Michelle Arpin Begina, CFP®, CIMA®
Founder & Gateway at MichelleAB
Financial Services and Wealth Management
Education: Rider University
Wyckoff, NJ, USA
Biography
Michelle has used the money lessons from her life to rethink how financial advisors and their clients have traditionally worked together. Rather than thinking of her role as a gatekeeper of portfolios, she sees real value in being a gateway to personal financial freedom.
To support her clients on their unique wealth journeys, Michelle is a technician of financial planning, investment, and wealth management. But what differentiates Michelle from other financial advisors is that she has spent the last two-plus decades studying the unconventional, non-financial aspects of life satisfaction, financial therapy (it’s a thing), behavioral bias, choice, and decision advising.
She believes we all need to examine the money stories, scripts, and lessons that affect our financial psychology so that we can rethink what we know about money to have more of it.
Michelle lives in Wyckoff, NJ with her husband, Mike and sons, Alex and Nick. She is an avid photographer – her sons are her favorite subject!
Passion
What lights me up: watching my kids play lacrosse, being witness to people's success, learning, all things photography, beating the odds kind of stories, meaningful conversations.
Featured Video
I am willing to travel
More than 100 miles
When it comes to payments
Everything is negotiable
Topics
Best Story
When I was 17, I died. Luckily my heart was shocked back from flatlining and I realized that I was actually standing on a dock at the marina, not lying down inside a coffin. A secret about money is what killed me, my desire to learn brought me back and shame kept me silent for 33 years. Having spendthrift parents created a profound insecurity in me that I wore as shame.
That day on the dock, I left with my soul a pulse and a dream. It was my dream to get an education and I worked for 8 years to do it. But the shame that I carried robbed me of faith in people. It was getting in the way of my gifts and preventing me from truly helping others. When you finally free yourself from shame, learn to have a loving relationship with money and how to teach others to be loving with money and respecting money, we can all be guided back home from our traumas.
Origin Story
I have an ear for money like others have for music and speak the language of money that sounds different to most.
Advisors, of all sorts, are no longer gatekeepers of information; they are gateways ushering clients through to the lives that they design.
In the past, people sought out personal financial experts because they had access to information that was not available to the general public. When the system worked correctly, advisors were better at managing and investing their money than they could be because they constantly had their fingers on the pulse of the financial sector and access to information they couldn’t get on their own.
This scenario put financial planners in the position of being gatekeepers. But these walls have come down. By developing the systems and tactics, as I have, to help clients step more fully into being the hero of their own financial journey, they access the inspiration and motivation within.