Her Story
About Carol
My journey into financial services began in an unexpected way. Around 2008, I was working as a social worker in a medium-sized city, doing mental health and physical cleanup of a flood during the time of the economic recession, BP oil spill, and when a lot of financial institutions' corruption came to light. I really wanted to empower myself with financial information and make sense of our economy and everything that was going on, so I started reading some books - one of the first was by Suze Orman. In 2015, I had relocated to a small town in Iowa that was ironically very close to a mid-sized, independent broker-dealer and RIA, basically a company that supported independent financial advisors. Since I had done some reading and kind of dabbled, I had applied at a few different financial institutions prior to that, and it didn't turn out to be the right fit, but when I looked at their website, I was like, I want to work there. I worked there for nine and a half years, got my licenses and some different experiences. After a while, I got tired of training other advisors to play the game, and I wanted to play the game myself. Now I'm a financial advisor with three different securities licenses, helping people with financial planning and investments. What keeps me driven is the desire to engage the under-engaged - I love working with neurodivergent single women because I feel like there's a need and a calling to empower unique people that have had life struggles. Inherently, there's life struggles, because I'm one of them. The beautiful dream is to lead neurodivergent single women into the wealth and legacy that they dream of.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Carol
01What do you attribute your success to?
It's really just the desire to engage the under-engaged. I was asking myself, what's the one thing that I must do? Because I've had a hard time lately narrowing my focus and my niche, because I learned so many different things that I can focus on a lot of different types of clients and financial planning strategies. But if there's one thing that keeps me going that I love working with, the type of people that I love working with is neurodivergent single women. That is really what I think keeps me driven, because I feel like there's a need and a calling to empower unique people that have had life struggles. Inherently, there's life struggles, because I'm one of them. So that is the beautiful dream, to lead neurodivergent single women into the wealth and legacy that they dream of.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
There's the practical advice of just, like, just start. Just start investing. Just open the account, just get the savings going. We do a lot of these internal mental blocks - we just want to show up perfect. And that causes a lot of procrastination and self-doubt. Listening to fear is the biggest mistake that we can do. So it's really easy to listen to fear, especially right now with a leader who is difficult for many people to trust, and with the wars going on, with market volatility, it's very easy to run into fear. But I would just encourage people to not listen to fear, and to listen to practical advice, and find somebody that you trust to help with that journey.
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