Designing Your Next Chapter: The Financial Moves That Make It Possible

You’ve done the hard part. The debt is gone, the systems are running, the savings are building, and your financial life is finally stable. But once the question of “Am I okay?” quiets down, a new one tends to show up in its place: What do I actually want my life to look like now? In the final episode of the After the Hustle series, Shari walks you through how to move from simply managing money to intentionally aiming it. Because optimizing your finances without a direction just creates sophisticated anxiety. The real power of financial stability is the options it creates. Download the Now What? Money Reset - If you’re finally good with money but still wondering what comes next, this guide is for you. You’ll learn how to identify the next chapter you’re building toward, translate that direction into real financial strategy, and match your money to the timeline that makes your goals possible. Shari breaks down five common next-chapter paths women often find themselves drawn to—career flexibility, lifestyle expansion, work-optional timelines, security and peace, and building capacity for something new—and explains the financial moves that support each one. You’ll also walk through a simple three-sentence exercise designed to help you shift your money from automatic habits into intentional direction so your next dollars actually support the life you’re building. This episode closes the After the Hustle series by helping you move from surviving money, to stabilizing it, to directing it toward the future you want. You’ll hear: How to identify the next chapter you want your money to support The five most common directions women take in the post-chaos money phase The financial strategies that match each path How to align your money with short-, medium-, and long-term timelines A simple exercise to intentionally redirect your next dollars You’ll walk away with: Clarity on the direction you want your money to support next A framework for turning life goals into financial strategy A practical first move you can make to start funding your next chapter If you’re ready for personalized, judgment-free financial guidance, learn more about working with Shari. Shari Rash is the founder of GWA Wealth, a virtual advisory firm helping women make confident, values-aligned decisions with their money. Visit GWA Wealth to explore your next step. Talkin’ Points → where your money gets smarter. Real talk, practical tips, zero guilt straight to your inbox. Sign up here. Be sure to like and follow the show on your favorite podcast app! Keep the conversation going on Instagram @everyonestalkinmoney Shari Rash is a financial planner and Investment Adviser Representative of GWA Wealth, a Registered Investment Adviser. The information provided in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be construed as personalized investment, tax, or legal advice. Listening to this podcast does not create an advisory relationship with Shari Rash or GWA Wealth. All investments involve risk, including the potential loss of principal. Any references to specific investments, strategies, or securities are for illustrative purposes only and are not recommendations. You should consult your own financial advisor, tax professional, or attorney regarding your individual situation before making any financial decisions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Shop Black Friday appliance savings and get up to an extra $1,250 off select appliance purchases like GE Profile. Plus, free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. Make life easier with the fridge that doubles as your personal kitchen assistant. Or upgrade your laundry room with the UltraFresh Vent System Plus Front Load Washer. So your clothes stay fresh after every single wash. Shop Black Friday appliance savings with fast free delivery at The Home Depot. Offer valid November 4th through December 2nd at participating stores and at homedepot.com. U.S. only. See store online for details.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  Are you ever shopping online and suddenly a discount that helps you save pops up? It makes your day, sometimes even your week. Want that feeling month after month? Well, new customers who save by switching their home and auto insurance to Progressive save hundreds. Cue your happy dance. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Chronic migraine means 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more. Botox, onabotulinum toxin A, is a chronic migraine treatment that prevents headaches in adults. It's not approved for adults with migraine who have 14 or fewer headache days a month. Botox prevents, on average, eight to nine headache days and migraine probable migraine days a month versus six to seven for placebo.

