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The ‘Collat F.A.M.’ podcast is a bi-weekly podcast, brought to you by the UAB Department of Accounting and Finance at the Collat School of Business AND the Regions Institute for Financial Education at the Collat School of Business. Here on ‘Collat F.A.M.’ your co-hosts, Marena Messina and Sevante Metcalf, faculty from our own Accounting and Finance department, will conduct in-depth interviews with expert guests on Finance, Accounting and Personal Finance topics that matter. The “Collat F.A.M.” podcast also highlights UAB alumni working in Accounting and Finance; as well as our faculty, students, and student organizations in the department of Accounting and Finance at the UAB Collat School of Business.
Intro 0:10
Greetings Blazer Nation and welcome to the UAB Collat F.A.M. podcast, your premier bi monthly podcast for information on finance, accounting and money brought to you by the Collat School of Business' Department of Accounting and Finance and the Region's Institute for Financial Education. So without further ado, welcome to today's episode.
Marena Messina 0:38
Hi Everyone! What's up? What's up? I'm Marena Messina, visiting instructor here at the Collat School of Business. And today we have Amber Terakedis, who is a partner in wealth management at Plante Moran with over 18 years of experience. And she has been recognized numerous times for her ability to balance her career and her active family of five. So Amber, thank you so much for being here.
Amber Terakedis 1:05
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
Marena Messina 1:07
We're super excited. So before we kind of dive into today's episode, can you tell us a little bit more about your background?
Amber Terakedis 1:16
Sure. So I graduated from Western Michigan University back in 2004, with a degree in finance and a minor in economics and started out uh working just primarily in the financial planning industry working for a brokerage firm. And then my husband's job moved us around a couple of times. And I ended up in Lansing, Michigan in 2008 and joined Plante Moran, which is the 11th largest public accounting firm in the country based in Southfield, Michigan. So I've been there for almost 15 years now.
Marena Messina 1:53
Wow. Okay, so yeah, and you're out of Birmingham. So you are still continuing to work with them, even though you've obviously moved from Michigan.
Amber Terakedis 2:02
Yes, thankfully, I joke that I was remote before remote was cool pre COVID. I started working remotely back in 2014, my husband, his job relocated us, as I said multiple times we were in Chattanooga, Tennessee for two years. And then we've been in Birmingham for almost eight years now. And just my firm, thankfully, believed in my ability to work remotely and travel and see our clients as needed, wherever I needed to do that. And so I have been working full time out of my home ever since.
Marena Messina 2:35
Awesome. So tell us a little bit more about what your day looks like as a partner in wealth management.
Amber Terakedis 2:41
Yeah, so I'm a partner. So as the last couple of years have a little bit more added responsibility with managing my team and the firm and just different areas of actually managing the business that I didn't have prior to being a partner. But kind of at my core, I'm a relationship manager in our wealth management practice. So I have the responsibility and the pleasure of working with a large group of clients kind of based all over the country that are utilizing our wealth management and accounting services. So I've built deep relationships with clients that I get to know them and their goals and objectives and really get to colleague with them, and they're outside professionals like their attorneys and their CPAs and really act as that personal CFO for my clients. So they're kind of the CEO of their family, I get to be the CFO and work with my team of other CFP certified financial planners and CPAs to to manage all aspects of their personal balance sheet and their financial life.
Marena Messina 3:42
Awesome. So can you talk a little bit more about the CFP and the CPA and kind of how those are working together?
