ABOUT R&V PERSONAL FINANCE, LLC
Betsy Ratashak-Vogel, CFP®
Founder and Financial Planner
Betsy is a fee-only fiduciary financial planner serving women in medicine, military/veterans and those who call the Driftless Region home. She strives to ease the burden of financial decision making, planning, and management.
Outside of her work with RVPF, she can also be found savoring a robust cup of coffee, reading, and exploring the beautiful Driftless Area with her spouse and four children.
Betsy’s story begins in Iowa on a pretty typical small family farm. Her mom was a high school teacher and her dad turned from full-time farmer to full-time CPA. Her youth was spent playing sports, preparing projects for the county fair, a first job bagging groceries, and roaming about in a way that is atypical now. High school graduation sent her off to Iowa State University toward a bachelor’s degree in Food Science. A couple collegiate job experiences included a test kitchen analyst for a large regional grocery store chain and quality control engineering position for the company that makes SPAM. Betsy then completed a master’s degree in family and consumer sciences, an area of study formerly known as home economics which gave rise to many of today’s collegiate financial planning programs.
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Four years of teaching personal finance to high school students while her new spouse completed medical school steered her toward a position as a personal financial counselor at Travis AFB in Fairfield, CA, where her spouse completed residency and eventually joined the teaching faculty. It was at the University of California Davis Extension where Betsy completed her CFP® professional certification and knew that she had found her calling. The birth of their second child coincided with the establishment of RVPF and a move back to Iowa where they made their home in a little piece of heaven called Decorah.
Now, several years into the life of RVPF, Betsy still believes that financial planning holds particular value because of the options it provides at punctuation moments in life. When faced with difficult choices, having well managed financial resources allows for decisions to be made for reasons other than money. Maybe it's taking time off to care for a terminally ill loved one, accepting a dream job that pays less, supporting a young adult child through a period of unpaid service work or retiring early. At the end of it all, it's never just about the money.
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RVPF exists to reduce the stress client's experience as they fulfill their roles as professionals, daughters/sons, spouses, siblings, parents, and friends.
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