A professional colleague felt she needed to ask her husband to use a $5,000 bonus to start her own consultancy. Her bonus. Her income. And she had to ask … her spouse? The issue for her was less about getting permission than assuaging her guilt for using her money on herself and not on her family. (Spoiler alert: Her spouse was completely supportive, so she did it, she’s wildly successful, and she’s never looked back.)

But I hear this a LOT.

Women feel stuck in their careers, relationships (yeah, I’ll go there) and general life situations for lack of creating a separate bucket of money (one of their own) and giving themselves permission to use it in the way THEY see fit.  Not all money is family money.  And you aren’t a bad person to carve off something of your own. To be clear, I’m describing a pool of money that is separate from the family emergency fund.  I call it the Forget You Fund.

Sometimes the money is already there, but we fail to segregate it and call it by its name.  Yet, all women of a certain age and income should have a fallback fund to:

• Take your marbles and exit a difficult work situation before you have your next employment/career opportunity lined up, if disengaging is essential;

• Provide safe alternative housing for a few weeks (or months) should you need to exit an unacceptable relationship; or

• Capitalize a second act or side hustle (i.e., fund your startup)

I’m convinced planners don’t talk about these things because the first two do not affect men as much as women. It’s a flat-out gap in the financial planning domain. The last is a challenge for all startups because undercapitalization makes everything harder. But I want to acknowledge something that every employed woman knows to be true:

You can be swimming along, outperforming your peers, be certain in your decisions and maintaining a rock-solid reputation. Then, like a bolt of lightning, some new executive shows up and things change, and not for the better: the company culture, the work process or maybe the freedom to exercise discretion all go downhill fast. Do you wait it out? At what cost?

Suddenly, someone has stolen your joy, and you find yourself spending the next six months coming home bitching about a role you “used to” love.  

Now, you can choose to be miserable, or you can choose to walk away, leaving Rome to burn and blazing your own “woman-of-a-certain-age” trail. “They” assume you will play by their rules.  But what if you could go somewhere else and change the rules to favor you?  When you walk away, you are exercising the only real power you have: the power to determine how you will be treated. 

I know. It’s happened to me three times in my career with a few variations on a theme. Each time, the organization did not understand my unhappiness because I was overperforming and well-compensated for my efforts. They just assumed I was satisfied because their quid pro quo was that I produce for them in exchange for money.

The reality is that my idea of reciprocal benefit was also dependent on my ability to have discretion to do right by my clients, not just to get paid. Or it was in protest of a sudden, unannounced significant compensation change, one they assumed we’d all just swallow. Or it was because of a merger and management shakeup, wherein I told them, with 6 months notice, that I was not sticking around for the drama.

When you care about what you do (like I did in all three scenarios,) the alignment with people for whom you do it matters. It’s important to acknowledge that something changed and neither you nor Barry Manilow are successful when you try to “get the feeling again.”

So now I’m going to tell you something I tell my corporate clients. Do yourself a favor and, if you haven’t already, start a Forget You Fund. Do it without any apprehension or guilt.  There’s room in your family savings for yours, mine, ours, and also mine.

You’ll be stunned by how much confidence and strength comes with a little extra bankroll.  Let me know if you agree. #WeRescueOurselves

Reading : Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke.

© 2024 Madrina Molly

The information contained herein and shared by Madrina Molly™ constitutes education and not investment advice.