My mother became a financial advisor in the 1970s, one of the first women in the field. I grew up watching how she treated the people she worked with. She knew their families and their worries, and she carried the responsibility personally. That stayed with me long before I thought of it as a career of my own.
My route into the work took a few detours first. I finished an accounting degree and headed to Texas in the early 1980s to trade energy, which went well until deregulation reshaped the business a few years later. Young and unattached, I moved to Vail and spent the next three years on skis while I figured out what I actually wanted to do with my life. Boston is where it came together, and in 1996 I founded Cambridge Cape Cod Advisors around an idea I had absorbed from my mother, that you serve a small number of people extremely well rather than a large number adequately. I still work that way, with a limited group of individuals and families, most of them with $1 million to $10 million to protect and pass on to the people they love.
Most of my week runs through portfolio reviews, tax planning, and client meetings, and the tax work is the part I enjoy most. A complicated return reads like a puzzle to me, and there is real satisfaction in solving it so a family keeps more of what it earned. I built my planning around the moments that reshape a financial life, among them divorce, a layoff or career change, retirement, an inheritance, the sale of a business, the loss of a spouse, and the long stretch of caring for aging parents. As a member of the Alliance of Comprehensive Planners, I pair that focus with tax-forward planning, so a client sitting across from me gets someone who understands both the weight of the moment and the tax mechanics underneath it.
Many of my longtime clients still remember a letter I sent in September of 2001. I had been booked on one of the nonstop flights on 9/11 from Logan to California. One of the flights crashed into the World Trade Center and one landed safely in Chicago. I was on that plane.I found three other stranded travelers from Boston, we managed to get a car, and we drove twenty hours home, where I hugged my four-year-old son harder than I ever had. In the letter I told my clients that if the morning had gone another way I would have had no regrets, because I had built a life that let me do the things that mattered to me, and I promised to help each of them do the same. They wrote back with cards, letters, and flowers. Their response told me I was doing right by them, and it has guided how I have worked ever since.
I was born and raised in Cleveland, which makes me a long-suffering Guardians and Browns fan to this day, and I have called Massachusetts home since 1988. Family and friends come first, and when I can get away I travel, thirty-seven countries so far and counting. These days, with a few decades behind me, my favorite part of the job is sitting with retired clients and watching the plans we made years ago play out in real life. We trade a lot of good stories, and I still learn plenty from them.
Credentials
- CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ (CFP®), 1996
- BS in Accounting, Bowling Green University