About Us
Together, we’re changing
the personal finance conversation
for women.
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Eleanor Blayney, CFP®
The fourth of four girls, Eleanor grew up in a “very traditional” family with a prosperous lifestyle. After graduating from Mount Holyoke, the nation’s first college for women, she earned degrees from Cambridge University and the University of Chicago. But her work as a government consultant in Washington, D.C., left her dissatisfied: “Nothing was ever accomplished, and I didn’t feel like I was part of anything bigger than myself. I wanted to work with real people.”
She attended FPA meetings, listened and learned, and earned CFP certification in 1990. The firm she co-founded, Sullivan, Bruyette, Speros and Blayney, became a success. “I’ve always enjoyed the intersection between numbers, technical information, finance, and the language that we need to explain this to our clients, to people that don’t understand this,” Eleanor says. “Financial planning was a perfect way to bring right-brain thinking—literature, language—to the more practical areas of knowledge like numbers.” She is the CFP Board’s Consumer Advocate.
Over the years, she notes, she has done “just about everything I was helping my clients do: I’ve been separated and divorced, raised a child and put her through college with the money I saved, started a business, sold a business, and retired.” The retirement in 2007 didn’t take; she was too eager to develop her ideas about empowering, educating, and engaging women. “Empowerment is getting women to know that they wield tremendous power, that they don’t have to conform to the old models of wealth management or wealth creation,” she says. “With Direction$, I want to open the door wider for women.”
Click here to read about Eleanor Blayney in the news.
Click here to view Eleanor Blayney’s educational videos.
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Peg Downey, CFP®
One of four girls in a low-income family, Peg had her future changed by her eighth-grade math teacher. “She asked who would go to college, ‘Raise your hand,’ and I didn’t raise my hand, because my mother told me we were too poor for me to go to college. The teacher said, ‘Peggy Downey, raise your hand! Anybody who wants to go to college can find a way to pay for it.’” Peg worked her way through college with the help of scholarships and loans, inspiring her sisters to do the same.
At the American Association of University Women (AAUW), she created programs on women’s issues, including a two-year financial education program. In 1980 she and Denise Leish founded Money Plans to provide financial advice primarily to women. “Keep in mind,” she notes, “that this was a time when it was very difficult for women to obtain credit, mortgages, or loans in their own name.”
Since then, Money Plans’ primary marketing strategy has been Peg’s hundreds of presentations to women’s groups and her writings on women and finances. She served on NAPFA’s Board from 1989-93 and was Chair of NAPFA in 1992-93.
Her links with the other two Direction$ partners developed while she was Dean of NAPFA University’s School of Communication, a position she’s held for the past five years. Peg explains, “When Eleanor Blayney came to speak to our Women’s Initiative, people told her she needed to talk to me, since we shared a similar passion for addressing women in new and creative ways.”
Eleanor had also been contacted by Elizabeth, whom Peg had met while doing training for George Kinder’s Seven Stages of Money Maturity program. Peg says, “I remembered Elizabeth as being extremely impressive, so I encouraged Eleanor to follow up and get her to come and meet with us.”
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Elizabeth Jetton, CFP®
Elizabeth calls herself an “Episcopal Southern gal from Memphis, Tennessee,” who grew up very middle class. Bored in college, she followed a spiritual bent by starting a Transcendental Meditation Center near Washington, D.C. She observed, “One of the things that came out of running that business, teaching Senators and Congressmen, was that I needed to manage my own money. In an odd sort of way, it prepared me to be in the financial planning world.”
An eight-year stint at a brokerage firm ultimately was not the right fit. “Something felt very wrong about it. It was the inability to have an impact on people’s lives, because it wasn’t financial planning.” She went back to college, earned a CFP, and was taken under the wing of one of the first trained financial planners in the 1970s, Earl Rubin. Eventually she formed her own practice with another planner, Michael Smith, to whom she is married.
Elizabeth’s first exposure to a Nazrudin conference and George Kinder’s training was a tipping point. “I’d found my tribe, my community,” she says. “I never knew there were other people out there who thought the way I did about the holistic financial life planning model.” She came back fired up about getting more involved in the profession. After heading the Georgia chapter of the newly formed FPA, she put her name in for the National Board of the FPA. She was elected president in 2004 and chair in 2005.
In 2007, her firm merged with RTD Financial Advisors, founded by friend and thought leader Roy Diliberto. Elizabeth still sees clients and helps with overall financial planning direction and marketing, but she has more freedom to speak around the country, teach in California Lutheran’s MBA program, write, and coach other financial planners and firms.
Click here to read about the August 2010 cover story featuring Direction$ in Investment Advisor magazine.