Hello, and welcome. You’re listening to SuperPower Mommas, and I’m Laura Greco, your host, and I’m so excited to be talking with you today. We are speaking on this topic of how to improve your confidence by gaining clarity around your finances, and I have Jessica Weaver with me, and she is a wealth advisor.
Jessica’s mission is to help more women to gain control, clarity, and confidence over around their finances. She’s been working in this wealth management for about eight years, and what she noticed was that how women are not as involved in their finances, or the understanding of money, and it becomes overwhelming to them as a topic.
So Jessica’s mission, of course, is to help to bridge that gap, and help women to be more engaged, and she’s a mom. I met Jessica at a meeting that we both are a part of called, Believe, Inspire, Grow. She gave a beautiful presentation, she wrote a book, and anyway, I’m so excited to have her with us, so please welcome Jessica.
Hi. Hi, Laura. How are you?
I’m great. How are you?
I’m so excited to be here, and to be talking with you about Super Power Mommas. This is awesome.
Yeah, and you’re going to share your wealth with us. You’re a mom now, your little girl is about a year old now, right?
She turned one last week. I can’t believe it. She’s starting to walk now, too. It’s amazing.
Isn’t that great?
It’s a fun time, yeah. It gets better, and better.
Yes, it does. Yes, it does. And, you’ll learn more, and more as you go.
Oh, I’m sure I will.
So anyway, I love that you are looking to help people improve on their confidence, especially moms, or women. That will really help them to gain clarity with their fiances, and then gain that confidence as they go. So, we have a traditional question that we always ask mommas when they come on our show, or anyone, which is what is your momma super power?
I think my super power is really thinking outside the box when it comes to your money.
I think my super power is really thinking outside the box when it comes to your money. My whole mission is to make money not a taboo topic, that it’s approachable, that we need to be talking about it, and we need to be constantly trying to improve our relationship with money, just like we have relationships with our husbands, with our kids, our family, you have a relationship with your money, and that relationship, it needs its own TLC. It needs to be nurtured, all right?
Yeah, and I love how you say, “Money,” often, and deliberately. That can be an energetic trigger, couldn’t it?
It is, and people think money, and sometimes its too painful to deal with, so they avoid it. It overwhelms them, it stresses them out, and so, I make it a point of let’s talk about it, let’s talk about the big elephant in the room, and address it, because that’s the only way you can move forward with your life. We always think we need to figure everything else out first, and then I’ll address the money. But, I’m the complete opposite. I strongly believe, and I’ve seen it happen time, and time again with the women I work with, that we need to get the money under control, because it allows you to do all these other wonderful things with your life.
Beautiful. Jessica, I’m going to ask you this question, so you’re a mom of a one-year-old, and you’re doing your business, right? You’re running your business, and I think you work outside the home, right? With your business.
I do, yes.
You’re your own business, but you take it outside the home. So how does your think outside the box super power assist you as a mom, and in life in general?
The strongest person is one who asks for help.
Yes, we had to get very creative. My husband works as well, and he does shift work, and it’s always changing, so I found we need to take advantage of a few different things. One is having better structure, so instead of my schedule being all over the place of when I do evening appointments, when I do morning appointments, I need designated days, so that I know what the week’s going to bring, and if I need extra help, which leads me to my other thing, asking for help.
Sometimes we think being weak is when we ask for help, but it’s the strongest person who asks for help, and takes advantage of it. I know my family they want to help us, they want to be a part of our daughter’s life, so if I do have an evening appointment and we can’t be there, my mother-in-law is so happy to go pick her up from daycare, and put her to bed. She loves having that one on one time with her, when it’s just the two of them. We’re not hovering, she’s not worried about us.
So I think it’s having structure, asking for help, and being okay that not everything’s going to be perfect.
Beautiful.
Isn’t it? It’s not always going to work out exactly as you planned, what your expectations were, and that is okay. That is better than okay, because we stress ourselves out when we think everything needs to be put away, in the right time, and the right spot. We drive ourselves nuts, and I learned that the hard way. I was trying to keep it all together for so long, and then I just couldn’t do it anymore, and I felt like I was choking, I felt like I was alone, and reaching out to people to help and understanding it’s going to be messy at times, and that’s okay. It can be messy.
