Adam Torres and Marguerita Cheng discuss Marguerita’s new book.
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Marguerita Cheng, CEO at Blue Ocean Global Wealth, explore Blue Ocean Global Wealth and Marguerita’s new book, Mission Matters: Mission-Based Leaders Share Inspiring Stories on Power and Purpose (Women Leaders Edition, Volume 1).
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About Marguerita Cheng
Marguerita “Rita” M. Cheng is the Chief Executive Officer at Blue Ocean Global Wealth. Prior to founding Blue Ocean Global Wealth, she was a Financial Advisor at Ameriprise Financial and an Analyst and Editor at Towa Securities in Tokyo, Japan. She is a Certified Financial Planner® (CFP), a Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor® (CRPC), a Retirement Income Certified Professional® (RICP) and a Chartered SRI Counselor (CSRIC®). An in-demand financial writer and speaker, Rita has contributed her expertise to numerous media outlets including Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Reuters, Kiplinger, Investopedia, Entrepreneur, Huffington Post, U.S. News and World Report, Time, Yahoo! Finance, NerdWallet, Financial Advisor, Be Inkandescent, and more. In 2021, she was named the #7 Most Influential Financial Advisor in the Investopedia Top 100, a Woman to Watch by InvestmentNews, and a Top 100 Minority Business Enterprise (MBE®) by the Capital Region Minority Supplier Development Council (CRMSDC). Rita is also a recipient of the prestigious Japanese Monbukagakusho Scholarship.
About Blue Ocean Global Wealth
Blue Ocean Global Wealth is an investment advisory firm that strives to be a trusted partner and educational resource. They provide corporations and institutions with portfolio construction, investment due diligence, and risk management consulting. Blue Ocean Global Wealth delivers comprehensive financial planning and wealth management solutions to families, entrepreneurs, and executives. They embrace global diversity and steward the protection, growth, and distribution of our clients’ wealth.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres. And if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on, be our guest to apply. All right. So today is a very special episode. We’re bringing Margarita Chang back on the line, also known as Rita.
And she’s the CEO. CEO of Blue Ocean Global Wealth. And she’s also an author in our most recently released mission matters book that we put together with Dr. Nancy and women connect for good. And she’s Rita. You know what? Your intro is getting longer than my intro. She’s also an author and two of our previous release books and an, and a podcast host on our network.
So just read up thrilled to have you back on welcome, welcome, welcome. It’s so good to catch up with you. Well, likewise, thank you so much for having me. And I got to add to this and accomplished marathon runner. And I mean, how many more you got? Your intro is getting good. It’s getting better and better as the years go on.
And I’m just so thrilled to work with you. And as you’re aware, we’ll start this episode, the way that we start them all with what we call our mission matters minute. So read that mission matters. Our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, for experts, for professionals, for people that we feel need to be heard and want to get their story out there.
So thrilled to have you. That’s our mission. Rita, what mission matters to you? What matters to me is for everyone to have clarity, confidence control over their financial lives. There’s a lot of noise out there, right? What’s appropriate for you, your personal financial situation, the confidence to know that once you figure out what’s right for you personally and financially, Yeah, not to doubt yourself and know that makes sense for you.
So we talked about clarity, confidence and control, a sense of control. We cannot control interest rates, the markets or politics for that matter. I know we can play an active role. So the mission that matters to me is for everyone to have clarity, confidence and control over their financial lives. Amazing.
Love it. And so welcome back as always. And as I mentioned, we’re celebrating the most recently released book with women connect for good. And so the topic that we’re going to talk about today, make your passion, your purpose. But before we get into that even further, I just want to, for some of maybe the, the newer audience or listeners that haven’t heard us work together before, maybe just start with your background in finance a bit and blue ocean global wealth.
So tell us a little bit more, more about that to get started. So I mentioned what really matters to me is helping individuals and families gain clarity and confidence control over their financial lives. My profession is I’m a CFP professional certified financial planner, CFP pro, and I actually studied finance and East Asian language and literature.
My first job is I wrote a newsletter for English speaking investors. I felt a little bit disconnected. It. It didn’t necessarily make me feel I didn’t have that feeling of gratification knowing I’m making a difference. So I decided to do something about it. So the takeaway is here is don’t be afraid to question, don’t be afraid to switch things up.
