From Y Professional to Financial Planner
Ed's Story
In the 1990s, I was working as a substitute teacher considering a career in secondary education (my wife, Jennifer, was a high-school Spanish teacher). During that same time, a 16-year-old teenager in foster care joined our family for about a year. That experience changed my personal and professional outlook.
I took a position as a counselor at a group home for incarcerated youth transitioning back into the community and reintegrating into family life, and I never looked back. With positions at several non-profit organizations, I grew professionally. Of course, non-profit work does not always pay the best, but by living below our means in our late twenties and early thirties, we learned how to save, invest, and strategize.
While studying for my MBA and starting our family, I made the decision to stay in non-profit work. However, both my wife and I were tired of my moving from organization to organization for career and financial growth. So in 2004, I identified the YMCA as an organization in which I could grow my career and made the move.
In August 2004, we moved with our three daughters under the age of 5 to Winston-Salem, NC, where I began my Y career as a branch executive director for the YMCA of Northwest North Carolina. Later, we moved back to western Massachusetts when I became CEO of the Greater Holyoke YMCA. From there, I joined YMCA of the USA as a Resource Director for Connecticut and Rhode Island YMCAs (and I didn’t have to move this time!).
Always interested in financial wellness, I had the privilege of joining the YMCA Retirement Fund in 2015. While traveling across the U.S. to educate staff and board members about the retirement benefit, I took advantage of every educational opportunity. I became a Certified Retirement Counselor® in 2017 and then I obtained my CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® certification in 2019. Even with these designations, my fiduciary responsibilities to Y Retirement did not allow me to provide advice to Participants (and rightly so).
Toole Financial is the natural next step in my journey: the ability to provide unbiased financial advice and education on a range of financial topics to Y professionals and Y retirees.
Values and Philosophy
Toole Financial values Education, Partnership and Trust.
We believe that...
Unbiased education is
a key step in ongoing
financial wellness.
You are the most important person in the decision-
making process.
Your service to the Y Movement deserves financial education
you can trust.
More About Ed
What am I doing in a typical week when not helping Y staff?
You can find me attending to my board and committee duties with some Y organizations, golfing, reading, practicing Tai Chi, walking our dogs, or volunteering at the local soup kitchen with my wife, Jennifer. I also watch professional soccer highlights weekly. (Playing is on hiatus due to nagging injuries.) Most importantly, any week is even better if we have time with one or all three of our adult daughters who live out of the area.
What else am I passionate about?
Outside of financial wellness, I enjoy planning a travel experience as much as the experience itself. We have visited over a dozen countries on four continents, and I have been to 49 states (just need to get to Alaska!).
Did you attend Y programs as a child?
There were no YMCAs in the places I grew up; however, all three daughters were on the Y swim team when they were younger and then taught swim lessons and lifeguarded for the Greater Holyoke Y. Our twin daughters spent ten summers at YMCA Camp Mohawk, nine as campers and their last summer as CITs.
Anything interesting about me?
I am the only person I know who is both the child of an identical twin and the parent of identical twins. There must be others, but I haven’t met them!