The time has come for me to share a little personal secret with you.

I wasn't always a financial genius.

Okay, so maybe I overstated the "genius" part a bit! But seriously, there was a time about 25 years ago when I didn't know the difference between a stock, bond or baloney sandwich.

Oops...there I go again overstating things.

I could always pick out a baloney sandwich from a lineup.

My point is that like so many of you, I believed that money and finance were way too complicated to understand and frankly, b-o-r-i-n-g.

I was busy raising a daughter and running a household, and my husband was a successful stock broker who handled our investing.

My epiphany came in the fall of 1984 when Ken came home one day and announced that he had just quit his high paying job on Wall Street to become a radio talk show host.

This career change, he added, came with a 70% pay cut!

This stay-at-home mom was totally floored...and scared! (Do I need to mention that I was also angry?) How was I going to "maintain our lifestyle" with such a pay reduction?

Well, it took me a week to figure it out...a week of frigid silence in the Dolan household. But when I finally started talking to Ken again I said, "Then I guess I'll become a stockbroker."

What prompted a Theater Arts and English major to say this is anybody's guess. In fact, I think I looked over my shoulder after the words tumbled out just to see if there was someone else in the room who might have actually said that!

How could I even think I'd make the grade never having taken an economic or business course?

But Ken, God love him, gave me lots of encouragement. Yeah right. In fact I think his actual words were...

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