And so that’s when I decided to After the birth of two kids helping my husband launch his career that I was going to take all these concepts we learn in corporate finance and apply them to individuals and families. That’s what a personal financial advisor does. A balance sheet is a net worth statement, a statement of cash flows.
Okay, I just got to say, it’s the B word budget and taking those concepts to help individuals and families make better decisions because I believe at my core financial planning transforms lives, not just the lives of those that you’re talking to today. But if future generations to come, yeah, it’s great.
My longterm listeners that maybe have heard a little bit of my background. So I started my career in finance and as I’ve gotten to know through the lenses of watching you and watching your career, I mean, and how you’ve also taken that CFP designation and how you’ve worked through that. And I saw pictures of you at the Capitol and all these other things that you’re doing super, you’re an advocate also, not just for your, your business and for your work, but for planning as a whole.
Like, can you talk a little bit about like what financial planning and just that concept of having a plan means to you? Sure. So financial planning really is the process of helping individuals maximize their potential for meeting their life goals. And we do that through financial advice that integrates both the personal and financial elements.
So investing just happens to be a component of financial planning, but a lot People think, Oh, I don’t know where to invest. You actually shouldn’t be investing until, you know, your specific time horizon, risk tolerance, and your goals. So that’s what a financial planner does. And so one of the things that I’ve that I was excited about when we, as we’ve been putting together this.
book for the last year, last year and a half now, actually time flies. So this was our women’s leaders edition. And it was, we did it with again, Dr. Nancy and women connect for good. And this concept of collaborating with the group of all these rock star women that have done all of these things. things in their own lives from all coming from different, by the way, different backgrounds for context for everybody listening to this all coming from different backgrounds, from different professions.
I have Rita from finance. We have Dr. Nancy, who’s now a philanthropist runs women connect for good. We have Gloria felt to just a pioneer and working for women’s rights. And she worked in with planned parenthood for 30 plus years. I mean, Tiffany slang, the list goes on and on director, filmmaker, a lot of different women that have pioneered and just done a lot of good work in their here.
So we’re thrilled to have you Rita join us in this book and your overall topic was make your passion your purpose. So a lot of different things that you could have written about a lot of things you could have shared. Why this? Why did you feel that this topic was important to share in the book? So as mentioned, I am an advocate for financial planning.
I believe that everybody can benefit from financial planning. You know, just as an example, one of my longstanding clients has been a client since like 2009 2010. That’s a long time. That’s before the. Global financial crisis. He reached out to me. He’s like, is it okay if I give brother your name? And this is what I told him.
I was like, absolutely. I’m confident, not arrogant. I told him this verbatim that I can help your brother. The question is, does he want help? I want people to enjoy today while planning for tomorrow. And I think that’s really important all too often. This is what I tell people. In developing your financial plan, we need to know your assets, your liabilities, your income, your expenses, your taxes.
That’s all that financial stuff, right? But what about the personal stuff? What’s important to you? And the reason why I want to know this is not because I’m nosy. I want to judge you. I want to know what’s important to you today. Yeah. So I can make sure you have the time. Yeah. And resources to do it tomorrow.
That definitely changes the mindset. Yeah. And some of the tips that you planned in there that you, I’m going to read them maybe high level and I’ll ask, and I’ll pick one or two that I want you to go a little further into, but for the audience, just so you know, it’s all available in the book and we’ll, we’ll have a link to the book and the show notes, so you can just click on it and pick up a copy if you’d like, if you want to go further into it, but one of them, you had a plan for tomorrow, but enjoy retire to something.
What should you be investing in? What is best for you? With a capital Y O U. And then the, and another section in there, building your career, define what success is to you, know your worth, let values drive your decisions. And another one traits, fearless, know your strengths, trust your intuition. So you pack a lot of content into this couple of points I wanted to, I wanted to pick out for our listeners.
So first one under the financial planning tips. Retire to something with a capital T and a capital O. What, what were you trying to convey to the reader in this one? Cause this one was interesting to me. So a lot of times when I ask people, I don’t say when you want to retire. And I was like, what does retirement mean to you?
How do you envision, right? When people could just say like they could say tomorrow and then the conversation is done, right? So it is true. You may retire from your job, from your profession, but it doesn’t just start there. It doesn’t end there. It actually just starts there. So when I mean by, I want you to retire to something, I want people to open their possibilities.
