Figure 1 PCWA Founder Morgan Lemaitre guest appearance on Fox 13’s The Place
Somewhere in the first twenty minutes of almost every first meeting, a number shows up.
“I think we need four million.” “My last advisor said I was behind.” “Is six percent good? It sounds low. Or high. I honestly don’t know.”
I understand why. The number is what the industry hands people. It’s what fits in a headline, on a statement, in the little bar chart that turns green when you’re on track and amber when you’re not. It’s the thing that can be measured, and our profession has an old habit of mistaking measurable for important.
But I’ve been doing this long enough to know this: When I ask a woman what she wants her money to do, she almost never leads with a number. She leads with a person, or a place. And two answers come up so often that I’ve stopped being surprised by them.
The first is some version of this:
“I want to have enough money to make sure my daughter never has to stay in an unhappy marriage.”
I have heard that sentence, or something very close to it, from nearly every woman who has sat down with me. It’s usually said with hands clasped, sometimes with an apology attached, as though she isn’t certain it qualifies as a financial goal.
It qualifies. It may be the most precise financial goal anyone has ever handed me. What she is describing is a specific sum, held in a specific way, available at a specific moment, so that her daughter’s decision about her own life is never made for her by a bank balance. That is a planning problem, it has liquidity, titling, trust, and tax implications, and it is entirely solvable. But you will never arrive at it by asking whether someone beat their benchmark last year.
The second question sounds smaller and isn’t:
“Do I have enough to give to the animal shelter and to the local theatre?”
Read that again. She didn’t ask whether she has enough. She asked whether she has enough to give. Those are different questions with different answers, and the plan behind each one looks different; different withdrawal strategy, different tax treatment, possibly a donor-advised fund or a small recurring commitment structured so it survives her. The animal shelter and the community theatre are not a rounding error in her plan. Very often, they are the plan. They’re the reason the rest of it needs to work. Women are inherently givers.
The number is downstream of all of that. When we build in the other order – number first, life second – we end up carefully optimizing something that was never the goal.
The industry’s blind spot
Here’s the uncomfortable version. A great deal of financial advice was designed around a conversation that goes like this: here’s your benchmark, here’s how we did against it, here’s what we’re recommending. It’s a performance conversation. It’s tidy, it’s defensible, and it takes about eleven minutes.
It’s also, for a lot of women, beside the point – and worse, it’s often delivered in a register that assumes she needs to be brought up to speed (cringe!!!). I’ve heard the stories: the meeting where the questions were directed at her husband, the advisor who explained what a bond was without being asked, the phone call that came the week after the funeral to discuss “repositioning the portfolio.” Studying after study finds the same thing, and I don’t think it’s mysterious – it isn’t that women are less interested in money. It’s that a lot of advisors have been talking about the wrong part of it.
The blind spot isn’t a shortage of expertise. Our industry has plenty of expertise. It’s a shortage of curiosity about what the money is for – and an assumption that “more” is a complete answer to that question.
More of what, though? More years of work? More risk than you can sleep through? More house than you want to maintain? At some point every plan must answer a harder question than how much, which is what would make this feel like enough. That question doesn’t have a benchmark. It has an answer that belongs to you.
What values-first looks like
I want to be specific here, because “values-based planning” has become the kind of phrase that can mean nothing at all. In our work, it means the order of operations is different.
We start with the life, not the balance sheet. The first real conversation isn’t about your accounts. It’s about the next ten or twenty years — what you want more of, what you’re carrying that you’d like to put down, who depends on you and who you’d like to be able to help. Sometimes that conversation surfaces something you haven’t said out loud to anyone. That’s usually the most useful thing on the page.
We name the trade-offs plainly. Values only become a plan when they get ranked. Almost everyone wants to retire earlier, help the kids, give more, and take less risk, and those four things compete. My job is to show you what each one costs the others and then let you choose. You’d be surprised how often someone discovers that the thing she’d been told to want isn’t the thing she’d trade for. That she’d rather work one more year and know the money is there for her daughter or spend a little less on herself and endow a seat at the theatre.
Then we run the math and the number finally means something. This is the part people expect us to do first. We do it last, on purpose. Cash flow, taxes, Social Security timing, insurance, how the portfolio is built. Rigor matters enormously; I’m not romantic about this. But a target you can defend is one that came from your priorities rather than from a rule of thumb about someone else’s life.
We build a portfolio that fits the plan, not the other way around. Risk isn’t a personality quiz score. It’s the amount of turbulence your commitments can absorb without you having to change them. Two women with identical balances can correctly own very different portfolios.
We revisit it when your life changes, not just when the market does. Plans go stale for human reasons far more often than for economic ones. A divorce, a diagnosis, an aging parent, a business offer, a grandchild. These are the events that reset the whole picture, and they deserve a meeting more than a volatile quarter does.
Why this matters more for women, specifically
Not because women are more emotional about money, they aren’t (and I’d retire that idea entirely). It’s because the arithmetic of many women’s lives is genuinely different. Longer average lifespans mean a longer retirement to fund. Career interruptions for caregiving mean fewer contribution years. A meaningful number of women will manage the household’s finances alone at some point, often at the worst possible moment to be learning the system.
Those realities don’t call for a more cautious version of the standard advice. They call for a plan built from the ground up around the actual life being lived.
A better first question
If you take one thing from this, let it be this: the next time someone in my profession opens with a number, you’re allowed to ask what it assumes about you.
Most of them assume a great deal.
I’d rather start somewhere else. Not how much do you have, but what do you want this to make possible; a daughter with options, a shelter that stays open, a season at the theatre that wouldn’t happen without you and then do the hard, unglamorous work of building something that gets you there.
The number still matters. We’ll get it right. But it’s the answer, not the question.
If you’d like to have that conversation, I’d welcome it. There are no cost and no obligation to a first meeting — it’s mostly me asking questions and listening, visit ParkCityWealthAdvisors.com
