Terri Spath, CFA, CFP Founder & Chief Investment Officer of ZumaWealth, Top 10 Inspiring Women Leaders of 2022 Profile

Terri Spath, CFA, CFP
Founder & Chief Investment Officer
ZumaWealth


Terri Spath, CFA, CFP Founder & Chief Investment Officer of ZumaWealth, Top 10 Inspiring Women Leaders of 2022

Many women feel overwhelmed, overlooked and underserved in their financial lives. Terri Spath, CFA, CFP® understands. It’s why she has taken her experience managing billions of dollars through the bull and bear markets of the past 25 years to create Zuma Wealth, an investment management by women and for women.

Many women feel overwhelmed, overlooked and underserved in their financial lives. Terri Spath, CFA, CFP® understands. It’s why she has taken her experience managing billions of dollars through the bull and bear markets of the past 25 years to create Zuma Wealth, an investment management firm by women and for women.

Throughout Terri’s career spanning large and small investment management shops, two RIAs and a private equity shop focused on socially responsible investing. Time and again, Terri recognized that women wanted to feel financially empowered and free. To do that, holistic, personalized guidance is needed, not the one-size-fits-all products the financial industry sells. In both her personal and professional life, she regularly heard from women that they did not know where to start or who to trust with their wealth.

Terri wanted to change that.

In February 2021, Terri launched her own firm to help women feel free, understand their financial health and remove their fears around money and investing. The response has overwhelmed her in the best way. Since creating Zuma Wealth, some examples of the women who have sought out Terri’s guidance include a judge, a biotechnology executive, a marriage therapist, a mother of 9, a grandmother of 5, the founder of a successful market research firm, and many more. These are smart women who are successful in their respective fields, well educated and eager to learn, yet they felt overlooked and underserved in their financial lives. For Terri, this life-changing approach for helping women inspires her every day.

The investment strategies for clients of Zuma Wealth pursue two goals: growing wealth while guarding it. This is how they do it.

• Strategically, through great offense, different asset classes are combined in a strategic allocation designed with rock-solid prospects for delivering the unique needs of each client, while also guarding against unnecessary risk.

• Protectively, through effective defense, data is incorporated to flexibly respond to market information and to help guard clients in stormy markets while participating in rising tides. Together with her clients, Terri guides, grows and guards wealth because waves happen.

In addition to her impressive client base of outstanding women, Terri has a personal passion for helping younger women as they navigate their professional (and personal) lives. She has mentored countless women, not just those who have careers in the financial world, but those still in college and seeking to define their own future paths. It has been her great pleasure and inspiration to be a sounding board and guide to many.

Terri is often asked how she became interested in such a male-dominated field that had even fewer female role models 25 years ago when she was interviewing for jobs out of graduate school at Columbia University. When she was still in grade school, Terri’s dad explained compound interest to her, igniting what has become a lifelong interest in the power of saving and investing. Terri’s dad helped her buy her first stock when she was still in high school, and shares were still issued in paper form! When she graduated college from the University of Michigan, her dad opened a mutual fund account for her that she still holds today. There is a saying that behind every good man is a great woman, but Terri would add that behind every great woman is a great man.

A lifelong passion for learning is one of the keys for her success, Terri explains. In addition to her undergraduate and graduate studies, Terri earned the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation, a challenging 3-year exam that tests the fundamentals of investing, wealth planning, portfolio management and more. More recently, she earned the Certified Financial Planner (CFP) certification, another multi-year test that represents the gold standard in study of 7 areas of financial planning.

Terri also recommends that women step into situations, roles and towards people even when that is uncomfortable. Last summer, Zuma Wealth ran a survey that uncovered a shocking result: only 12% of the smart and sophisticated women in the survey felt confident managing their wealth. Digging deeper, Terri found study after study documenting the “confidence gap” that women have relative to their male counterparts. For instance, when applying for a job, the guys apply when they thought they had 60% of the qualifications listed; women talked themselves out of applying if they did not have 100%. Seeing this “confidence gap,” Terri encourages women to apply for the job, ask for the raise and take money from cash and put it in the markets. All these steps can lead to great success.

We are pleased to highlight Terri and her passion for guiding women to grow and guard their wealth. WL


Company

ZumaWealth

Management

Terri Spath, CFA, CFP
Founder & Chief Investment Officer
ZumaWealth

Description

We guide, grow and guard wealth


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