• 1:16Speaker 03

  Huh, I'm having fewer headache days this month.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  Prescription Botox is injected by your doctor. Effects of Botox may spread hours to weeks after injection, causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's Disease, Myasthenia Gravis or Lambert-Eaton Syndrome, and medications including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Ask your doctor. Visit botoxchronicmigraine.com or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

• 1:58Speaker 04

  You can spend years asking yourself the same money questions. Am I okay? Am I safe? Am I doing enough? Am I behind? And for a long time, those questions make sense. They push you to save, pay off debt, fund an emergency fund, to get serious and to get your financial life together. But then one day, sometimes gradually, or sometimes all at once, those questions get quieter because you built the thing. The emergency fund is there. The retirement contributions are happening. The systems are working and you are no longer in chaos.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  And what shows up in the silence is a completely different question. What do I actually want my life to look like? That question is harder than most people expect because debt has a number. Savings goals have a target. Retirement accounts have limits. But figuring out what you actually want your money to make possible, that has no checklist, no gold star, no tidy finish line. So a lot of women do what high functioning women always do. They keep optimizing. Save more, invest more, do the next right thing, keep moving. But after nearly two decades of helping women with their money,

• 3:24Speaker 04

  here's what I can tell you. Optimizing your money without knowing what you're optimizing for is just sophisticated anxiety. It looks responsible. It sounds productive, but it feels hollow because you did not do all of this work just to end up with a better savings rate. You did it to have options. And today, we're going to talk about what to do with them.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Welcome back to Everyone's Talkin Money. I'm Shari, and if you've been with me for this whole series, I just want to say this has been real work. If you downloaded my Now What Workbook, you did the stability audit, you built the Protect, Build, Live framework, you looked at your money with more honesty and intention than most people ever do. Do not minimize that. And today, we finished what we started. If you haven't downloaded my workbook yet, there's still plenty of time to do so. Just check the show notes and download the Now What Workbook. This will walk you through what we covered in the first two episodes. This is the final

• 4:39Speaker 04

  episode of the series called After the Hustle: The Post-Chaos Money Phase. And today, we're talking about what comes after stability. Not how to save more, not how to be more disciplined, not how to optimize one more account. We're talking about how to actually aim your money at the life you want next, because managing money keeps you secure. But aiming money? That's what builds a life. So let's get into it.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  So just for a quick recap, for anyone who's jumping in, and then I want you to go back and listen to Episodes 1 and 2 if you haven't, because the work builds upon each other. In Episode 1, we did the stability audit. We measured your actual foundation, your emergency fund, your margin, your runway. Not where you think you are, not where you wish you were, but where you actually are. And for a lot of you, you found out you are more solid than you've given yourself credit for. In Episode 2, we built the Protect, Build, Live Framework. You chose your safety cap, you found your place in the investing stack, and you created

• 5:54Speaker 04

  a live allocation, an intentional, automatic funding of your actual life. Every dollar got a job. So now you have a stable foundation and a system for your surplus. You are managing your money well. And today, today is where we stop managing money and start aiming it.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  Managing money keeps you secure. Aiming money builds your life. Those are two completely different activities. And today, we are doing the second one. So let me start with something I see all the time. And I mean, all the time with women in the post-chaos phase. They are not lacking goals. They have goals everywhere. They've got a vision board somewhere, maybe a notes app full of things they want to do someday. Maybe a rough sense that they want to retire early, or travel more, or start something of their own. But when I ask them what they're actually working towards right now, financially, in this season of their life, there's a pause.

• 6:59Speaker 04

  And then usually some vague, "I just want to be more financially free." Or, "I want to have options." Or, "I just want to feel like my money is doing something." And those aren't bad answers, but those are accumulation answers. They're about the money itself. Growing it, protecting it, optimizing it. They're not about what the money is for. Here's the distinction I want you to make. Those goals that got you to this phase were accumulation goals. Grow the net worth, increase the savings rate, get to X dollar amount in retirement. Those goals are about the scoreboard. And they served you well. They got you here.

• 7:44Speaker 04

  But the goals that move you forward in this phase are life-shaping goals. They're about what your actual day-to-day existence looks like. How you spend your time. What you have the freedom to say yes and no to. What your energy goes toward. What your next five years feel like. Accumulation goals grow the number. Life-shape goals, design the life.

