The Life Maximizer with Shari Greco Reiches

0:00:06.4 Liz Tinkham: Hi, this is Liz Tinkham and welcome to Third Act, a podcast about people embracing the Third Act of their lives with a new sense of purpose and direction. The Third Act begins when your script ends but your show’s not finished.

0:00:21.3 Liz Tinkham: Hi everyone and welcome to the Third Act. On today’s show, I talked with Shari Greco Reiches. Shari’s adopted father gave her a great piece of advice early in her life, “You could have anything you want, but you cannot have everything you want.” Shari has taken that advice and used it as the foundation for how she advises her clients as the founder of Rappaport Reiches Capital Management. Her firm’s motto, “How can we help you maximize your return on life?” builds on that early advice by helping clients figure out what their core values are and then balancing those wants against the values and their financial portfolio. While Shari is still actively involved in running her firm, she’s creating her own Third Act within the firm, distilling all the valuable lessons she’s learned and giving them back through a blog, book, and podcast. Shari, where do I find you today?

0:01:16.3 Shari Greco Reiches: I’m in my office in Skokie, Illinois, at Rappaport Reiches Capital Management.

0:01:22.6 Liz Tinkham: I was commenting ’cause I was looking at you on the video that you are… You’re about to start a podcast, if you haven’t already, you look very professional. But you commented you could also do the weather with that as well…

0:01:31.6 Shari Greco Reiches: I could, I could in the traffic, but we’ll stick with the podcast today.

0:01:36.2 Liz Tinkham: Oh, yeah. And you look great. But we were introduced by Athena Chief Growth Officer, Carol Winfrey. If I remember quickly, did you go to Illinois with her?

0:01:43.4 Shari Greco Reiches: Yes, we went way way back. We were both accounting majors. We spent a lot of times in the stack studying and we were like soulmates.

0:01:53.2 Liz Tinkham: Oh my gosh. I was telling one of my college age kids about the stacks. I said, “You know… ” He’s at Michigan state, “You might go to the library and try the stacks.” And he’s like what? He was having trouble focusing. I’m like, you know the upstairs scary parts of the library where, but it’s really quiet. So I don’t think he ever went. But let’s go back to your first act, which was at Illinois, and what did you think you were gonna do with your accounting major? Why’d you pick that and what’d you think you were gonna do when you graduated?

0:02:18.6 Shari Greco Reiches: Yeah, sure. Well, my family was in the banking business and we had seven kids in our family and it was… We could go to any school we wanted to, as long as it was in Illinois, and my dad sat me down one day…

0:02:31.8 Liz Tinkham: Stop there, I could go to any school I wanted to as long as it was Ohio State.

0:02:36.7 Shari Greco Reiches: Okay. Very similar.

0:02:41.3 Shari Greco Reiches: And so I had brothers and sisters, some went to Illinois state, some went to Illinois. But one day, I worked at the bank in high school, and my dad sat me down and he said, “You should really be an accountant, even though you might wanna get into banking one day, bankers are much better if they have an accounting background.” So I decided to major in accounting and Illinois had a fabulous accounting program and the rest was history. Went, got my CPA. My family had community banks, at the time there were two, but again, my dad’s advice… And again, this is my second dad, I’ll probably talk a little bit later about my history, but he said, it’s better to get outside experience. So I went to Arthur Anderson and went in their financial services division and audited banks, ’cause I thought that would be a good background and after three years I went to the family bank.

0:03:37.1 Shari Greco Reiches: But there’s another story there that, for your listeners, it was kind of interesting and I tell my kids this. Back at Illinois, there was a society called Beta Alpha Psi, which was the honorary society and to be a member of that, and Carol O’Reilly was, who we just talked about, you had to have a certain average and there was a really tough accounting class and I got a 79.4, which ended up being a C, which eliminated me from being in this honorary society. And the honorary society had all the big eight at the time coming to interview and you really had an advantage. And I decided that there was probably 50 people in this society and there was another 350 accounting majors. So Neil Goldstein and I started the accounting club at Illinois.

0:04:28.7 Liz Tinkham: So you just went around it.

