hotels articles

His handsomely brooding face may have taken center stage when he first emerged as the mysterious Jordan Catalano, the grungy object of Claire Danes’s wish-fulfillment fantasies, on the mid-1990s cult TV show My So-Called Life, but the years–at least onscreen–have not been kind to Jared Leto. He was pummeled by Edward Norton’s anticonsumerist everyman in David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999); Christian Bale, as Medecade mass murderer Patrick Bateman, hacked him up with an axe in Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000); a nasty abscess borne from an out-of-control heroin addiction caused him to lose an arm in Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream (2000); and he was charred in a backdraft fire in 2002’s Panic Room, again under Fincher’s direction.

But while calamities tend to befall Leto in his movie life, the trajectory of roles he has taken are all part of the larger puzzle that is the actor himself. Born on a commune, he grew up bouncing around with his photographer mother from Alaska to Florida to Louisiana and Wyoming, followed by stints in Haiti and Brazil, before landing in New York as a teenager.

In Alexander, Oliver Stone’s controversial new epic about famed conqueror Alexander the Great, Leto plays Hephaistion, Alexander’s close friend and lover, joining a cast of Hollywood heavyweights that includes Angelina Jolie, Anthony Hopkins, Val Kilmer, and Colin Farrell in the title role. Fincher caught up with the 30-year-old actor in South Africa, where he was completing work on Andrew Niccol’s upcoming gun-running thriller, Lord of War, and preparing to hit the road with his rock band, 30 Seconds to Mars.

DAVID FINCHER: So, dude, tell me about your pursuit of rock stardom. It just wasn’t debauched enough, so now you’re back to acting?

JARED LETO: Why? Are you disappointed that I’m making movies again?

DF: No, I’m just curious.

JL: Well, I took a lot of time off–I think I made three movies in five years–so now I’m just going through a phase where I’m working more. But I’m still doing the music thing. I just finished about 80 percent of our second record [the follow-up to the group’s 2002 self-titled debut]. It comes out in March on Virgin Records.

DF: Are you going to get the support this time–

JL: That we so badly deserve? With the first record, we had a record company that was falling apart, and as everybody knows, the industry is kind of in its version of the Great Depression right now. We were casualties of all that. But, you know, we did sell more than 100,000 records and toured everywhere, playing more than 350 shows, and we had an incredible time doing it. So, in those terms, it was all a success. What are you up to, by the way?

DF: I’m in the first trimester of my gestation on the next film. I’ve been trying to put together this Benjamin Button movie. [bird calls in background] What is that?

JL: Those are some really weird African birds.

DF: C’mon, Jared, are you allowed to keep sheep in your house?

JL: Well, it’s a secret, so don’t tell anybody. [laughs] Those fucking birds wake me up every morning. So, you’re going to make a movie called Benjamin Button? With a title like that, I can’t tell if it’s about a stuffed animal or a pedophile.

DF: Well, it’s both. [laughs] No, it’s based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story [”The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”], and we’ve been working on it for about five months, trying to get the budget down to something that two studios can swallow.

JL: I can’t believe that I actually made another movie after Panic Room before you did.

DF: And you made a record, and went on tour, and had a life. But I also went to a premiere and did a DVD commentary, if that counts.

JL: I didn’t even get to the premiere of Panic Room. I’m such an asshole.

DF: Well, that’s part of your mystique.

JL: It’s not even mystique! I was probably in Grand Rapids, Michigan, playing with the band at a bowling alley. You know, that’s my exciting life.

DF: So, tell me about Alexander. I have friends who worked on the movie who are extremely high on it, and they’re not drug-addled and deluded. How did you get roped into this thing?

JL: Well, I met with Oliver Stone, and then had a reading, which was … uh … interesting.

DF: Oh, do tell.

JL: At one point during the audition, the casting director, Billy Hopkins, had his head in my lap. I was whispering sweet nothings to him, so it was kind of ridiculous in a way. It also sort of felt like we had a moment together–and we’ve been dating ever since. [laughs] But it was good because I got the part. The script was unbelievable. Oliver, man–the guy is an incredible writer. There’s no doubt about that. He was one of my favorite directors growing up, and I would have died to do anything with him. Going in and meeting with Oliver, talking about this project, I felt like I did when I met you, when you were casting that little role that I did in Fight Club.

DF: But you didn’t have to travel around the world for that.

JL: I just had to show up with white eyebrows and say about three lines in the whole movie.

