
Professional
Biography

Abby began her career in finance in an unconventional way, through social work. After getting her Bachelors of Social Work at a private school in Indiana, she began working at a housing and community development organization writing grants and heading up a matched savings program. Abby’s first project was writing a grant to the state of Indiana for a million dollars to build housing units for low-income families, negotiating a loan with the bank, and establishing a partnership with the local government. The grant was awarded and Abby oversaw the development of the project. At the same time, Abby was running Indiana’s match savings program by counseling low-income residents on budgeting, saving for home purchase, starting a business, or going back to school. It was then that Abby knew she needed more education in finance to really make a difference in people’s lives.
After moving back to Arizona, Abby started her MBA program and was encouraged by her professors to start at a company that invests in their employees’ education. Abby applied to be a stockbroker at Charles Schwab & Co. and began in their broker education program. She was able to learn the ins and outs of the broker world and quickly received her Series 7 & 63 licenses to help clients with trades over the phone. Within a year, Abby applied for the advanced broker training, was accepted, and received a promotion to the active trader group, which works with the more complicated trading strategies and margin accounts. “This group had virtually no women in it and the strategies and concepts were not my strength, so I applied for this group because I wanted to learn. I saw where my weakness was in speaking to clients over the phones about their trading strategy and I embraced it. I threw myself into the group who were experts and challenged myself to know what they know.”
After Schwab, Abby was asked by her father-in-law to help him write a retirement workshop. She wrote a retirement book, workbook, and presentation, which has been used by dozens of advisors across the country to educate their clients on retirement subjects and help advisors bring new clients in the door. During the process, she interviewed money managers to understand their various strategies and learned the mechanics of passive, active, and tactical money management techniques.
Then, Abby began working at Simplicity Financial Marketing to help her husband, Tom, in his role as a marketer, manage a business of $200 million of annuity premium. It was her job to establish efficient business processes. She established an onboarding process, business processing, recruiting, sales, marketing, lead generation, etc. This got the attention of management and Abby was asked to help the other marketers engage the same processes, so she trained the other marketers to increase their productivity and customer service. She was then promoted to marketer and began recruiting women agents and advisors.
Abby has always dreamt of making it back to how she was able to help clients face to face in her social work days. Now that she has the broker, money manager, and insurance knowledge to do that, she has opened her own investment advisory firm, Paradigm Money Management LLC. Paradigm is ready to help any generation with their financial needs, from college planning to retirement, we want to be your partner for life. Paradigm offers independent, fiduciary advice, which means we aren’t answering to a big company with their corporate ideas of finance or their cookie cutter solutions. We only answer to you and it's our job to find the best company, the best products, the best money management, and the best solution for you (Or your company, we do custom 401k plans, too!).
Paradigm is a proud partner of WEFI, Women Empowering Financial Independence, where the goal is to increase financial literacy among women and mentor women to begin their career in finance.