So. One of my clients said, you know what, Rita, I decided that I want to be the world’s best 65 plus golfer. And I’m like, that’s fine. You know what, whether you’re the world’s best, you have to put it out there. You have to manifest it. So it gets people thinking about what they enjoy, because while you are, you know, retiring from your career profession, there’s like.
a whole, you know, life ahead of you, even if you retire at 65 or 67. You know, my grandmother lived to be 94. I, I don’t want to think that you don’t have any good years ahead of you. Yeah. Yeah. And so and retirement too. I mean, I feel like it’s been changing, right? That concept in general. So meaning once upon a time, it was like you retire and you’re done and you’re not going to do anything else.
You’re not going to work. No other project. Just maybe you’re going to go golf or just vacation and that’s it. But with some, some life expectancy and age, you know, exceeding that, Spending and otherwise, I feel like the concept of retirement has changed a bit too. Has it? Or do you have a different experience or, well, I absolutely do feel like it’s changed and we are living longer, and I know there’s data that said that because the pandemic and people feeling isolation, experiencing social isolation, not having access to diagnostic testing.
There’s a period in time where it. Life expectancy did decline. But I think about like my parents, my parents are 14 years apart. And when my dad retired from his corporate job, he was 60. That would mean that my mommy was 46, right? Her mom lived to be 94. My dad at age 60 was still young, very good health.
Yeah. So for about 10 years, my dad was Did consulting work and those of you who know my story, my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, but not till 73 and the disease really didn’t devastate him until he was like 78, 79. And my dad would say that he was very, very direct, but this is what he said. You know, if I were unhealthy, I would have dropped dead.
I would have had a stroke. My dad was very, very direct. But I’m saying that to say that retirement mindset around it has changed. It has shifted and it’s important. It goes back to plan for tomorrow while you’re enjoying today or enjoy today while planning for tomorrow and You know, think about what you, you know, want to do in retirement, you know, for example, one of my clients is a retired pharmacist, right?
And he wanted to travel. So what he did is he went on a medical mission to East Africa. So this combines his profession as well as service in travel. So that’s a beautiful example of how he’s still able to stay engaged and spend quality time with his community and his wife. Wow. It’s a great story. And I want to I want to Another, another section here.
So building your career. So you add a couple of different things there. One I wanted to talk about was let values drive your decisions. And I thought that was an interesting way to look at it. So talk to me a little bit about that. So it’s true that maybe what we want in our twenties and thirties may differ from when we are in our forties and fifties, and it is okay because we are always evolving with that in mind, as we evolve our needs.
Wants and preferences will evolve. So here’s what I mean about values. There were times when people said to me, they’re like, Hey, if you know you come work here. You’ll earn more money. There is nothing wrong with earning more money, but I had to think about what was important to me. If you’re not comfortable using the word values, you just say priorities, right?
And as mentioned, my dad was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. My, what I valued or what was a priority for me was flexibility. Sometimes with Parkinson’s, you could have a great day and you could, you Have a bad day. All in one. So I needed to have control. It’s okay to say the word. I needed to have control and flexibility over my schedule.
I was still willing to work hard. So values for me, my value. Was still is, but at that time when I was going through the decision is family and flexibility. So even if someone comes along and this individual did say this, Hey, if you come work here, I’m going to pay you X, but I expect you to be at your desk at 8 AM.
Yeah. I was like, well, that’s not going to work because I have three school age children and I take my kids to school. Yeah. I valued. The flexibility to be able to adjust my schedule to my personal responsibility. So that’s what I mean. And that kind of did guide, you know, my career decisions. And what I like about this though, is it, it shows that it’s possible.
And in the past we, I mean, let’s say for me at least like pre pandemic, pre COVID, like, and I think even the workplace was pretty rigid, like it was pretty rigid. So for you to say something like that, when you made that decision way back when. When, when your kids were very young, you probably look like you weren’t conforming or you weren’t supposed to be in the finance or this or that, or whatever, like, cause you’re not coming to that desk at 8 AM or whatever the particular hour was, but now I feel like as a society, at least in the United States, we’ve, we’ve had a lot more different opinions and different views and things have changed a bit.