• 8:10Speaker 04

  And here's the good news. You do not have to invent this from scratch. After working with women in this phase for a long time, I've found that most of us are moving toward one of five directions. Not forever, just for this season. And when I share them, my clients almost always go, oh, yeah, that one. That's me. So let me give you the menu. Path one, career flexibility. This is for the woman who wants more room in her professional life. She's not necessarily trying to quit. She might want to downshift. She might want to negotiate better terms, more remote work, fewer hours, a role that doesn't require her to give 60 hours a week to survive.

• 8:55Speaker 04

  She might want the ability to walk away from a job that's no longer working without financial panic, being the thing that keeps her there. She might want to take a sabbatical, pivot to a different industry, or create enough space to figure out what she actually wants to do next. The core desire here is, I want my career decisions to be driven by what I actually want, not by what my mortgage requires. Path two, lifestyle expansion. This is for the woman who has been so focused on building the foundation that she forgot to actually fund the life she's building for. She wants to travel, not someday, but now.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  She wants to relocate or upgrade her living situation, or buy back her time by paying for things that drain her. She wants her daily life to feel better, richer, not in a flashing up, flashy, keeping up with anyone kind of way, in a, this is how I actually want to live kind of way. The core decision here is, I want my present day life to match my income and my values. Path three, work optional timeline. I want to be careful about how I frame this one because I see it misunderstood a lot. This is not early retirement in the grind until 40 and stop.

• 10:21Speaker 04

  This is about creating a point in time, maybe five years, maybe in 10, where work becomes a choice rather than a requirement. Where you could choose to keep working because you love what you do, or you could choose to stop, or scale back, or switch to something that pays less but fills you up. The financial goal here is not to stop working, it's to make working entirely voluntary. The core desire here is, I want to reach the point where I work because I want to, not because I have to.

• 10:59Speaker 04

  Path four, security and peace. This one doesn't get enough respect in the personal finance space because it's not glamorous, but it's completely valid. Some women in this phase don't want to pivot, or expand, or build something new. What they want is to sleep better, to feel like they've had enough cushion that one bad thing, one layoff, one health scare, one unexpected expense, doesn't destabilize everything. They want to eliminate the low-grade financial anxiety that has been running in the background of their life for years. The core desire here is, I want my financial life to feel genuinely safe, not just technically okay.

• 11:45Speaker 04

  Path five, capacity for something new. This is for the woman who has an idea, a business she's been thinking about, a creative project she's never made space for, a caregiving season coming up for a parent, a child, a family member, that she needs to be financially ready for, or a passion she's been deferring because she couldn't afford to give it any time or resources. This path is about creating the financial capacity to say yes to something that currently doesn't have room in your life. The core desire here is, I want to make space financially and energetically for the things I keep putting off. Take a moment with these five.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Don't overthink it. Don't try to choose the one that sounds most ambitious or most responsible. Choose the one that made something in your chest go, oh yeah, that one. And you only need to pick one for this season. One direction, one thing to aim at. Got it? Good. Because now we're going to talk about what that direction actually means for your money. This is the part where I pull my, put my full advisor hat on because I want to get very specific. I want you to hear your path, the one you picked, and walk away knowing exactly what the financial strategy looks like for that goal. We're going through all five.

• 13:12Speaker 04

  Even if yours isn't the first one I cover, stay with me. Because you might hear yourself in the framing of another path. And also, the people in your life are probably living in one of these. And this might help you help them.

