What does it really take to shift from a traditional career path to building your own company—and how do your earliest money experiences shape the journey? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, listeners are invited to consider how personal financial histories and mindsets can be as pivotal as business acumen in entrepreneurship, especially when the goal is empowering others. Our guest, Stephanie Guttman, brings a uniquely diverse background, having started her career in corporate finance before moving through the world of startups, eventually becoming an investor and now a founder. She shares her early fascination with financial independence—opening an IRA at eighteen, working multiple jobs in high school, and volunteering for tax preparation—all of which laid the groundwork for her deep understanding of money, its power, and its potential as a force for individual autonomy. Throughout the episode, Marcia and Stephanie Guttman dive into the founding of Huntress Wealth—a platform designed not as a typical wealth management firm but as a resource for women seeking confidence, clarity, and purpose in their financial lives. Together, they explore the investing gap, societal and psychological barriers women face, and why understanding “enough” can be the secret to true financial empowerment. This conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersections of entrepreneurship, mindset, and financial equality, as it not only surfaces actionable ideas but also challenges listeners to rethink how they approach money and self-worth.
What does it really take to shift from a traditional career path to building your own company—and how do your earliest money experiences shape the journey? In this episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast, listeners are invited to consider how personal financial histories and mindsets can be as pivotal as business acumen in entrepreneurship, especially when the goal is empowering others.
Our guest, Stephanie Guttman, brings a uniquely diverse background, having started her career in corporate finance before moving through the world of startups, eventually becoming an investor and now a founder. She shares her early fascination with financial independence—opening an IRA at eighteen, working multiple jobs in high school, and volunteering for tax preparation—all of which laid the groundwork for her deep understanding of money, its power, and its potential as a force for individual autonomy.
Throughout the episode, Marcia and Stephanie Guttman dive into the founding of Huntress Wealth—a platform designed not as a typical wealth management firm but as a resource for women seeking confidence, clarity, and purpose in their financial lives. Together, they explore the investing gap, societal and psychological barriers women face, and why understanding “enough” can be the secret to true financial empowerment. This conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in the intersections of entrepreneurship, mindset, and financial equality, as it not only surfaces actionable ideas but also challenges listeners to rethink how they approach money and self-worth.
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MARCIA DAWOOD
0:02
Well, Stephanie, welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
0:05
Thanks for having me, Marsha.
MARCIA DAWOOD
0:07
I am so excited to talk to you today about everything. Huntress, Wealth. Oh, my gosh, so many things. Your background is so interesting. And you. Okay, so you start us off. Tell us a little bit about your background, but you have to go back to your childhood and tell me the things that you said. So interesting.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
0:24
Go. Yeah. So I don't know if you've heard the Steve Jobs, like, Stanford commencement speech, and it was, like, notable, made the rounds. Like, this is before LinkedIn was a thing. So, like, you heard about it? Well, I was there not for my graduation, but for my sisters and she. Or but for my sisters. And the thing that stuck in, like, my little, like, preteen, like, mind was that you can't connect the dots forward. You connect the dots backward.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
0:58
And I say that introducing my experience and how I came to be here, because it does not make sense going forward. It is a really broad career path that I've had. And so I studied finance in undergrad. I went into corporate finance. I was writing, like 10Ks, doing all the SEC reporting, or did a rotation like managing a $30 million product line. Like, all of this, like, very corporate stuff. Wanted to be closer to the business, both the strategy and the doing next to each other. So I knew I wanted to go smaller.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
1:33
And so I went to business school, which everyone would tell you you don't have to do to go smaller, but I'm actually really glad I did. And I came out of business school and ran an accelerator affiliated with school. And so I've had that stint of Fortune 500 down to, like, little tiny. Before their companies, they're just ideas, like Stage. And then I went and worked with startups. So series A. And then even my path within that started in marketing, moved over to sales, eventually led the whole revenue motion, and then finally became a founder myself. So it's a long journey.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
2:07
I've been an investor since I was 18. I, like, worked three jobs in high school and opened an IRA. Like, I've always been that person, but I realize how uncommon that is. And now everything that we're building ties back to people feeling confident with their money, using their money, moving through the world, and creating the world they want to see around them with their money.
MARCIA DAWOOD
2:32
I love that. So when you were young, you were obviously very influenced by Steve Jobs speech, but you were doing things that were very different than what most other teenagers were doing. By having multiple jobs, you really started to understand taxes, right?
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
2:52
Oh, yeah. I Did volunteer tax preparation when in college, so.
