First Step Wealth Planning

06/16/2026

When one spouse suffers a stroke, everyone rallies around them.

The one left managing everything — the finances, the caregiving, the grief — often does it alone.

I wrote about someone I know who lived that. The Forgotten One.

What a stroke taught me about the spouse nobody plans for.

06/09/2026

I have been struggling with getting back to the level of fitness I want. I've done it more than once. Yet I still revert to behaviors that are inconsistent with what I want.

Why? Because understanding what to do and being able to do it are two different things.

I see this all the time in my work. People spend time and money developing a plan, only to sit on it.

I wrote about why that gap exists and what's actually missing.

Read the full essay on Threshold.

Understanding isn't doing

06/04/2026

Retirement is supposed to feel like a finish line.

For a lot of people, it doesn't.

This video is for the space between how it's supposed to feel — and how it actually feels.

You did everything right. And somehow, it still doesn't feel the wa...

06/02/2026

There's typically one spouse in a planning meeting who would rather be anywhere else.

They're not disinterested.

They just don't feel like this is their conversation to have.

I wrote about what that silence costs and the importance of involvement.

Why the quiet spouse in the room matters more than anyone realizes.

06/01/2026

Plans are useless. Planning is indispensable.

A plan changes the moment something new happens. Planning helps adapt to that change.

Your plan will change. The real value is in the thinking you do bef...

05/26/2026

Some of the hardest financial decisions aren't about the numbers.

They're about whether you trust yourself enough to act on what you already know.

I've watched people sit on a dream for years, not because they couldn't afford it, but because they couldn't give themselves permission.

I've watched someone stay trapped by a budget problem that had a simple solution she couldn't see, because decades of discipline had made it invisible.

Both of them already had everything they needed.

This week's essay is about those two moments and what they taught me about what people actually need from a financial advisor.

What got you here can get in the way of where you need to go.

05/19/2026

There is no cultural script for grieving the end of a career.

We cry at graduations. We mourn deaths. We recognize the empty nest.

But retirement? We hand someone a cake and tell them to be happy.

The financial media has a loud message right now: once the money is there, retire immediately. You're squandering time.

Maybe. But that message has nothing to say about what it feels like to lose the structure, the belonging, and the identity that work provided for decades.

I've been there. Not retired — but untethered. And I know what that silence sounds like.

This week's essay is about the grief nobody names, and why the fact that you feel it is evidence that it matters.

Please click the link to read the essay on my SubStack.

The silent grief of leaving a career behind

04/01/2026

Social Security claiming strategies are the subject of more heated debate than almost any other retirement decision.

After watching this play out countless times with people facing it firsthand, I wrote down what I think is really going on here.

Link in comments.

03/24/2026

There’s a part of retirement that doesn’t get talked about very often.

Most of the focus is on whether you’re financially ready. Whether the plan works.

But even when that part is handled, something else can show up. And it’s harder to explain.

I wrote something about that side of the transition.

If you work with people approaching or entering retirement, or you’re there yourself, this may resonate.

Link in the comments.

03/17/2026

We live in a time where there’s more financial information available than ever before.

But I’ve found that for a lot of people, that hasn’t made decisions easier. It’s made them harder.

At some point, more information stops being helpful and starts becoming noise.

Curious if others have felt this. Does having more financial information actually make things clearer or more confusing?

I wrote a piece on this if you’re interested:

Why more financial information hasn’t made financial decisions easier