the-money-advice-no-financial-planner-talks-about-(my-mom-knew-it-all-along)-Feb-17-2026-restream
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Intentional Money Moves Live. I'm Leah Hadley, and this episode was recorded live and is brought to you in audio form so you can take it with you wherever you go. Each week, I tackle the money topics that matter most to women who are ready to build wealth with purpose and confidence from investing and retirement planning to navigating finances through some of life's biggest transitions.
No topic is off the table. Now. Let's get into it.
Hi there. Welcome back to Intentional Money Moves Live. I'm just getting myself set up here so I can hopefully see your comments and respond to any questions or comments you may have as we go. So just gimme one second to get on here. Oh, fantastic. The comments seem to be working well today. Oh, that's great.
So you guys, I think you can just put right into the comments, any questions, and I should actually be able to answer them today, which is fantastic. So if you're new, [00:01:00] I do wanna welcome you every Tuesday at noon. This is the place for real conversations about money. Not the kind where somebody's lecturing you about what you should be doing, but the kind where we actually talk about what's going on in your life and how to make money work for you.
So please drop a comment. Let me know if you're here, where you're watching from, and please ask any questions you have as we go. It's always a conversation. Hi Jennifer. Thanks for being here. All right. Today's episode is a little bit different from what I traditionally do tomorrow. Would've been my mom's birthday, so February 18th.
And many of you know that I lost my mom last year and it was honestly one of the hardest things that I have gone through. And even honestly prepping for this episode, I was getting very tearful as I was thinking about her. But I think my mom was an amazing teacher in a lot of different ways.
And it is my absolute pleasure to honor her and to share the lessons that she [00:02:00] shared with me. And, she really didn't just teach me how to be a good person, right? She taught me how to be intentional. And that's not something that you really get through a textbook or a course, but it's something that you can really witness as you see how somebody lives their life, right?
And so the lessons that she passed down to me, those are really. The foundation of everything that I teach right now, right? They're really woven into the Intentional Money Method. That's the book that I have coming out. It's actually, it's coming out next month. It's gonna be here in no time. I'm very excited.
But she did, she taught me how to be intentional with money. And I really wove the lessons that she shared with me through the book. So today I wanna honor her memory by sharing five lessons that she shared with me. And to give something that you can do really do actually do in order to to implement these things.
I do encourage you to grab. Your phone or a pen, take some notes because we will have some actionable things that I would love for you to take advantage of. Now, my mom, [00:03:00] I'm gonna say lesson one. It was really about reinvention just. Always being an option. You always have the option for reinvention.
My mom when she went to school for undergraduate, she was in accounting. She ran a commercial tile company with my dad when I was young. She was a business owner. She was a controller for my uncle's company. Actually, she helped my other uncle. She did so many different things. She had a stint in commercial real estate.
She actually, when she retired, she was director of financial aid for a college. She truly reinvented herself over and again. And I will say that she didn't just model it for me but she really pushed me to as well, some of you, maybe you've known me my whole life. I know many of you have just known me for the last couple of years, but I was a painfully shy child, like painfully shy, hide behind my mom, shy.
She pushed me to go to summer camp every year. That was way outside my comfort zone when I was 14. She encouraged me to travel internationally with a group of teens. When it came [00:04:00] time for me to apply for colleges, she actually encouraged me to apply outside of the state of Ohio where I grew up. So I would have a different experience, which is how I ended up at Bryn Mawr.
Something that. Quite frankly, completely changed the trajectory of my life. And she just, she had really seen a lot of, a lot in me that I just quite frankly, didn't see in myself yet, and she made sure, and this is the most important thing, I think when it comes to reinvention. She made sure I did not let fear make my decisions.
I'll say that again. She made sure I did not let fear make my decisions every single time, whether it was her own career reinvention or nudging me out the door. I will say she didn't just leap. She didn't just leap. She planned. She evaluated what was needed financially to make the transition possible.
She saved for things. She built a foundation. And I honestly, I think a lot about this when I work with [00:05:00] women who are going through a divorce or, maybe their kids are grown up, they're, you're dealing with an empty nest or a career change. There's this fear that this next chapter you're in is you're stuck.
It's just not true. Okay? I want to be clear about that. Reinvention is always possible, but it does require some intentionality, right? You can't just step into something now if you haven't positioned your resources to support it, right? So I would love to hear from you. If you are watching or if you're watching the replay, that's great too.
