Stephanie McCullough is founder of Sofia Financial and co-host of the award-winning Take Back Retirement podcast. One of Investopedia's Top 10 Financial Advisors of 2023, Stephanie provides non-judgmental, truly holistic financial planning for professional women. She has found that women “of a certain age” are faced with a particular set of problems around the goal of retirement, especially those facing it on their own. Her mission is to empower women to make wise financial decisions so they can control their future, and thus she speaks to women’s groups regularly. Stephanie is married with two kids in their 20’s, and has degrees from Duke University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Follow Stephanie @sofiafinancial and www.sofiafinancial.com.
Sofia Financial Insights - May 2025
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Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING Reminder: What the stock and bond markets are doing NOW does not tell us what they will do. Read that again. Markets are forward-looking: an investor buys a stock or bond based on what they think the value will be to them in the future. However, they can only act on the information they have today -- basically their own version of reading the tea leaves. To quote Jason Zweig again (alert readers will remember I did so last month too: Sofia Financial Insights - April 2025): “At times like these, we all need to be reminded that 'long-term investor' is redundant. To be an investor at all, you must think past the short term. That’s never easy, and it’s especially difficult now.” How do we keep our focus on the long-term when there are so many short-term disruptions going on, and new ones every day? I’m not advocating disengagement from the world or living in denial. We should pay attention and act on our convictions! But in the case of your investment accounts, I strongly suggest both paying a little less attention (whatever you do, don’t be checking your balances every day!) and also taking a stance of patience. Patience is crucial when investing for the long term, because the rewards are in the long term, and it may be a bumpy road to get there. You may find it interesting, as I do, that the word patience is actually derived from the Latin word patientia, which means “to suffer or endure.” When it comes to investing, that seems almost too perfect! This is also why we feel so strongly that investing without financial planning is unhelpful at best. It's like starting out on a journey without knowing where you're trying to go. The very point of the planning we do together is not so that you can avoid the uncertainties of this world, but so that you may endure or even thrive through it all. TOPS FROM OPS May 1 was World Password Day. Yes, they actually have a day for it. Like National School Nurse Day May 7 (shout-out to Helen!) and, of course, Mother’s Day on May 11. We are required to have so many passwords any more, it’s hard to come up with new ones, much less remember them all. But it really is vital to have long, unique passwords for each of the services and logins we use. Here’s a quick video with our friend Kathy Stokes about some simple steps you can take to protect yourself and your money. Kathy says, “Our recommendation is to do a little bit of research and invest in a password manager app that does all of the hard work for you and then encrypts all of those passwords, and you only have to remember 1 to have access to them.” RECENT SIGHTINGS
PERSONAL A couple of my recent highlights have been music-related. The night after my son’s last-ever college lacrosse game several of the families went to the boys’ favorite dive bar in Worcester, dancing and singing at the top of our lungs to a great cover band. I also sang silently to myself at the Lyle Lovett concert at The Grand Opera House in Wilmington, DE (thanks Kimberly for the invite!). And did you catch this? The Los Angeles Koreatown Senior Center Harmonica club played the national anthem at a NHL hockey playoff game - twice! Here's to the power of older women making music. LET'S CONNECT! How about you? What's been lighting up your life lately? Please reply and let us know - bonus points for pictures! We love your pictures. Be careful out there, Stephanie Whenever you're ready, there are three ways we can help:
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Stephanie McCullough, Financial Planner, Speaker and Podcaster
Stephanie McCullough is founder of Sofia Financial and co-host of the award-winning Take Back Retirement podcast. One of Investopedia's Top 10 Financial Advisors of 2023, Stephanie provides non-judgmental, truly holistic financial planning for professional women. She has found that women “of a certain age” are faced with a particular set of problems around the goal of retirement, especially those facing it on their own. Her mission is to empower women to make wise financial decisions so they can control their future, and thus she speaks to women’s groups regularly. Stephanie is married with two kids in their 20’s, and has degrees from Duke University and the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Follow Stephanie @sofiafinancial and www.sofiafinancial.com.
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING Did you know that while the human brain is designed to reason, a recent book posits that we were actually built to reason not alone, but with one another? Meghaan Lurtz, PhD explored this in a fascinating article on Substack. She says, "when we try to make decisions in a vacuum, we struggle. In solitary echo chambers, we do even worse." This totally fits with what I...
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING Today I decided to put my thoughts about investing in video format for you. Click on the image below to play. (It's about 7 minutes long.) Below is the image I created from Jason Zweig's Wall Street Journal column that I reference in the video, and here's an unlocked link to the article itself. **Remember that speaking with your financial planner is one of the items...
Sharing my latest thoughts on money and life, with an eye to empowering more women to financial confidence. I'VE BEEN PONDERING Apropos of nothing (!!), I share the recording of the Wellness Webinar we held for clients in January, where my coach Lindsay shares brain and body science about stress, and teaches us a very practical stress management tool to take back a bit of control in what can feel like an unending storm. The stock market has started to react to the uncertainty about our...