Kim Curtis

Author, President and CEO

Kim is a nationally recognized wealth management advisor, speaker, president, and CEO of Wealth Legacy Institute. She is proud to have created a firm where she can truly put her clients first, bringing the alignment she needs to feel true joy in her work. For Kim, how you deal with money says a lot about how you deal with life, and she’s passionate about helping her clients find a balance.

Kim is a bestselling author of Money Secrets: Keys to Smart Investing and Retirement Secrets, published by Financial Literacy Press. Kim has spoken on leadership, negotiations, and finance to organizations such as West Point, Oracle, EPA, University of Colorado Hospital, Comcast, Level 3, CenturyLink, OtterBox, Johnson & Johnson, and AAUW, amongst others. She has been profiled on NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX, CW, and The Wall Street Journal.

Kim's "shadow" story:
I grew up in a small, rural farming community in upstate New York, the kind of place where everybody knew everyone. Then, one day when I was fourteen, my parents told my two sisters and me they were getting divorced, and my mother would gain full custody. Because my mom had dropped out of school to marry and because she’d never worked, her job prospects were limited. Desperate, she took a job at our high school cafeteria. It was the only job that allowed her to have the same schedule as her daughters.

Unfortunately, the money she made wasn’t nearly enough to support us, so she applied for—and received—government-assisted school lunches. I had to hand a red paper ticket to the cashier to get the free lunch. I was deeply ashamed of that red ticket and all it meant—that my dad was gone. That my mom couldn’t afford lunches and that we were poor.
I did everything I could to make sure no one would see the cashier putting the red ticket into the till. I’d find the line farthest from my friends. I’d wait until a line was empty. I’d hide the ticket underneath my plate.
That red ticket was a measurement, a standard of comparison. It set me apart at school, made me feel less deserving, and was the beginning of my anxiety around the scarcity of money.

Following her example, I put myself through college and then law school. While job hunting, I worked in a luggage store owned by my roommate's family. Since I was under-employed and had never learned to manage money (because we never had any), I defaulted on my school loans, condemning myself to a long period of financial debt and bad credit. The debt strangled my sense of self, immersing me in guilt, doubt, and feelings of incompetency. I obtained a good education. But money?
Money was something other people had—but not me.