Following My Muse
WHEN I WAS A YOUNG boy, my grandmother kept telling me, ���You must go into the family warehouse business.��� She was a product of the Great Depression. To her, this well-established business represented security. Many people would crave an offer of financial stability and a career roadmap. But I hated the feeling that my life path was being dictated by my family.
Maybe my financial journey was complicated by two competing influences���my father and my mother. My businessman father, who had gone into his own father���s warehouse business, made life choices based on their financial return. He had enjoyed going to college in California, but succumbed to family pressure and returned to Youngstown, Ohio, to join the warehouse business.
Meanwhile, my cosmopolitan mother, who grew up in Manhattan, had a more expansive worldview. She valued ideas and diverse experiences, and encouraged me to find my own voice and remain curious. Perhaps influenced by my mother, I wondered how intellectually stimulating it would be to run a warehouse in northern Ohio.
During my high school years, our struggling steel-mill town saw its main industry start to collapse. It never recovered. Even though our family enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle in a leafy suburb, the region was marked by poverty. My family���s home was worth $100,000 in 1970. If you simply adjusted for inflation, the house should be worth more than $725,000 today. Instead, it���s currently valued at less than $150,000. Working in the family business would have meant living in this declining community.
Getting educated. While attending Vassar College in New York���s Hudson Valley, I became intrigued by psychology. My college advisor suggested I pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology, but that sounded too narrow to me. Instead, I was more interested in social psychology and the influence of group dynamics. My favorite economics professor stressed that human emotions can distort financial choices. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest.
Even though I felt pressured to go into the family business after graduation, I delayed any career decision. I half-heartedly took the Graduate Management Admission Test and applied to business schools, even though I had no real-world business experience.
I was fortunate that my parents had paid for my undergraduate education. But I knew I���d have to foot the bill for graduate school. That���s why I chose the MBA program at the University of California at Los Angeles, where tuition was lower than at top-rated private schools.
While attending UCLA, I concentrated on strategic marketing, while also working as a teacher���s assistant for two organizational behavior classes. I was still unsure about pursuing a business career and considered becoming a fulltime academic. Despite more than 300 business recruiters coming to campus, I graduated without signing up for a single job interview. The only definitive career decision I made during the two-year program was to reject going into the family business.
Not pursuing job interviews and seemingly forgetting about my pending MBA debt was out of character. I wanted to be financially responsible. Yet I felt so stressed and ambivalent about working for any business, I became stuck. At age 24, younger than most of my MBA classmates and with no significant work experience, I needed to find a sense of purpose. I was convinced things would fall into place once something got me excited.
The future foretold. While many of my fellow business school classmates took the summer off before starting their new jobs, I devoted that time to regrouping. I found temporary work to pay bills, swam and biked to clear my head, and spent time in the library exploring career ideas. Within a month, I was inspired by reading Alvin Toffler's futuristic book The Third Wave , which argued that the developed world was moving from an industrial age to an information age. He predicted that the information and entertainment world would become decentralized, and new cable services would lead to a social transformation. My interest was piqued.
I attended cable industry conferences that summer and diligently studied future trends. I targeted a specific company, Continental Cablevision, known for its high-quality and innovative management team.��Thanks to the knowledge and insights I���d picked up through my research, my interview at the Boston headquarters went well and, in the fall, I was offered the position of director of corporate marketing.
My new bosses gave me a fair amount of autonomy. The work offered variety and the growing company granted flexibility. The CEO and co-founder, a brilliant and successful Harvard Business School graduate who went on to become a billionaire, shared his philosophy with me. He hired bright people and gave them leeway, which he hoped they could handle.
I was grateful that no one tried to make me fit the corporate mold and that the company encouraged creativity. I had market research and customer service responsibilities. I also designed and taught company workshops that encouraged employees to buy into new corporate initiatives.
From a purely financial perspective, I knew I should stay with this thriving private firm, which would eventually be bought out for mega-bucks. After four interesting years, however, my academic itch had only gotten stronger. To the surprise of company management, I informed them of my plans to go to graduate school at Harvard to study organizational behavior. My boss wanted me to stay, and offered me a generous raise as an inducement.
Instead, I left on good terms to focus on my academic interests. The missed financial opportunities���leaving before Continental Cablevision���s eventual buyout���mattered less to me than the chance to be more intellectually stimulated. Having the opportunity to study with world-famous professors felt liberating. I used personal savings from my corporate job to pay for the one-year master���s degree program. My plan: Find a decent paying job with a company shortly after graduation.
