Kane Brolin is a financial planner and owner of Brolin Wealth Management. He received a Bachelor of Science in speech communication at Iowa University and a Master's in management at Northwestern University. Blind since birth due to retinopathy of prematurity, Kane helps families with special needs achieve their goals through ethical financing. In his personal life, with his wife Danika, he adopts and fosters special-needs children, and he's actively involved with outreach programs at his church. He's also been a leader at the Michiana chapter of the National Federation of the Blind since 2012.
Brolin Wealth Management
Brolin Wealth Management provides a full range of financial and retirement services, specializing in clients with disabilities or disabled family members. This independently-owned company ensures that clients have access to crucial government benefits, finds products that increase quality of life, and creates a comprehensive plan specific to the individual.
Kane describes his work as a unique form of financial planning that helps clients consider possibilities that they had never imagined beyond pure survival. Unlike many financial firms, Kane targets his services toward younger people, managing around $13 million, not including life insurance. Lately, he's been working largely with social workers, judges, courts, attorneys, and schools.
Kane works with an assistant, Heidi, who handles visual aspects like graphic design, reviewing physical documents, and helping blind clients sign in the right places.
To learn more about Kane, you can read his interview with Think Advisor, or you can catch him on an episode of the Penny Forward podcast where he speaks in depth about his approach to finances.
Trades Win Interview by Emma Rolph
This section is an excerpt from our book, Sailing Farther than the Eye Can See.
Kane Brolin is a business owner and certified financial planner practitioner who recommends investments and insurance policy to his clients. Kane was originally in the broadcasting industry in the late 1980s and early 90s while studying tele-communicative arts. After foregoing a career in broadcasting, he received his master’s degree in business and then entered the field of financial planning.
Kane found that actively disclosing his disability helped him get more job interviews. He says, “I did find when I started to practice more disclosure up front than what the ADA (American Disabilities Act) recommended, I was able to get more interviews with folks that were more prepared for the fact that I actually could do life.” He offered a smart, concrete strategy that set him up for success with prospective employers by clearing up potential misconceptions right at the outset: “I sent along a little one-page letter in addition to my resume and cover letter that just said ‘Here’s what you should know about me. I do live with total blindness. Here’s things I do independently that you might not have thought possible. I show up to work independently using public transportation, and I can use a personal computer and do so on a daily basis to do class work and to do correspondence.’”
In particular, Kane is eager to address the fears employers may have about the financial burden of providing accommodations for their blind and visually impaired employees. “They may worry that they’re going to have to spend $30,000 to buy me a special computer to be able to do my job.” He emphasizes that that is definitely not the case and that employers should feel safe to hire blind and visually impaired employees because the necessary technologies “can be done with reasonable, affordable accommodations using a lot of the same tools that everybody else uses.”
Kane asserts that people with disabilities offer new perspectives and ways of doing things that are needed in the workplace. He emphasizes the need for diversity, not simply for the good of prospective employees but for the good of the companies and causes they could support. “By and large, most of us just want a chance to participate in the economy and to lend our ideas, our support, our different perspectives as a positive focus so that you can succeed better, reach more customers, reach more good employees.” He urges workers and employers to “Look around, notice, and celebrate points of difference.”
Kane’s story is a testament to all that blind and visually impaired people have to offer to the working world. At the same time, he says that navigating a sighted world as a blind or visually impaired person isn’t always easy and that’s OK. He says, “It’s a journey and even at age 56 I am still trying to figure it out and I still make mistakes and misunderstandings continue to happen. As long as life happens, the journey is ongoing. It’s a process.”