Have you ever reinvented yourself? Actually, I don't know if Maria's on today. I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Maria Fontana for her podcast. It'll come out later next month around the same time the book comes up. But I had the pleasure of being interview interviewed by her for her podcast this morning, and.
She's all about reinvention. If you get to hear her story. She was on my Intentional Divorce Insights podcast. She has just reinvented herself time and time again, and it's been so [00:06:00] inspiring to hear her story and listen to the way she shares. So any of you who might be listening or watching the replay, if you have reinvented yourself, maybe you're in the middle of a reinvention right now, I'd love to hear about it.
I'd love to hear what that looks like for you as far as an action that you can take this week. I want you to look at your finances, and I want you to truly ask yourself. I want you to just sit and really reflect on is there one area that no longer fits who I'm becoming? Is there one area that no longer fits who I'm becoming?
So what do I mean by that? Maybe there's subscriptions that you signed up for that you're just. You don't need anymore. Your life looks different right now. Maybe it's an investment strategy that doesn't make sense for you where you are at in life right now, right? Maybe it's a saving goal that was actually tied to somebody else's dream.
I want you to identify it to name it. That is the first step, and that's a huge step. So if you do that, get for you. The second lesson I wanna [00:07:00] share with you from my mom is about resourcefulness, and that is. At the end of the day, resourcefulness does beat a big bank account. My mom was a single mom for most of my life.
My parents divorced when I was eight years old. We were never wealthy, but I never felt like we were lacking either. There was never a sense of scarcity. Just a quiet confidence that with planning and with persistence, we would always have what we needed. And I actually remember sitting down with my mom and her showing me how she budgeted for the year.
And I always thought this was really interesting when I became a financial professional. 'cause I still budget for the year, but so often. People just budget for the month, and I think that's how their numbers get thrown off because they're not thinking ahead far enough. Okay. She was intentional about every do, every dollar and she really did approach financial challenges with a calm determination.
That quite frankly, I did [00:08:00] not fully appreciate until I went through my own divorce with three young kids. But here's what she taught me, financial confidence. It's not about having a huge bank account. It's about having a plan. It's about knowing your priorities and making decisions that are aligned with those priorities.
That is really the core of the Intentional Money method, and one of the steps that we share and teach people in the book is about. How do you align your spending with your purpose, with your goals? How do you spend with purpose? It's not about restriction. To be very clear, it's absolutely not about restriction.
It's really about clarity. It's really about alignment. And I wrote an entire chapter in the book about it. So many women that I work with feel like they need to earn more before they can feel in control. And the truth is. The truth is the feeling of control comes from the plan, not from the paycheck.
Okay? You can get more money and still not have a plan and still not feel confident. Okay? So here's your move for this week, and this is setting you up for our session next week. I'm really [00:09:00] excited. I'm gonna have, Jennifer Bush is one of our senior financial planners. She's gonna be on with me. She might be watching still, I'm not sure.
But she's gonna be on with me next week and I'm gonna interview her specifically about having a money date. What does that look like? We talk a lot about money dates. We talked about them when I did the challenge. So you're gonna learn a lot more from Jennifer next week, but in the meantime.
I do wanna encourage you to just set 15 minutes aside for yourself this week. Call it a money day. Call it what you want, but look at your accounts and ask yourself this question, do I know where my money is going? Do I know where my money is going? And if you don't, I want you to know you're not alone. I hear it all the time.
People feeling frustrated 'cause they're not building wealth as quickly as they think they could be. They just don't know where their money's going. Okay? And that's all I want you to do. Just take a look and see where your money's going. Okay. Oh, fantastic. Jennifer's here. She said she's excited to join me next week, so she's gonna have a wealth of information to really get you in the hobbit of scheduling that money date for yourself.[00:10:00]
So lesson three for my mom is that generosity. It really is a financial strategy. She really was one. The most generous people I've ever known. She gave her time, she gave her money, she gave her energy to causes and to people that she believed in. But here's what made her different from a lot of folks.
She planned for it. It was not an impulse, it was actually a line item, right? She built giving into her financial plan because it was a reflection of her values. Now growing up I learned about a concept called saka. It is a Hebrew word that often gets translated as charity, but it's really more about justice than it is about charity.
And it says that when you have more than you need, giving is not optional. It's an obligation not out of guilt. Not out of guilt, but out of connection. The person receiving is not beneath you. They're connected to you. And a community that doesn't take care of itself [00:11:00] that's not really a community. So the concept really does shape everything about how my mom approached, giving, and it shaped everything about how I approach it in my work today.