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Shop Black Friday appliance savings and get up to an extra $1,250 off select appliance purchases like GE Profile. Plus, free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. Make life easier with the fridge that doubles as your personal kitchen assistant. Or upgrade your laundry room with the Ultra Fresh Vent System Plus Front Load Washer. So your clothes stay fresh after every single wash. Shop Black Friday appliance savings with fast free delivery at The Home Depot. Offer valid November 4th through December 2nd at participating stores and at homedepot.com. U.S. only. See store online for details.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  If your path is career flexibility, here is the foundational truth of this path, and I want you to really hear it. Your power in the workplace is directly tied to how long you can live without needing the paycheck. That's it. That's the whole thing. When you can financially survive without your current income for 12 months, you negotiate differently. You set boundaries differently. You say no to things that don't work for you. You don't stay in jobs that are making you miserable because the paycheck is the only thing keeping the lights on. So if career flexibility is your path, your financial strategy has three moves.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Move one, prioritize the brokerage account. The taxable brokerage, your freedom account, as I talked about in episode two, is your primary investing focus after the employer match and the Roth IRA. This is the account that can fund a transition. It's accessible, it's liquid, it grows. And when you need to make a career move that requires a gap or a step down in income, you have the resources to do it without gutting your retirement savings. Move two, build a 12 to 24 month transition runway. This is separate from your emergency fund. Your emergency fund is for disasters. Your transition runway is for decisions.

• 15:27Speaker 04

  It's the dedicated pool of cash or conservative investments that point, that you point at a specific professional move, whether it's a sabbatical, a pivot, a negotiation that might result in you leaving, or a career rebuild. It is the difference between feeling trapped and feeling free. Move number three, reduce your fixed expenses where possible. Every dollar you can take out of your required monthly spending increases your freedom ratio, meaning the ratio of what you can live on versus what you currently owe. The goal is not to deprive yourself. The goal is to increase the number of months

• 16:10Speaker 04

  you can sustain yourself without your current income. That number is freedom measured in time. If your path is lifestyle expansion, this path is for the woman who has been responsible for so long that she forgot how to actually live. And I say this with complete love because I know this woman. I've sat across from her. She has a beautiful savings account and she hasn't done anything fun in two years. If this is you, the financial strategy is actually simpler than you think, but it requires a mindset shift first. The shift is this, you have to stop treating your life as an afterthought.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  You have to stop funding your present life from whatever happens to be left over. And if you have to stop apologizing for spending money on things that make your life actually better. Here are the three moves. Move one, increase your live account intentionally. If you built the framework from episode two, you have a live account. The question is whether you funded it at a level that actually reflects what you want your life to look like. For a lot of women in this path, the answer is no. They set a number that felt safe rather than a number that felt true. This is your permission to revisit that number and increase it.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  Move number two, stop overfunding low yield cash. I see this all the time. Cash sitting in a savings account earning very little, way past the protect cap we established in episode two. That money has served its purpose. It is not producing security for you anymore. It is producing an illusion of security. The move is to redeploy it into brokerage, into a high yield vehicle, into an account that actually produces something. Move number three, automate the life spending so the guilt doesn't have a chance to show up. When that transfer happens automatically, you don't have to make a decision every time.

• 18:21Speaker 04

  You don't have to talk yourself into spending the money. It's already allocated. You already decided. The spending becomes execution, not permission seeking.

• 18:32Speaker 04

  If your path is work optional, this is the long game path. And if this is where you're pointed, I want to tell you something important. You are not behind. I know the internet can make it feel like everyone arrived at financial independence at 32 with a passive income portfolio and a newsletter about it. That is not real life. Building towards work optional is a multi-year project. And the financial strategy is about creating distance. Distance between your required income and your actual income over time. There's three moves here. Move one, increase your total investing rate year.

• 19:14Speaker 04

  You don't have to do it all at once, but every year you should be incrementally putting more of your income to work. 1% more into the brokerage, maxing the Roth if it's not already maxed, gradually increasing the 401k contribution. Compounding is patient. The more you feed it and the longer you let it run, the more options it creates. Move number two, optimize your retirement accounts contributions strategically. For this path specifically, where the goal is eventually having enough invested to support a work optional life, you need to think about the tax picture now versus later.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  A mix of tax-deferred accounts and Roth accounts gives you flexibility in retirement to manage your tax burden. This is an area where working with a financial advisor can genuinely pay for itself because the strategy gets personal fast. Move number three, reduce your future required income. This might be the most underrated move in this whole episode. The less you need to live on now, not through deprivation, but through intentional design, the shorter the timeline to work optional. Every expense you eliminate from your fixed monthly costs is not just a savings today.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  It's a reduction in the number you need your investments to produce. It makes the whole thing closer and more achievable. If your path is security and peace, I want to spend a moment validating this path because our culture, especially in personal finance, tends to look down on it. The narrative is always about growth, ambition, building something bigger. And if you're here saying, "I don't want bigger, I want safer," that is not a small goal. That is a completely legitimate thing to build toward. There is a version of financial well-being that looks like this. You know that no single bad thing can take you down. You are not one layoff,

