Board Member of the Month: Alana Scott

Meet our Co-President and September’s Board Member of the Month, Alana Scott!

Born In: Modesto, CA

Profession: Financial Advisor, Certified Divorce Financial Analyst CDFA™

Favorite Color: Pink

Likes: Running, Traveling, Volunteering, Spending time with family

Dislikes: Pancakes

Role Models: Mom, Oprah, Aunt Susie, Melinda Gates

What Does W.E.L.L. Mean to You?:

I lost my mom when I was fifteen, and when I turned thirty I began to realize that I never really grieved her loss.  These different emotions started to come up and I wanted to figure out what was going on and why I was feeling the way I was. I started reading different books, going to different seminars, etc. and what I learned form the different experts in this area was that I had a lot of fear associated with the fact that my mom died young.  I thought I was afraid of dying young, but I was actually afraid of living for her because it was this huge responsibility that I felt I had to fulfill. I went to a seminar where they really had you dig deep and think about your purpose in life and what you want to accomplish, so I wrote down that I wanted to start a nonprofit for women and that I wanted to be a part of a group of people who really believed in helping women.  The way that I saw it back then was that it would be something I started when I was older and retired, so I wrote it down but then put it on the back burner.

As a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst, at times we are referred women who are going through messy divorces.  Last September I was helping a woman whose husband was cheating on her for three years, transferring assets to the mistress, bought a house in Washington, and then sent her to Washington to get things ready for people who were going to visit.  However, while she was there her husband sent her a letter stating that they were getting a divorce and it was to be remediated in Washington.  She came to California and hired a lawyer who charged an arm and a leg, but did very little to help her.  Suddenly, her husband ended up committing suicide and as a result she hired an estate attorney who also did very little to help her.  It was around this time that she heard about me and my Certified Divorce Financial Analyst designation.  Once she came to me, our team began reaching out to all of our different resources, such as trusted attorney’s and CPA’s, in an effort to help her.

It was about this time that Michael Faircloth, a fellow financial advisor, approached our team with the idea of investing in women.  So a group of us got together and decided to start doing focus groups with women in our local community to get input from them on how to best mesh all of these different ideas together.  Originally our focus was on providing financial literacy for women because the finance industry really does tend to be geared more towards men.  We wanted to be able to share the information in a way that women would be able to understand and be interested in.  However, throughout this process we realized that we needed to provide a lot more than financial literacy for these women that we were helping.  We needed to provide the resources and mentors necessary in order to help them thrive in whatever situation they may be in.  As a result, a couple months ago our team sat down with an attorney because we realized that we needed to put this nonprofit together in order to help every woman regardless socioeconomic status. As we were sitting there, I looked at my team and thought, “Oh my gosh, we are doing it.  We are doing this to help women.”

It’s so amazing how the timing of everything worked out so perfectly and I still can’t believe that we have made this a reality. For me, W.E.L.L. is my way of carrying on my mother’s legacy while helping women because she was such a giving person and this is the best way I could possibly honor her.