Lynn Herald has checked off many items on her “bucket list”, and she believes that she finally has learned how to live her dreams and be happy.  Throughout her life, Lynn has set objectives for herself, and then set conditions to achieve her goals, such that she now finds herself doing what she feels she is supposed to do – being a Financial Advisor—with a mission to help women especially to embrace and manage their wealth. 

Empowering women has always been a passion for Lynn. As a life-long feminist and athlete, Lynn in fact, gathered signatures from her neighborhood in support of the Title IX Amendment (equal funding for girls’ sports programs) as a young girl during the ‘70’s and she joined the National Organization for Women while in high school.  “I have always had a real sense of independence,” she said.

Career-wise, Lynn said she was attracted to finance because of her love of math and economics, and because she had a desire to be financially independent.  Her career in finance began as a bank teller in her hometown of Detroit as she worked her way through university to later become a senior level bank officer and investment analyst.

Now with over 25 years of professional experience, Lynn feels that every career move she made was an obvious stepping stone to achieving her goals.  For example, early on she decided she wanted to leave Detroit, with a desire to move to Chicago.  However, the first step was moving to Columbus, Ohio to take a new position--even though this city was not anywhere she thought she wanted to be. From Columbus, she moved on to Wall Street and then after a few years in New York she finally achieved her goal to move to Chicago, becoming one of only a few women in her industry to work on a trading floor.  For Lynn it’s all about how you define your objective – and the conditions you put in place to achieve your goal–as she learned:  “If you feel stuck, and that’s your energy, you will stay stuck.”

In 2002, after a personal, life-altering event with the premature death of her Mother from ovarian cancer, Lynn changed her career objectives.  She credits her late mother for inspiring her to pursue her dream to live abroad and be an entrepreneur.  In 2003, Lynn set out to pursue this dream by enrolling in an MBA program in 2003, which took her to Madrid, London and Santiago, Chile, and helped her to achieve another goal of becoming bilingual in Spanish.  From Santiago, Lynn set her sights on Buenos Aires, Argentina where she moved in 2004 to fulfill her entrepreneurial aspirations.

Lynn chose Buenos Aires because she saw an opportunity to buy real estate at great prices after Argentina’s financial crisis.  She bought several small apartments “at prices less than a car costs” and started renting them out to visiting tourists.  She also opened a small business, a women’s gym, given her lifestyle commitment to health and fitness.  However, she learned quickly that while she enjoys going to the gym, she didn’t like owning one.  Nonetheless, Lynn notes that owning the gym was a tremendous experience in leadership, management skills, and patience, and she gained a lot of respect for and insight to small business ownership. This experience also helped her to realize that her true passion is with working with clients within the financial markets.

So with the “bucket list” adventure to live abroad and be an entrepreneur achieved, Lynn changed her objective and decided to return to the U.S. and back into the financial world. In early 2009, she completed an exit strategy with the help of her trusted advisors to liquidate her Argentine investments and return to the U.S., choosing Miami as her ideal place to re-enter the American work force while keeping her Spanish skills intact.

With this proactive approach to managing her life and career, Lynn joined Morgan Stanley Smith Barney as a Financial Advisor in October, 2009. Lynn feels that her practice’s focus on women entrepreneurs and executives enables her to combine her livelihood with her passion for encouraging women to embrace and manage their wealth. Her biggest challenge is often in getting women to put their financial household as a top priority.  “Women tend to take care of everyone else before themselves.”  So Lynn is trying to change these attitudes when it comes to women’s financial health by encouraging women to metaphorically “put on their own financial oxygen mask first before trying to help others.”

Lynn also notes that women have unique investment needs because they tend to live longer (30% of women live into their 90s!), but earn less money than men do, and have less savings for retirement (typically because of time taken out of the workforce for childbearing.)  Lynn feels we need to break the cultural stereotype that men take care of the finances because it conflicts with reality – women are typically the “Chief Purchasing Officer” for a household, yet tend to be in denial regarding their own financial security.  For Lynn, such attitudes can change only with financial literacy training for young girls and with wealth planning education for women.

In sum, Lynn truly strives to live in the present, in body, mind and spirit, while helping her clients to plan for their financial future.  As such, Lynn urges her clients to stay focused on their unique bucket list and reminds everyone that “having no plan is planning to fail.”

Lynn A. Herald, CFA
Financial Advisor
Wells Fargo Advisors, LLC
2555 Ponce de Leon Boulevard
Coral Gables, FL 33134
305-569-1980 office | 305-789-4698 fax
800-745-3827 toll free
lynn.a.herald@wellsfargo.com