Her story
Her office was on the 73rd floor.
She was on the 44th.
On September 11, 2001, Dr. Nicole B. Simpson was working as a financial planner in the South Tower of the World Trade Center, with an office on the 73rd floor. She was on the 44th floor when the tower was struck. She survived. Rebuilding a career and a client base from that point is what turned her into a specialist in financial recovery.
She is careful about how much room this takes up. On the call that started this project she put it plainly — she is working away from letting the day define her, and at the same time it remains, “critical to the work that I’ve done in this industry overall.”
So this page exists once, does its job, and hands off. Everything else on this site is about the twenty-five years since.
What it cost, and what it taught
She has said that she struggled through a significant portion of the years that followed because of September 11th. The practice did not survive the event; the work of rebuilding it did two things at once.
The first was practical. She learned what the months after a catastrophe actually require of a household — the order the decisions arrive in, which ones cannot wait, and how little of it conventional financial planning has a process for.
The second was the observation her whole practice now rests on. When something devastating happens, everybody attends to the devastation. Nobody is ready for the question that arrives immediately afterward.
The first question
“What happened?”
Everyone shows up for this one. Family, church, neighbors, colleagues. It is the question the world is built to answer.
The second question
“What can we do financially?”
Arrives within days. Almost nobody is ready for it. This is the gap she has worked in ever since — and the reason a financial planner went and earned a doctorate in trauma-informed care.
One World Trade Center, from across the water. The tower that stands there now is the one she chose to be photographed in front of.
“The worst experiences in your life do not have to define you for the rest of your life.”
Dr. Nicole B. Simpson, CFP®
What she built with it
A method, not a memoir
The point of the story is not the story. It is that she can do something specific because of it: sit with somebody whose life has just come apart and be useful in the same week, rather than in six months when they have “had time to process.”
That capability now shows up in four places — the planning practice, the doctoral research behind it, two books, and the speaking work. And in 2020, nineteen years after the fact, she went and put academic rigor underneath it with a doctorate from Boston University.
“How do we create a strategy to begin to rebuild, even if the worst thing has happened?”
She has written about it
GoBankingRates
I’m a Financial Planner From The World Trade Center: Here’s How Financial Challenges Rebuilt My Career After Tragedy
InvestmentNews
How depths of 9/11 trauma propelled planning career
Titles as published on her media page. Direct links to the articles still need collecting — see Media.
I am credentialed, I’m credible, and I’m called.
If something has happened, start here
She does not need you to have processed it first. Bring the situation as it actually is.