the local water board caused me to switch my major to economics with a minor in social studies education. None of those areas of study led me to my first job though. What did was success selling cutlery in people’s homes for a commission. This led to a position running a brokerage office for Edward Jones, where instead of knives, I sold investments in people’s homes for a commission.

There was a big difference though. With cutlery and other consumer goods, people could reasonably determine how valuable they were to them and how much they were worth paying for. With investments, people are often relying on the broker to make those decisions for them. That’s like relying on a car salesman to tell you what car to buy. To make matters worse, the brokers got most of their information from other salespeople (called “wholesalers”), who worked for various mutual fund companies that shared their revenue with the brokerage firm. We were also given special trips and other incentives to push those particular funds and selling other funds was frowned upon.

Although I was doing okay, I soon left Edward Jones for an independent brokerage firm that didn’t push particular funds. This allowed me to recommend better investments to my clients but I was still working on commission. That meant I couldn’t recommend funds we didn’t sell if I wanted to be able to pay my bills. I also had to take a pay cut every time I recommended someone put more money in emergency savings, contribute to their employer’s retirement plan, or pay off debt rather than purchase investments from me.

However, I really enjoyed teaching seminars and helping people with financial planning, both of which were ways to get clients but were also very satisfying in their own right. I also found some investment products that I believed in enough to sell and ended up doing pretty well there, winning sales awards and presenting on a panel of top new reps, but I still wasn’t comfortable with the inherent bias of working on commission. When my chosen products closed, I decided to move on.

After about 3 years, I got an RFC and CFP® designation and took a position at Charles Schwab. The nice thing about a discount brokerage like Schwab is that we didn’t make money from selling commissioned investments. Instead, each of us was assigned a client base of over $200 million and we got a small percentage of the revenue generated by them. The good news is that I didn’t have to steer people into expensive load funds and annuity products anymore. The bad news is that it was still essentially a sales position. We were rewarded for bringing more money into the firm and upselling clients into advisory programs. There was little to no actual financial planning involved. Although I did really well, I eventually got bored and decided to apply to law school to study tax and estate planning.

While in law school, I worked to start a financial planning division at a boutique investment management firm. The work was a lot more interesting but it was still too sales-oriented for me since I was primarily compensated for bringing in more assets for the firm to manage for a fee. That’s when I discovered Financial Finesse.

The great thing about working as a full-time financial educator is that we can really help people without trying to sell them something that may or may not be in their best interest. We do this through a variety of methods (workshops, webcasts, phone and in-person consultations, blog writing, and media interviews) on the whole spectrum of financial issues (everything from severe budgeting and debt issues to executive wealth management and estate planning) and all over the country so it never gets dull. We also get to impact a lot more people, many of whom couldn’t afford this kind of help (their employer or credit union pays for it) and probably need it the most. This type of work has attracted the best group of professionals I’ve ever worked with. You probably know this because you can read the thoughts of several of them on this blog every week…with no sales pitch!