Dollars and Sense Episode 1

In the first episode of the podcast series "Dollars and Cents," host Sophie Moresky discusses her interest in economics and the importance of financial education. She believes that the financial system in America is broken and works against the poor and working classes, widening the wealth gap. Sophie aims to explore the lack of financial education, diversity in economics, and investment throughout the series. She struggles to find the perfect guest but eventually connects with Cindy Kuyumjian, a financial expert who manages millions of dollars in assets. Cindy emphasizes the need for financial literacy, especially for women, and discusses the difference between micro and macro financial literacy. She also highlights the lack of emphasis on financial education in schools and the need for change in the financial sector. Welcome to the first episode of my podcast series, Dollars and Cents. I'm your host, Sophie Moresky, and welcome to my world. Before I really get into this episode, hi, I'm Sophie. I'm a senior at the Beacon School, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I got interested in economics. Last year, I took a math class with a teacher who was really interested in economics, and we used algebra principles to calculate student debt, to write functions for loans, and we learned about retirement funds. Quickly, I became fascinated with all the information I was learning, and I realized that the kind of wealth you needed to be rich in this country, or to maintain your wealth, isn't the money at all, it's the knowledge of what to do with your money. It became obvious to me that America, the country of dreams, the one my family immigrated to hoping for a better life, kept secrets. The financial system in America is broken. It works against the poor and working classes, it traps them in poverty, growing the gap between the upper and middle classes. With this podcast, I hope to investigate one of the roots of this problem, the lack of financial education, then diverge into a conversation about diversity in economics, and finally end the series with an episode about investment. Thank you again for joining me on this journey, and I hope you learn something along the way. Finding the perfect guest for this first episode was much harder than I anticipated. Cindy Kuyumjian was one of the first people I reached out to after reading her book, Redefining Financial Literacy. After a week went by, I had given up hope of a response, and I asked a few other experts. I got some rejections, a few excuses, and I was at a bit of a loss. I went around asking my friends and family if they knew anyone who had redefined financial literacy in some way, and quickly realized just how niche that was. As soon as I thought all hope was lost, a very intriguing email popped up on my phone. Cindy's last name makes her very memorable. Truthfully, I'm not sure that I'm pronouncing it correctly. I asked Cindy in the interview. I don't think I was too far off. Quick question. Yes. How do you pronounce your last name? I don't want to make a mistake. Oh, Kuyumjian. It's really Kuyumjian. Okay. I call it Kuyumjian. Anyways, I just had to add that in there. Back to the intro. When Cindy reached out to me, I immediately remembered who she was. She reached out, offering to mail me three of her books for free, and to have her media assistant set up an interview. I became more intrigued when I spoke to her media assistant over the phone. Cindy is so busy that I needed to book her two weeks in advance, two days before my deadline for this podcast. So I'm recording this in advance, hoping to lighten the editing burden in the day before my interview and the due date. Not only is Cindy nearly impossible to book, but her assistant told me that in order to interview her, I needed to send them all of my interview questions in advance so that her security team could approve Cindy's answers before they were publicized. Now this is where I started to get really interested. I remember being on the phone with her assistant, thinking to myself, who is this woman? What I know about Cindy is all based from her book and some research into her company, Synergy Financial. After this phone conversation, I looked deeper into who Cindy is. She manages $200 million worth of assets for her clients, and I assume this is why she's sworn to some type of secrecy. One of the first things that appear beside Cindy's name in a quick Google search is, redefines financial education. She's the perfect person for this episode, and I'm so grateful to have her joining me today. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to me. Oh yeah, no problem. Cindy asked me to tell her a little bit more about my project, and we had a good laugh about how she is virtually the perfect person that I could have interviewed for this episode. I was looking for somebody who had tried to redefine financial literacy. You actually picked, you couldn't have picked someone better for what you're doing. I know. I mean, how that happened is amazing, because my books on economics and financial literacy and the lack of, wow, you hit it right on the nose to find me. Anyways, let's get straight into the interview. Could you tell me a little bit about yourself and your work? Yeah, so I'm from Detroit. I moved to California when I was 23. I had graduated from Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan with a marketing degree, but across the street I saw an only discount brokerage firm, and I thought, God, I'm really interested in learning more about money, but can I pass all those licenses? So I knew there was a bunch of security licenses you had to pass. So I was very short, graduated, and in my last finance class, I met somebody who he knew that worked for the equitable at that point, and I said, well, why don't you get me an interview? He goes, well, his wife cuts my hair. Well, next time I'm over there, I'll ask Gary and see if he can give you an interview. So I did get an interview, and I stayed with the company 17 years, okay, and I've been with four financial firms in my career. I've never turned back on my career. It's always been financial planning. Then I moved to L.A., Los Angeles area when I was 