With its charming concentric canals, crowded bike lanes, and abundance of tulips, AMSTERDAM is understandably considered “quaint.” However, the Netherlands’ capital city is increasingly considered a modern architect’s utopia. Check out the Eastern Docklands for an eye-popping tour of some of Europe’s most avant-garde design, including innovative buildings, bridges, and outdoor art.

GREEK MUSEUM ACTION

Most visitors fly into and immediately out of ATHENS on their way to some sunny isle after their requisite tour of the Acropolis. Next visit, consider a one- or two-night stay: Greece’s bustling capital offers much of interest to visitors, including two intriguing and underappreciated museums: the Jewish Museum of Greece (JewishMuseum.gr) and the elegant Museum of Cycladic Art (Cycladic.gr).

Known primarily as a business destination, MOSCOW (below) offers accommodation options geared principally toward the homme d’affaires. Here are two exceptions to the rule, where you’ll find pampered service and cutting-edge design: The Ararat Park Hyatt Moscow (Moscow.Park.Hyatt. com) provides luxurious public spaces and guest rooms buffed out with the latest technology. Meanwhile, Moscow’s modern, sleek, and minimal Golden Apple (EpoqueHotels.com) is a lovely boutique hotel.

This fall, forget your Prada slippers and instead pack your best hiking shoes for PARIS. Yes, the City of Light, with its high culture, swank hotels, exquisite dining, and fancy clubs, also offers invigorating hiking opportunities. One randonnee leads you 10 miles from the Bois du Boulogne to the Bois de Vincennes, passing along delightful and hidden parks, gardens, and cobblestone streets. Your first stop: Paris’s Office du Tourisme (127 Avenue des Champs-Elysees) for a rundown of urban “trails.”

PIZZA BE GONE

Unlike other European capitals, ROME has only recently begun to recognize the varied cuisines of its immigrant groups. After you have your fill of traditional Italian ristoranti and trattorie, head on over to Esquilino, one of the seven hills of Rome, where you’ll find a wide variety of Asian, African, and Indian eateries. Rome boasts a particularly strong

Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, by Cullen Murphy (Houghton Mifflin, 272 pp., $24)

IN the last decade, and especially after 9/11, it has become popular once again to compare the United States to ancient Rome. The pop analogies almost always appear in the pessimistic context of an American colossus betraying its origins and ideals–and, like Rome, facing the deserved end of its empire.

Those on the left warn about America’s hard imperial hand on the “Other” abroad. Meanwhile, our contemporary conservative elder Catos lament the corruption of the old, small, agrarian republic into an empire. Both predict–almost gleefully, and sometimes in apocalyptic terms–American “exhaustion,” “decline,” or something similar to a Roman “fall.”

Of course, there are a number of similarities between the two superpowers, ancient and modern. Both were practical, inclusive societies that rapidly incorporated foreigners. They alike unexpectedly achieved global stature and influence–at first through astounding feats of arms in filling the vacuum of eroding empires (the end of the Hellenistic East in the 2nd century B.C. was perhaps analogous to the postwar breakup of the British Empire).

Soon each upstart nation won further adherents by an insidiously efficient way of doing things, based on merit rather than mere class, that offered material prosperity to millions not to be found through local indigenous cultures. Likewise, brilliant Roman and American writers have left thoughtful observations about the ironies–and pathologies–of their seemingly unstoppable societies that changed the world abroad and, in the process, their once-traditional citizenry within.

But for any valid comparison, some basic ground rules of this old game of “America as Rome” are to be followed. First, keep in mind that the idea of a monolithic “Rome” is a sort of construct–reflecting 700 years of Italian republican government, followed by another half-millennium of imperial Mediterranean rule. What “Rome,” then, do we of infant nations evoke? Is Rome to be the rather small, agrarian republic trying to stop Carthage in the first Punic war? Or Edward Gibbon’s 2nd-century A.D. hundred years of bliss? Or the chaos of a perennially tottering empire yet another 200 years later?

Second, recognize that Roman literature, usually written by disaffected elites, is as consistently reactionary as it is moralistic in nature. Juvenal, Livy, Petronius, Sallust, the younger Seneca, Suetonius, and Tacitus, all knee-deep in the luxury of their times, all nevertheless deplored the supposed decadence of their respective eras. They can be fine witnesses to Roman decline and the corrosive effects of luxus, but their pessimistic–and often hypocritical–genre of “things going to hell in a hand basket” needs to be weighed carefully against concomitant evidence from mute numismatics, epigraphy, and archeology that reflect a booming culture often at odds with what the cynical said about it.

