CREATING YOUR FINANCIAL CLOSET
February 19th kicks off the Fierce 50 Campaign, a group of 50 top women bloggers — over 50 — who are collaborating with brands to crush stereotypes about women and age. I’m excited to be part of this amazing group and want to introduce one of my fellow Fierce 50 women, Annette Findling.
Annette helps women create personalized wealth management strategies that give them financial independence. More than anything, Annette wants women to have choices.
Annette Findling is the founder of the Chicago-based Stonebridge Wealth Advisers, LLC and has spent the last 25 years growing and protecting her clients’ investments. Her Rich Women Rock is an online resource for women embarking on their path to financial independence.
Annette’s created an ingenious speaking platform called, “How to Build Your Financial Closet,” to help women better understand investing. Annette’s discovered that a woman’s investment risks correlate with her personal style of dressing. I love this clever approach because she takes large cap growth stocks, large cap value stocks, bonds, etc. and equates them with different designers and ways of dressing.
At her speaking engagements, Annette uses a rack of clothes to make investing easy to understand. For instance, if you wear edgier fashions like a moto jacket with studs on it, you’re someone who may want some riskier investments in your portfolio. If your style of dressing is more conservative, you may want to stick with more conservative, safer investments with guaranteed return on investment. Like most of our closets, however, we have a mixture of clothes. It’s the same thing with building our investment portfolio.
Annette and her husband live in the suburbs outside Chicago, and both work in the city. Since the last of their children will leave the nest for college in the fall, Annette and her husband are thinking about what they want the next chapter of their lives to look like. The idea of ditching their long commute and walking to a restaurant or a gallery in the city sounds more and more appealing.
Last week Annette and her husband were in Los Angeles and had tickets to the Grammys! Her 17-year-old son and his jazz band auditioned and were selected to perform at the Grammy after parties. What an exciting experience for the whole family.
While Annette appreciates the strong men who mentored her at a young age, she also learned to sidestep men like the one who told her, “Women should be barefoot and pregnant at home.” Clearly Annette did not choose that path, but instead, chose to empower all women to become financially independent.
If you’d like to learn more about The Fierce 50 Campaign, please contact me, Brenda Coffee, or visit this page where you’ll find each of the women participating in The Fierce 50 along with their blog posts. If you or someone you know is interested in joining or supporting the movement, contact info@catherinegraceo.com for more information. We have lots more planned for this year and beyond so, stay tuned.