23 because my best friend had graduated from Michigan State, and I don't know what I was thinking. I mean, I was just getting my career. I'd been one year in my career. My dad was helping me build my base because he knew a lot of people from GM. So I moved to California not knowing anyone, so it was quite a challenge. But 36 years later, here I am. I stayed in this business. I have a great practice in Orange County now, and I thought the most important thing as a female advisor, because most advisors today are still men, you know, one out of five are women, is that I thought, okay, I don't know anything about it. So I got my CFP by the time I was 28. It's a certified financial planner, and I had eight security licenses. So I pretty much studied from not being that good in high school and college and academics because I played sports and I had to work. So something had to give. I really dedicated my life to academic study in the money business after I left college. So by the time I was mid-30s, I was done studying. But then everything I learned, I was already changing. So I was fortunate to stay in the same field, and I was fortunate to stay in the same field because a lot of women have left the industry because it's still sort of a man's world, the money business, right? And, you know, I wrote The Rise of Women and Wealth, which was my second book, because in the next five years, women are going to hold two-thirds of the wealth in America, and they're just not equipped. And we've waited 5,000 years to have that type of mass of wealth, and now women really need to focus up. Everyone needs financial literacy, but women really need to focus in on it more than ever to create generational wealth for their loved ones. Yeah. How do you believe financial literacy needs to change in order to diversify the financial sector in the world of economics? Well, I think Susie Orman did a good job, I mean, in coming out with micro. So there's two kinds of financial literacy. Micro, which means things you and I can control, our saving, our spending, our debt, our investing, our retirement planning, our goal setting, our insurance, and our estate planning. She's done an amazing job of starting to bring awareness in the simplistic form of financial literacy. The more complex form is macro. Macro financial literacy takes a look at the economic conditions and how to fix our money. And there was a teacher back in, I'm not sure the state, North Carolina or South Carolina, he won Teacher of the Year, and he says what this country needs is macro financial literacy. But the problem is, teachers, how do you teach it? If teachers don't know about economics and financial literacy, how are they going to teach students? So I think Susie Orman came on the scene, you know, I don't know how many years ago, 20 years ago, and started to get, you know, average Americans, you know, educated about financial literacy. But what I bring to the table in my three books I wrote in five years is the big picture. How does the economic environment affect our future, our retirement, and our legacy? So it has to change. But the problem is, you know, this country, we rank 50% in the world in financial literacy. We're the superpower. I mean, Norway and Sweden, 71% of the people are financially literate. And in the United States, there just hasn't been any kind of legislation put in place to mandate that. How has the importance of financial literacy changed in recent years? I don't think it's changed that much, but when I started doing research for my first book, I think there were eight states that required one class in financial education before you graduated from one class. I mean, here we spend our whole life learning how to make money, but no one teaches us how to handle our money. And in the last couple years, it's increased to 20 states. But one class, one semester is definitely not enough to equip the public once they get their jobs, because financial literacy is something just like any other subject, whether it be math, science, history. If you really want to become good at it, you have to do repetition, right? And there isn't any repetition. They don't require financial concept classes in college. So here you are, you go to school and you learn practical applications on things that you'll never use, like your history class or your, I mean, math is definitely something that you'll use throughout your life. But, you know, there's just been no emphasis. So I have to believe that was done on purpose. Could you talk about the realm model that you wrote about in your book, Redefining Financial Literacy? How does it work and why is it important? The first 15 years of my career, the stock market went straight up. Baby boomers put money in the stock market. It averaged 17% a year after inflation, 15%. So the last 20 years of my career, things started to change. And I noticed that the stock market became more volatile, that interest rates became lower. And how were my clients going to retire with a stock and bond model that, in my opinion, was not efficient, productive, giving the clients the type of returns? So over a 20-year window, I started to add other asset classes outside of a stock and a bond mutual fund or a stock and a bond individual securities. And it took me 20 years, but I actually created a multi-asset strategy that the big institutions were using for 30 years, rich Americans were using. And when I realized I had mimicked something like an institutional strategy, I thought, bingo, I need to start writing a book about it. Get investors educated on why the 60-40 or why stocks and bonds aren't effective. And I write about in The Silent Retirement Crisis, in the first six chapters, what went wrong the last 50 years economically and politically that they don't teach you in college. How did we end up in this crisis today? So I touched based on it's broken, why is it broken, and what's the solution? So it was a very complex journey, but I think we got the books out so that the average person can pick it up and say, hey, I have to do something different. You don't have to be the expert. You just need to be empowered and find other advisors that are innovative and do take macro financial literacy seriously