For the once-great families, it might have been a seminal moment to see respected Roman matrons increasingly covered with blood and dust in the first row of the amphitheater, oohing and aahing the abs of the gladiators. But most in North Africa or Eastern Europe–who with Romanization at last had clean water and habeas corpus–could not have cared less. Petronius (Nero’s own arbiter elegantiae) saw the crass nouveau-riche upstarts as proof of imperial decadence. But some of the novelist’s gauche characters, like the Jewish buffoon Trimalchio and the rag-collector Echion, are more likely welcome evidence that millions by the 1st century A.D. were succeeding in a global system increasingly based on merit, not class–anathema to Petronius’s old Italian upper crust.

Third, there should be an up-front recognition that common Rome/America comparisons, from Oswald Spengler’s to Pat Buchanan’s, are rarely meant to be laudatory. Instead, they are admonitory in nature, warning that the “bread and circuses” of the United States, too, will–and should–soon end. Key is the superficiality that both Romans and Americans were somehow malevolent, forgetting that in comparison with the alternatives of the times, most of the “Other” voted with their feet to get within the imperial borders by any means at their disposal.

Cullen Murphy (editor at large at Vanity Fair and co-author of Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage) does not draw extensively from the evidence of the ancient world, other than selected quotes in translation from the usual grim Roman moralists. That paucity of ancient evidence is buttressed on the modern side by a plethora of references to contemporary culture. So evocation of everything from Abu Ghraib, the Green Zone, Halliburton (but of course), and Blackwater USA to Ahmed Chalabi, Ken Lay, and the Cheneys is used to hammer home the preordained point that our selfish right-wing elites have become like Suetonius’s vulgar Julio-Claudians in devouring public resources, eroding our freedoms, and ruining our name and influence abroad. But even the non-classicist will finally bristle at such simplicity, replete as it is with references to the movies Spartacus and Gladiator and the video game Rome: Total War.

IT’S no surprise that tourism in Los Angeles County took a hit last year.

International visitors were staying away in record numbers, down 8.6 percent in 2001 over 2000, and regional tourists helped buoy numbers only slightly. There were 23.8 million tourists to L.A. in 2001, down from 24.7 million in 2000.

Germans tourists were most likely to stay away, their numbers down 29 percent from the year earlier. Also absent were the Chinese and Taiwanese, who curtailed their visits by 22 and 18 percent, respectively.

As a result, visitors contributed $11.8 billion to the L.A. economy, compared with $13.8 billion in 2000.

Hotel occupancy in L.A. County dipped accordingly in 2001, to 68.4 percent from 76.1 percent in 2000. The average daily room rate declined to $120.66 in 2001 from $122.36 in 2000.

Los Angeles remains a top domestic destination, ranked fourth among U.S. travelers behind Las Vegas, Orlando and Chicago.

THE PACESETTER

PLEASANT HOLIDAYS LLC

THE travel industry was hit hard after Sept. 11, but Pleasant Holidays nevertheless saw revenues climb to $490 million, up from $450 million in 2000.

“The first half of the year we had a lot of momentum in travel,” said spokesman Ken Phillips. “Then in June it began to slow when the economy started to slow down. Sept. 11 finished off the year.”

The company still isn’t seeing a bounce back for Hawaiian tours, which usually account for up to 85 percent of revenues. Still, Pleasant Holidays projects as percent to 8 percent revenue increase this year, in part due to more travel to Mexico.

Formed in New Jersey 43 years ago and now headquartered in Westlake Village, Pleasant Holidays has undergone an overhaul in the last year.

At the end of last year, the Automobile Club of Southern California extended its stake in the agency known for Hawaiian holiday packages to 96 percent, combining the firm’s four non-Hawaiian operating groups under the broad corporate umbrella.

Founder Ed Hogan was replaced as president and chief executive by Tim Irwin, vice president of travel for AAA. Under Irwin, the company combined its various branded companies, including Pleasant Mexico Holidays, Pleasant Tahitian Holidays, Pleasant South Pacific Holidays, and Japan & Orient Tours all under the Pleasant Holidays name.

The MESEA Executive Board, 2003: Alfred Hornung, President; William Boelhower, Vice-President; Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Program Coordinator; Rocio G. Davis, Secretary; Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Treasurer.

Katharine Newman has been called the Founding Mother of MELUS. As the current executive board of MESEA, we are honored to claim that her vision of ethnic studies was fundamental not only for multi-ethnic studies in the United States, but in Europe as well.

