Evelyn Zohlen

Numerous life influences led Evelyn Zohlen to create California based Inspired Financial, a firm that helps clients— especially women in transition—support their values with their wealth.

For Zohlen, values are perhaps the most important part of the financial advisory experience, as wealth that is not anchored in values can easily lose purpose and eventually erode. "If your wealth supports what is most precious to you, you are going to be very careful with it. You are going to search out others to help you with it, because it is a life-affirming resource," says Zohlen.

At the same time, she points out, if wealth is not aligned with values, the individual may be more apt to treat it as an end in itself or use it for speculative, transitory purposes—which can lead to significant problems and a less fulfilling life.

Zohlen is one of a series of pioneers in wealth management, a financial discipline that is becoming increasingly popular in the advisor community—at least in name, if not in application. "Wealth management has become a kind of buzzword, like financial planning once was," Zohlen says. "But just because you adopt the term doesn't mean you apply the concepts." Indeed, when it comes to wealth management, Zohlen still finds that "there is more to do, deeper levels to achieve and better ways of helping individuals reach their goals."

Wealth management goes deeper into the planning process than traditional methods do, by aligning values with wealth and ensuring that clients use wealth to reinforce the positives that life's transitions offer. In addition, wealth management goes beyond financial planning in that itprovides a process, not just a plan. At its basic level, wealth management gives the affluent the tools they need to maximize personal, professional and family growth.

For Zohlen, success is measured by how effectively her firm assists clients in realizing their highest values as well as in securing their financial independence. Inspired Financial supports a number of different kinds of clients, but focuses largely on serving women in transition—individuals who are experiencing personal and professional life changes such as divorce, retirement, a new job or the death of a spouse. Zohlen has found transitions can be difficult and are sometimes even frightening for women, especially those whose spouses once handled all the finances. The wealth management process is especially helpful for such clients as they try to determine a newlife path and how best to support that path with their available resources. "When someone is making a life transition, there's both vulnerability and opportunity for them," she says. "It is a gift as much as a challenge but it may take an outside perspective to look at it that way."

From personal experience, she knows that what may seem an obstacle is actually an opportunity for tremendous personal and professional growth. Zohlen says that one of the reasons she is drawn to wealth management as a tool to help women in transition is because she has had so many transitions herself. Only ten years ago, Zohlen was a career military officer who had graduated from the Joint Military Intelligence College with a rare MS in strategic intelligence. Before that, she received a BA in Spanish and business at The University of Texas. After she left the military in the late 1990s, she attended Villanova University, where she obtained an MBA in finance.

She then worked for The Vanguard Group as an institutional relationship manager before setting out on her own—first on the East Coast and then on the West, where Inspired Financial is now a growing firm with several employees, including three CFP® professionals and a CPA.

As the firm has evolved and focused on wealth management, it has received key support from CEG Worldwide, a wealth management coaching firm that works with financial advisors and institutions that serve them. Zohlen says that CEG Worldwide is a pioneer in wealth management and has codified the areas that make the discipline unique. The idea behind wealth management is not merely to suggest, but to implement. It is not merely to find the full spectrum of professional and personal growth resources for the individual, but to organize those resources and supervise the implementation.

The supervisory approach extends to investing, which Zohlen approaches via disciplined asset allocation. She discovers an individual's risk/reward profile and then uses the services of Dimensional Fund Advisors to implement an assetclass investment process.

Zohlen explains: "Asset-class investing is all about providing individuals with ways they can potentially gain the most returns for their portfolios with the minimum amount of risk. Again, we're trying to reduce the stress level and increase the amount of control that the individual has. For women, especially, gaining control over their wealth in all its aspects—from tax and estate planning to retirement and investing—provides a level of security that may help propel them to new and more fulfilling places in their lives. That's what wealth management is about, and that's the inspiration we want to provide here at Inspired Financial."

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