• 21:24Speaker 04

  or one medical bill, or one market correction away from crises. You sleep without the background hum of money anxiety. That is not nothing. That's actually a lot. There's three moves for this path. Move one, extend your runway. If your current protect layer covers three months, work towards six. If you're at six, work towards nine or 12. This is the difference from the transition runway I described for career flexibility. This is about your core safety net feeling genuinely deeply adequate, not just technically sufficient, deeply adequate. Move number two,

• 22:07Speaker 04

  eliminate remaining fixed obligations. If you're carrying any fixed monthly payments, debt, subscriptions, lease obligations that are creating a floor on your required spending, strategically paying those down reduces your monthly financial vulnerability. Every obligation you eliminate is a reduction in how much you need to bring in every month. Move number three, increase your protected cash within reason. I want to be careful here because there's a version of this that becomes like hoarding, cash piling up in a savings account because the number never feels big enough and that anxiety actually never goes away.

• 22:52Speaker 04

  If that resonates with you, that's worth exploring because it may be about more than the money. But if you have a genuinely underfunded protect layer and a concrete number in mind that would make you feel safe, fund it. Give yourself permission to prioritize security right now. If your path is capacity for something new, this is the path I find the most energizing to talk about because the women on this path are usually sitting on something real. A business idea they've been holding for two or three years. A creative project that keeps showing back up. A caregiving season they know is coming and they want to be ready for.

• 23:34Speaker 04

  A passion they've been telling themselves they'll pursue someday. And the thing that's almost always in the way is not the idea itself. It's the absence of financial permission.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  They can't see how to fund the time, the resources, the initial investment that making the thing real would require. Three moves. Move one, create a dedicated opportunity fund. This is separate from everything else. Name it after the thing, the business, the creative project, the caregiving season, whatever it is. Set up a separate account. Fund it with a monthly automatic transfer and let it build. Having a dedicated account does something psychological. It makes the goal real. It signals to your brain and to your nervous system that this is actually happening. You are not just thinking about it anymore. You are funding it.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Move two, prioritize the brokerage over retirement for this season. If your next chapter requires financial flexibility, capital you can access without penalty, without age restrictions, without complicated rules, the taxable brokerage account is where that capital lives. That doesn't mean abandoning retirement early. It means that for this specific season, your freedom account gets priority because what you're building toward requires accessible money.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Move number three, fund your time. This is the most overlooked move in this whole category. The thing that usually blocks women from building something new is not money, actually. It's time. They're working too much. They're too depleted. They have no margin in their days for the creative or entrepreneurial or caregiving work they want to do. So, part of the financial strategy here is funding the things that buy back time. The household help, the outsourced tasks, the anything that returns hours to you. Your time is the resource. Protect it financially. Okay, you have your path. You have your moves.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  Now, I want to give you one more piece of the framework because it changes where your money goes and it's simpler than you might expect. I want to ask yourself one question. How many years until you want your next chapter to be available to you? Not when you'll start working toward it. You're doing that now. But when do you want that chapter to actually be open? When do you want to be able to say, okay, this is now possible for me? Is it in the next zero years or two years? Is it a medium term goal, three to seven years out? Or is it a longer arc, 10 years or more? Here's why this matters.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Your timeline tells you where to hold the money. If your timeline is zero to two years, the money you're earmarking for this goal needs to be in cash or in very conservative investments, not the stock market. Because if you need this money in 18 months, you cannot afford a market correction between now and then. High-yield savings accounts, short-term CDs, money market, liquid and protected.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  If your timeline is three to seven years, you have enough runway to let money grow, but not so much that you should be locking it in long-term retirement accounts. This is the brokerage account territory. You're investing in a diversified portfolio. You're accepting some market volatility, and you're letting time do some work for you. But you maintain the flexibility to access these funds when the window opens. If your timeline is 10 years or more, you have the gift of time and you should use it. Retirement accounts, long-term brokerage investing, compound growth over a decade or more. This is where the math gets really good in your favor. The trade-off is access.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  You're locking some of this up in exchange for the tax advantages and maximum growth potential. Most people are building towards something on multiple timelines at once, and that's fine. Your short-term freedom runway looks different from your 10-year retirement strategy. They can coexist. The framework just helps you match the right money to the right timeline. So write down your answer. How many years? And then check, is the money you're designating for this chapter actually sitting in the right vehicle for that timeline? Because a lot of women have three-year goals funded with 10-year money. Or worse, 10-year goals sitting in a savings account doing nothing.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  The alignment matters. All right, we're in the final stretch now. This is a series finale exercise, and I want you to do this one out loud if you can, or write it down. Again, download the Now What Workbook. The link is in the show notes. But please, don't just passively listen to it. Because here's what I want to know. Insight without action just becomes another thing you know, and you do not need more things you know. You need one thing to do. So we're going to finish three sentences. And the third one has a date on it. Because a money move without a date is just a nice idea,

