Sometimes good things come from bad things. Soon after Jennifer Berdell went through her divorce, she realized that her financial planning expertise could help other women.
When she offered her Certified Financial Planner help for other divorcing clients, she learned that the legal world recognized another designation: a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst who’s trained to understand the financial and legal sides of divorce proceedings.
Having earned the CDFA designation, Berdell describes her role as a financial coach at a time when a woman has sometimes lost confidence and is often wrestling with sadness and anger. “I’m there to empower them, to tell them that they are in charge now of their financial world and to help them build a team around them,” says Berdell, who also works with women who have recently lost their spouses.
As the full-time complement to her part-time CDFA work, she and her husband, Peter Walls, opened their own wealth-management firm, Kinloch Capital, in May 2019, after two decades running their practice at large brand-name brokerage firms. They advise individuals and families with between $1 million and $10 million in investable assets. “I like to say that we bring billionaire strategies to your next-door millionaire,” says Berdell, adding that Kinloch Capital’s investment specialty areas include securities, real estate and private equity.
Recently, Berdell had a full-circle career moment. In the early 1990s, she worked on trusts in Crestar Bank’s private banking department under manager Bonnie Turner. “She had an open-door policy, allowed us to sit in on meetings and held training sessions for me and two others a few times a week,” Berdell recalls. The week of Mother’s Day, Turner became a Kinloch client.
