As the housing market goes up in price and the stock market wobbles, many people look to professionals for guidance. Two Jewish men in Maryland, meanwhile, offer financial planning for an underserved group: the deaf community.
Schwarz Financial Services LLC, located in Bethesda, is the only deaf-owned, independent, registered investment advisory firm, according to its president, Louis Schwarz, 59, who became the first deaf man to have gained the credentials as Certified Financial Planner (CFP). Schwarz is joined in his firm by Simon Roffe, 29, who is also deaf. Their main goal is to help deaf people achieve financial security,
Roffe explains that Deaf people, have often been at a disadvantage when dealing in financial matters. Their literacy skills are often not on a par with their hearing counterparts, making financial information difficult to grasp -even more so than it is for most consumers not trained in finance.
Both men are fluent in English and American Sign Language so that Roffe and Schwarz are well able to communicate with deaf clients, and their offices utilize the latest in communication assistive technology.
“The Internet has leveled the field, professional-wise and social-wise,” Roffe says, noting how a 20-minute phone conversation with someone, using an old-fashioned telecommunications device for the deaf (TDD) hooked up to a telephone, could now be handled in a two-minute Internet exchange.
Both men can draw upon their own life experiences to empathize with the needs of their deaf clients, about 70 percent of their business.
After 15 years as a chemist at the U.S. Geological Survey, Schwarz hit the “deaf glass ceiling” and, in 1983, his business was born, as he turned his part-time occupation as an income tax preparer for deaf clients, which he had been doing out of his then-Silver Spring home since 1971, into a full-time career.
Self-taught in finance, except for a correspondence course he took to earn his CFP designation, Schwarz has since added a string of other financial credentials to his title as the firm’s president.
Born and raised in Chicago into a Reform Jewish, hearing family, Schwarz had no difficulty being understood by his family and close friends, even though profoundly deaf. Life in the classroom, however, was difficult and hearing aids ineffective.
Yet, he maintained above-average grades by keeping up with his reading. In fact, he recalls, in his senior year, he graduated at the top of his chemistry class, which astounded his fellow students. He said, “They wondered how I did it.”
He added, “I have to thank my family,” who persisted “to motivate me and socialize me to participate in activities,” who kept him from becoming isolated in the hearing world. His older brother and sister, he said, always took him with them to the library, and his parents maintained high expectations for him.
At age 18, Schwarz came to Washington, D.C.’s Gallaudet University–the world’s only university designed to serve deaf and hard of hearing people, graduating in 1968 with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. It was there he met his future wife, Doris Fowler.
Both later taught for a short spell at the Illinois School for the Deaf in Jacksonville, III., before returning to Greater Washington, settling in Bladensburg when Schwarz went to work at the USGS in Reston, VA.
Though raised in an observant Reform household, the Bethesda resident now says that he is not very Jewishly engaged, preferring to be actively engaged in the deaf community.
“When I show up at a deaf event, it’s ‘Hi, so good of you to come,’ ” he says, waving his hand as though to draw someone in.
He cites the lack of easy communication with congregants and the irregular use of sign language interpreters at temple as factors in his lack of synagogue affiliation.
For his part, Roffe was the first Marylander to receive, through state assistance, two hearing aids instead of just one after being diagnosed at 8 months old with a profound, bilateral hearing loss, which was precedent-setting for that kind of state assistance.
Being diagnosed that young, says his mother, Sarina, “was revolutionary at that time,” given that most children with hearing loss went undiagnosed until typically 2 1/2 years old (which was the case for Schwarz) — and he was fitted with his aids only a month later.
Even with aids, learning English was not easy.
At age 3 1/2, his mother says, “he had a vocabulary of only 150 words. He was two years language-delayed for his age,” she says, adding that children at that age acquire roughly three-quarters of their working vocabularies that they will use throughout life.
But, two years later, he had more than caught up with his peers with normal hearing. What made all the difference, he and his mother believe, was the use of cued speech, a manual method of helping lipreaders distinguish speech sounds.
Created in the 1960s, cued speech utilizes eight handshapes in four different placements near the face, in combination with mouth movements of speech, that effectively translate the sounds of spoken language, distinguishing them for lipreaders.
Eager to give her son every benefit possible, Roffe’s mother said that, when he was a toddler, she took a crash course in cued speech at Gallaudet and became her son’s first cued speech teacher.
He later entered Flower Valley Elementary School in Rockville, the first school in the country to offer cued speech to students, and became one of the first young deaf adults to have been mainstreamed through public schools with cued speech.
Roffe also learned Hebrew with the aid of cued speech, so that he could recite his bar mitzvah haftorah at Magen David Sephardic Congregation in Rockville. Later, he was active with the Orthodox Union’s National Conference of Synagogue Youth’s group for deaf Jewish high schoolers, Our Way.
A proponent today for cued speech, as is his mother, who is president of the National Cued Speech Association, Roffe says, “I’m positive that cued speech is responsible for my success today . … I wouldn’t be where I am today without it.”
Roffe also credits Jeffrey Archer’s novel, Kane & Abel, which his mother gave him as a young teen, for boosting his confidence level. Roffe says he identified with one of the book’s characters, a poor immigrant turned wealthy businessman.
“When I read the book, I [had] felt difficulty being accepted . … If he [the character in the novel] could overcome those odds, so could I,” Roffe remembers deciding.
He then realized, he says, that one of his greatest strengths was perseverance. Now, he says, “I never give up. I always get what I want.”
And he knew he was good at business, having run a successful neighborhood lawn mowing business with a friend.
His confidence grew such that, when he graduated New York University in 1998 with a B.S. in finance, he told his congratulating dean, “I’ll be back to put my name on a building.”
But, his confidence was soon put to the test. He started his own Wall Street hedge fund, but “it went bust,” he says, leading him to return to Greater Washington, where he was offered a job “with another dot com” in Northern Virginia that, after six months, “also went bust.”
The year “2000 was a rough period,” Roffe says, but he persevered, seeking out Schwarz, an acquaintance through the deaf community.
Schwarz took Roffe on as an associate at his firm after Roffe received the necessary credentials.
Recently, the younger man capped his professional success with his marriage in New York to Nicole Houck Welzer, who also is deaf. The Sephardi-style wedding was conducted in American Sign Language, cued speech and English. Schwarz, meanwhile, is now hearing certain sounds for the first time in his life, thanks to a cochlear implant he obtained last March.
Last month, he heard a baby cry for the first time when he visited his new — and first — granddaughter.
“I never even heard my own daughters cry,” he says, beaming, and throwing a glance over his shoulder at the photographs of three young women on his office credenza.