Some life-changing advice. The lesson that made the biggest impression on me���and which changed my life���resulted from a paper I wrote for an instructor whose own book recommended using certain organizational techniques to create a strong company culture. In my critique,��I praised the book���s insights. But under each section, I added comments from my own perspective. I explained that I personally would feel too constricted working for an organization that used his techniques.
He wrote on my paper, ���Great Insights, you SHOULD DEFINITELY work for yourself!��� This shocked me. I invited the professor to lunch and he graciously accepted.��He explained that in class I appeared comfortable when presenting my point of view. Working for myself would require marketing ability, which he felt wouldn���t be a problem for me.
I was a bit intimidated by the professor���s suggestion. My financial goals had evolved as I turned age 30, and now included owning a home and supporting a future family. I had concerns that being self-employed came with some financial risk, such as not qualifying for a mortgage due to unsteady cash flow. Still, the idea of working for myself got me excited, and I began to envision what services I could offer my network of contacts.
My transition to self-employment went smoothly, thanks to my connections at Continental Cablevision. Right after graduation, my old employer���plus other managers who had left to work for other firms in the same field���hired me for numerous consulting projects. Working on a variety of marketing and organizational projects proved stimulating and financially rewarding. Had I not been lucky enough to have worked for an industry leader like Continental, which was respected by other firms, breaking in as a business consultant would have been more difficult. Within a few years, the steady consulting earnings allowed me to qualify for a mortgage to purchase my first home.
Most of my consulting projects involved marketing research and strategy, but my background in organizational behavior and teaching also allowed me to offer instructional workshops.��Many managers find thick reports full of analysis boring. I tried to make my research and strategic reports come alive, and to encourage managers to reexamine their assumptions.
Rather than simply presenting research findings, the workshops I led encouraged managers to challenge their current plans. What research findings concerned them? Where was their firm most vulnerable? How would they attack their firm if they were a competitor? No challenge to accepted beliefs was considered off-limits. As one executive commented, ���The sessions were exhilarating by allowing us to let go of assumptions, and terrifying to see how unprepared we were in key competitive areas.���
Complementing my consulting work, I taught strategic marketing part-time as an adjunct lecturer at a Northeastern University Graduate School of Management evening program. But what I found most enjoyable was instructing older adults in a community college program.
Financial necessity had forced the best of these students to get fulltime jobs right after high school. If they hadn���t been economically constrained, they would have thrived in college. Now, heading back to school later in life, they were passionate and driven. I volunteered to review some students��� business plans, which were often impressive. Several went on to run their own successful companies.
Over time, the entertainment and telecommunication industry consolidated.��Many of my consulting clients became business whales gobbling up smaller companies. My little fish clients, which were often the most innovative, felt an imperative to sell out. I found myself secretly rooting for the underdogs to stay independent.
The accidental planner. This new business environment felt confining and forced me to reassess my consulting career. Around the same time, I was asked to sort out the financial mess created by my parents��� late-in-life divorce.
The warehouse business ownership split up after their divorce. My parents had owned half the company, which was divided between them. My older cousin���who managed the warehouse���owned the other half. My parents wanted someone they could trust on the company board. They asked me to join it to represent my mother���s interests and to assist my aging father. I wasn���t at all pleased by their urgent request, but I felt obligated to help. The warehouse business, which I had long ago rejected, still haunted me.
Participating in a family business sounds appealing to many people. But in this case, the relationship dynamics made everything more difficult. Upon joining the contentious board, I found out the building roofs and infrastructure needed substantial updating. Obtaining major bank loans for these unbudgeted capital expenditures, and redirecting management���s focus, became a time-consuming imperative. I wanted to disengage from this quagmire and have the company, or at least my parents��� shares, sold, so I could concentrate on my fulltime career. But there was no existing provision for buying out an owner���s stake, so everything became a difficult internal negotiation.
Meanwhile, after my parents��� legal separation, my mother hired a broker who constantly churned her bond account, while charging high trading commissions. When I challenged this slick employee from a well-known financial firm, he claimed to have unique market-timing insights. Outraged, I compared his performance to Vanguard Group���s intermediate-term bond index fund. I found he underperformed this benchmark by more than 10 percentage points a year. It became apparent why older people���and others���need a financial advisor they could trust. The self-serving hype of many financial providers motivated me to become a more educated investor.