0:04:29.8 Shari Greco Reiches: We went around it and Arthur Anderson is the sponsor, I called… I can’t believe I was that young. I called Arthur Anderson Gary B at the time and I said, “Will you sponsor this event?” And he said, yes, and the accounting club is still going on. And for a long, long time, my name was on the website as one of the founders. So I always say to the young adults, if at first you don’t succeed, try again, and there’s always a workaround.

0:04:55.0 Liz Tinkham: Yeah, exactly. Now you mentioned your two dads, and I wanna go back to your childhood, ’cause you had a really interesting one with two very influential father figures who both positioned you to do what you’re doing today. Can you talk a little bit about the two men and what you’ve learned from them?

0:05:11.8 Shari Greco Reiches: Sure. Yeah. My biological father, Marty Breslau, he was a CPA and I remember even being young, I think six or seven, I’d go with him downtown on Saturdays ’cause you had to work back then, and he had a little, one of those 10 keys and I’d play around with the calculator and had a lot of fun and he used to have a stamp pad and I’d play with that. But he passed away really young. He was 30 years old and he had been at a big accounting firm and just started his own firm about four years before he passed away. So that was my first experience of an entrepreneur. But then also the next experience I saw was my mom who was only in her late 20s at the time having to deal with all the finances and everything and it was me and my young brother.

0:06:06.5 Shari Greco Reiches: And I’ll never forget those years my mom went back to work and she never let us know really what the situation was, but it was very difficult. I always say my mom’s a survivor. Fortunately, a few years later she got introduced to Dante Greco who actually ended up adopting me, my name Shari Greco Reiches. He was in the banking business. We call my mom the closer ’cause she’s only dated three men and married them all. Met my first dad at 16…

0:06:35.2 Shari Greco Reiches: Some of my friends wanna have lunch with her after they get divorced or something. But she met my first dad when she was 16, I think married him at like 19 and then she got fixed up with Dante and married him. And he was an unbelievable role model. When I was in high school, he put me through all the areas of the bank. We used to call it the one-two punch, I’d be at school and hear someone was getting a new car and I’d call him and have him call the family and try to get the loan. And at an early age I used to process the loans and I’d have to pretend if they get approved or not. And so it was a great experience. When I was 14 he started his second bank group, Bank of Highwood was the first one. New Century Bank, which was out in Mandalyn. And this was probably the biggest influence of my career as we went door to door to sell stock for the new bank. And so many times people said no. And I kept saying, “Don’t you get discouraged when people say no?” And he always said, “You need a lot of nos before you get a yes. If you don’t have the nos, you’ll never get a yes. So never be afraid of the no’.” And I’ve never been afraid of it from that point.

0:07:47.9 Liz Tinkham: You went door to door to sell stock?

0:07:49.7 Shari Greco Reiches: Door to door to sell stock from the community bank that was going in the community.

0:07:53.4 Liz Tinkham: Oh my goodness. Can you imagine doing that today? I mean…

0:07:54.8 Shari Greco Reiches: I know. And we sold the Bank Group in 1994, never paid a dividend. These people had tears in their eyes ’cause they had no idea what that stock was worth. They just were supporting the community bank. We’re talking a lot of money.

0:08:07.8 Liz Tinkham: Yeah.

0:08:08.8 Shari Greco Reiches: We had hundreds and hundreds of people that bought stock, especially a lot of the immigrants from Highwood, the Italian immigrants, they had bought stock. That was the first bank. My dad was Italian, his family came over from Italy to Highwood and he just wanted to make sure there was a bank for the Highwood community. So it was really an unbelievable story from start to finish. But that was my first sales lesson; Never be afraid of the nos.

0:08:41.0 Liz Tinkham: When did you realize, for both your dads, the kind of advice you were getting? Which I think is fairly rare. I mean, my dad gave me great advice, but we certainly didn’t go door to door, he was in insurance, selling insurance or anything like that.

0:08:54.2 Shari Greco Reiches: I think it’s later in life, you’re so young, and my gift for going with him was we would go for pizza after and I thought that was pretty cool.

0:09:02.8 Liz Tinkham: Yeah.

