We were lucky to catch up with Jeanie Alessandrini recently and have shared our conversation below.

Jeanie, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Everyone deserves professional help with their finances. Yet they will not generally seek it out. They think that they can just Google everything. Would you Google how to defend a legal case or representing yourself in a serious legal case? What about diagnosing your illness and then operating on yourself? I pray everyone would say no. Instead, you would seek out a specialist and a fiduciary to partner with you.

Before I was born my family would not consider life insurance, a will or trust. They were superstitious to discuss such matters. They didn’t plan properly for the unexpected. After my father died when I was just 5 years old, there was no Google for my mother to use to determine what to do with the 3 restaurants, 5 kids and a house. How would she pay for everything? She didn’t know how to run a business. There was no CPA, Financial Advisor, nor an attorney that they had any relationship with. They did it all themselves. She instead turned to a male cousin of hers who owned a construction company. Surely, he could direct her how to deal with the estate. What she overlooked in the upset was this cousin was seething with jealousy over my father’s success. He knew exactly what to do that would be best for the family. His own family that is. He told her that the kids would end up in foster care as she would be broke after the attorneys and taxes ate her alive. She asked him what she should do. He offered to take it all off her hands. He took my father’s legacy and left my mom a widow with 5 children and nothing. It’s an unfortunate story that I see happen regularly. People who are vulnerable due to infirmity, age, divorce or death of a family member. They are taken advantage of in their most vulnerable state. It’s vile and disgusting and happens very often by the person’s closest friends and family members. People act very ruthless and strange when someone dies with money. It brings out the worst of the worst in people.

I don’t recall my exact age when I came to the realization of what really happened. But I vowed at a young age that I would never be in that position and would ensure that nobody that I care about would be either. But had no tools or any idea how I would attain it. Ultimately, this is why I became a financial advisor. It’s my calling. I don’t do it for the money at all. It is truly to help others prepare and ensure that they never get into the position that my family was in. To protect the vulnerable and partner with the broken and help put them back together. To guide the financially naïve so that they don’t loose everything or have it taken from them by unscrupulous characters.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My calling to become a financial advisor stems from my childhood. My father’s family left Italy to escape Mussolini and came to the states in the early 1900s. My father, Domenico Alessandrini, became a CPA and moved to California from New York.

He suddenly passed away at the age of 56 when I was 5 years old. They had no trust, no life insurance, and my Mom did not know where to turn. She was told by her cousin that the five kids would end up in foster care and the lawyers and taxes would eat her alive. He offered to take the 5-bedroom 6 bathroom family home in Orange County and all 3 of the off of her hands. Yes, he took my father’s legacy and left her a widow with five children and nothing!

This is why I believe I had the calling in 2001 to become a financial advisor – to protect the most vulnerable, women, widows and business owners from making the same mistakes. I went on to attain licenses to offer life insurance and long-term care. I’m a perpetual student of the business and attained my CRPC™, Chartered Retirement Planning Counselor™, designation in March of 2020. Currently I am studying for the Certified Kingdom Advisor designation. This is to work more deeply with my Christian and faith based clients. I feel very fortunate and love my calling or what others call their career, which I take very seriously.

As an Edward Jones financial advisor, I want to understand what is most important to you. I use an established process to build personalized strategies to help you reach your goals. I’ll partner with you throughout your life to help keep you on track. I also work closely with you and your CPA, attorney and other professionals to determine the most appropriate strategies in the most tax-efficient manner.
I work with individuals and business owners to assist them with complete human centered wealth management. Services and products include:

*Retirement, nonretirement planning
*Estate and Legacy planning
*IRAs
*401(K) , Profit Sharing, and Defined Benefit Plans
*Life Insurance and Long-Term Care
*Goal Setting
*Budgeting
*Education Savings Planning
*Short Term Savings Cash Planning
*CDs
*Treasuries/Bonds
*Donor Advised Funds
*Tax planning and efficiency

I live blocks from my office in Hermosa Beach with the love of my life, Dennis Naples. I love my community and volunteer regularly in the Beach Cities for various fund raising events such as the Walk To End Alzheimer’s. I’ve attended the same church for nearly 30 years where I sing with our worship team and volunteer in several capacities. Additionally, I sit on the board for Child Evangelism Fellowship, am a membership ambassador for Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach Chambers of Commerce, member of Hermosa Beach Womens Club, and Kiwanis Club and serve on the Government Relations Counsel of Redondo Beach.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

After working for 16 years in Corporate America, I was fed up with the lack of transparency, professionalism, and could no longer take the racist and agist comments towards me as a white woman over 40. I had never walked out of a job or quit anything without another job lined up. But with no other position lined up, I decided my health and well being was more important and handed in a resignation letter 2 weeks before Thanksgiving in 2015. I started my entire career over from scratch, one client at a time at Edward Jones in January of 2016. I was only permitted to contact my previous clientele once, and that was it, in hopes that they would follow me. The rest was the hardest part. I knocked on doors in residential neighborhoods as well as local businesses from 8:30 am-6pm Monday through Saturday. I eventually started attending networking groups and meetings. I opened my own office in December of 2017.