MARCIA DAWOOD
2:55
Wow. Okay.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
2:58
It was part of a school curriculum, but then I kept doing it, so yeah.
MARCIA DAWOOD
3:02
Wow. Okay, so you got all this incredible background about finance at every level. Right. Household finances and then all the way up to corporate finances. So. So then what are some of the patterns that you started to notice?
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
3:17
Yeah, I'll say. Just going to money story a little bit. For me, money was a sense of control. My parents, I grew up upper middle class and. But my parents would pay for basics and everything beyond that was on me or if I wanted to buy the swimsuit they definitely did not approve of that was me. So the sense of money equals freedom, like put in my brain very early on, hence like the three jobs in high school is that kind of let me do whatever I want. So it was that sense of freedom. And back then I didn't know that would set me up to have this sense of freedom and mobility in life.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
3:53
Like starting Investing when you're 18 Definitely translated, right. Having this money has created opportunities. It's allowed me, I can. Starting investing when I was 18 has given me the foundation to like go be an entrepreneur now. Right. I feel confident in my personal Runway. I feel confident in my medium and long term goals. Right.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
4:14
And being a startup founder now is additive. Right. Even if I'm throwing a bunch into it.
MARCIA DAWOOD
4:20
Right.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
4:20
I feel like this sense of like confidence and baseline that is afforded me. So it's that freedom all the way through that's been there the whole time.
MARCIA DAWOOD
4:30
Interesting. So what did you notice about starting a basically a retirement savings brokerage account at 18? By the time you were 30, it was probably at least on its. Well on its way. Right?
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
4:45
Yeah, it's. So the Fortune 500 that I went to work at, I'd say the workforce trends pretty conservative. And I don't mean that politically. I just mean like very steady, modest. Like I went to so many like retirement parties of people who like started working there when they were 22, 45 years before. Like, wow. It's just like a very steady environment. So a lot of the people that chose to work there, like I was working with 22, 23 year olds that were maxing out their 401ks.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
5:14
I thought they were crazy. I was like, I don't know how you're finding $23,000 out of our $55,000 paycheck. Like, I didn't or I guess back then it wasn't 23, it was like 18, whatever it was. And I was like, how? But like, we're not able to go to dinner because you're doing that. It was this balance of now versus later that already showed up then. So I feel like I was doing it, but it didn't feel special, if that makes sense. Like the. I was swimming with all the fishes, and I wasn't like the outlier in that way because of that working environment that I was in.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
5:49
The prompt when I was 18 was from my dad. He's always been. He was like an engineer. So he, like, tinkers and like, he's got the spreadsheets. It's. He's actually a financial advisor now, which is a little ironic that he was like, this is what an IRA is. You should go do it. And like, there.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
6:05
There was a little skepticism. I was like, why would I tie this up for 40 years, dad? And he's just go through the motion, understand how to open an account, how to fund an account, how to pick an investment. After you do that, use that as, like, the training ground and do the minimum that you have to do. I don't care if you keep contributing, but go do something so that, like, fear of knowing what's on the other side goes away. And it's just like a habit that you know how to do. So when you're ready to do more, you can. And so coming out of undergrad, having this, like, finance education, like how to value a stock, how to construct a portfolio, like, these are things that I learned I didn't have. And like, index funds didn't exist back then.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
6:51
I think people.
MARCIA DAWOOD
6:52
Yeah.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
6:53
And think it's just this thing that they don't know about and no one taught them. But, like, our parents didn't have the index funds. They didn't have ETFs. Right. They actually had to construct portfolios, which is why they. If they had enough money, they had like a stockbroker on a phone that would literally buy stocks for them on a trading floor. It didn't. Now you can get diversification, but 20 years ago, you had to learn how to do that.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
7:17
And so I knew I needed to buy at least 10 stocks, hopefully 20. And so it's like my dollar amount per stock was literally like 200 bucks per stock. Right. But it's like, I'm diversified. I got this. Right. And so it became. It's really treating it as this, like, playground and this learning ground.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
7:36
Well, before it was a strategy, it was like learning tactics before it became a strategy.
MARCIA DAWOOD
7:42
Interesting.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
7:42
Now I just.
MARCIA DAWOOD
7:43
Yeah.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
7:44
So.
MARCIA DAWOOD
7:45
So let's talk. You mentioned something earlier about how people were maxing out their 401k, meaning that they were putting in the maximum amount allowed. No matter how much money you make, whether you're, you know, a millionaire or whatever or you're making 50 grand. So what, what do you think? Tell me more about that mindset of you can't really go to dinner, but you're saving for the future. Like at what, like where do you think the balance lies?