Yeah, and I love how you bring that out, because when we think of structure, we think of rigidness, right? So, I always said, as a mom before myself, I always said, “Schedules are a direction, and they’re set so that we can adjust.”
Oh, I love that. That’s true. Just know the structure’s there, but it can change, and it will change.
It will change, there’s a guarantee something will raise up that we don’t expect, right?
Yes, exactly.
But you also mentioned to me, briefly, that you have also used this outside the box thinking in other ways for your daughter and her preparation in life. Want to expand on that?
We do. We’re a big fan of daycare, and I’ve seen it already with her. She loves playing with other kids. She’s interacting with them, she’s giving them hugs and kisses, and waving to them, and it’s amazing to say is that I’m a big fan. Yes, somebody else might be raising my kid during the week, but they’re able to teach them things that I wouldn’t think to teach her at this time, or know how to teach her, or have the patience to teach her, is a big thing. And, that they can learn from so many different people in their lives.
Children are sponges. They’re absorbing all these different things.
They’re just sponges, they’re absorbing all these different things. So I think embracing that you don’t have to have the traditional family life where the mom’s at home, or taking care of the kids all by themselves. My husband is as involved as I am raising her, and I want that to be a huge part of it. I want him to have that bond, that relationship with her, because we talked about this before, I don’t think it’s healthy when the kids are the mom’s entire life, because the mom isn’t the kid’s entire life.
They need to have relationships with their grandparents, with their aunts, and uncles, with their cousins, all these different people, and that’s healthy. It’s helping them be social, and understanding how our world works with relationships and bonding. So, I think it’s so important. Being a mom makes me so happy, and I love it, but my work is what fulfils me.
Yes, and this is what I wanted to dial in on, is maintaining your autonomy as a mom. How do you see that as … You’ve met a lot of women closer to retirement age, who have become empty nesters, can you expand on the experience and the differences between what you’ve seen, or research you’ve done on this topic?
I will, and I saw it first hand, because my mom, she worked for my father, but that was part-time. We were really her life, raising us. She always says we forced her into early retirement. I’m like, “Well, that’s kind of mean to say, mom. I’m sorry I grew up. You had to knew it was coming.” But, I see it a lot with women when they don’t have something that gives them their identity.
So raising the kids is their identity, but then the kids move off, and they’re going to do that no matter how much to instill in them how much you are dependent on them, they will leave, and they should leave, it’s healthy. But when they don’t have something to fulfill them, to satisfy them, to give them purpose each day, they feel so lost, and if you’re removed, they connect with their friends in the same way anymore.
And, I also see it on a scary side, is they get stuck in a bad marriage, or bad relationship, and they don’t have an income, or maybe it’s a part-time income, a smaller income, and now they don’t know how they would support themselves outside of the marriage. Or, you start to settle for things in your life because you don’t have that confidence in yourself. Your identity is gone, and you don’t have the purpose, that confidence that can continue to improve your life, so I see it a lot, and there is a big difference.
And it’s also cool, a lot of the women who were staying at home moms, now they find this is their time. This is their time to really go out and find something they love to do, whether it’s a passion project, I call it a retirement career. Something where they can put these skills that they’ve been putting on hold, or they’ve been a little neglected to, but now they can use them and do something so cool with them, and that’s what gets me excited, when they really want to do something, something important in their life.
Yes, totally, and I want to … We have to take a short break, Jessica. But, I wanted to say that we’re going to go deeper into this, because I’d like to also explore the value that a mom who maintains her autonomy brings to her children, in a little deeper way when we get back. But for now, Jessica, would you please share with everyone how they can find you.
Yeah, so you can go … I have a blog, a popular finance blog called, Not Your Father’s Advisor, because I’m not your typical advisor. You can read that at jessicaweaver.com. There’s information about my number one best selling book, Strong Woman, Stronger Assets, there, and also about my upcoming events. I do events exclusively just for women throughout the year, they’re awesome, they’re educational, but they get you thinking outside the box. So go to jessicaweaver.com, and you can get all that good stuff there.
Beautiful. Thank you, Jessica. And, listeners, hang in there, we’re going to be right back after this break, and we’re going to dive a little deeper into this exploration of autonomy, and how fulfilling your own interests can actually benefit your children. So hang in there, we’ll be right back.
To listen to the entire show click on the player above or go to the SuperPower Up! podcast on iTunes.
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