I wrote a whole chapter about this as well in the book about how Akah really taught me something. Most financial advice never does, and that's really important. I wanna be very clear that generosity is not the opposite of security. It can be part of it. When giving comes from a place of intention, from a place of justice, rather than guilt or performance, it stops feeling like a sacrifice.
It starts feeling that most purposeful thing that you could do with your money. And here's the flip side of it. Here's the flip side of it. If you're not intentional about it, it can actually become a source of guilt and resentment can actually replace your joy. Now, I'm not saying that you say yes to everything, or you overextend yourself, right?
And [00:12:00] that makes you feel behind. That's not what we're talking about here. That's not sedaka, that's burning. The, what did they say? I was gonna say, burning at both ends. I don't know. It's not coming to me right now. Anyway, you get the idea, right? What what my mom modeled for me was that you can be generous and you can still be financially grounded, right?
Those are not opposites. In fact, the more intentional you are with your money, actually the more generous you can afford to be. If you're watching live, or if you're sh you're here watching the replay, let me know. Is there a cause or a person that you wish that you could give more to and what might be holding you back?
What's holding you back from doing that? Now, here's your move for the week. I want you to look at your spending from last month and find one act of generosity you made, even a small one, a donation, a gift, buying someone's coffee. Then ask yourself, did that feel intentional? Or did it feel accidental? If you want your giving to feel purposeful and to [00:13:00] feel sustainable, you really do want that to be part of your plan.
So write down, cause a person organization that you wanna support, put a number next to it, honestly, even if it's $10 a month, that's intentional giving. Okay? Now, lesson number four is the one that I shared in the email that went out promoting this session, and that is to make room for joy. Now I shared that my mom was a single mom.
That money was often tight, right? She took a vacation every single year. Every year did not matter how tight the budget was. And when I say took a vacation, I'm not talking, we were not going to, Disney World and Universal Studios and these kinds of places, but we did go to lovely small towns.
Throughout the United States, one of our favorites that we went to many times when I was growing up when I was very young, we lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and we used to go to Helen Georgia up in the mountains, which wasn't very far from Atlanta. We used to go up to South Carolina sometimes.
I have spent quite a bit of [00:14:00] time in lots of random small towns throughout the country. Wasn't about the location, right? She believed in creating memories. And taking time to recharge. Some of my favorite memories are from those trips, honestly, like simple things of just laughing together, right? Or having some kind of like a random adventure without the pressure of everyday life.
Since losing her, this is one that I've held onto. Grief can feel. Grief can make joy feel very far away. Okay? And during those hard seasons that's when joy matters the most, quite frankly, right? Even something as simple as going for a cup of coffee, taking a walk with a friend who makes you laugh like it's a lifeline from a money perspective, this is where spending with purpose gets real.
Okay? So many women that I work with. So many women that I work with feel guilt around spending on themselves. They [00:15:00] will spend on their kids, they'll spend on their home, they'll spend on everybody else. But the idea of budgeting for their own joy feels selfish. And I wanna be clear. It's not selfish. It's not selfish.
It doesn't have to be extravagant. My mom proved that, right? It's small, thoughtful choices that make life feel full. When you build joy into your financial plan, instead of treating it like an afterthought, everything changes. Jennifer shared, my father was also a single dad since age eight. He worked as a male carrier and three, three kiddos full-time.
We always went on vacations each summer as a family. My favorite trips were road trips and camping and a trip to Yellowstone where we laughed our heads off in a ca one evening. I love that. That's awesome. I haven't been to Yellowstone yet, but it's definitely on the bucket list. I will get there for sure.
Okay. So if you don't have a joy line in your budget, I do want you this week, that's your action for this week. Add a joy line. Literally give it a name. Doesn't have to be joy line, right? But give it a [00:16:00] name. It could be, fresh flowers for $25 a month. It could be a dinner with a friend or saving toward a special trip, right?
The point is to make it so that you are planning a joyful expense. Not something that you're trying to justify after the fact. Okay, that's really important. All right. And last, but absolutely, certainly not least, that is lesson number five is to never stop learning. My grandmother got her master's degree when she was in her sixties.
My mom took classes at Baldwin Wallace University's Institute of Learning and Retirement literally up until just months before she passed away. She loved it. She loved to learn. She was always in a book club. She read constantly. She stayed curious about the world. And honestly, it's a family trait.
