Founder, Chestnut Beach Wealth
I spent 26 years in institutional capital markets before building a system to manage my own wealth. That system is now the framework behind every plan at Chestnut Beach Wealth.
Executive Director, JPMorgan 19 years
Director, Citigroup 7 years
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® Certification
I live in Wilmette, IL, just north of Chicago, with my husband, Alvin, and our blended family of four children.
I was raised to value hard work and service. My dad was a Navy veteran and an engineer. My mom taught in Catholic schools for more than 45 years. She is kind and patient, and she values simplicity over complexity.
After my dad passed, I stepped in to help manage her finances. I watched her go silent for an hour while her investment advisor walked through dense performance metrics. Afterward, she told me the truth: she had no idea what he was saying and all she really wanted to know was:
She was paying for complexity when what she needed was clarity.
I built Chestnut Beach Wealth to be the firm where people who have worked hard to build their wealth find a real thought partner, and where someone like my mom finally gets a straight answer.
My first job after college was for JPMorgan on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It was terrifying, exciting, and chaotic. I loved it. I later moved to their Bond trading floor on Wall Street in New York; hand signals were replaced with stacks of computer monitors. It looked different but had all the same feelings, because that’s just what markets do.
I spent the next 26 years trading for the large institutions whose investment products you have probably heard of or use – from insurance companies to pension funds and asset managers. I traded the derivatives strategies that are the backbone of the investments, mainly futures and options, which are the trading instruments large institutions use to manage risk.
Markets are only part of the story, though. I became obsessed with managing and building my own wealth efficiently since I made so many missteps when I was younger. Most significantly, I missed tax strategies and made my own trading far more complex than it needed to be.
What I really needed was a system, so I built one. It’s the same framework behind your financial plan at Chestnut Beach Wealth.
It incorporates the biggest lessons I learned on trading floors, married with ever-changing tax laws, estate planning, and personal finance techniques. Its goal is simple: manage wealth efficiently so money can take a back seat to life while giving you peace of mind. When wealth is managed, the chaos of markets and Congress’s tax changes can fall to the background.
The firm is named after a quiet stretch of shoreline at the end of our street in Wilmette, Illinois. I walk there most mornings. It is a peaceful place and represents the feeling I want your personal finances to have when we work together: clear, calm, and under control.
The goal of building your Wealth System is to organize your finances, meet a few times a year, and let me manage the markets, so you’re free to focus on the assets that matter most: your time, your family and friends, your health, and your purpose.
My clients have spent their careers building real wealth. At some point, managing it well became a different job entirely, one that requires technical expertise they never needed before. For example now a missed tax strategy or an unconsidered estate decision has really high stakes. Most tell me some version of the same thing: they suspect they are leaving money on the table, and they no longer want to spend their limited time and energy managing something this important on their own.
They are wondering whether the decisions ahead are being made as thoughtfully as they deserve. Financial independence, taxes, estate planning, family matters. Most know they are missing opportunities, usually in tax planning.
Others say they are navigating something personally challenging: the conversations between generations. Who understands what was built and why? How does this impact children and their motivation? Is everything organized clearly if something happens? I help families have those conversations before it’s too late to have them well.
I keep the practice small deliberately. Every family works directly with me.
