Daughter Helps Mom Escape Corporate Stress

The Detroit News:

Although she has a master’s degree in business and years of experience in corporate finance, Devonna Adams got her most valuable financial lesson from her daughter.

“I was driving with her one day and she said I made her want to cry because I didn’t smile all the time like I used to,” recalls the 34-year-old Detroit woman. “Another time we were driving and she asked, ‘Do you like your life?’ ”

Stress at work was getting to her, and Adams decided then and there she wasn’t giving a very good lesson about work and life to her daughter.

“I was showing her something that was unhealthy. I needed to show her that because of my background, because I’d gone to school, I could step away from a high-paying position and go into something that I liked,” Adams says.

Since that day in 2005, Adams arranged a buyout from her finance job at General Motors Corp. and, with a friend launched Divine Impressions, a financial literacy tutoring firm for youngsters.

Her first move was to run a finance section at her church’s summer camp. Since then, she and her partner, Tracie Hightower, have run three summer finance camps in Southfield and West Bloomfield. In April, working through United Way and the YMCA, they handled 600 students.

The business is making money but Adams estimates it will take about another year to get it to the level she wants.