My Story

We didn’t know what we didn’t know. For over a decade my husband was a well paid screenwriter in Hollywood. I was a stay-at-home mom for my son. Times were great and we thought we knew what we were doing. We felt wealthy and financially secure.

Suddenly, the climate in Hollywood changed and the studios weren’t buying scripts the way they used to. No worries. We had our house, our emergency savings, and our retirement funds and we would ride this out by working together as a family and doing whatever we needed to do to get through this difficult time.

We were not prepared. Within a couple of years, the house was gone through a short sale. We had already depleted the emergency fund trying to keep ownership of the house. The retirement accounts were gone. We were in survival mode and eventually homeless. We made the decision as a family to separate for a while. My son and I went to live with my Dad in Idaho while my husband kept grinding for jobs while couch surfing in Los Angeles. These are the types of losses you can’t write on Bankruptcy forms.

We eventually reunited and started our lives over. Not wanting to repeat the same mistakes, we tried to figure out where we had gone wrong. We found that we just “didn’t know what we didn’t know.” We had just been lucky for many years. Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it sure makes the mistakes much easier to weather.

My passion now is to help people who find themselves in a similar positions. I need to make sure you know what you don’t know.

How I’m expanding what’s possible with money

I want to help people see and experience things they’ve never seen or experienced before. I don’t want money to be a source of pain and frustration, I want it to be a source of confidence and goodness. Above all, I want to connect people with their authentic money selves so they can be fulfilled—and do it with laughs, spark, and heart.

Outside of work, my passions include

1) Learning new things, magnet fishing, traveling, and having adventures with my teenage son.
2) Binge watching while knitting with my husband.
3) Researching and recording two podcasts I host–one is about spooky ghost stories, the other is a history-comedy show focusing on amazing women throughout history.
4) All things Broadway.