Career shift lands Fish in financial planning

Memphis Standout profile for The Memphis Daily News

Sept. 27, 2013

To hear the way she speaks of Memphis, and to know the many ways in which she works to better her community, one would never guess thatKathy Fish was not born and raised right here.

Originally from Rochester, N.Y., where she was the third of eight children, she first visited the South after a free-spirited, cross-country trip after high school.

“I fell in love with this city,” she said, explaining her return here as an X-ray technician student at the Baptist College of Health Sciences, and then to the University of Memphis to study biology with the plan to become a physician.

Upon graduation, however, health care in the country was in transition and so was she, determining that what she wanted was “to have it all: work, job, family, own a business. I just felt like I needed to go in a different direction.”

She altered her path and eventually earned an MBA from the University of Memphis.

It was a degree – and a passion – that would eventually lead her to found the financial planning service Fish and Associates.

“We do comprehensive financial planning to include investment management; we work with people on estate and tax planning, (and) income planning.”

Fish felt all along that she wanted to work for herself and “to somehow be able to control my own destiny,” and her boutique firm works to help people with a similar mindset, those who also find themselves in transition – whether it be from a change in career, death, divorce or any other life event.

Her client list is extensive and diverse, yet, she said, “I have a special desire to have meaningful conversations about money with women. I don’t exclusively work with women clients, but I do have a good amount, probably at least 40 percent of my clients.”

She maintains a financial and philosophical blog called “A Man is Not a Plan.”

Her first job in the business was working with the Memphis office ofExecutive Financial Services Inc., which was closed only a year and a half after her start. Fish continued to share office space with others from the firm and to grow her own client list within the industry, going out completely on her own in 1996 . . . (read more)