Advice from the Heartland — With Bonnie Maize

Bonnie Maize offers financial planning with a progressive sheen in the heart of conservative Kansas. If those odds of success weren’t long enough, she opened Maize Financial during the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Maize has found her niche as the business’s two-year anniversary nears. “I just love it,” Maize said. “It’s very important to me that just regular, working-class people can afford my fees. I have some local clients who I meet with, but I do almost all of it virtually, and I have clients across the country now.”

The work is fulfilling and fits Maize’s need for family flexibility. Maize and her husband, Will, are the parents of three boys, ages 11 to 17, two of whom are special needs.

“We’ve home-schooled them,” Maize said. “It has worked out so well because we live in a really small town that doesn’t have lots of special services. And I love it and they love it.”
Maize recently won a diversity scholarship from the Financial Planning Association. It will provide her fledgling business with several industry perks, including conference attendance and a one-year FPA membership.

“She is really involved in financial literacy and trying to help underserved communities,” said Christopher Woods, chair of the FPA Diversity and Inclusion Committee. “Anytime I see people doing that kind of community service work, it tells me something.”

Law on the mind

A fifth-generation Kansan, Maize was raised on a farm near Manhattan. About 85% of all Kansas land remains agricultural, and the state economy relies upon it. The state generally ranks low in unemployment data and Gross Domestic Product growth. “I didn’t leave my military clients. I stretched myself and added more women and federal employees. And that’s my client base right now.

Many Kansans retain a vigorous provincial identity. The pop culture image of insular Kansan neighbors helping neighbors is not all fictional, Maize said.

“They’re all such hardworking, wonderful people, and they deserve to get help with their questions and to feel secure in their finances, too,” she said.

After graduating Kansas State University with a bachelor’s degree in agriculture, Maize got her law degree from Washburn University in Topeka, Kan. She married Will, “a computer geek,” and the couple settled down.

Maize never intended to practice law, she explained (“I’m too agreeable to make a good attorney.”). Instead, she advocated for farmers in the public policy arena.

“I did work in the policy arena in state government for almost two years and enjoyed it immensely,” Maize recalled, “but after a change in administrations, we decided to start a family instead of me trying to find a new job.”

The family plan called for Maize to stay at home until the kids started school.

That short stay turned into 15 years while the couple raised their boys. As the years went by, Maize drifted further from the law and more toward helping people with their finances. It became a new calling, one she answered by returning to Kansas State in 2019 to earn a graduate certificate in personal financial planning.

“Eventually, it got to the point I was thinking the boys don’t need me as much,” Maize said. “I’d really like to do something professionally but still have time to take the kids to appointments and activities and stuff.”

Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. The plan to become a financial planner was scrambled before Maize could even get started. She couldn’t do an internship or get a part-time position, and plans to take the Certified Financial Planner exam in the summer of 2020 had to be postponed.
“Just like that, everything’s kind of up in the air,” she said. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”

‘My own business’

Fortified by a lifetime of challenging situations, Maize massaged her plan on the fly. She took an FPA virtual externship in the summer and passed the CFP exam in September 2020.
“By that point, I just kind of figured, ‘If I want to get started in financial planning, I’m going to have to open my own business to do it,’” she said.

Maize Financial began serving clients out of the Maize home in May 2021. With a roster of about 20 families, Maize is delivering highly personalized, neighborly, Kansas-style financial advice. Fees are low, and the focus is on the family financial building blocks, including things like health savings accounts, how much to contribute to a 401(k) plan and what types of insurances are available.

“They’re not high net worth clients that have needs like extensive estate planning or all this tax planning,” Maize explained. “They just have basic questions. They just want to know that they’re doing the right things and will be secure in the future.”

Maize reminds clients first and always to take care of their kids. “Even if you don’t think you have a lot of assets, enough to need a will, please have a guardianship for your kids,” she said.
Repeated studies show that financial literacy corresponds with better preparedness for all aspects of money management.

For example, a 2022 FINRA study found that respondents with higher financial literacy (scoring above the median on a seven-question financial literacy quiz) spent less than their income and set aside three months’ worth of emergency funds.

Those with higher financial literacy were also more likely to have taken steps to plan for their long-term financial future by calculating retirement savings needs and opening a retirement account.

Maize is very committed to giving back time to advance financial literacy, teaching financial literacy courses and doing pro bono work when she can.

Progressive lean

Maize is also proud to advocate for causes such as wealth equality and LGBT issues. Those progressive issues, and others endorsed by Maize on her website, are not normally associated with conservative Kansas. It is a polarity of opinion that Maize hopes to overcome by remaining true to herself.

After all, financial independence and good family budgeting are largely agnostic concepts, she noted.

“The wealth gap in the country really bothers me,” she said, “I guess because of my background. I see how hard people work and they’re still struggling, and I want them to be able to feel comfortable. I believe everyone deserves to feel financially secure.

“If you’re getting up, working hard every day, there’s no reason you should be just barely scraping by or not being able to afford your rent or mortgage. So it’s just really important to me to try and help narrow that divide.”

The combination of motherhood and the devastation of Hurricane Katrina cemented Maize’s progressive idealism. The epic Category 5 Atlantic hurricane caused 1,392 fatalities and between $97.4 billion to: and $145.5 billion in damage in late August 2005, especially in the city of New Orleans and the surrounding areas.

“Seeing mothers on the news, stranded and unable to get formula to feed their babies, while I held my own sweet boy, broke something inside of me,” Maize said. “I had never really questioned the way things worked in our country before, but there was no going back after that. The initial desire to create a better world for my kids began to grow into the larger goal today of creating a better world for everyone.”

When political issues do stray into the financial planning process, Maize takes direction from her clients. Take environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing. ESG took a place along the cultural divide in 2022 when the Biden administration published a Department of Labor rule recognizing that ESG factors may be relevant to the risk-return analysis of potential investments.

That rule took effect Feb. 1. On her website, Maize includes an endorsement of ESG titled “Values-based investing.” It is a tool, she stressed, that can get a client excited about investing in things that matter.

“If you get into these different issues with them and say, ‘What values do you care about? What’s important to you?’” Maize recounted, “then they just feel so much better about investing, and they get so much more engaged in the process. So that’s why I really enjoy it.”

Continued outreach

As the two-year anniversary of opening her business nears, Maize keeps her focus on the work. She now has clients nationwide, a nod to the new virtual methods that have taken root.

Maize remains active in her community and serves on the board of directors of a pair of Topeka groups: the Omni Circle Group, a professional development organization, and Capital City Equality Center, a nonprofit supporting the LGBT community.

In an industry known for being white, male and boomer age, Maize is among the wave of women and people of color taking advantage of opportunities. She won three scholarships to attend industry conferences and plans a greater involvement in debates about the future of the industry.

“That’s just really important to me — to try to help keep increasing the diversity in financial planning,” she said.

InsuranceNewsNet Senior Editor John Hilton has covered business and other beats in more than 20 years of daily journalism. John may be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @INNJohnH.