It's part of why I do what I do. I love to continue to learn. I love to share that lifelong learner kind of mindset is why I put such strong emphasis on education and empowerment in my work. [00:17:00] And honestly, it is at the core of what we do in the Empowered Sisterhood, and it really is the backbone of this book that I have coming out.
But here's what I want you to hear. You don't have to have it all figured out. There is so much power in being a beginner. There's power in staying open to new ideas and to give, giving yourself permission to evolve especially when it comes to money, especially when you're going through changes in your life.
Now, my mom was. Always my sounding board. She was always my sounding board. Whenever I faced a financial decision, she was there to help me think things through. She didn't always have all the answers. Nobody does, but she had wisdom and she had calm, and she did have financial wherewithal to help me figure things out.
And that truly is the inspiration behind the Empowered Sistered [00:18:00] because. Sounding board that was so critical to my own experience. So here's your move for the week. I want you to commit to learning. Something about your finances this week. Just one thing. It could be understanding what the funds in your 401k actually are.
We just did that whole masterclass last week about maxing out your 401k. It could be reading an article about estate planning. I recently shared a book that one of my friends published just with Silver, just came out with a book about estate planning. That's wonderful. It could be looking up your social security benefit, if you've never.
Established a credential on the Social Security Administration website. Get yourself set up with a log in there, right? Small learning actually compounds over time, just like money does. You don't have to take it all in at once. Just one little thing. One little thing. It's all going to compound over time.
And of course, if you want support in that kind of growth, that's what the Empowered Sisterhood is, and we are here for [00:19:00] you. So if you would like to join us, the invitation is open. So I'm gonna stay on for a couple more minutes and just see if there are any other questions that came up. It looked like I see the YouTube comments are working fine, I thought the Facebook ones were, and then I'm not seeing any come through, so let me just double check and make sure that nobody's feeling ignored.
'cause I would feel terrible about that.
I am trying to sort through all the tech challenges that I've been having. But anyway, I will I'll pull that up while I'm wrapping up what we talked about today. Okay. So let me just look to see if there are other comments or questions or feel free to pop 'em. If you're watching on YouTube, pop 'em in there.
If you're watching on LinkedIn, I think I should be able to see them. I think Facebook's the only one that's not coming through right now. But as far as a recap of some of the things that we talked about today we talked about lesson number one is really all about identifying an area of finances that just doesn't fit who you're becoming.
It might be the way you're spending, it might be the way you're earning it might be the way you're investing. Look at it, [00:20:00] see what doesn't fit anymore. Lesson two was that the action was encouraging you to just set a money date with yourself. Just set it up. Jennifer's gonna go deeper into some of the things that you might do on that date in the future, but this one is literally like just creating the habit, right?
Action Number three is to write down a cause or a person you wanna support this year. And intentionally allow yourself to put that line item in there and plan for it. Support it, right? Add that joy line into your budget if it's not already there. And last, but certainly not least, learn something new about your finances.
Just one thing. Just one new thing, right? If you do even one of these things this week. Just do one of them. I just went through five very simple, like short things that you can do, but just do one. You are already being more intentional with your money than most people are all year long if you just do one, and that's what this is about, right?
Now if you [00:21:00] wanna keep the conversation going beyond our live show every Tuesday, I just wanna reiterate that the Elm powered sisterhood is open. We have our financial coaching call this afternoon, 3:00 PM Eastern Time. That's where we dive deep into our members'. Financial questions. And then we have our masterclass for our sisterhood members next week, Tuesday at 3:00 PM Eastern Time as well.
And that really is, that's a really good one. If you're somebody who struggles with budgeting and cash flow, that's gonna be a really good class. All right. So I just wanna. Reiterate that you are all welcome in that space. I will include a link in the show notes or the comments to join the Empowered Sisterhood, if that's something that is of interest to you.
I wanna thank you for being here with me today, for letting me share some lessons that I learned from my mom, and preparing this episode and outlining what I wanted to talk about. There were definitely some cheerful moments, but. I'm hoping that I did her. I'm hoping that I did her justice.
She is an amazing woman. And I just wanna [00:22:00] take a minute to thank you for letting me share some stories about her with you and just for sharing this space for me, with me. And I will see you next week.
Thanks for listening to Intentional Money Moves Live. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to hit follow so you never miss one. Wanna join the conversation live? Tune in every Tuesday at noon Eastern time on YouTube. And if you're ready to take the next step in your financial journey, head over to watch her thrive.co.
To learn more about how my team and I can help you build wealth with purpose and peace of mind. I'll see you next week.