0:09:04.5 Shari Greco Reiches: So you don’t realize it. But there’s another quick story that really had a big influence on how I raise my family and how I really have… Which we’ll talk about the book in a few moments and I dedicated it to my dad. But when I was 16, my dad said for every dollar that I earned he would double it. So I got three jobs that summer. I was selling pizza at night, I was waitressing in the morning, I worked at a yogurt store and he ended up taking that money and we bought a few shares of the bank stock, and that stock again, that was years before, and we sold the bank. Really, I learned the compounding of money and the investments. I spent a little bit of that money when I was 16 and I remember Bruce Springsteen was coming to town and I also wanted a pair of Frye boots and I only had enough money for one or the other.

0:10:03.1 Liz Tinkham: For one or the other, right.

0:10:04.3 Shari Greco Reiches: And so I thought if I talked to my dad about it, he would say, “Sherry, I’ll get you the Frye boots, you buy the Springsteen tickets.” But that didn’t happen. And I think today a lot of parents would do that but he said, he looked me in the eye and he said, “You can have anything you want, not everything, so pick what’s most important.” And I ended up going to Springsteen and I think since then I’ve always been kind of an adventurer, that’s how I spend my money. But that was a lesson that has really resonated with clients of mine. I’ve taught my children that, I tell friends, I try to send the message, “You can have anything you want, not everything. Just pick what’s most important.”

0:10:41.2 Liz Tinkham: Yeah, that’s a great, another great lesson. So you talked about going to Arthur Anderson then back to the community bank. Then how did you get to working with your friend, Dave Rappaport, in forming your own business? Talk about that.

0:10:55.5 Shari Greco Reiches: Yes. So Dave and I actually went to Yovai together and we were friends there. And we had our community bank and it was the heyday of mergers when we sold the bank, it was in 1994. We sold the First Colonial Bank who sold to First Star Bank who sold to Star Bank who sold to US Bank. So in about three years I went through four mergers, five different re-organizations. I went from market president to president of private banking and I loved the bank. My dad had leukemia and he passed away. So he became president of Bardis and I was president of the five banks for a while, there was a lot of publicity with that and we had a lot of fun together.

0:11:41.6 Liz Tinkham: Yeah.

0:11:42.7 Shari Greco Reiches: But after all the mergers, what I realized is, I love clients and I really wanted to get back into the business. And actually as a kid, my dad would send me the stock prices. I used to pick different stocks and he would send it to my camp. When I was at camp girls were getting…

0:11:58.5 Liz Tinkham: Oh my gosh.

0:12:00.4 Shari Greco Reiches: Magazines and I was getting these little stock prices from the newspaper and I would chart them on my cabin. But anyway, to make a long story short, I decided I wanted to get into the investment world, make a career change. So I met with a lot of different firms. I called Dave Rapaport and he had been at Sanford Bernstein, he had started at Goldman Sachs, went to Bernstein. So he kind of recruited me over to Bernstein. And I was at Bernstein for about three or four years when they merged with Alliance Capital Management. And I said, “Oh, here it goes again.” When you don’t own your own business, you never know what the future looks like.

0:12:33.5 Liz Tinkham: Yep.

0:12:34.7 Shari Greco Reiches: So there was a friend of ours, was at Goldman Sachs and he had a big hedge fund and he was thinking of starting a private client business and asked if I wanted to run it and I went over to Dave and we were talking about it one day and all of a sudden the light bulb went on and I said, “Why would I wanna run someone else’s business?”

0:12:53.0 Liz Tinkham: Yeah.

0:12:53.5 Shari Greco Reiches: Why don’t we start our own? And this was the days where a lot of people were monetizing, they were leaving one brokerage firm and going to another and there was… monetizing their book or business. And the RIA business, this was in 2005, had just started to get steam and I…

0:13:14.8 Liz Tinkham: What’s an RIA?

0:13:15.0 Shari Greco Reiches: Registered Investment Advisor. So you’ve got the broker firms, you’ve got the banks and then you have these independent Registered Investment Advisors. And I looked at Dave and I said, let’s start our own firm. And we left on extremely good terms of Bernstein, in fact, we still have great relationships and there’s times that they refer us business if they can handle it for one reason or another. And so went back in 2005, Dave and I took the plunge, we say we were either really smart or not smart, but I think it all worked out, and we’ve grown the firm and it’s just been a fabulous ride.

