Butler financial planner leaves clients with book compiling her lessons
One of financial planner Wendy Bennett’s clients said they would have a lot more room in their drawer after they recently received a gift from her.
For years, the client had gathered copies of the Butler Eagle containing Bennett’s columns in a drawer and revisited them when in need of financial advice, but Bennett recently surprised her with a book compiling many of the columns.
Bennett, who had been a financial columnist for the Butler Eagle for more than 10 years, started writing in 2013 to provide a “personal touch” to economic and financial know-how to a Butler County audience.
She compiled many of her Butler Eagle columns into a book called “Dollars and Sense: A collection of financial wisdom.”
Bennett is retiring at the end of the year from her position as a financial adviser with Bennett Associates Wealth Management in Butler, a firm she founded in the 2010s after leaving a similar job at a national agency.
“I wanted to get it organized,” Bennett said of her collection. “The ones that I could categorize and the ones (that were) well-received I put in there.”
Bennett self-published the book, and so far she has only gifted copies to clients, instead of selling it online or in local outlets.
Still, she said she might list it for sale online once she leaves the business on South Washington Street for good.
“The reason why I put this book together is I wanted to have a gift to give my clients as I exited,” Bennett said.
She was delighted when she heard that one of her clients could save space as a result. It was confirmation that her advice had been valued and revisited. It mattered to many over the years.
Bennett left Morgan Stanley in 2015, and started her own firm with the goal of being able to work and speak with community clients in a more direct fashion.
She started writing columns for a similar reason — they allowed her to communicate with residents on topics she brought up by her own clients, which likely reflected help the community needed at large.
“My goal was to help people build confidence in their finances and give them goals to work toward,” Bennett said. “I wanted to write it as if they were seeing the concepts for the very first time.”
Bennett said the substance of her columns tackled many topics, but she usually tried to tie them to “what specifically was going on, whether it was presidential elections or financial uncertainty.” Sometimes, she used the column to breakdown topics that regular readers may find hard to understand, like a Grey Swan event, or a potential, but unlikely, event that can have a significant impact on the economy and financial world.
According to Bennett, a topic like a Grey Swan event was a way for her to give insight on volatile market conditions, which typical readers may not know how to react or respond to without help.
“I thought of trying to explain a Grey Swan event because when something unexpected and kind of severe happens in the financial market, people tend to get unsettled,” Bennett said. “That one always stands out because markets are volatile. I try to lend some peace of mind.”
Looking back through her years of financial columns, Bennett said they were all written in an effort to “have a focus and teach people how to understand finances.”
“You find yourself explaining concepts to your clients multiple times,” Bennett said. “The entire community is not a client, but the community needed to know.”