Like now that that concept of having balance, it’s, it’s changed a bit. Like, so I think it’s interesting. Absolutely. And make no mistake. That was a period in time where probably my caregiving responsibilities were the greatest. I had an eight year old daughter and an 80 year old dad, and then two kids, you know, that were in middle school and high school and still pursuing a career.
It’s amazing. Sometimes I’m like, man, what, what did I do? But I don’t know. I’m saying it’s still, it’s amazing. But truth be told back then I didn’t run a train for marathons because I don’t know that I’d have time to run two, three, four hours on a long run. My family would report me missing. Like what happened?
Where’s our mom. And so some of the other things that you propose in the, in the chapter that you wrote, so be fearless, know your strengths, trust your intuition. What has intuition meant in your career and just in your life, like what has that meant to you? So, sure. You know, I am an INFJ, so that means I, I’m an EFT, I forgot ENTJ.
I’m an ENTJ, so I’m just off one for you. I think from UF Go ahead. Great. Very, very similar. So I skew ever slightly. More on the scale of introversion. I’m also very intuitive, very feeling judging. And I think, what does that have to do with any, sometimes I get mad at myself because I can feel things and sense things.
Why do I get mad at myself? Because I think that sometimes when I try to explain myself, people think I’m absolutely crazy. So I learned just. to like, kind of keep it to myself. Then people come to me like, did you know this? I’m like, yeah, I knew that. They’re like, why didn’t you say anything? So trust your intuition when you’re introspective and you observe the world.
It doesn’t mean that if you’re not introspective and not observing the world, you don’t experience this. But I have more of a heightened awareness about. Behavior and interactions, and that has actually served me really well in the sense that sometimes I’m not predicting the future, but I can sense that maybe that’s, you know, not right, and it allows me to go back and reflect so I can be really concrete as we’re talking about finance.
So, just to give you an example, so. I know that life insurance is a very important part of the financial planning process. That’s risk management protection planning. And I knew a client had a medical condition. I did not take the application. I gathered his information and I. Contacted the underwriter. I said, would somebody with this condition be underwritten?
And they’re like, we probably wouldn’t underwrite him, but he can go to another company. So what I did is I was honest with the client. I said, I don’t want you. This isn’t like credit where you’re like rejected. And then you can clean up your credit and apply again. I don’t want this in your file. So sure.
As much as I’d like to sell you insurance. I encourage you to go to somebody independent who has access to more companies than I do. So I used my like intuition. I’m like, let me do this. And what’s interesting about that is the sales manager got really mad at me. This is a true story. He banged his head on his hand, not head on the desk.
I was like, I can’t believe you missed that sales goal. And I said, well, actually. I missed it and I don’t have any regrets because I did what was in the client’s best interest. I might have missed that sales goal, but I have a client for life and it’s true that client I’m very close to still today and he’s in his eighties and that’s what I mean.
Intuition is knowing and feeling and trusting yourself. I didn’t want him to be rejected. And as it turns out, he did get insurance with another company. Independent company. And he’s very grateful for that. And so is his family. Yeah. Well, Rita, this has been so much fun having you back on the show and just getting to hear more and catch up.
And obviously I’m so excited about the book. I mean, this is long time, long time working in and it’s one of my proudest. Books that we put out a woman’s leader edition, and I think it’s going to continue to do much good in terms of inspiring others. I know it was, and we were inspired putting this thing together.
That being said, what’s next? I mean, what’s next for you? What’s next for your firm? Like what’s next on what’s on the horizon for you? Well, I’m truly honored to be part of this because it is amazing to see incredible thought leaders and subject matter expert. Connect for good. So what’s next for me is I am going to continue to champion financial planning.
And I’m also working with business owners and female entrepreneurs to inform them of changes in secure act, to help them do good for themselves, their employees and safer retirements. And for everybody listening, how do people connect with you? How do they follow up if they want to learn more and work with you?
So sure. You can find me on LinkedIn Margarita Chang, or you can visit my website, blue ocean, global wealth. com. And. There you can fill out the contact us form. Fantastic. And for everybody watching, we’ll put the links to the website, all that good stuff in the show notes. So you could just click on the link and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Rita again, So excited to have you here and so excited. Thank you for participating in this book release and I look forward to continuing to promote with you. Thank you so much.