• 29:11Speaker 04

  and you are past the nice ideas phase. Sentence one. I am done automatically funding blank.

• 29:22Speaker 04

  I want you to name the thing your money has been going to by default, not because you consciously choose it, but because it was the past of least resistance. The thing you've been funding out of habit, or fear, or inertia, not out of intention. For some of you, this is excess cash. Your savings account has been growing and growing past any reasonable cap because adding to it felt safe and stopping felt scary. And now you have more cash than your protect layer actually needs, and it's not producing anything.

• 29:57Speaker 04

  For some of you, it's maxing retirement by default. You set it and forget it. And it's been getting maxed every year without ever asking whether that's actually the right move for where you are now. Whether your brokerage account is underfunded, whether your live allocation exists, whether the money is going to the right places in the right order. For some of you, it's tracking every dollar, the obsessive budgeting that made sense when you were getting stable. But now that creates more anxiety than clarity. There's a version of financial monitoring that serves you, and there's a version that's just guilt on a spreadsheet. If you're past the chaos, you might be ready to let the system run and stop watching every penny.

• 30:43Speaker 04

  And for some of you, it's over-saving past enough. It's adding money to accounts that are already funded, already full, already doing their job because stopping felt like losing control. Because more always felt better. Because you hadn't given yourself permission to say, "This layer is done." So what are you done automatically funding? Name it, say it out loud, write it down. Sentence two, I am now intentionally funding blank. This one is the flip side. This is where the surplus goes instead. And the word I want to underline here is intentionally,

• 31:25Speaker 04

  because the goal is not just to move money around somewhere else by default. The goal is to make a conscious, deliberate choice about what your next dollar is building. For some of you, this is your flexibility account. The brokerage that funds the career pivot, or the sabbatical, or the negotiating power. The account that makes optionality real and not just theoretical. For some of you, this is your time. The household support, the outsourced tasks, the friction reducers that return hours to your week and energy to your life. This is a legitimate and intelligent use of your money. For some of you, this is your health, in a comprehensive sense. Not just the gym membership you already have, the therapy,