My background in research statistics proved useful as I reviewed evidence-based studies. Nobel Prize-winner Harry Markowitz explained the value of portfolio diversification. John Bogle, the founder of shareholder-owned Vanguard, stressed the value of low-cost index investing. Eugene Fama, the renowned portfolio theorist, demonstrated how small-cap and value stocks could enhance performance.
The investing books that I found compelling highlighted why investors had great difficulty beating the market. I became a do-it-yourself investor, relying on well-diversified, low-cost U.S. and international stock index funds. I had slight tilts toward value and small-cap stocks, and I also invested in quality short-term bonds to limit volatility. To these, I added a few speculative stocks picked using my knowledge of information and entertainment companies.
Creating a low-cost diversified portfolio didn���t seem too difficult. What proved more challenging was managing my own emotions and ego. Keeping up with current events and the latest market trends may have helped in my consulting work. But the financial markets were too complex to forecast, and overconfidence when investing can be treacherous.
I nevertheless found myself predicting where the market might be heading. It was all too easy to find confirming articles or have discussions that reinforced my opinions. Fortunately, I heeded the warnings of experts who criticized market-timing. Obeying John Bogle���s maxim to ���stay the course������rather than act on market forecasts���saved me lots of money.
Advising families and other individuals about their personal finances seemed like a career possibility. I enrolled in Boston University���s financial planning evening program, while continuing to consult during the day.��I had concerns about business models that depended on commission-based brokerage fees and insurance sales. That led me to embrace a fee-only financial advisory model that followed the fiduciary rule���clients��� interests come first.
A fork in the road. My background in strategic planning and psychology seemed well suited to financial planning. Yet I questioned whether it made financial sense for me to give up a solid 20-year consulting practice. Perhaps I should keep consulting and gradually add personal finance clients?
Then, unexpectedly, a longtime consulting client offered me a chance to dive in. This wealthy entrepreneur had worked in the cable, entertainment and search engine businesses. By age 50, he was set for life and had been able to provide his children with substantial trust funds.
He offered to jumpstart my financial management career by providing me the opportunity to oversee these trust accounts.��He made a stipulation, however, that I must stop all business consulting. He insisted personal investing and financial planning would require my full attention. I contacted other prospective clients and found a receptive audience. Since I no longer found consulting especially satisfying, I agreed to focus on my new career.
What bothered me most about the financial services industry was its emphasis on generating investment buys and sells. I wanted a practice that instead cultivated long-term relationships. Would a potential client be a good fit over time, regardless of her financial value to my practice? Rather than maximizing my advising income stream, like my traditional father might have suggested, I favored my mother���s orientation toward quality connections with people.
As an advisor, two behavioral finance insights have proven invaluable. The first revolves around loss aversion. Studies show that people feel the loss of money much more severely than an equivalent gain. I suggest to some clients that they may want to temper their aggressive investing approach. What, I often ask, about the potential impact of substantial losses on their lifestyle? Might they sell in a panic during tough times?
My second insight is that many clients��� career choices have a big effect on both their finances and life satisfaction. Maintaining the status quo���staying in one place rather than considering career options���can prove limiting. This, of course, is a lesson I���ve learned myself. The path ahead can seem murky and changing course is often difficult. Professional and family commitments may weigh you down for an extended time. In my case, my father passed away three years ago. Last year, my cousin���s son bought out my mother���s and stepmother���s warehouse shares. Finally, after reluctantly sitting on the board of the family business for two decades, I was free.
At this point in my journey, at age 66, I continue to enjoy working with clients and teaching, but I���ve expanded my approach. Now, I teach personal finance courses at adult education centers for senior citizens, while also guiding medical school residents at Boston-area teaching hospitals. I write blog posts and articles that cover financial behavior and planning topics.
Since I remain curious about other people���s financial quests, I started a podcast series called ���Financial Crossroads��� that explores how people handle career and lifestyle transitions. My goal is to interview a range of people willing to share what���s worked for them. A surprising bonus: My 93-year-old mother listens to���and comments on���my episodes.
What about my own journey? Managing my human capital hasn���t meant making the most money possible, but I have earned a comfortable living. When I think about the people I admire most, it���s those who feel they have enough and who enjoy giving back.��I remind myself that success and failure have never been totally in my control. My goal: Follow my passion���and be grateful when things happen to go my way.
Rand Spero is president of Street Smart Financial, a fee-only financial planning firm. He provides comprehensive financial services to help clients organize, increase and protect their assets through life transitions. Rand teaches personal finance and strategic planning classes at universities in the Boston area, and also hosts the podcast series Financial Crossroads. Check out his earlier articles.
