To you, before you begin —

I’ve spent more than two decades working at the intersection of financial planning and mental health — first as a financial advisor, then as a researcher, and now as a Certified Financial Therapist™ with a doctorate in Personal Financial Planning. I lead financial wellness programming at Beyond Finance, where I work directly with clients navigating debt, financial stress, and the behavioral patterns that keep both in place.

You’re here because something about your financial life isn’t working the way you want it to. Maybe you’ve tried the budgets, the apps, the plans — and something keeps getting in the way. I know that feeling well. Not just professionally. Personally.

I lost my dad when I was 13. He’d been living with Multiple Sclerosis for most of my childhood, and both of my parents were insurance agents — so I grew up with an unusually clear view of what happens when life doesn’t go according to plan. Financially, emotionally, all of it. I watched my family navigate the collision of illness, loss, and money without a real roadmap, and something in me decided early on that I wanted to help people have a better experience of that moment than we did.

That’s what started me on this path. Not a love of spreadsheets. Not a fascination with markets. A deep, personal understanding that money is never really just about money.

I spent years in financial planning and coaching before I found the field of financial therapy — and when I did, it felt like finally having language for something I’d been seeing my whole career. The people I worked with weren’t struggling because they lacked information. They were struggling because of grief, fear, shame, identity, and stories they’d been carrying since childhood. The numbers were almost always secondary.

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve had my own complicated relationship with money. I’ve navigated debt. I’ve had to confront my own patterns around spending, around emotional recentering, around the way charged seasons of life can quietly undo even the best intentions. On paper, everything looked right — I was educated, I worked in finance, I knew the rules. But knowledge alone doesn’t make you immune to money struggles. I had to learn that the hard way.

That’s why I built the Financial Wellness RESET™ Framework. Five stages that move you from financial overwhelm to financial embodiment, starting not with your budget but with your nervous system and your story. Recenter. Examine. Simplify. Empower. Transform. Each one builds on the last, and together they do something no spreadsheet ever could: they change who you are with money, not just what you do with it. And that transformation can help you transform your financial picture completely.

This framework is the work of my career — built from what I’ve seen actually work for the people I’ve sat with, over and over and over again.

What I want you to know is that I haven’t just developed this work — I’ve watched it change lives. In my clinical work and in my role at Beyond Finance, I’ve sat alongside thousands of clients moving through this exact process. I’ve seen people who came in believing they were “bad with money” leave with documented evidence to the contrary. I’ve watched survival mode loosen its grip on people who had been living inside it for years. I’ve seen graduates of Beyond Finance’s program improve their self-reported financial habit scores by 42% on average. But what stays with me even more than the numbers are the moments — the relief in someone’s face when they finally understand why they’ve been stuck, the steadiness they begin to carry into financial conversations that used to overwhelm them, the quiet pride in someone realizing they can trust themselves with money again. Every one of those moments deepens my conviction that this work shouldn’t stay inside a clinical practice or a single program. It should be available to anyone willing to do it.

One more thing to know before you begin: I’m not just the person who designed this curriculum. I’m a person who has lived what it addresses. And I’m going to be with you through it — in the frameworks, the exercises, the questions I ask you to sit with. Every part of this curriculum was written with the belief that you shouldn’t have to do hard things alone.

There’s no failing this curriculum. There’s only becoming.

Let’s begin.