Founder, Chestnut Beach Wealth
I spent over two decades trading in capital markets before becoming a fee-only financial planner. Then I built a tax-efficient system to manage my own family’s assets; that system is the framework behind your plan at Chestnut Beach Wealth.
Executive Director, JPMorgan 19 years
Director, Citigroup 7 years
CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® Certification
I live in Wilmette, Illinois, 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. What she needed was someone who understood her investments and understood that money, at its core, is about security, freedom, and peace of mind.
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, where 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 26 years working with large institutions whose investment products you have probably heard of, from pension funds and insurance companies to sovereign wealth funds. I traded the derivatives strategies behind those investments, mainly futures and options, the 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 because 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 tax strategy, estate planning, and personal finance techniques. Its goal is simple: manage wealth efficiently so money stays in the background and peace of mind stays in the foreground.
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. Missed tax strategies and unconsidered estate decisions are expensive mistakes that compound over time. 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.
Others are navigating something more personal: the conversations between generations. Who understands what was built and why? How does wealth affect 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.