Maybe my financial journey was complicated by two competing influences���my father and my mother. My businessman father, who had gone into his own father���s warehouse business, made life choices based on their financial return. He had enjoyed going to college in California, but succumbed to family pressure and returned to Youngstown, Ohio, to join the warehouse business.
Meanwhile, my cosmopolitan mother, who grew up in Manhattan, had a more expansive worldview. She valued ideas and diverse experiences, and encouraged me to find my own voice and remain curious. Perhaps influenced by my mother, I wondered how intellectually stimulating it would be to run a warehouse in northern Ohio.
During my high school years, our struggling steel-mill town saw its main industry start to collapse. It never recovered. Even though our family enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle in a leafy suburb, the region was marked by poverty. My family���s home was worth $100,000 in 1970. If you simply adjusted for inflation, the house should be worth more than $725,000 today. Instead, it���s currently valued at less than $150,000. Working in the family business would have meant living in this declining community.Getting educated. While attending Vassar College in New York���s Hudson Valley, I became intrigued by psychology. My college advisor suggested I pursue a doctorate in clinical psychology, but that sounded too narrow to me. Instead, I was more interested in social psychology and the influence of group dynamics. My favorite economics professor stressed that human emotions can distort financial choices. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest.
Even though I felt pressured to go into the family business after graduation, I delayed any career decision. I half-heartedly took the Graduate Management Admission Test and applied to business schools, even though I had no real-world business experience.
I was fortunate that my parents had paid for my undergraduate education. But I knew I���d have to foot the bill for graduate school. That���s why I chose the MBA program at the University of California at Los Angeles, where tuition was lower than at top-rated private schools.
While attending UCLA, I concentrated on strategic marketing, while also working as a teacher���s assistant for two organizational behavior classes. I was still unsure about pursuing a business career and considered becoming a fulltime academic. Despite more than 300 business recruiters coming to campus, I graduated without signing up for a single job interview. The only definitive career decision I made during the two-year program was to reject going into the family business.
Not pursuing job interviews and seemingly forgetting about my pending MBA debt was out of character. I wanted to be financially responsible. Yet I felt so stressed and ambivalent about working for any business, I became stuck. At age 24, younger than most of my MBA classmates and with no significant work experience, I needed to find a sense of purpose. I was convinced things would fall into place once something got me excited.
The future foretold. While many of my fellow business school classmates took the summer off before starting their new jobs, I devoted that time to regrouping. I found temporary work to pay bills, swam and biked to clear my head, and spent time in the library exploring career ideas. Within a month, I was inspired by reading Alvin Toffler's futuristic book The Third Wave , which argued that the developed world was moving from an industrial age to an information age. He predicted that the information and entertainment world would become decentralized, and new cable services would lead to a social transformation. My interest was piqued.
I attended cable industry conferences that summer and diligently studied future trends. I targeted a specific company, Continental Cablevision, known for its high-quality and innovative management team.��Thanks to the knowledge and insights I���d picked up through my research, my interview at the Boston headquarters went well and, in the fall, I was offered the position of director of corporate marketing.
My new bosses gave me a fair amount of autonomy. The work offered variety and the growing company granted flexibility. The CEO and co-founder, a brilliant and successful Harvard Business School graduate who went on to become a billionaire, shared his philosophy with me. He hired bright people and gave them leeway, which he hoped they could handle.
I was grateful that no one tried to make me fit the corporate mold and that the company encouraged creativity. I had market research and customer service responsibilities. I also designed and taught company workshops that encouraged employees to buy into new corporate initiatives.
From a purely financial perspective, I knew I should stay with this thriving private firm, which would eventually be bought out for mega-bucks. After four interesting years, however, my academic itch had only gotten stronger. To the surprise of company management, I informed them of my plans to go to graduate school at Harvard to study organizational behavior. My boss wanted me to stay, and offered me a generous raise as an inducement.
Instead, I left on good terms to focus on my academic interests. The missed financial opportunities���leaving before Continental Cablevision���s eventual buyout���mattered less to me than the chance to be more intellectually stimulated. Having the opportunity to study with world-famous professors felt liberating. I used personal savings from my corporate job to pay for the one-year master���s degree program. My plan: Find a decent paying job with a company shortly after graduation.