Amber Terakedis 3:51
Yes, so many of the colleagues that I work with at Plante Moran went the accounting route and in college they got accounting degrees, they may have come out and worked as you know, New Start New Hire in the tax department or they might have gone into audit, or they might have dabbled in both done a bit of a fellowship and each and then focus and choice allowed them to decide where they wanted to go in the firm. And then they may have later decided that they had an interest in the wealth management practice and moved over to the consulting side that I work in, which is Plante Moran financial advisors. But many of our our colleagues do have both the CPA license so they're, you know, Certified Public Accountants and then they've switched over or they colleague enough with our wealth management side that they also have the Certified Financial Planner designation. I just hold the CFP license, I don't hold the CPA license, but it is a great combo. We really see just such great synergy between the two and we can talk more about that but I think that having the CPA and accounting background is such a great platform for most careers in wealth management and or accounting, because there's just a deep technical knowledge that you get getting the CPA license. And same for the CFP. But they're just slightly different kind of the tilt there, but both highly credentialized and highly respected fiduciary designations that you have to have at our firm, if you're going to sign tax returns, if you're going to give direct advice to clients, you have to hold one of those designations or both.
Marena Messina 5:27
And we know that right now in the world, there's a lot less students going into accounting. And I know kind of off the record, we were chatting beforehand about how people may not see it as this you have a bad image per se of the field. And what is kind of your take on it?
Amber Terakedis 5:52
Yeah, I mean, I can speak for myself, going back to my college years, I knew I wanted to go into business, I didn't know specifically what I wanted to do in the Business College. So when I went into business school, I kind of went with an open mind, I wanted to check out accounting, I wanted to check out finance, I wanted to check out, you know, marketing, I had no idea exactly what I wanted to do. And I took all the basic accounting 101, you know, all the basic intro courses, and I wasn't immediately drawn to accounting, I thought, Gosh, this is difficult. And it's, you know, like you said, maybe it doesn't come across super glamorous, or like, what am I going to do with this. And now in hindsight, I feel like if I would have if I knew now what I knew, then what I know, now I would have said, Gosh, it's such a great field to go into again, because it's so diverse. There's so many opportunities to utilize an accounting degree, whether you do want to go the CPA route and work in, in public accounting, or do tax or you want to you want to pivot and do something else, like be a CFO for a company or work in private industry, or work in wealth management. There's it's such a great foundation. So I think that accounting has a reputation for being a little bit boring, as I said, not glamorous, very technically driven. But there's there's so much more to it than that, and a lot that you can even glean from accounting to use in your personal life managing your own finances.
Marena Messina 7:19
Yes, I try to tell the accounting 201 students that you know, like you may not love this right now, but apply this to your everyday life. So I think it's super important. So shifting gears slightly, can you talk about how this profession has allowed you to be able to juggle your family of five and do everything and work remote and just kind of that whole thing?
Amber Terakedis 7:47
Yeah, I think, as you said, we're seeing a lot of numbers decreasing and the number of people that are going in to accounting majors or coming out and are seeking careers in public accounting firms. I think public accounting has a reputation to have a lot of hours and certainly during tax season, even if you're not in a public accounting firm, you there is expectation that you're gonna work a lot during certain times of the year. And I think that there's a stigma there that you can't really balance a job like that. And in your personal life, and being a parent and all that all the responsibility that comes with that. I do think that there has been a little bit of a mindset shift post COVID, with the ability for people to have a more balanced work experience of days in the office versus days at home. I think that coupled with what people are expecting that the younger generations and people coming out of college want more flexibility, they don't necessarily want to work as many hours or have to sit at a desk in an office every day, I will say I've been fortunate, my firm, I think is was ahead of the curve that gave me that opportunity to work remotely early on. And it's allowed me to be there for my family, it's allowed my husband to continue his professional career, it's never held me back in terms of my ability to progress and become a partner of the firm. And I think that we're seeing that more and more, I think that's what I would want people to know is that there are firms like Plante Moran and others that we want and need this great talent that's going to school right now and getting their education to come out and to know that they have a lot of flexibility and options for the firms that they can go to work for and be able to have the work life balance that they want. And they're going to be recruited heavily. I mean, there's such a need, there's a lot of baby boomers leaving the industry. There's a lot of people retiring, this a great amount of opportunity out there. And if people are willing to, you know, work hard and communicate what their expectations are around the work that they want to do and the hours that they're willing to commit to the career. I think that they can they can balance it and have it all for sure.