In the early eighties in Europe, Dorothy Skardal (Norway) and William Boelhower (Italy) began actively collaborating with the MELUS organization and publishing in its journal. When Wayne Miller, then the journal’s editor, came to Italy and Boelhower was appointed book review editor in 1982, ties between scholars of ethnic literatures in the United States and Europe began to thicken. Beginning with the 1980s, Dorothy Skardal and William Boelhower inaugurated a series of EAAS (European Association of American Studies) workshops on immigrant literatures within the larger biennial conference format and these encouraged further dialogue between European and American scholars. This forum became what we might call the first MELUS outpost in Europe when workshop members decided to set up their own European journal; In Their Own Words, under the editorship of Boelhower, had a short but intense life of four issues over as many years.

Behind all these efforts, of course, was Katharine Newman, who repeatedly encouraged Skardal and Boelhower to start MELUS-type activities in Europe. Through letters and mutual friends, her presence confirmed for us that the study of multiethnic literatures and cultures was not only necessary but urgent, and that European scholars had a central role to play in making the MELUS project the new cultural studies paradigm of the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike the States, European societies still had no clear perception of themselves as multicultural, and mainstream interest in issues such as immigration, citizenship, rights discourse, and transnational identity was practically zero. In this context, European scholars found the lifeline with MELUS to be a major source of support and legitimation. The MELUS journal was one of the few organs where scholars from European countries could publish and read about the latest theoretical developments in this field. For the Winter issue of 1985, in fact, Skardal and Boelhower edited a special MELUS issue titled “European Perspectives.” Such collaborative efforts went a long way to creating a community of scholars across the Atlantic divide. And today that community has become a donnee for all of us.

After those years of mutual inspiration, MELUS Executive Committee members back in the States started to consider making these collaborations more substantial and official. During 1994-95, the idea of MELUS chapters abroad was born. For MELUS Europe, one can indeed claim with pride that the end product was the result of concerted efforts by a variety of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic who made the idea of MELUS Europe their own. In early 1995, the then MELUS President, Amritjit Singh, started talking to Bill Boelhower, who was invited as the opening keynote speaker to the annual MELUS conference in Providence, R1, in April 1995. As a Fulbright scholar at the University of Munich, Germany, in 1995-96, John Lowe officially approached Alfred Hornung and William Boelhower on behalf of the MELUS Executive Committee to serve as members for the MELUS Europe steering committee. In April 1996, Heike Raphael-Hernandez was invited by Amy Elder and Amritjit Singh to join the steering committee. After the annual MELUS Convention in Greensboro, North Carolina, Boelhower and Raphel-Hernandez began to draft executing steps, and by 1997, MELUS Europe had a functioning steering committee, consisting of Hornung, Boelhower, Raphael-Hernandez, Giulia Fabi, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung, Susanne Opfermann, Helmbrecht Breinig, Alison Goeller, Wolfgang Binder, and Rocio Davis. Together they shared the vision: MELUS Europe as a “home” for those scholars in Europe researching the wide and varied field of US ethnic literatures.

As exhilarating as the concept of MELUS Europe was, it was also intimidating: Would others respond because they too felt the need? How could a founding conference be financed? Where could we hold it? Many of these questions were answered by the overwhelmingly positive response to the call for papers for the First MELUS Europe Conference, which was held in Heidelberg in June 1998 as a joint project of the University of Maryland in Europe and Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat, Heidelberg with Dorothea Fischer-Hornung and Heike Raphael-Hernandez as the organizers of this founding conference. The “founding moment” was a heady one, with over 200 scholars, students, and friends from several continents meeting to join in a leap of faith that global scholarship and understanding were indeed necessary and possible. Nellie McKay, Frances Smith Foster, Amritjit Singh, John Lowe, Daniel Walden, and Cheng Lok Chua, as veteran members of MELUS, as well as Manju Jaidka from MELUS India, came to Heidelberg to support the fledgling new organization. Since Heidelberg, three more conferences have been held in Orleans, France in 2000; Padua, Italy in 2002; and Thessaloniki, Greece in 2004. The conference in Thessaloniki also marked the launch of the organization’s new journal, Atlantic Studies, to be published with Routledge twice a year.

Scores of companies worldwide offer offbeat cruise experiences–everything from a European river voyage to an Antarctic expedition, from backwater jungle explorations to luxury yacht sailing. As part of our annual Directory Issue, Cruise Travel has detailed these offerings in the following guide to cruises of special interest.