• 32:10Speaker 04

  the specialists you've been putting off, the sleep support, the nutritional support, the things that make your body and mind function at the level your ambitions require. You are an asset. Investing in you is not self-indulgent. It's strategic. And for some of you, it's the opportunity fund. The dedicated account for the businesses, the project, the creative work, the caregiving season, the thing you've been wanting to make room for. What are you now intentionally funding? Say it. Sentence three. The first transfer I'm making is blank on blank date. This is where the episode becomes real money. A direction without a first move is just a direction.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  A first move without a date is just a plan. A first move with a specific date is a commitment. I'm not asking you to overhaul your financial life this week. I'm asking you for one transfer. One account opened, one automatic contribution adjusted, one number changed. Maybe it's opening a brokerage account this weekend and funding it with the first small contribution. Maybe it's going into your 401K. Pay Portal tomorrow and adjusting the contribution percentage. Maybe it's setting up a new savings account, naming it the thing, and automating a monthly transfer into it and starting the first of next month. Maybe it's calling your financial advisor or finding one or booking the conversation you've been putting off.

• 33:40Speaker 04

  Whatever it is, make it specific. Make it small enough to actually do and give it a date. That's the exercise. Three sentences. That's the whole thing. And if you did it, you actually said the words or wrote them down. You have just done more intentional financial planning than most people do in a year. So I want to bring this full circle because we've covered a lot of ground over these three episodes. And I want you to see the arc of it. In the beginning of this phase, the early years, the chaotic years, you were the survivor. You were the woman keeping everything together, getting through the month, managing the emergencies, making the numbers work against the odds. And that version of you was strong in ways that don't get enough credit.

• 34:25Speaker 04

  Then you became the stabilizer. You built the foundation. You created the emergency fund and the retirement contributions and the margin. You answered the question, am I okay with a real, solid, documented yes? And that version of you was disciplined and focused and determined. And then you became the optimizer. You read the articles and listened to the podcasts and tried to max the right accounts in the right order. You stayed informed. You stayed sharp. And that version of you was hungry for growth, for security, for doing it right. But there's a version of you that we haven't fully stepped into yet. And that to the series has been building toward.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  You are the allocator of capital toward your life. Not just a life that works, not just a life that's financially safe, a life that's actually yours, a life that reflects what you value, what you want and what you've been working toward, a life with direction. You did not spend years building a solid financial foundation so that it could just sit there, looking responsible, earning compound interest, technically doing fine. You built it so you could aim it at something. And now you have the framework to do exactly that. Before I send you off, I want to give you something that lasts beyond the series,

• 35:48Speaker 04

  a practice, something you come back to, not daily, not every month, but once a year. A rhythm for staying intentional with your money as your life keeps changing. The Now What Money Reset walks you through the exact recalibration we talked about in this series, so you can figure out what phase you're in, stop over optimizing the wrong things, and start directing your money toward a life you actually want. Inside, you'll run your stability audit, identify where your surplus should go using the Protect, Build, Live framework, define what enough looks like for you, and choose one intentional shift to make this year. It's not a budget, and it's not another financial

• 36:32Speaker 04

  checklist. It's a reset for the phase after you've already gotten your financial life together. You can find the link in the show notes. Remember, money is a tool to help you live your life that you are designing. I'll see you next time.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Thanks for listening to Everyone's Talkin Money. Before we go, a quick reminder, the information shared on Everyone's Talkin Money is for informational and entertainment purposes only and shouldn't be considered personalized investment advice. Shari Rash is an investment advisor representative of GWA Wealth, a registered investment advisor, and investing involves risk, including the potential loss of principal.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Shop Black Friday appliance savings and get up to an extra $1,250 off select appliance purchases like GE Profile. Plus, free delivery on appliance purchases of $398 or more. Make life easier with the fridge that doubles as your personal kitchen assistant. Or upgrade your laundry room with the Ultra Fresh Vent System Plus Front Load Washer. So your clothes stay fresh after every single wash. Shop Black Friday appliance savings with fast free delivery at The Home Depot. Offer valid November 4 through December 2 at participating stores and at homedepot.com. U.S. only. See store online for details.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones. Like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones. Like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.