Women's Money Wisdom

Money is rarely the real problem. More often it points to the life underneath. Melissa Joy, CFP®, is joined by her friend Liz Hand, CFP®, ACC, a second-generation financial planner and certified coach, to talk about Liz's new book, Money Is a Mirror, and what our relationship with money can reveal. Liz traces the book back to the farming sayings she grew up around in the Midwest, such as wast...

The great wealth transfer is usually framed as a story about accounts changing hands. Melissa Joy, CFP®, and Tiffany Charles, a wealth advisor at Traction Financial Partners , talk about everything that surrounds that headline: aging parents, shifting care needs, caregivers stretched across work and family, and the paperwork, phone calls, and decisions that land on the next generation. Tiffany sha...

Melissa Joy, CFP®, sits down with Claire Smith , CEO of Beyond Investing and founder and Chief Investment Officer of Beyond Impact, to talk about building a portfolio that reflects personal values. Claire traces her path from investment banking and investment consulting to a decision to devote her career to vegan, climate-conscious investing. She explains how the rules-based screens behind the Veg...

Doing great work is supposed to protect your career. But what happens when being a high performer, speaking up, or challenging the status quo is exactly what puts you at risk? Melissa Joy, CFP® sits down with Shannon Nutter , a global executive, board director, and founder of My Classroom Economy, whose career includes leadership roles at Vanguard, Deloitte, and General Motors. Shannon is the co-a...

Charitable giving can grow your impact, pass your values to the next generation, and lower your tax bill, but only when the intent to give is genuine.  Melissa Joy, CFP®, sits down with Grace Bernhardt, Director of Charitable Solutions and Advisor Experience at Raymond James Trust, for a wide-ranging conversation on charitable giving philosophy and the planning tools available to put it into pract...

Melissa Joy, CFP® sits down with Hugh Massie , founder of DNA Behavior International, to explore how our natural, hardwired behavior shapes the way we make financial decisions, especially under pressure.  Hugh traces his path from CPA to behavioral pioneer, explaining how a simple observation, that people revert to their instinctive behavior when money puts them under stress, led him to build an o...

Most people have never heard of an ABLE account, but it may be one of the most useful and underused tools in disability financial planning. Melissa Joy, CFP®, is joined by Scott de Varona, division director of MiABLE, Michigan's ABLE savings program, to explain how these accounts let people with disabilities save and invest money without jeopardizing benefits like Medicaid, SSI, and SNAP.  Fo...

After her husband Doug's sudden death in 2023, Samina Bari discovered that having a will, a trust, and a team of trusted professionals in place made almost no difference in the chaos that followed. What she needed was not a checklist, but a guide, someone or something to tell her what to do first, second, and third while she was too overwhelmed to think clearly. That gap became the foundation...

Historian and investor Joseph Moore, PhD, spent over a decade digging through 300 years of American financial advice to find out what actually worked, and what everyday people, not just the Rockefellers of the world, were told to do with their money. In this conversation with Melissa Joy, CFP®, Joseph explains why Americans used to say “go ahead” instead of “get ahead,” what that shift in language...

Midlife comes with plenty of taboo topics that rarely get discussed together: money, sex, and the fantasy of burning it all down. Melissa Joy, CFP® sits down with Lindsay Goldwert, a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Slate, and MarketWatch, and the author of Bow Down: Lessons from Dominatrixes on How to Be a Boss in Life, Love, and Work, a Glamour Magazine Be...

Retirement talk tends to fixate on a magic number, but Melissa Joy, CFP®, and fellow financial planner and podcaster Stephanie McCullough argue the real work happens well before and long after that number is reached. In this candid conversation, the two planners compare notes on what they see in their own practices: clients who retire on a fixed rule of thumb only to discover it doesn't flex...

What is money actually for? On this episode of Women's Money Wisdom, Melissa Joy, CFP®, welcomes Shanna Due, CFP®, founder of Due Financial and editor of the book series More Than Money and Even More Than Money, back to the podcast to talk about her newest project.  Shanna walks through how a group of advisors turned an idea into a traditionally published book, why the follow-up book needed t...