0:13:54.2 Liz Tinkham: One of the things I find interesting about this, just given that you and I are about the same age, and I think it’s unusual to have seen women go into business with a friend of theirs and then your husband came into the business. Wow.

0:14:07.8 Shari Greco Reiches: Right.

0:14:08.8 Liz Tinkham: And so I think that’s just… I think that’s a fantastic story. So how long have you had the business and where are you headed with it?

0:14:15.7 Shari Greco Reiches: So we started the business in 2005, and my husband was an estate planning attorney for many years at a big law firm in Chicago, and we just were having so much fun, so he said he should join… He wanted to join us, so it started where he ran Compliance and Operations, Dave was more on the investment side, and I was on the new business development or marketing. So we kinda had our segregated duties, but again, in a small business, everyone does everything. So we started with the three of us, we hired our first associate, Karen Esbra. 16 years later, Karen is now our COO of the company. We have 13 people of which six of our nine advisors are women, so 66%, which is amazing. Actually, I just saw the play, ‘Six’, I don’t know if you saw that, ‘The six wives of Henry VIII”, and I’m doing a blog on the six women advisors at Rapaport, ’cause it is so unusual…

0:15:29.5 Liz Tinkham: That’s good, but it’s really unusual and great for women.

0:15:30.6 Shari Greco Reiches: Great for women, and great that we have a COO, and so by… Initially, it was Dave, Steven, and I, we were making all the decisions, but having a dedicated COO was a big change for us in the last year, and then we’ve just been really growing rapidly. We were at 400, 500 million, we bought another firm at the end of last year, we’re about 850 million, if the market would cooperate a little more, we’d be higher, but you can’t control, you can only control what you control. And so what’s really been great for me is I still work a lot with clients, but by having the COO and having days with the investments, and Stephen with wealth transfer, it’s giving me time to really pursue things like writing a book and blog, because I just want this message to reach more people than our 350 clients. So I’ve been speaking and writing, and after all these years of being in the trenches with the clients, it’s been a lot of fun to share this wisdom with a larger audience.

0:16:30.7 Liz Tinkham: You were telling me, you’re kinda calling it your third act within the Rappaport Reiches Capital Management. So what are you planning to do? So you’re not leaving the firm yet, but you’ve got…

0:16:41.0 Shari Greco Reiches: Oh, no, no.

0:16:43.5 Liz Tinkham: No, no. You’ve got some other things, you talked about speaking, writing, what else are you gonna do?

0:16:48.2 Shari Greco Reiches: Yeah, a big part is mentoring our younger advisors. The beauty of our firm is that when you become a client, you’re a client of Rappaport Reiches Capital Management, our management style is centralized, so our clients get the best. Thinking of the firm, we’re family CFOs, we have a standard CFO checklist. And so really mentoring the advisors, making sure our clients will all get the Rappaport Reiches Capital Management experience. But what really has changed about three years ago, I went to a woman’s conference with the firm dimensional that we outsourced a lot of our money management, and we spent a lot of time talking about values, and so much of our industry is really about analytics and performance, and I really have shifted the firm, we call it maximize our clients’ return on life, and really how I work with clients, and it comes down to this whole values and values discussion on what’s most important to you, how do you wanna spend your time? How do you wanna spend your money? And that has really been kind of a third act in this business to really bring the values to the forefront and do a lot of writing and a lot of speaking and really working with our clients to figure out their values and if they have a significant other, are they in line with each other? Because money is a leading stress for a lot of relationships.

0:18:16.3 Liz Tinkham: I know. I was just listening to a podcast and they were talking about that but they were… I love the Pivot Podcast with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway. They were interviewing this young woman who’s… She’s on TikTok, Shari, there you go, doing all kinds of financial videos and she was… They were talking about the stress with marriage. But you recently published your book, ‘Maximize Your Return on Life; Invest Your Time and Money in What You Value Most.’ I read it, it’s great. So how did you… I mean, it’s a lot to write a book. What prompted you to do that, and where are you headed with all of that?