Some life-changing advice. The lesson that made the biggest impression on me���and which changed my life���resulted from a paper I wrote for an instructor whose own book recommended using certain organizational techniques to create a strong company culture. In my critique,��I praised the book���s insights. But under each section, I added comments from my own perspective. I explained that I personally would feel too constricted working for an organization that used his techniques.
He wrote on my paper, ���Great Insights, you SHOULD DEFINITELY work for yourself!��� This shocked me. I invited the professor to lunch and he graciously accepted.��He explained that in class I appeared comfortable when presenting my point of view. Working for myself would require marketing ability, which he felt wouldn���t be a problem for me.
I was a bit intimidated by the professor���s suggestion. My financial goals had evolved as I turned age 30, and now included owning a home and supporting a future family. I had concerns that being self-employed came with some financial risk, such as not qualifying for a mortgage due to unsteady cash flow. Still, the idea of working for myself got me excited, and I began to envision what services I could offer my network of contacts.
My transition to self-employment went smoothly, thanks to my connections at Continental Cablevision. Right after graduation, my old employer���plus other managers who had left to work for other firms in the same field���hired me for numerous consulting projects. Working on a variety of marketing and organizational projects proved stimulating and financially rewarding. Had I not been lucky enough to have worked for an industry leader like Continental, which was respected by other firms, breaking in as a business consultant would have been more difficult. Within a few years, the steady consulting earnings allowed me to qualify for a mortgage to purchase my first home.
Most of my consulting projects involved marketing research and strategy, but my background in organizational behavior and teaching also allowed me to offer instructional workshops.��Many managers find thick reports full of analysis boring. I tried to make my research and strategic reports come alive, and to encourage managers to reexamine their assumptions.
Rather than simply presenting research findings, the workshops I led encouraged managers to challenge their current plans. What research findings concerned them? Where was their firm most vulnerable? How would they attack their firm if they were a competitor? No challenge to accepted beliefs was considered off-limits. As one executive commented, ���The sessions were exhilarating by allowing us to let go of assumptions, and terrifying to see how unprepared we were in key competitive areas.���
Complementing my consulting work, I taught strategic marketing part-time as an adjunct lecturer at a Northeastern University Graduate School of Management evening program. But what I found most enjoyable was instructing older adults in a community college program.
Financial necessity had forced the best of these students to get fulltime jobs right after high school. If they hadn���t been economically constrained, they would have thrived in college. Now, heading back to school later in life, they were passionate and driven. I volunteered to review some students��� business plans, which were often impressive. Several went on to run their own successful companies.
Over time, the entertainment and telecommunication industry consolidated.��Many of my consulting clients became business whales gobbling up smaller companies. My little fish clients, which were often the most innovative, felt an imperative to sell out. I found myself secretly rooting for the underdogs to stay independent.
The accidental planner. This new business environment felt confining and forced me to reassess my consulting career. Around the same time, I was asked to sort out the financial mess created by my parents��� late-in-life divorce.
The warehouse business ownership split up after their divorce. My parents had owned half the company, which was divided between them. My older cousin���who managed the warehouse���owned the other half. My parents wanted someone they could trust on the company board. They asked me to join it to represent my mother���s interests and to assist my aging father. I wasn���t at all pleased by their urgent request, but I felt obligated to help. The warehouse business, which I had long ago rejected, still haunted me.
Participating in a family business sounds appealing to many people. But in this case, the relationship dynamics made everything more difficult. Upon joining the contentious board, I found out the building roofs and infrastructure needed substantial updating. Obtaining major bank loans for these unbudgeted capital expenditures, and redirecting management���s focus, became a time-consuming imperative. I wanted to disengage from this quagmire and have the company, or at least my parents��� shares, sold, so I could concentrate on my fulltime career. But there was no existing provision for buying out an owner���s stake, so everything became a difficult internal negotiation.
Meanwhile, after my parents��� legal separation, my mother hired a broker who constantly churned her bond account, while charging high trading commissions. When I challenged this slick employee from a well-known financial firm, he claimed to have unique market-timing insights. Outraged, I compared his performance to Vanguard Group���s intermediate-term bond index fund. I found he underperformed this benchmark by more than 10 percentage points a year. It became apparent why older people���and others���need a financial advisor they could trust. The self-serving hype of many financial providers motivated me to become a more educated investor.
My background in research statistics proved useful as I reviewed evidence-based studies. Nobel Prize-winner Harry Markowitz explained the value of portfolio diversification. John Bogle, the founder of shareholder-owned Vanguard, stressed the value of low-cost index investing. Eugene Fama, the renowned portfolio theorist, demonstrated how small-cap and value stocks could enhance performance.