Real estate decisions carry enormous financial weight, and yet many people navigate them with a realtor who treats the work as a side hustle rather than a true advisory relationship. Melissa Joy, CFP® sits down with Donna Castillo, a top 1% producer realtor with Intero Real Estate Services in Silicon Valley, to talk about what separates a transactional agent from a real financial partner. Donna sh...

Most investors assume the key to building wealth is picking the right stock. Melissa Joy, CFP®, says the far more important decision is how you structure your portfolio in the first place, and how much risk you choose to take on. In this solo episode, Melissa breaks down asset allocation, the mix of cash, bonds and stocks that make up an investment portfolio, in plain language, without requiring a...

AI has made everyday life more convenient, but it has also given scammers a powerful new set of tools. In this episode, Melissa Joy, CFP®, is joined by Patrick Coughlin, CEO of Savi Security and author of the new book The Dark Side of the Boom: How Scammers Hijacked the AI Revolution. After building and selling a cybersecurity company to Splunk, Patrick shifted his focus to protecting everyday fam...

What would it look like if your financial plan actually included a line item for aesthetics? Melissa Joy, CFP®, sits down with Stephanie Stewart, PA-C, founder of The Aesthetic Method , an award-winning medical spa in Ferndale, Michigan, to have the honest conversation that most financial planners and patients avoid entirely. From the secret dollars women squirrel away for skincare to the emotiona...

Debt is one of the most emotionally charged topics in personal finance -- and one of the most common. This week Melissa Joy, CFP®, sits down with Bruce McClary, lead spokesperson for the National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC), to take the stigma out of the conversation and walk through what it actually looks like to get professional help with debt. Whether you're watching balances c...

In many households, one person quietly carries the full weight of the family's financial life: tracking premiums, coordinating with advisors, managing the budget, and planning for the future. Melissa Joy, CFP®, founder and president of Pearl Planning, calls this person the family's chief financial officer, and she has been seeing the role come up repeatedly in client conversations.  Whet...

As we move into the second half of the year, Melissa Joy, CFP®, takes a solo deep dive into five major themes shaping the current investment landscape. From artificial intelligence and IPO cycles to persistent inflation and the resilience of employment, Melissa unpacks what is actually happening in the markets and what it means for your financial life. Rather than reacting to pessimistic headlines...

High-achieving women often wear exhaustion as a badge of honor, pushing through until the warning signs become impossible to ignore. For Molly Rosen , co-founder and co-CEO of Project Next Leadership, that moment came while driving between obligations, fantasizing not about a vacation, but about simply being allowed to stop. That recognition led to a sabbatical that stretched from one year to six,...

Almost everyone has heard of a prenup, but very few of us have actually sat down and thought one through in practical terms. In this episode, Melissa Joy, CFP®, opens up a candid, surprisingly approachable conversation about what prenuptial agreements really are, who they are for, and why they belong in the financial planning discussion. Whether you are considering one for yourself or thinking abo...

Women are told to lean in, negotiate, and step up. And many do. But new research reveals that doing all the right things still isn’t enough — and may actually work against them. On this episode of Women’s Money Wisdom, Melissa Joy, CFP® , sits down with award-winning journalist and author Stefanie O’Connell to unpack the systemic forces that penalize women for their ambition, and what that means f...

What does it look like to turn a hobby into a thriving business — with no roadmap, no industry model to follow, and a drafty warehouse as your starting point? Melissa Joy, CFP®, sits down with Christy Howden, CEO and co-founder of Wolverine Pickleball, to trace an extraordinary entrepreneurial journey from stay-at-home mom to leader of one of the country’s first pickleball-centric destination faci...

The financial news cycle moves fast, but the fundamentals of investing have not changed. Melissa Joy, CFP® sits down with Ben Carlson, Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management and author of five books including his latest, Risk and Reward, to explore what history actually teaches us about markets, human nature, and the psychology behind smart long-term investing. Be...

Nearly a quarter of Americans have no traditional next of kin, yet the financial planning industry has long operated as if everyone will eventually have children. Melissa Joy, CFP® sits down with Maddy Roche, co-host of the Child Free Life by Design Podcast and Chief Growth Officer of Partnerships for Child Free Trust, to talk about what changes and what becomes possible when you are building a fi...