0:18:47.4 Shari Greco Reiches: So I started with a blog about three years ago, and the blog really got a lot of traction and I was getting a lot of emails from people and people saying that they thought of the blog when they were making a life decision, and I decided to take the blog to the next level, I’ve always wanted to write a book, and it’s not as hard as people think it is. There’s a lot of hybrid options, I hired a publisher who also had editors, so I worked on chapter by chapter and then I would have him edit it, I had an illustrator, and I wanted to make this book very interactive with exercises, thought… I wanted it to be the kind of book you could read a few chapters, put it down, and I really thought this book was going to resonate with the 50 plus because a lot of, especially with your podcast, a lot of people are thinking, I’m 50, I’m 60, I’ve got 20, 30 years, how do I wanna spend it? What do I wanna do? And I thought that this book would help with those decisions, but what I found was a lot of people were getting this book for their young adults.

0:19:54.2 Liz Tinkham: Yeah.

0:19:54.9 Shari Greco Reiches: Because there was so much in there and I had… One of my clients who was in his mid-80s called me almost in tears and said he wished he would have read my book about the values, ’cause he just worked way too hard and it ruined his marriage and his relationship with his kids and that was really his value and he thought work was the most important thing of his life and that he ended up buying the book for all his kids and grandchildren and he’s hoping that maybe they will make changes that he wasn’t able to make in his life. I really wanted to spread the word on this, and so I think that’s why I wrote the book, but it kind of took a life of its own once it got published. I don’t know if there’s a lot of books like it out there, but it’s really been a lot of fun.

0:20:37.7 Liz Tinkham: So I’m gonna talk a little bit about two things that resonated with me and maybe some of our listeners about the book. One, I do… The whole values piece, which was write down, understand your values, and then evaluate all of your financial decisions against those. Now, that seems like a very obvious thing to do, but the stories you told, the way you wrote it down, I don’t know that most people are doing that, and in fact, I’m gonna give this book to my kids for that. I assume, is that… Did you learn that, or is that something one of the dads taught you or, how did that come to be with you?

0:21:13.0 Shari Greco Reiches: I think it was just over time, and the happiest clients I had through the years were the ones that really understood their values. And it wasn’t always the wealthiest clients, because you have a resource, you have your earnings, you have your savings, you have your investments, but it’s what you do with those resources. You could be a very, very wealthy client, you could spend a lot and not be happy, and so I started thinking about that, and then when I went to the seminar, I kind of wasn’t looking forward to it. It was a three-hour, they had candles, we did meditation, they had a notebook. I was like, “I know my values. Why am I doing this?” But a few of them really surfaced that I hadn’t expected. I was running our capital campaign for synagogues, spending a lot of time on that, and people often ask me, “Why are you doing this? Why are you spending… ” And then all a sudden when I looked at my values, it was community and giving, family, and those were big values of mine and that’s why I was doing it.

0:22:18.5 Shari Greco Reiches: And then another one that I kind of forgot about was adventure. When I was younger, I used to do all these adventurous vacations, time goes by, and we’ve decided now that once a year, we’re gonna do a backroads trip or we went hiking in Costa Rica, zip lining and things like that. And so if I’m working with clients and I talk about values and I’ve never taken the time to really articulate my own values, then I think there’s a lot of people that haven’t. I had one couple I talked with, their values, and they said they spent more time picking out the color of their last vehicle than ever talking about their values. And I give clients kind of this checklist, and sometimes we compare it, and it’s often very surprising that they don’t even know each other’s values. One wants a big home and one doesn’t wanna work so hard and they’ve never talked about it and that can lead to a lot of stress.

0:23:21.6 Liz Tinkham: The second thing you write a lot about is time management, and again, something that people talk about all the time. But you give some great examples about how busy you are. Now, again, it goes back to your values. As you think about your third act, really focusing on your values, how do you advise us? We have a lot of really high people who have done very, very well, women in particular who listen to this podcast, how do you teach people to say no? I found it to be a big problem since I retired. I got really good at it at work ’cause I was so focused on work, but I’ve kind of been in this say yes mode ever since I retired and it’s killing me.

