“I can’t stand this. I want to help these women.”
Certified Financial Planner (CFP) Linda Stubblefield opened her boutique retirement planning firm Bedrock Asset Management, after watching friends and loved ones navigate traumatic life changes without a financial advocate.
The Arkansas-native, mother of three, and craft artist came of age when women weren’t in the room for financial discussions. “At that time, women weren’t really encouraged to pursue business," she said. "Some did, but very few, and fewer pursued financial services.”
Things are different today, but the fact remains that many women, regardless of age or marital status, are undereducated about financial literacy and have a bias towards safety; a reality Stubblefield says prevents women from seeing more growth in their portfolios.
Then, in the event she finds herself “suddenly single,” as Stubblefield calls it, she might feel up creek without a paddle.
“For some of them, they just thought they’d never need to understand finance,” Stubblefield explained. “They’d think, ‘He's doing a good job, he makes all the money, let him make them all the decisions.’ But then, the marriage dissolves, or he passes away, and they’re left without the knowledge they need.”
“I had a friend whose husband passed away, and her name wasn’t on the house. The bank wouldn’t refinance for her because she had never had a job. She had to sell the house.”
While Stubblefield has been happily married to her husband for decades, exposure to stories like her friend’s, plus her experience working family cases at Morgan Stanley, pushed her to open her Bentonville-based firm.
“I got the designation of Certified Divorce Financial Analyst (CDFA), which is highly specialized. I spent years in that capacity, and it taught me that there's just a certain segment of women that have kind of offloaded all of their financial decisions to a spouse.”
Layering her efforts, Stubblefield outlines her success matrix in her Suddenly Single Workshop and book “Hidden Figures: Seven Numbers Women Must Know for Financial Success,” which is available on Amazon.
“Understanding cash flow and net worth are essential to being financially healthy,” she said. “You need to have a sense of whether it’s going forward or backward; this is how we make good financial decisions. That’s one of the classes within the Suddenly Single Workshop.”
Stubblefield credits her interest in finance to her dad. As a young woman, he would drive her to school with the news on the radio discussing everything from investing and economy to politics.
“I had gone to school on a journalism scholarship, but later in life, after I had three children and they were in school, I decided I was going to step into a different career.”
She was in her thirties before pursuing finance; a shift I think we can all draw inspiration from. While helping women and pre-retirees find financial confidence is an altruistic calling, her work is yielding real returns and changing the narrative around women and money.