Eleanor Blayney, CFP®
The fourth of four girls, Eleanor grew up in a “very traditional” New England family. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, the nation’s first college for women, she earned degrees from Cambridge University and the University of Chicago. But her first real job as a government consultant in Washington, D.C., left her dissatisfied: “My clients were government agencies, and the possibility of making a real impact was slim. I wanted to work with real people.”
She set up informational interviews with DC financial planners, listened and learned, and earned CFP certification in 1990. The firm she co-founded, Sullivan, Bruyette, Speros and Blayney, became a success. “I’ve always enjoyed the intersection between numbers, technical information, finance, and the language that we need to explain this to our clients, to people who need to understand,” Eleanor says. “Financial planning was a perfect way to bring right-brain thinking—literature, language—to the more practical areas of knowledge like numbers.” She is now the CFP Board’s Consumer Advocate.
Over the years, she notes, she has done “just about everything I was helping my clients do: I’ve been separated and divorced, raised a child and put her through college with the money I saved, started a business, sold a business, and retired.” The retirement in 2007 didn’t take; she was too eager to develop her ideas about advising women. “We need to be telling women that they wield tremendous power, that they don’t have to conform to the old models of wealth management or wealth creation,” she says. “With Directions, I want to open the door wider for women.”
Peg Downey, CFP®
Peg had her future changed by her eighth-grade math teacher. “She asked for whoever intended to go to college to ‘Raise your hand.’ And I didn’t raise my hand…because my mother had always told me we were too poor for me to go to college.” The teacher said, ‘Peggy Downey, raise your hand! Anybody who wants to go to college can find a way to pay for it.’” Peg worked her way through college as an English major (“Business was for boys”) with the help of part-time work starting in high school, plus scholarships and loans, inspiring her three sisters to do the same.
After college there was a writing job for Kodak, a stint teaching Composition and World Literature at Ithaca College, a marriage, two children, a divorce, and exposure to the feminist movement.
At that time she joined the staff of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), where she created programs on women’s issues, including a two-year financial education program. She left AAUW, obtained her CFP, and in 1980 she and Denise Leish founded Money Plans to provide financial advice primarily to women. “Keep in mind,” she notes, “that this was a time when it was very difficult for women to obtain credit, mortgages, or loans in their own names. These were the very issues I had been working on politically and educationally at AAUW, and I now wanted a chance to use what I’d learned to work directly with individual women.”
Since then, Money Plans’ primary marketing strategy has been Peg’s hundreds of presentations to women’s groups and her writings on women and finances. She also served on NAPFA’s Board from 1989-93 and was Chair of NAPFA in 1992-93.
Until joining Directions, Peg was Dean of NAPFA University’s School of Communication, a position she held for five years, during which time she and her team developed numerous advisor-aimed trainings on subjects like empathic listening and effective communication. Directions now provides her the opportunity to reverse her past career path; Peg can now share a lifetime of learning about women’s needs and their specific financial planning challenges with other financial advisors.
Elizabeth Jetton, CFP®
Elizabeth calls herself an “Episcopal Southern gal from Memphis, Tennessee,” who grew up very middle class. Bored in college, she followed a spiritual bent by starting a Transcendental Meditation Center near Washington, D.C. She observed, “One of the things that came out of running that business, teaching Senators and Congressmen, was that I needed to manage my own money. In an odd sort of way, it prepared me to be in the financial planning world.”
An eight-year stint at a brokerage firm ultimately was not the right fit. “Something felt very wrong about it. It was the inability to have an impact on people’s lives, because it wasn’t financial planning.” She went back to college, earned a CFP, and was taken under the wing of one of the first trained financial planners in the 1970s, Earl Rubin. Eventually she formed her own practice with another planner, Michael Smith, to whom she is married.
Elizabeth’s first exposure to a Nazrudin conference and George Kinder’s training was a tipping point. “I’d found my tribe, my community,” she says. “I never knew there were other people out there who thought the way I did about the holistic financial life planning model.” She came back fired up about getting more involved in the profession. After heading the Georgia chapter of the newly formed FPA, she put her name in for the National Board of the FPA. She was elected president in 2004 and chair in 2005.
In 2007, her firm merged with RTD Financial Advisors, founded by friend and thought leader Roy Diliberto. Elizabeth now coaches financial planners, speaks extensively around the country, and teaches financial planning at the University of Georgia and California Lutheran’s MBA program.
Click here to read about the women of Directions in the media.
