Q: How did your early years in the financial business compare with what we’ve just witnessed?
A: Last year was the hardest I’ve had in my professional career. The early years, we were young and naive with 40 years ahead of us, not like today’s retirees.
What was really hard about last year was there truly was no place to hide. In other market downturns, there was always some place that was kind of a safe haven.
Last year, there was a period of time . . . that people were in terror. When you have hundreds of clients and all feel some degree of panic or terror, it’s no longer about the money, it’s about the emotions.
People were just so frightened that we were more psychologists than we were financial planners.
Q: You didn’t start out in the financial-services sector nor did you look to get into it. Where did you begin?
A: After graduating from Carleton College and then graduate school at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, I moved to Denver in 1975, when it was still kind of a small town.
When you go to a liberal-arts college, anything can happen. I wanted to be a music major, but that didn’t work out.
I decided to pursue biology at the urging of my father, a physician, and needed a language requirement. He suggested Greek, and next thing you know, I had declared a major since I had more credits there than anywhere else.
Q: It seems that in your professional career, things just snuck up on you. Some might say it’s a jack of all trades and master of none, but that doesn’t appear to be the case for you. Why?
A: Yes, they did sneak up on me. I started doing things, and one led to another.
I came to Colorado really wanting to pursue a career in academia with a master’s degree in classical languages. But I quickly realized I wasn’t going to pursue that.
I chose to join Aetna Life and Casualty. I stayed in insurance sales about 2-1/2 years and was asked to enter management in the mid- 1970s.
Suddenly financial planning and investments were part of what we did there — very early in that type of industry. My husband and I formed our own independent firm.
Edited for length and clarity by David Migoya