0:23:56.7 Shari Greco Reiches: And I hear that with a lot of my retirees, ’cause they think they have all this time now, so they end up joining boards or philanthropic activities, and sometimes they don’t have the assistants or people helping them, and it ends up being more stressful than it was when they were in corporate America. And things just don’t move as quickly as corporate America and you’re working with volunteers and you can’t order people around, not that you order people around in corporate America, but it ends up being stressful. But I kind of… I was guilty of that, because I love life and I wanna do everything, but sometimes saying yes is saying no to something that you didn’t realize in the future. So you commit yourself to being on a board and you wanna go on a trip later on and you can’t because you’re committed to something. So I kind of use this, “Is it something I really wanna do? And is this aligned with my values” before I say yes.

0:24:52.3 Shari Greco Reiches: And I really… I’d never say yes right away anymore. People used to call me and ask me to help out with something. Because I also know I’m the kind of person that does something 110%, so I’m not gonna be on a board and just sit there, and so I really have to be passionate about it and it has to really be in line with my values. And I did reduce some of my board activities. I was on a lot of boards and spreading myself too thin, and one of my values personally was health, and as I’m getting older, I really decided that this has to be some time for me and I needed to spend time working out, and I took up tennis recently and I’m enjoying it. There’ll be plenty of time, I’ve given a lot to a lot of organizations, but I decided that I was gonna limit myself to two and really decide which ones I wanted to be involved with, be involved at a very deep level and not try to be there all the time for everyone and it’s very hard.

0:25:52.4 Liz Tinkham: You’re still working full-time, but to limit yourself to two, that’s a really… That’s a good thing, to just say “Two, I’m gonna look at them against my values and really devote my time and energy to that.” And then if one of them ends, you can pick another one but not…

0:26:04.9 Shari Greco Reiches: Exactly.

0:26:05.6 Liz Tinkham: Yeah.

0:26:05.9 Shari Greco Reiches: And most of them do, they’ll have four-year terms or six years…

0:26:08.4 Liz Tinkham: Yeah.

0:26:09.5 Shari Greco Reiches: You also have to understand your values change over time, so you need to re-evaluate that. During COVID, a lot of people’s values changed, and you really need to look at that and be true to yourself and really take the time to really dive into them.

0:26:25.0 Liz Tinkham: So one last thing on the book and just your experience being a financial advisor, what are the one or two things that… And again, it’ll be people who have done fairly well in life, as they think about retiring, what do they get wrong?

0:26:37.7 Shari Greco Reiches: Well, obviously, there’s two prongs. The first is financial and they… So many people, I ask them, “Well, what do you spend?” I get this blank look. The best time to really think about your retirement is not three years before you’re retired, it’s probably 15 years before, and really making sure that you’re planning for the retirement, that you understand what your spending is, and also understand your family needs. Often it might be a child that needs help, a parent. So really understand what all those expenses are and financially make sure that you’re secure, we do a lot of modeling for our clients and make sure that you feel confident with that. But the other is what are you going to do with your retirement, I think that’s a lot of your Third Act podcast, is, do you have enough hobbies, is there a non-profit, is there may be a small business you wanna start? What does your retirement look like the day after? And try to visualize that. And I think that’s where some of the mistakes people make, they’re financially fine to retire, but they’ve never thought about what it will look like after, and especially if they were energetic, they were an executive, they were working hard, there’s gotta be an outlet for them, they’re not used to doing nothing.

0:28:01.6 Liz Tinkham: Hence my podcast.

0:28:03.1 Shari Greco Reiches: Yes. Yes. Exactly.

0:28:05.1 Liz Tinkham: I’ve always called it my vanity project to try and figure out what I’m gonna do when I retired. So you’ve got a podcast coming up, why don’t you tell us about it.

0:28:13.8 Shari Greco Reiches: Yeah, so I’m starting, probably it’ll be mid to late June. It’s called Maximize Your Return on Life. I’m gonna be talking with real people, with real stories, how they’ve maximized their return on life, and I’m also going to be talking with people who can help people maximize the return on life. So it’s kind of a new project that I’m just starting, got a bunch of guests lined up, but I’m really excited about it, and it’s not celebrities, like I said, it’s just gonna be real people with their stories, and I hope that people will resonate with a few of the guests or maybe there’ll be another guest that can give them some insight, like your podcast, which I’d love to have you on at some point, how their third act can be. And I think there’s a lot of thought process that goes in before you retire and it used to be, you worked at a company for 50 years, got your gold watch and retired in Florida, but that’s not what I’m seeing. And I’m often seeing that people don’t wanna retire, they just don’t wanna work as hard as they’ve been working, so how can they still get that intellectual curiosity and have the time to do the things they wanna do, and that’s really where what we try to help clients figure that out, and I bet your third act is helping people really with the trade-offs of that.

