Georgia Lee Hussey launched her Portland-based firm in 2015. | Photo courtesy of Modernist Financial.
If there’s here’s one key thing Georgia Lee Hussey wants investors to know, it’s this: Your personal values should absolutely influence your financial planning and wealth management.
Hussey, a self-described former “guerilla artist” (a creator of disruptive art that challenges norms) founded progressive wealth management firm Modernist Financial in 2015. The certified, Portland-based B Corp works only with clients and businesses with more than $3 million in assets — most have between $5 million and $20 million.
The 50-client boutique firm has about $120 million in assets under management and takes on two, maybe three new clients a year.
Hussey calls research showing that women investors outperform men “intriguing,” adding that she thinks cultural expectations and norms, rather than biological differences, account for the difference. One oft-cited study found that women outperform men by 1.8%, with men more likely to pick speculative stocks. Female investors, on the other hand, tend to take a longer-term perspective.
Women may simply be better, she says, at Warren Buffet’s famous adage: Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.
“Women are often socialized toward a different relationship with the biases of overconfidence and self-attribution that usually push folks to act on the emotional swings in markets,” Hussey says. “We may be less conditioned to chase hot stocks on the way up or sell when we sense a turn coming.”
Simply put, Hussey’s investing philosophy revolves around progressive values that measure a company’s sustainability and ethical impact. She encourages clients to align their wealth and investment decisions with social impact, generosity and collective wellbeing rather than purely for maximizing personal gain.
Her firm — it employs five — works with clients to identify their long-held relationships with money. That often dates to childhood and can involve everything from their racial or immigration backgrounds, to whether they inherited to made their wealth or to their socioeconomic upbringing.
Couples, too, rarely have the same money story — opposites attract, she says — and investing solutions can be created together or individually “so everybody gets what they want.”
She often directs clients to MacKenzie Scott’s website, Yield Giving, or to Phila Engaged Giving, a Seattle-based philanthropic advisory firm that focuses on values-aligned philanthropy. She calls the organization “the Modernist of philanthropic work.”
Above all else, Hussey notes that there’s very little evidence that anyone can beat the market over long periods of time. Her investment philosophy is pragmatic, data-driven and based in “financial science.”
“Or, as I like to say, if investing is exciting, you’re probably doing it wrong.”
Tomorrow: We’ll talk more with Hussey about her background and her motivation for launching Modernist Financial.