Marena Messina 9:48
If you were to like, go back to where you were when you were in college, like you said that you may have gotten an accounting degree. How would that have looked now as far as the world that we're in?
Amber Terakedis 10:03
Yeah, I think now I've sort of learned a lot of the accounting things that I know and tax things just from serving clients and colleagueing internally with other professionals in my firm and external CPAs. But I think that I've had a, there's been a learning curve for me, because I didn't have that deep accounting, technical background. So I think that if I could do it, again, I probably would consider like a double major in accounting and finance or getting an accounting degree as a baseline. And then you could certainly add on financial planning and other technical, financial planning wealth management pieces. But accounting, again, is such a baseline for everything. So there's, there's a huge need for people that do understand personal balance sheets, profit and loss statements, you know, you need CFOs, you have to do your taxes. I think about a lot. I know I mentioned this to you, I think about like nursing and physicians, there's always going to be a demand for professionals in those industries, you're always going to have healthcare needs, you're always going to have basic accounting and finance needs. So it's such a marketable and diverse space to get education.
Marena Messina 11:14
And along those lines, like people want to do meaningful work. They want their jobs to affect, you know, not just themselves, but others. Can you talk about how your career in accounting as well can you cross over into that?
Amber Terakedis 11:36
Yes, I think that, at, at their core, people want to help other people. So, in a nutshell, like I don't derive, you know, a great deal of pleasure from, you know, maybe placing trades in my client's portfolio or looking at their 1040 and saying, oh, gosh, you have this net operating, loss carry forward. Like, that's not where most people derive personal enjoyment and satisfaction from, I love knowing that every day when I do my work, even though I do have to do those tasks, that it's impacting people, and it's helping people make important decisions for their lives, it's helping them make decisions for their families. And I think our accounting professionals and our finance professionals like they, they inherently want that deep kind of human interaction and experience that's valuable to them. And that's where we get our, our joy from, I think so it's not, it's not the technical day to day accounting one on one stuff, it's the relationships, the knowing that you are having a broader impact, and you're educating others in the process, and you're giving them a platform with which they can use to make better decisions about their future, I think it's very cyclical, and you're building generations of, of people that are able to kind of move forward and use that knowledge to kind of impact the world around them. It's It's such deep technical expertise.
Marena Messina 13:00
And if you had one thing to tell a graduating senior at some life advice, what would you tell them?
Amber Terakedis 13:09
I think everything related to kind of financial management and accounting like early and often, you know, any any, any earned income that you have coming out of college, start thinking about how best to utilize that looking at your debt, you know, coming out of college, and I know we're in a higher interest rate environment now. And people are getting out of school trying to figure out how to manage student loan payments with buying a car or buying a home and, or saving. And I think, you know, there's just some really basic principles that coming out of college again, you can work with a CFP, or use your own knowledge, knowledge from college, to figure out how to put yourself in a really good position with savings and reduction of debt. And just save early and often pay off debt early and often. And just create those really healthy habits. And manage your own personal balance sheet, put together a list of your assets and liabilities. Look at it every year, figure out how best to kind of again, plug in this income or any any liabilities that you have, so that it's serving you well moving forward. Because again, that's going to give you the most flexibility and opportunity in the future, to be able to retire when you want to be able to take the trips that you want, again to do the things that we work hard for in our life. And that's kind of to enjoy the fruits of our labor. We don't most people want to work to be able to travel and live their lives with their family not just to work so I think it's life is always a balance of working hard and having something that's fulfilling for you professionally, but fulfilling your personal goals and objectives too. And I think again, that's what I love about my job because I feel like on a day to day basis I get to help people manage that.
Marena Messina 14:46
This is such a great episode! Amber, thank you so much for coming here and talking with us today and giving our listeners some great advice and insights really appreciate it.
Amber Terakedis 14:59
You are are very welcome. Thanks for having me.
Marena Messina 15:01
Thank you and thank you Blazer Nation for listening and stay tuned for our future episodes. Go Blazers!
Transcribed by https://otter.ai