Just make more money than you know what to do with, and then everything will work itself out.

This is the mantra that I didn’t know I had. I think it dates all the way back to age 11, when I decided that being an accountant was the perfect career. 

The AICPA had put together marketing materials. Somehow, these materials made their way to Marion Junior High. They hyped accounting degrees as “The one degree with 360 degrees of possibilities.” Oh, there was nothing sexier to 11 year old Ranie than all those possibilities… one of which was (and is)preparing tax returns out of your home. I would never be out of a job. I found myself enamored with becoming a CPA.  I made a choice then and there, and I honestly never ever looked back.  Because my biggest fear, then and now, is not having enough money to do something I want to do – from buying a house, to taking a vacation, to taking care of myself, to sending my kids to college. 

My mom had a friend whose husband was a CPA.  While I wasn’t told that this was the world’s best profession, at least directly, but it certainly came up as a relevant fact that “well, they have plenty of money, because K is a CPA.”  Wow – the glamour.  It wasn’t just accountants though, really. I always felt a sense of envy when the subject of money came up. Money was something others had, that we didn’t, and it was worth coveting.  Girl, meet money.  It’s the thing that will keep you happy and warm at night and the envy of the whole town.  

My mom was always good with numbers and bookkeeping, whether for the household or our small baptist church, and when I took my first accounting class in high school, I really was smitten (and not just with the hot teacher who was also the track coach).  Double entry accounting is an incredibly elegant concept, and to this day I continue to be amazed with the fact that someone must have come up with this system out of seemingly nowhere, and it’s absolutely ingenious.  Everything comes out evenly, it balances, and the numbers TELL A STORY.  Two of my favorite things – stories and basic math.  

The real draw was the fact that with this magical CPA designation, I would always be able to find work, always be able to make money.  And this was important.  My mom worked as a bank teller between having me and my youngest sibling, but after staying home once she had her third, it took her a long time to find her home in a job – and honestly, she really never did.  Eventually, she became a business owner when she set up a home daycare that was incredibly successful for 20 years. But when I was younger, my mom seemed to float from job to job, just doing something to help (isn’t that an interesting word?) bring in extra income when we needed it.  We always seemed to need it. But the level of unhappiness and frustrations she experienced in most positions were never really worth giving up the time with us in the long term. 

I want to be clear that I mean no disrespect to my mother, who did her absolute best, when I say I wanted no part of a life like hers.  Married (ugh), saddled with kids (3 of them!), dependent on another person for everything financial and ultimately, incredibly busy with shit that has nothing to do with herself.  Literally the stuff of nightmares – at least for young me.  Kind of for current me, honestly – though obviously I had to get over some of those things.  

What I wanted, what I still crave, what I want for my daughters, is a concept that I never could have defined until well into adulthood – Financial Wellness.  It certainly manifested in the early years as just personal independence – the freedom to decide what I’ll do at any given time without anyone else’s opinion (see ‘string of failed relationships’ in a future chapter, folks), and that desire was enough to drive me to a bachelors degree, then a master’s, then a CPA license and a job with a Big 4 Accounting firm when I graduated.  

I now have one of those careers that no one really would have scripted looking ahead – you can only connect the dots in hindsight.  During my decade in public accounting, I effectively had a new job description at least every two years. I wanted to try everything – and turns out, I explored many of those 360 degrees of possibilities.  Sarbanes-Oxley 404 was brand new to the accounting world when I began my career, and I raised my hand to learn.  This led me to several other paths which would bore most of you to tears. By the end of my “career” in accounting, I was working on a team called Tax Performance Advisory – shorthand for consulting on process transformations necessitated by software adoption.  I got to see the inside of corporate tax departments, pick apart how people worked with each other and with their systems (spoiler alert, rarely well), and use design thinking rather than trying to follow rules that literally no one understood.  When it comes to process, there are only “best practices” – there are no perfects and it’s ever changing.  I love that to this day.  It was really, really fun work.

I decided it was time to leave my job at EY because I had met my now husband, who was from St. Louis. If you know anyone who lives in St. Louis, you know that either they grew up here or they married someone who did.  St. Louisans don’t leave!  For me to make partner, which was always the goal, a move from the area would have been 99% certain.  And I’ll be honest – that career is fucking exhausting.  You’re constantly working with some of the smartest people you’ll ever come across, from the firm’s own partners to CFOs, CEOs and tax professionals.  The universe of law to learn is endless and always changing, subject to interpretation, and then treated as gospel until it changes again. It’s such a struggle to keep up while those around you seem to have absorbed it in their sleep, if they even slept.  Impostor syndrome was such a relief to learn about, to realize other people felt this way – but for a DECADE, I honestly can’t remember ever feeling smart.  I remember feeling like I was possibly the dumbest person in the room, in several rooms – and looking back, I very well may have been.  What I didn’t know was that even being in those rooms was a result of being intelligent enough to be there, but that didn’t matter then.  But I digress… I needed to stay in St. Louis, so I looked elsewhere.  I looked at some jobs that made me want to vomit even thinking about them – showing up to the same desk in the same dreary headquarters building to do the same boring work every day/week/month/quarter forever… I just can’t.  For one of my dear friends, the transition to financial planning had been an excellent fit for her several years earlier, and an introduction was made.  Blah blah, fast forward, I didn’t know what I didn’t know, then magic, then Plancorp.  

For all of this, though, my time in public accounting was pretty much paycheck to paycheck.  I still have the spreadsheets to show it.  I graduated with something $40k in student loans and $6k in credit card debt. That debt crept up to $8k during my first year or two in the working world.  I didn’t even contribute the minimum/match amount to my 401(k) in my first few years at KPMG. It simply wasn’t a thing I felt I could afford on top of rent, a new car payment, student loan and credit card payments… and I had to have nice clothes to wear to work, right?  I can still remember my starting salary, $45,500, and thinking “holy shit, there’s going to be so much money to save.”  Didn’t take long to realize, holy shit indeed, I could barely make it work, and I had NO safety net.  A 401(k) was the least of my worries – my dad had a pension. KPMG had a pension. It would probably be fine, right?  My main concern was freeing up enough room on my maxed out credit cards that I could at least pretend I’d be ok in the event of an emergency.  

So let me be clear – I have a degree IN ACCOUNTING.  A Master’s degree in TAXATION.  For both of these degrees, finance was a required part of the curriculum – and I was less than clueless about savings, let alone investing, for at least the first decade of my professional career.  That’s where the mantra came in – just keep making more money, more and more, until you don’t even know what to do with it.  As long as I made enough, and never thought about retiring, it would all be fine.  Thank God it has been fine, but it just as easily could have been a disaster.  I can’t sit back and think of all the other women on this same journey without wanting to do something, anything, to be of assistance.  So here we are – Girl, meet money.  It will keep you warm and happy and… well, that’s what we’re here to talk about.

Money is hard.  It’s fraught with complexity, and I don’t mean the investments.  I mean earning it, spending it, saving it, investing it.  It’s all tied into our emotions and our most vulnerable places.  Our memories, good ones and bad ones, have so much to do with money.  While this is the case for everyone, not just women, I have seen in my career that women tend to show less confidence and more fear when it comes to money, and I truly attribute this to a lack of education around it, both currently and historically.  This is what has motivated me to share my knowledge with others, both in my career and through my writing.  As a mother of daughters, I hope for them that this is just the beginning.