Nancy Etemad is an experienced Financial Advisor with 30-years of experience. She specializes in Wealth Management, Restricted Stock Trading, Retirement & Estate Planning and Charitable Giving. For 25- years she was working with some of the wealthiest decision makers of the American business community. She helped them invest, grown and give back to their communities during her time with Merrill Lynch.
Nancy never considered being a teacher, but she loved educating her clients. She felt their sense of accomplishment when they meet their goals of seeing their children graduate from college or when they took that first vacation after years of building their business.
Nancy’s passion has always been to help people set up a nest-egg. She hated seeing many small businessowners leaving their business after long years of hard work with nothing or near nothing. A daughter of immigrants and a small restaurant owner, Nancy knew firsthand that a small business meant it was “all hands-on deck” 24/7. She worked side by side with her parents from being a dishwasher, to cleaning tables, to a waitress and to helping as a liaison to the shopping center where the restaurant was located.
Being immigrants, Nancy’s parents did not know about business tools like tax savings accounts or retirement plans. They only knew hard work and sweat equity. Now with years of experience, Nancy wants to educate and show small business owners how to use the tools to build and secure a future for themselves and their families.
Born in Hong Kong and arriving in the United States at age 7, Nancy was a leader even at that young age. She would be the one rounding up the kids on the playground to play tag or dodgeball. She wanted to be a teach people and thought being a news reporter would be a way to do that. While she worked in her parent’s restaurant, she interned at a radio station and worked part-time a local news station. She continued for a couple of years until she graduated from Pasadena City College and attended Mount St. Mary’s College. She continued to balance helping her parents, school and now working at FOX News as a Planning Editor. As much as Nancy loved the news, unless you are in front of the camera, the hours are long, and the pay is not very good. Before she could graduate from college a couple of events happened that would change the course of Nancy’s future. Her father was hospitalized with internal bleeding and the family had to sell the restaurant. A new Managing Editor was hired at FOX NEWS, and he fired nearly everyone behind and in front of the camera. Nancy dusted herself off and was pickup up by KCAL to be their Planning Editor and Field Producer within a day. She stayed with them for a year until she took a hard turn into Market Research with JD Powers.
For the next three years Nancy coordinated a research team to study high end cars and traveled through 28-states to complete research studies for some of the largest automakers in the world. After a whirlwind 3-years, Nancy decided to go back to a more traditional career. She landed with a Commodity Company dealing in Cotton and Soybean trading. After a long 5-years, Nancy was hired by Merrill Lynch to work with a High-Net-Worth Team in the Los Angeles Flagship Office.
Nancy loved her time at Merrill Lynch. She moved east to Charlotte, NC with her husband and continued to work with Merrill Lynch in Charlotte. Nancy was in shock when the bottom fell out of stock market in 2008 and Bank of America acquired her beloved Merrill Lynch. She soon left Charlotte and Merrill Lynch and returned to Los Angeles. This was where her family and lifelong friends were.
Nancy joined Raymond James and rediscovered her first love of educating people about ways to build a future for themselves. Most of her clients at Raymond James were not the top 1% like her clients at Merrill Lynch. These were your normal, hard working men and women who were striving to build a future for their families.
Time flies by when you are doing what you love. After 5 years at Raymond James; Nancy joined forces with her good friend, Cris Cuevas to begin Bright Legacy AMG LLC. The primary goal for Bright Legacy is to help small business owners build their nest egg so they can set their path to build a legacy for themselves and their families. Nancy has come full circle to be able to educate and help people build and secure a future for their families.
When Nancy is not working, she loves to cook, travel and give time to help local women’s shelters. You can also find Nancy hiking the trails around the Pasadena foothills with her two Lab Mix; Bubbles and Coco. Nancy is also a lifelong San Francisco 49er’s fan and yes, she does listen to Classic Rock.