Company names, arranged alphabetically, are followed by addresses and types of cruises offered. For more information, write the company directly for brochures, schedules, and rates, or contact your travel agent.

You drive across Alberta, seeing nothing but cattle and sky, and suddenly Calgary rises from the plains, a cluster of glass skyscrapers bordered by the Bow and Elbow Rivers. A friendly, white-collar city symbolized by a white cowboy hat, Calgary has evolved from an 1875 fort into a thriving business and cultural center.

It is a city with a dual personality. There is Calgary during July’s stampede–the Wild West Show started by American trick-roper Guy Weadick–when motel prices triple, pancake breakfasts abound, everyone from desk clerks to bank tellers sport cowboy hats, and rodeo cowboys from around the world compete. The rest of the year, Calgary is businesslike, elegant and international with its banks and oil companies, grand Fairmont Palliser hotel, and its neighborhoods that bear the stamp of their Asian and European residents.

A favorable exchange rate and good air connections–the city is served by Air Canada, United, Delta, and Alaska Airlines–make Calgary an appealing place to visit for a summer weekend, or longer. And it’s an easy place to navigate; the city is laid out in a grid. Major expressways are known as “Trails,” avenues run east to west, and streets run north to south. The Calgary Transit C Train along Seventh Avenue is free downtown. Prices listed are in U.S. dollars;

DUBLIN, Ireland — Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/reports/c42747) has announced the addition of UK Travel Insurance 2006 to their offering.

A comprehensive analysis of the UK travel insurance market

Scope of this title:

* Analysis of the competitive issues shaping the market, supported by interviews with senior industry executives and data from secondary sources

* Exclusive market sizing, travel trend, competitor and distribution statistics

* Forecasts of growth up to and including 2010 and the key factors behind this growth

* Interviews with industry executives conducted suggest that the split between annual and single trip travel insurance varies widely between competitors books. However, on average the split is 60:40 in favor of single trip travel.

* Following a Government review in 2007, travel agents could become included under FSA regulation. If this does take place, it is likely that some travel agents will leave the market, in particular, creating opportunities for the alternative distribution channels.

* While European destinations are still the most commonly visited, the number of trips taken to more exotic destinations is growing the fastest. For example, the number of trips taken to Africa grew the fastest in 2005, driven by holidays to Egypt.

Reasons to order your copy:

* Develop your business strategy with confidence using our exclusive sector forecasts of market size

* Understand the current market structure including market size, growth and competitor markets shares to see the potential in this market

* Incorporate the analysis of travel destination data into your marketing strategy

Tony Corley thought he’d done something great a few decades ago by asking a prominent surfing magazine the following question: “How can I find all the Black surfers?”

Weeks after that magazine printed Corley’s letter, the California man received a troubling missive in his mailbox. It read: “Tony [N-word] Corly, stay out of the water. Coon. Don’t start a Black Panthers’ surfing club either. The ocean is for humans not spooks … If you start a Black [N-word], spook pie club, there’s going to be trouble for you, gumby.”

That was in 1974, when, Corley recalls, he only heard rumors of other African-American surfers regularly riding the waves off California, Florida and Virginia. Yet now, decades after founding the Black Surfing Association, Corley says he’s located some 150 Black surfers–many of them the sport’s fastest-rising stars, riding waves in such places as South Africa, Australia and Mexico.

“I continued searching for years,” says Corley, 58, of Paso Robles, Calif., who still surfs and just ordered a custom-made board. “I got one letter from a guy in Germany, another in Peru and another in Washington state … Then I had someone to go out on the water with, to share the friendship and the camaraderie.”

These surfers gather, speak their own language of ocean and tide, and ride majestic, unpredictable waves. Many of them liken the frightening, yet exhilarating, experience to a spiritual baptism, where one begins to glimpse the presence of an unseen higher power. They get on chunks of expensive wood sealed by an even more expensive fiberglass process and balance precariously on top of a living, breathing ocean that often tumbles with 20-foot waves possessing the power to flatten entire cities.

Surfing is not for the weak of heart, yet they do it.

Rahim Walker is one of them. This surfer of Jamaican descent grew up on the East Coast and learned to surf while attending college in California. At 21 years old, he quit a $60,000-a-year Silicon Valley job to travel the globe and surf the waters of 12 countries while, at the same time, brushing up on his French, Spanish and Portuguese. He’ll finish his world tour in two years.

