Financial Planning - December 2012

practice

practice profile

What Women Investors Want

After a long time focused on medical professionals, Cindy Conger’s new practice targets female clients. That means doing a few things differently. By Jim Grote

ATime magazine cover this year called women “The Richer Sex.” A new Prudential study found the majority of U.S. women surveyed are now the primary breadwinners for their household. Those are the kind of data points that Little Rock, Ark., wealth manager Cindy Conger pays a lot of attention to.

“Women are the largest overlooked natural resource in the world,” says Conger, for whom single, divorced and widowed women make up about 70% of her client base. (The other 30% is married couples.)

Conger knows something about a specialized practice. From 1985 to 2005, she was co-founder and president of the Arkansas Financial Group, a practice focused on the medical profession. Even today, many of her clients are physicians; among the couples she works with, women are often the primary breadwinners, and several clients are female radiologists married to stay-at-home fathers.

But there are different issues involved with her female clientele. Half of all her clients are widows and divorcees living solely on their investments, so Conger works to manage various income sources and develop a budget, including an account she calls “ savings to spend” for pricier discretionary items like travel and entertainment. There’s also an emotional component with her female clients, she says: “I’m a big nurturer and women respond to nurturing.”

AIMING SMALL

Conger, who says she prefers to run a small
practice, serves 46 clients with a bit more than
$47 million in assets under management.
She serves as lead planner and tax preparer
as well as chief investment officer; her staff
also includes one other CFP and one support
person. Conger tries to keep everyone’s work-
week to 32 hours, she says. That’s to stay in
line with the firm’s mission — “to help our cli-
ents live the life they want.”
An integrated approach to tax prepara-
tion is one reason she left Arkansas Financial
Group, she says. “My partner and I disagreed
on the future of our practice.” But Conger says
she “loves doing tax returns”; she boasts she
has never had a physician’s tax return audited.
As a result, Conger screens for clients who
like their financial planning, tax returns and
investment management bundled together
in one firm, as well as those who want her to
manage all their assets, including their 401(k)s
and 403(b)s.

Her annual fee structure includes the firm’s full menu of services and is layered: 1.5% on the first $500,000, 0.75% on the next $1.5 million, 0.5% on the next $3 million, 0.33% on the next $5 million and 0.25% on the next $10 million. The firm’s initial financial analysis — which covers employee benefits, insurance coverage, estate planning and investment strategy — gets billed as a flat project fee based on projected hours and complexity.

Cindy Conger Conger Wealth Management, Little Rock, Ark. Credentials: B.S. in Accounting, University of Arkansas-Little Rock; MBA, University of Arkansas-Little Rock; CPA, PFS, CFP

Experience: General securities representative for FSC Securities and Keogler Morgan; co-founder, president, and COO of the Arkansas Financial Group.