Saturday, October 29, 2011

A Woman Teaching Women How To Handle Personal Finances

The world of wealth management is a male-dominated field, filled with experts who know investing but who don't always possess the EQ (the ability to connect with people on an emotional level) to listen to the stories, values, and priorities of women.  

This is a great article, from the Denver Business Journal, about a woman who specializes in helping women to understand finances. 

Steph Bruno has researched how women think about and invest money. She has built a practice around educating women (and their partners). She helps them to explore their beliefs about money and to make sound financial decisions.


My favorite section: Steph “offers one-day, private wealth retreats to clients. It’s a full day of one-on- one consultation with Bruno in an undisturbed setting, where the client can freely ask questions and discuss financial issues. Bruno gives them a full set of recommendations they either can implement on their own or work on with Bruno. She includes a money mindset analysis, a money purpose map, journal of wealth aspirations, action plan and more.”
 
Does your financial adviser do this for you?

Steph was also, this same month, named as a Five Star Professional Wealth Manager by 5280 Magazine.  


She is also an avid skier, outdoorswoman, writer, and dog lover, an amazing partner to me and friend to my children. Enjoy! 


Wednesday, October 5, 2011

A Man Who Changed The World - in his own words

Today the world lost one of the greatest innovators of all time.  A man who had that rare combination of vision, intelligence, fortitude, faith, and passion.  He was a phenomenal speaker - and he once dated Joan Baez.  There will be countless tributes in the coming days.

Here’s mine, in a nutshell:

In 1984 when Steve Jobs launched the first Macintosh computer, I was starting my senior year of high school. I bought my first Mac Classic in 1991 and I'm on my 6th Mac since. In my household, we currently own 3 Macbooks, 5 iPods and an iPhone. He certainly changed my world. How about yours?

I don’t often devote too many inches of this website to the words of others.  But I urge you to read a few of these quotations from Steve Jobs and think about how he might have changed your world.

And take the time to read the Forbes Magazine article written by Eric Jackson only a week or so before Job’s death.  Link at the bottom of this post.

If we can live some of these lessons, we will have lead a life worth living.

Enjoy….

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

“The problem is I’m older now, I’m 40 years old, and this stuff doesn’t change the world. It really doesn’t.
I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much — if at all.
These technologies can make life easier, can let us touch people we might not otherwise. You may have a child with a birth defect and be able to get in touch with other parents and support groups, get medical information, the latest experimental drugs. These things can profoundly influence life. I’m not downplaying that.
But it’s a disservice to constantly put things in this radical new light — that it’s going to change everything. Things don’t have to change the world to be important.”

            “We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.
When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

“We made the buttons on the screen look so good you’ll want to lick them.”

“I’m an optimist in the sense that I believe humans are noble and honorable, and some of them are really smart. I have a very optimistic view of individuals. As individuals, people are inherently good. I have a somewhat more pessimistic view of people in groups. And I remain extremely concerned when I see what’s happening in our country, which is in many ways the luckiest place in the world. We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids.” 
                                                                                     [Wired, February 1996]

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
                                                [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]


“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”
                                    [Stanford commencement speech, June 2005]