“I took my own savings and didn’t ask for the help of my parents,” says Walker, who recently spent four months surfing in Australia while also working as a bartender. He’s now taking a brief respite in Hawaii, where surfing is legendary.

With no kids and no wife, he can break out, and enjoy cultures and society through the lens of a very exclusive club.

“It just opens up a whole new world,” says Walker, now 25.

“The mentality of surfers is different, and wave-riding is just such a pure form of being connected. It’s like there’s a higher power that you can feel bur you don’t have any need to define it. You just appreciate it and enjoy it for the time that we have.”

William Lamar, another longtime surfer, is hoping to spread the word about Black surfing with his soon-to-be-released documentary of the sport and its unique practitioners who seem unbound by house, home and money.

Called Soul on the Wave, the documentary will profile Black surfers of 1950s-’60s California who endured their houses being torched and their families run off the beach by racist Whites. Lamar also hopes to educate American Blacks on the rich tradition of surfing among Africans and others in the Diaspora.

“People in Jamaica, South Africa, Barbados? Those kids have been surfing for 20 years,” says Lamar, 43, who hopes to find the next inner-city Black kid who can be groomed into an international surf champ. “But White media are not focusing on that because surfing competition is a trillion-dollar industry.”

In addition to firming the body, wave-riding can also strengthen a person’s constitution, says Andrea Kabwasa, 38, of Los Angeles. The supreme concentration of observing the ebb and flow of the ocean while standing upright pulled Kabwasa out of a dangerous depression. Now, six years into the sport, Kabwasa feels she can take on anything.

“That first morning I drove to San Diego and took a lesson,” says Kabwasa, who soon decided that surfing would take the place of constant trips to the hairdresser. “[The lesson] cost me $35. I stood up, and it just made me happy when I hadn’t been happy for six or seven years. And I stayed happy all the way home.”

The feeling stuck and now Kabwasa wants to share it. “When you go surfing, unlike other sports, you really think about nothing but the ocean and the waves. Your whole frame of reference changes. It cleansed me slowly. There’s a true feeling of happiness.”

When she immigrated to the United States from the Caribbean island of Anguilla in the 1980s, Jerone Buchanan was determined to gain financial independence. She pursued a career as a nurse and eventually elevated herself to assistant director of nursing at HHC Health & Home Care in New York City, where she earns slightly less than $100,000 a year. With that type of income, financial independence was attainable for the Harlem resident, but she needed a plan. Buchanan’s first portfolio was with Merrill Lynch, but when its performance didn’t match her expectations, she looked elsewhere. A fellow member of the National Coalition of 100 Black Women referred her to Patricia Kerr, a Mount Vernon, New York-based adviser with American Express who helped Buchanan chart a different course.

“Initially my main goals were to establish a six-month cash reserve, plan for retirement, save for a house, and keep debt to a minimum,” Buchanan recalls. After a complete financial review, she says Kerr “advised me to be conservative al first and then change my strategy as the market improved.”

Kerr’s approach with Buchanan was simple: “When we first met, she had experienced some portfolio erosion, so my goal was to build her portfolio gradually and use an asset allocation model to suit her moderately aggressive style.” Buchanan’s portfolio was divided into 40% large-caps, 15% mid-caps and small-caps, 15% international, 10% real estate, 10% cash, and 10% bonds. Some of the investments included Fidelity Growth & Income (FGRIX), which yielded a return of 6.6%; Goldman Sachs Mid Cap Value (GCMAX), which generated a 22.59% return; and Franklin Real Estate Securities (FREEX), which returned 12.62%.

Overall, Buchanan’s portfolio has shown a 12.34% average return despite a downturn in the market. Earning those types of returns has her on track to meet her goal of retiring in 10 years at age 55. She has been careful to control her debt and contributes $900 monthly to her 403(b) plan as well as the maximum $3,000 a year to a Roth IRA. Under Kerr’s guidance, Buchanan’s initial investment of $75,153 has grown to $107,000 without her having to make any significant economic adjustments. “My lifestyle is unchanged,” says Buchanan. “I love to travel to places such as Africa and the Caribbean, and I continue to do so.”

What’s left to do now is shop for the house she wants and address some estate planning matters. “We’ve talked about her getting a durable power of attorney, a healthcare proxy, and a living will. And by the time she’s 50, [we’ll have made] provisions for long-term care,” projects Kerr. Buchanan says she’ll heed Kerr’s advice, adding: “It’s important for black women to put money aside for retirement so that they can maintain their lifestyle as they get older.”