0:29:37.2 Liz Tinkham: Yeah, and just some ideas of different things you can do for sure. So I almost named this podcast, I’m not done yet, what aren’t you done with yet?

0:29:47.4 Shari Greco Reiches: I think just trying… We obviously have our clients, but I’ve always been one of those nurturing people and try to maybe change some mindsets, whether it’s young adults, I preach this, and I always say the key to financial happiness is living within your means, and that basically is spending less than what you have coming in. And if you do that, you could have an emergency fund, you can start your retirement, you could put money away in your 401K and the ducks all get in order. So I’m trying to spread the word on that. I’ve done a lot of education, again, for young adults, I’ve done a bunch of webinars, I was asked to speak in Washington to jump start Coalition, which was 500 teachers from across the country on the top 10 things every high schooler should know. I think a lot of this is not taught in high school and college, so I’m kind of on a mission to do that. With my experience, with my mom, I’ve spent a lot of my career really empowering women to take control of their finances, and a lot of women will be the sole, in charge of their finances, I call them women in charge, whether they’re widowed or divorced. So I’m hoping that my blogs and the books can help people navigate this complex world of finance, some financial planning, so that’s kind of… From going and being deep in the trenches, I’m just trying to broaden my delivery.

0:31:22.1 Liz Tinkham: One of the things I love about your story is that you’re still in your kinda second act, but you’re kinda changing it the way you want it to be as you look at the next third act of that career, which is probably… You’re probably still in growth mode and getting more clients and everything, but really being able to be a trusted advisor to this last… Not last stage, but the retirement stage of people’s lives and then getting out there and taking everything you know and teaching other people about it, which is a really cool thing to do. So congrats on that.

0:31:54.6 Shari Greco Reiches: And empowering our firm with the same message, ’cause our firm’s tagline is, “Maximize your return on life.” And really, it’s not just me, but it’s the entire advisory team here is working with our clients to help them maximize their return on life, and it’s so gratifying because we’ll get calls, I went to Italy and I maximized my return on life, or I used to sleep on my daughter’s couch, she just had a baby, I decided to get a hotel room down the road, it’s been a lot of harmony for everyone. I’ve maximized my return on life. So it’s kind of been this tagline, and I do think that if you kind of have that in your mind, you’re gonna make the right decisions. And a lot of people have trouble spending money and I always… Again, like I do with the time, I always say, “Is it within your budget? And is it within your values, if it is, go for it, don’t feel guilty,” and I always find the people that have the money have the hardest time spending it, and the people that don’t have the money have the easiest time spending it. So you gotta live your life, and if I can change more people to do that, I’ll feel really good about it.

0:33:05.6 Liz Tinkham: Oh, it’s great. So thank you so much for being on the show. Where can our listeners find you online?

0:33:11.3 Shari Greco Reiches: Sure, I have my website at sharigrecoreiches.com or you can go to rrcapital.com, that’s our company website, LinkedIn. And I’ll be starting the Maximize Your Return on Life podcast shortly.

0:33:27.7 Liz Tinkham: Great. Okay. Well, we will put all that in the show notes. Thank you so much and look forward to following you.

0:33:33.0 Shari Greco Reiches: Great. Thanks, Liz, and I really am impressed with your podcast and I think you’re gonna be helping a lot of people, ’cause I have a lot of clients looking at their third act, so I’m so glad to be a part of this. And thanks for having me.

0:33:47.8 Liz Tinkham: Thank you. Thanks for joining me today to listen to the Third Act Podcast. You can find show notes, guests bios, and more at thirdactpodcast.com. If you enjoyed our show today, please subscribe and write a review on your favorite podcast platform. I’m your host, Liz Tinkham. I’ll be back next week with another guest who’s found new meaning and fulfillment in the third act of their life.