Building a secure financial house — With Rith Nou

Massachusetts — the city of Lowell and surrounding areas in particular — has the second-highest Cambodian population in the U.S., with more than 20,000 residents of Cambodian heritage calling it home.

Rith Nou, a Cambodian immigrant herself, wants to help them — and members of other cultural groups in her community — build what she calls “a secure financial house.”

Nou is a New York Life agent in Waltham, Mass., and entered the insurance industry about 10 years ago, after spending 15 years in banking.

Her interest in insurance and financial services stems from her desire to educate others. She also wants to help members of the Cambodian and other cultural groups overcome the financial trauma many experienced from being uprooted from their native culture and trying to find their way in the U.S.

Nou was born in 1980 in a refugee camp in Thailand to parents who escaped the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, a regime that was responsible for the deaths of between 1 million and 3 million Cambodians during the nearly four years that it held power in that nation.

“My mother told me that they hid in the jungle while she was pregnant with me and she was terrified of being attacked by wild animals,” Nou said. 

Coming to America

Because Nou’s father had fought alongside U.S. Marines during the war in Southeast Asia, the family eventually was allowed to enter the U.S. under the sponsorship of the Catholic Church. The family settled in a low-income neighborhood in Chicago when Nou was a year old. 

“We lived in the smallest apartment you could imagine,” she recalled. “There was a lot of drug use in the neighborhood, a lot of domestic violence going on in the street. I would get picked on and beat up in school. I think my dad had PTSD, and he wasn’t really there. I remember my brother taking care of him while my mom worked two jobs.”

After Nou’s mother was robbed, the family decided to leave Chicago. Nou recalled they moved from place to place, receiving assistance from various churches, before settling in a public housing project in Boston.

That experience taught Nou “that I needed to do well in school and work really hard so I could move my parents out of the projects and into their own house.”

Nou went back to Cambodia to visit relatives at one point and realized that her family’s experience in leaving the country “was something that happened for a reason. If we hadn’t left, I could have been one of the kids I saw selling food along the side of the road.”

Despite the horrors of the Khmer Rouge rule, Nou said “the Cambodian people are a forgiving people.”

“I don’t know if it’s from our Buddhist philosophy or our culture or whatever, but I think we’ve suffered so much loss that we know how to persevere in the moment. And I think that resilience of the Cambodian people has passed on to me to help me get to where I am now. Which is a good thing because this business is a roller coaster at times.”

A go-to person

As a child of 8 or 9 years old, Nou said, her English language skills made her a go-to person for anyone in her family’s immigrant community who needed help with things such as dealing with a utility company or filling out an application.

“It made me feel special, but it also made me want to spend my life serving as many people as I could,” she said. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but it was good practice for being in this industry.”

Nou said she originally was interested in pursuing a career in education. But after helping her family buy a house, she believed that educating people about money was the career path for her.

“I wanted to understand money and help others to understand how money works,” she said. “And from there, I wanted to guide people toward their goals, such as buying a house, saving for retirement.”

After 15 years in banking, Nou was ready for a change. She was helping her father transition into retirement and realized that she needed to learn more about financial planning. 

A college friend introduced her to a New York Life agent who convinced her that the company would be a good fit for her. She soon found a mentor in the agency who she credits with helping her find her market niche and create a process for serving her clients.

“My mentor believed in my vision when he asked me what I wanted from this business,” Nou recalled. “I said, ‘I really want to build a business on a practice where there’s cultural diversity … where people can walk in and we have an agent who speaks their language, who understands their culture, and where they feel safe and comfortable.’”

An advisor for all cultures

Many of Nou’s clients are from the Cambodian community, but because she had many Indian friends growing up, she also serves Indian immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants. But she said she aspires to be an advisor for people of all cultures and backgrounds.

“In order for someone to really understand someone else’s culture, you have to be the glue that brings those two paths together so we can understand each other,” she said. “I want to have an impact on the various communities where I live.”

Nou said that many of her clients have experienced what she calls “money trauma,” and she works to help them overcome that.

“I want to break those generational traumas and cycles and the relationships we have with money in a torn world,” she said.

She said her family experienced financial trauma in 2008, when she and her father both lost their jobs and lost the family house as a result.

“Because I went through that, I can help other people understand that as well,” she said. “I understand the mental and emotional pieces of a traumatic event. So if I can help people through it, it’s from a place of experience.”

Life insurance is the bedrock

Nou described life insurance as the bedrock of her practice.

“Life insurance and disability insurance are the foundations of planning, they’re the foundations of building that financial house,” she said. “In the cultural markets that I serve, a lot of my clients are laborers, and they need life insurance. But there’s often a superstition about life insurance. People don’t want to talk about it because they don’t want to talk about death. But I understand that and can help people get past that.”

Nou said that paying a death claim early in her career for a client who was a personal friend “solidified what I do.”

“As much as it hurt losing him, it gave me a new perspective on what my managing partner once said to me, that if it weren’t for the money we pay out in claims, people wouldn’t have the ability to do what they do after a loved one’s death.”

Coming from a banking background, Nou said she takes a holistic approach to planning. “I want to understand their position about money, and I appreciate that everyone’s family and lifestyle are different. It’s about tailoring my approach and developing a creative solution for their life. It’s knowing where they are, what they have in place and where they want to go — and knowing their story and relating to it.”

Susan Rupe is editor in chief, magazine, for InsuranceNewsNet. She formerly served as communications director for an insurance agents' association and was an award-winning newspaper reporter and editor. Contact her at [email protected].