The investing books that I found compelling highlighted why investors had great difficulty beating the market. I became a do-it-yourself investor, relying on well-diversified, low-cost U.S. and international stock index funds. I had slight tilts toward value and small-cap stocks, and I also invested in quality short-term bonds to limit volatility. To these, I added a few speculative stocks picked using my knowledge of information and entertainment companies.
Creating a low-cost diversified portfolio didn���t seem too difficult. What proved more challenging was managing my own emotions and ego. Keeping up with current events and the latest market trends may have helped in my consulting work. But the financial markets were too complex to forecast, and overconfidence when investing can be treacherous.
I nevertheless found myself predicting where the market might be heading. It was all too easy to find confirming articles or have discussions that reinforced my opinions. Fortunately, I heeded the warnings of experts who criticized market-timing. Obeying John Bogle���s maxim to ���stay the course������rather than act on market forecasts���saved me lots of money.
Advising families and other individuals about their personal finances seemed like a career possibility. I enrolled in Boston University���s financial planning evening program, while continuing to consult during the day.��I had concerns about business models that depended on commission-based brokerage fees and insurance sales. That led me to embrace a fee-only financial advisory model that followed the fiduciary rule���clients��� interests come first.
A fork in the road. My background in strategic planning and psychology seemed well suited to financial planning. Yet I questioned whether it made financial sense for me to give up a solid 20-year consulting practice. Perhaps I should keep consulting and gradually add personal finance clients?
Then, unexpectedly, a longtime consulting client offered me a chance to dive in. This wealthy entrepreneur had worked in the cable, entertainment and search engine businesses. By age 50, he was set for life and had been able to provide his children with substantial trust funds.
He offered to jumpstart my financial management career by providing me the opportunity to oversee these trust accounts.��He made a stipulation, however, that I must stop all business consulting. He insisted personal investing and financial planning would require my full attention. I contacted other prospective clients and found a receptive audience. Since I no longer found consulting especially satisfying, I agreed to focus on my new career.
What bothered me most about the financial services industry was its emphasis on generating investment buys and sells. I wanted a practice that instead cultivated long-term relationships. Would a potential client be a good fit over time, regardless of her financial value to my practice? Rather than maximizing my advising income stream, like my traditional father might have suggested, I favored my mother���s orientation toward quality connections with people.
As an advisor, two behavioral finance insights have proven invaluable. The first revolves around loss aversion. Studies show that people feel the loss of money much more severely than an equivalent gain. I suggest to some clients that they may want to temper their aggressive investing approach. What, I often ask, about the potential impact of substantial losses on their lifestyle? Might they sell in a panic during tough times?
My second insight is that many clients��� career choices have a big effect on both their finances and life satisfaction. Maintaining the status quo���staying in one place rather than considering career options���can prove limiting. This, of course, is a lesson I���ve learned myself. The path ahead can seem murky and changing course is often difficult. Professional and family commitments may weigh you down for an extended time. In my case, my father passed away three years ago. Last year, my cousin���s son bought out my mother���s and stepmother���s warehouse shares. Finally, after reluctantly sitting on the board of the family business for two decades, I was free.
At this point in my journey, at age 66, I continue to enjoy working with clients and teaching, but I���ve expanded my approach. Now, I teach personal finance courses at adult education centers for senior citizens, while also guiding medical school residents at Boston-area teaching hospitals. I write blog posts and articles that cover financial behavior and planning topics.
Since I remain curious about other people���s financial quests, I started a podcast series called ���Financial Crossroads��� that explores how people handle career and lifestyle transitions. My goal is to interview a range of people willing to share what���s worked for them. A surprising bonus: My 93-year-old mother listens to���and comments on���my episodes.
What about my own journey? Managing my human capital hasn���t meant making the most money possible, but I have earned a comfortable living. When I think about the people I admire most, it���s those who feel they have enough and who enjoy giving back.��I remind myself that success and failure have never been totally in my control. My goal: Follow my passion���and be grateful when things happen to go my way.
Rand Spero is president of Street Smart Financial, a fee-only financial planning firm. He provides comprehensive financial services to help clients organize, increase and protect their assets through life transitions. Rand teaches personal finance and strategic planning classes at universities in the Boston area, and also hosts the podcast series Financial Crossroads. Check out his earlier articles.The post Following My Muse appeared first on HumbleDollar.
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