As if this was not hard enough, in October of 2022 I was diagnosed with HER2 Positive breast cancer. I was facing losing my entire business, everything that I had worked for, and possibly my life. I didn’t feel that I could deal with the cancer and take the best care of all of my clients simultaneously. I therefore brought in a junior financial advisor and gave 1/2 of my business away to him. This allowed me to maintain the clientele that I was capable of dealing with in the fearful state that I was living in.

After 3 opinions on surgery and treatments, I decided that the cancer could possibly kill me, but I would not allow the pharmaceutical companies and the medical industrial complex to kill me. I refused all treatments including oral medications from the hospital, surgeon, and oncologist.

I prayed with hundreds of other people around the world for the cure to appear. Several strange things started to emerge from several sources. I was leery of trying anything but knew I would not return to the treatments that the hospitals were pushing. All of the treatments were all natural and grown from the ground, so I figured it couldn’t hurt me and took all of them. On February 8th of 2023 I finally agreed to a lumpectomy. This was only after I had started using all natural treatments and organic remedies. I knew that God could deliver me if he wanted to and I counted on the fact that He did want to, so that I could tell others about it to His glory. After removing 8 inches by 2 inches of my breast and a lymph node, the pathology showed NO CANCER PRESENT. I call it a miracle; others call it a miss diagnosis and will not believe God delivered me. Either way, I dodged a bullet by the grace of God.

I’m still rebuilding my business to this day. However now, I have a great since of calm and peace knowing that while with humans, everything is an issue, difficult, and seems impossible; but with the Living God EVERYTHING is possible. (Mathew 19:26 But Jesus looked at them and said to them, “With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.”)

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

There is one book of ancient wisdom that I use daily. It has been published and printed more than any book in the world. It is the Bible. There are more verses on money and investing than on heaven and hell combined. It is often the only thing that will work to get clients to stop making bad emotional decisions. I read a verse to them and let the Holy Spirit convict them. Keeping in mind that God owns everything, and that we are merely stewards of His provisions and blessings as it says in Job 41:11 whatever is under the whole heavens is mine. And in Deuteronomy 8:18 remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth. I also use it to teach clients the 4 primary reasons for the use of the funds that God has provided to them:

The 1st is for us to live-your lifestyle

2nd is for us to give-tithing and helping others in need

3rd is to pay what you owe for example your taxes and your debt

4th is to grow what He has given us to be stewards of

Today we have so much peer pressure, too much information from advertising and our neighbors, and friends that’s pushing us to, well, live inconsistently with the way God has told us to. Let me bring to mind,
1 John 2:15-17 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world – the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – comes not from the Father, but from the world.

The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever. We are not on this earth to feel unworthy that we are not keeping up with the Joneses. These thoughts and beliefs say that we are worthless if we don’t have what others have. Recall the 10th commandment in Exodus 20:17 “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his male servant, nor his female servant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.” We must understand that our self-worth comes from God, as we are made in his image; and it does not equal our net worth.

The financial service industry and investing in general leads people to self seeking and greed. These lead only to confusion where every evil is lurking. Recognizing this, I’ve been studying for a new designation called a CKA-Certified Kingdom advisor. This is to be able to advise from a biblical view rather than a secular world view. A Certified Kingdom Advisor maintains a servant spirit as they work with clients rather than a spirit of arrogance or pride. The humility of Certified Kingdom Advisor shall be marked by meekness and modesty in behavior, attitude, and spirit. We recognizes that God is sovereign and the fruit of our labor is a direct result of God rather than our own human efforts. Furthermore, it is a privilege and a blessing to be used of the Lord on this earth.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.edwardjones.com/jeanie-alessandrini
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ejadvisorjeaniealessandrini/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanie-alessandrini-crpc%E2%84%A2-financial-advisor-b6459423/
• Other: Email: [email protected] 310-372-0850