I would never say I was really ever irresponsible with money. Once I got out of the college debt phase and became an adult, I could balance a checkbook, I paid my bills on time, nobody would have looked at my life and said there's a woman who doesn't have it together.

But here is the other part of that conversation. There were financial things happening in my own house where I basically thought, he understands this better than I do, he will make the right decision. And that was enough for me to completely opt out on purpose. Nobody actually told me I couldn't be part of the conversation. I just told myself, what do I even have to offer here?

It wasn't about what I knew. I was plenty capable. It was about whether I believed I had any standing to be in the room at all.

And that's when I started realizing how badly we have defined being good with money for women. We taught women how to manage money. We didn't teach them they were allowed to ask what it was for.

This is the start of a new series: the financial advice that women need to unlearn. Not because budgeting or saving or paying off debt is bad advice. It's just half the advice. We've been taught the defense really well. What we haven't been taught is the offense.

In this episode:

• Why being great at managing money and actually having a wealth strategy are two completely different things
• The woman making $200K with $80K sitting in cash who by every definition we've been handed is great with money, and the one question that reveals the gap
• Why finding the $500 isn't the wealth strategy, finding it just gives you capital, and what you do with the capital is the strategy
• The difference between the money conversation and the wealth conversation, and why the language changes completely
• How leverage actually works when used correctly and why it's neither magic nor a trap
• The five questions to ask yourself right now: what am I earning, what am I keeping, where am I deploying it, what am I owning, and what does what I own actually produce
• Why cash has a job but confusing your emergency fund with your long-term capital has a cost you'll never see on a statement
• What changed for Amanda wasn't becoming a financial expert, it was stopping believing that expertise was the price of admission

Click the link to access the free five-question worksheet: Wealth Gap Diagnostic

It walks you through earn, keep, deploy, own, and produce for your own numbers.