in their practice. Do you think that young people have a place in redefining financial literacy? And if you do, how can the younger generation try to make a change? Well, I think, first of all, most people don't trust. And I think the foundation of trust is based on stats, not fear. Everyone needs to be empowered. I don't care if you're 12 years old, your parents should be teaching you about money. Whether you're 75, it's not too late. However, I have found, like, the Gen Zs and the millennials, because they saw what their parents went through, tend to do it themselves. Do it yourself first, right? They use social media. They use the Google 8. When you Google things, you think you're an expert, right? I get a backache. I tell my husband, oh, no, there's something wrong with my calculator. So, you know, we live in this information age, which is really not knowledge, and it sort of hurt us in our thinking. Financial literacy is something that not only you do need someone to help guide you as a coach, a financial coach. I don't even like to call myself a financial planner. I'm more a financial coach. I'm going to coach and say, hey, this decision might be better than that one, versus, you know, talk down to you because you don't know. So I think going back to the realm model, I was able to create something that the Yale Endowment created back in the 1980s called the Yale Endowment Strategy. And the reason I called it the realm is the retail, people like you and I, the retail endowment allocated like strategy, because these mega institutions were using these different asset classes for 10, 20, 30 years. And the wealthiest Americans were, why couldn't we have had those same choices? Because in the last 20 years, now you're going to see people very frustrated with their investments. They don't know who to turn to, who to trust, and the realm model was developed, and it was trademarked. Washington sort of debated me because they thought I copied Yale, but I didn't. As these new product options evolved in the last 20 years, I brought them into my practice. And I believe with a low interest rate environment in volatile stock markets due to, you know, companies mismanaging their balance sheets. The bottom line is the markets have gotten more volatile because companies have had the opportunity to grow at a low interest rate environment, buying back their stocks, mismanaging their balance sheets, and the Federal Reserve bailing them out. That is the problem that it was created that has caused the retirement crisis in America. I call the oligarchs corporate America. It wasn't the politicians. The politicians were manipulated or influenced by corporate America, and they pretty much have created some of the challenges investors and Americans are facing today with inequality, with financial literacy, with accumulation of wealth, and creating a legacy for their loved ones. Thank you so much for your insights. Those are all my questions. Oh, that's it? Yeah. You really are the perfect person for me to interview, so I really appreciate it. Oh, absolutely, and I highly recommend The Rise of Women and Wealth is really a critical book for all women to read, even women of today who will inherit that mass amount of mill. The Young Women, understanding what women have done for each other in the past, today, and in the future. And so I wrote that book because of the financial literacy crisis with women because women won't read my first book. Redefining Financial Literacy, they roll their eyes. So two-thirds of the book is really inspirational and motivational and inspiring for women to understand that you can use your intuition to grasp, you know, amazing things in your life. So I write about that in my book, and then at the end, I throw in the financial literacy after I hook them. And then the first book was because of the financial literacy crisis I saw in America, and the third book is the retirement crisis. But talking about these crises and giving people solutions is critical and being very objective and politically objective because a lot of my research I read on these, I read 27 books on capitalism. Everyone has an opinion, but the problem is they have no solutions, and you know their political stance. So three things I wanted to do. I didn't want anyone to know my political views. Number two, I wanted to make it very simple because a lot of those books were scholarly so that everyone could pick it up and read. And then thirdly, try to delineate the difference between politicians and corporations. And so the public, you know, is definitely frustrated, and I don't blame them. There's a lot of things going on in America today, but giving them the true facts about what happened, how did it happen, and what you can do to protect yourself from those forces and the real model is that potential strategy. Yeah, you're doing amazing work, and I will definitely read the books that you write. Okay, perfect. It was a pleasure meeting you, okay? Thank you so much. It sounds like Cindy is doing some amazing work in creating accessible forms of financial education and redefining what it means to be a woman in finance, a person in finance, a financial coach. The things that really stand out to me after this interview, just re-listening to it all again, are that big banks and big financial advisors for really wealthy people have been using something similar to the realm model for, like Cindy said, decades, while the rest of people, the average American, have been using the traditional 60-40 investment strategy that just isn't working with the new times and the new ways that the market moves. And this really just shows to me and really emphasizes how our system in America is just built upon the rich getting richer. Every system is working for the elite and against the working class, and I think that it's amazing that there are people like Cindy trying to change this idea, trying to change the models that average people use to invest their money and try to give a fair shot at success in the market or whatever other personal financial goals people may have. Thank you for joining me in this episode of Dollars and Cents. As always, I'm your host, Sophie Mareschi. I'll see you in the next one. Thank you.