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Early Lessons, Humble Beginnings

Insights gained at humble jobs long ago have helped these planners shape their messages to clients.
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Apartment Manager

As a young mother, Nancy Seely-Butler, a CFP in Groton, Conn., initially made her living renting apartments. Her boss required her to drive to buildings statewide. She learned a great deal.


"It affected me in a lot of ways," says Seely-Butler, who sold a successful financial planning business with $200 million in client assets in 2007 and now runs a divorce consulting business. In real estate, Seely-Butler recalls, she would meet potential renters, hear about their purported financial situation and then pore through their data from credit checks. What she learned, she says, is that few people describe their finances accurately.
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Computer Programmer

Louis Kokernak, a CFP and principal at Haven Financial Advisors in Austin, Texas who manages some $50 million in assets, recalls a variety of summer jobs that began his junior year in college. "I painted house and I was a janitor," he says. Kokernak thinks those stints, however, influence him little today in terms of his advice to clients.


A more consequential event: his decision to quit his first post-college job, the oone for which he had trained for years in school, at IBM, as a computer programmer.
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Gift Wrapper

Lynn Lawrance, a financial planner for Financial Network Investment in Dallas, has been working since her preteen years. She had a sister whose medical needs created significant financial burdens on her parents, so Lawrance began working when she was in the fourth grade as a babysitter. Later, she worked as a tutor and then as a gift wrapper for a department store. In college, she paid for her tuition and a car with earnings from a textbook warehouse job.
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IRS Agent

Brendan McGowan, a CFP in Bryn Mawr, Pa., whose firm, McGowan & Co., manages $175 million in assets, finished college and followed in an uncle's footsteps to become an IRS agent. But in evaluation other people's tax statements, he says, he developed a philosophy that he has never-in his 30 years as a planner-stopped stressing to clients: "Always do things the right way; don't take short cuts. You are always better off if you do it right the first time."
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Journalist

Matthew Kelley, a CFP and principal at Gold Medal Waters in Boulder, Colo., started in financial planning immediately upon graduation from college with a journalism degree. That career path became attractive to him after he worked as an intern for Ayco, a provider of financial counseling and education services. Kelley now manages $42 million in assets as a planner.
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Lumberyard Worker

Lawrence Montague, a CFP and tax consultant for Deloitte in Stamford, Conn., remembers physical labor and aching muscles from his days in college working in a lumberyard. He unloaded and stacked wood for seven summers before and during ocllege. Starting in his times, Montague says his parents applied a simple financial rule: "If I wanted to do fun things, I had to pay for it."


Their insistence on hard work played a role in how Montague chose to advise well-heeled clients who come to him seeking advice in structuring trusts for their offspring.
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