Why I Started Nexa Wealth Planning

When I was 32 and single, I met with a financial advisor because I was thinking about freezing my eggs. At the time, I was contributing to my retirement accounts and saving a little outside of them, but not much. Egg freezing was expensive, and I was considering financing the cost so I could do it sooner.

What I wanted help with was understanding the tradeoff and how I could pay for it without having a significant impact on my longer-term financial future. After all, I saw this as an investment in my future too, just a different kind of investment.

Would it make sense to temporarily reduce what I was putting into retirement so I could save more toward the cost? If I did that for a year or two, how much would it actually affect my long-term plan? Was I putting myself significantly behind, or was this something I could reasonably make room for?

I wasn’t looking for someone to tell me whether I should freeze my eggs. At that point in my life, preserving the possibility of having children someday mattered to me in a way that wasn’t going to show up on my balance sheet.

I wanted help figuring out what it would mean financially.

But the conversation kept coming back to growing my investments and how much I could fall behind if I didn’t continue contributing at the same level to my retirement accounts. I remember leaving that meeting feeling like the question I had brought in was clearly a financial one, but I still didn’t have much help weighing the choice I was actually trying to make.

That stayed with me.

Over time, I realized that a lot of the decisions women make don’t fit neatly into an investment conversation. Sometimes there are things we want or need to do that cost money and may mean we save less for a while. That doesn’t mean we ignore the long-term impact. It means we should be able to look at the numbers, understand the tradeoff, and decide whether it’s something we can afford to do.

That was the kind of conversation I had been looking for at 32.

A few years later, I made a major career change. I left sports marketing and went into financial services.

At that point, I was in my 30s and thinking much more seriously about my own financial future. My friends and I talked about saving money, but I realized that none of us really understood investing or had much of a strategy for what we were doing with the money we had saved.

I wanted to understand money at a much deeper level. I wanted to get the education and certifications, learn how investments and financial planning actually worked, and become someone who could help other women understand their finances and have more agency over their own financial futures.

So I went all in on financial services. I spent the next nine years at a large financial firm, building my expertise and working with clients. I learned a tremendous amount about investments, retirement planning, and what it means to help someone make important financial decisions.

Over those nine years, I also became clearer about the kind of advisor I wanted to be and the kind of financial planning I wanted to provide.

I didn’t want planning to start and end with a portfolio. I wanted to help people think through the decisions they were actually trying to make. I saw how important that could be for women in particular. Our lives don’t always follow a predictable sequence. Careers change. Marriage and children may happen later or not at all. We may take time away from work, care for family, start businesses, go through a divorce, or find ourselves managing money on our own.

Those decisions have financial consequences, but the answer can’t always be to do whatever leaves you with the largest investment account.

The numbers still matter. I want to understand what a decision could cost, what may need to change if you make it, and what it means for the rest of your plan. But ultimately, the numbers should help you make the decision, not make the decision for you.

Working in financial services showed me how valuable good financial advice can be. It also showed me some of the limitations of the way advice has traditionally been delivered

One of the things I kept coming back to was how much access to advice could depend on how much money someone already had available to invest.

That never sat quite right with me.

I thought about myself and my friends years earlier. We were working, earning money, and saving. We were also making decisions that could affect our finances for years to come. But we didn't necessarily have big investment portfolios.

You shouldn’t need a big investment portfolio before your financial decisions are important enough to deserve good advice.

Someone can be earning a good income and still not know what to do with the money left over each month. She can be saving into a 401(k) but have no idea whether she's saving enough or investing it appropriately. She can be thinking about buying a home, changing careers, starting a family, or making another expensive decision and want to know what she can actually afford.

Those are financial planning questions too.

I also became more aware of how financial advice can sometimes be wrapped within a product sale.

I don’t think financial products are inherently good or bad. Insurance can solve an important need. An annuity can make sense in the right situation. Different investments and financial products can all have a place.

What mattered to me was the order.

I wanted to understand the person sitting across from me first. What is she trying to accomplish? What does she already have? What is she worried about? What decisions does she need to make?

Once we understand that, we can determine whether a particular product or solution belongs in the plan.

The plan should tell us whether a product is needed, not the other way around.

After more than a decade working in financial services, I’ve seen how much our financial questions can change as our lives change.

I think about the questions I had in my 30s, and now, in my 40s, some of the things I’m thinking about in my own financial life are different. I see the same thing with my clients. What matters to us changes, and our financial plans need to be able to change with us.

When I decided to leave the large firm and start Nexa Wealth Planning, I knew I wanted to build a practice where I could help someone with her investments and retirement planning, but also make room for the question that brought her to me in the first place.

Sometimes that question is about retirement. Sometimes it’s what to do with company stock, how much she can afford to spend, or whether she’s financially prepared for a change she’s considering.

And sometimes it may be something like the question I had at 32.

I still think about that version of myself, sitting across from a financial advisor trying to figure out how to pay for freezing my eggs.

I didn’t need someone to tell me that saving more for retirement would leave me with more money for retirement. I understood that.

I needed someone to help me figure out whether I could make room for something that mattered to me without putting the rest of my financial future at risk.

I wanted women to have a place where they could understand their money, ask the questions that were actually on their minds, and get help thinking through what their choices would mean financially.

I wanted to be the advisor I had been looking for at 32.

That’s why I started Nexa Wealth Planning.

If you have a financial decision you’ve been trying to figure out, let’s talk.

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