By Katy Macek | Photography by Shanna Wolf
As owner and clinic director of Aneu Medical Spa Madison, and a wife and mother, Amie Neumaier keeps busy. She admits she didn’t think much about financial planning until she connected with Joanna Burish, a financial advisor with Northwestern Mutual. Burish has been working with family businesses and in family financial planning for the last 22 years — the last six with Northwestern Mutual.
When Neumaier was diagnosed with breast cancer just a month after finalizing her holistic financial plan with Burish, she became even more grateful for their planning. The two recently reconnected to share how important it was that Neumaier’s financial plan came to be, how grateful she is for having it and how important it is for everyone, no matter their age or point in life, to think about their own financial future.
Amie, you’re a business owner, mother, wife, pursuing an MBA and you’ve expanded your business during COVID. How are you keeping all this straight?
Just a lot of perseverance. I love projects, I love staying busy. This is my art. This is what fuels my passion.
What would you say your philosophy was about financial planning prior to our working together?
I always thought there was tomorrow, and this was very low on the totem pole. We were young and healthy, and simply did not make time for this. Our financial planning prior was minimal at best. We had a very basic life insurance policy, a 401K, a Roth IRA, but it wasn’t very well thought through.
There was really no analysis of what our debt-to-income ratio was, or what our long- term plan would be if there was a loss of mine or my spouse’s income, or if one of us was injured and unable to work.
[It made us think about] retirement and what our quality of life would look like.You want to retire, but really executing how you’re going to get to that point and get to a comfortable lifestyle, we really hadn’t done [that]. We really had not thought about holistic financial planning like we should have.
I hear that often. Has your philosophy changed since we’ve started working together?
Five hundred percent! My philosophy is now, tomorrow is never guaranteed and today is the best time. It was only one month after we figured all this out … that I was diagnosed with breast cancer.
As if receiving a breast cancer diagnosis was not hard enough, thinking about the stress of what your future could look like was overwhelming. It was a giant piece of comfort knowing I could at least have financial security for my spouse and my children,
and I could focus on getting healthy again.
When you called and said that it was a gift that you could focus on your health, knowing your family was taken care of — it was one of the biggest gifts to me. What advice would you give someone who doesn’t have a financial plan?
Do it. Don’t wait. We [dragged] our feet, and as long as it did take us to wrap things up, there’s still more I wish we could do on the business insurance side of things.
The beauty of holistic financial planning is it makes you constructively think very deeply about all aspects of your finances that you don’t normally think about. This process made it really transparent to think about how we’re going to utilize our resources and finances to reach obtainable goals.
Tomorrow is never a guarantee, but your actions today will definitely impact your future. I’d advise anyone to work with Joanna Burish and get this done as soon as possible.
Contact Joanna Burish directly at 608-658-3482 or [email protected]
joannaburish.nm.com/areas-of-expertise.htm | linkedin.com/in/joannaburish
The Brauds Network – Founder, Coach, COI, thebrauds.com
Northwestern Mutual is the marketing name for The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (NM) (life and disability Insurance, annuities, and life insurance with long-term care benefits) and its subsidiaries, including Northwestern Long Term Care Insurance Company (NLTC) (long-term care insurance) and Northwestern Mutual Investment Services, LLC (NMIS) (investment brokerage services), a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer, and member of FINRA and SIPC. NM and its subsidiaries are in Milwaukee, WI. Joanna Burish is an Insurance Agent of NM and NLTC.