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
8:13
Yeah, I think it's important to know what you need to do. So being in the the world where there were people going to that extreme, certainly there were people not doing anything too, right? Like that kind of being a status quo for a 20 something, right? There was the whole range. I'm the one who was like, well, I'm not going to wait until I die to use my money. And I also don't want to blow it all now. And so I created this frenchie back then that mapped out what my life could look like. And if I earn this now and get a steady 3 or 5% raise for the rest of my life, which like, clearly there are step changes as you go to school and take new jobs or lose a job, right? That's not that consistent. But just a 3% raise your whole life. And then if I put X percent away, how much will I have? Will I have enough to buy a house when I'm 30? Will I be able to afford to buy a car every five years? 10 or 10? That is something I'm pretty conservative on.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
9:19
And like if I let's do the. I had no idea where I was on wanting kids or not, but just assume the average two kids, right? Like when might I have those? When might they go to college? Like how much money will I have in this phase? And it's like projecting it out, right? It's like basic compounding. But it's like when you really see it and it's that answer of like, do I have enough? Or like, how much do I need to put towards retirement to be on track? I can tell you those. There's this one woman that stayed this early in my head that was put like maxing out. She could probably retire now. Like, we're almost 40. If she's been maxing out the whole time, she's good now. She might not be able to access it for another 20 years.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
10:01
So she might have to keep working. So it's that balance of should it go in retirement, should it go in brokerage, should I spend it? And until you like plan out that future, you can't know like you're just guessing. And that's where this like sense of uncertainty or flying blind comes in. And it's not like somebody didn't give you the answer. It's that you have to know what you want first.
MARCIA DAWOOD
10:26
Yes. That's what I talk all about in my new book, Unapologetic Wealth. Yeah, totally. I do love what you're talking about though, with this concept of enough as. And I love the idea that you put this all down in a spreadsheet and started really thinking about the future at a young age. Because it is so important to think about, well, what are the things that we value? What are the things that we care about? How do we want to align ourselves with and our money with our values and then be able to think about that idea of what is enough. I think sometimes people see the numbers go up in the bank accounts or the brokerage accounts or whatever accounts it is and then they think, well, I don't want to go down. But wait a minute.
MARCIA DAWOOD
11:10
You could actually use that money to do something to move forward.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
11:15
It might.
MARCIA DAWOOD
11:15
It's not going to go like this all. It's not going to go in a straight line up all the time. It could ebb and flow a little bit and that's okay.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
11:22
Yeah.
MARCIA DAWOOD
11:23
So talk to me a little more about that.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
11:25
Yeah, yeah. This sense of knowing how much is enough, but like even getting to that deeper sense of especially as women and it's not only, but I think women are more likely to talk about it, feel like money is this sense of safety. We've been taught it's our independence, it's our power. And it is. But I'd say it's not it that on its own. Right. And so that big bank account, if it's doing nothing for you, isn't actually helping. And we talk with.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
11:57
All I've done is talk with women about their money for a long time. But with this business for the last year and frankly, doesn't matter how much you have. Right. That's like probably one of the big, like learning lessons that we've had so far is we assumed we'd be helping people who had maybe 200k saved up in a retirement account, not much else. Liquid. A financial advisor doesn't really want to work with them because they don't have this like chunk of liquid assets. By the time they get a million or two, they're off to a financial advisor because they're like, have enough. There's that enough word again for a financial advisor to help them and be worthwhile.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
12:35
And all of that. And so it's like we're like that's who we're building for. But the more we learned, there's certainly people in that path. Right. But there's also people who are well past that path that still never sat and defined what enough is. And so they still don't feel safe, they still aren't using their money. And in a way again it's back to just like affecting your values in the world. And when we say that a lot of people, especially for we're talking about women, they assume like we're talking ESG and value investing, impact investing.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
13:07
And that's cool if that's on your list. But it doesn't. That's not exactly what I'm talking about. It's do you want to go start a company? It's do you want to invest in other companies that you believe in? It's do you want to retire early and go at pina coladas? I don't care. It's what's make happen, what's important to you. Just waiting in that like number isn't going to solve problems. How you feel about that number might solve problems.
MARCIA DAWOOD
13:35
Oh, that's so interesting. The number isn't going to solve the problem, but how you feel about the number can solve the problem. Oh, I like that. We'll have to use that as a quote. Okay, so now explain more about what gave you the idea to start Huntress wealth and what is it that you're really trying to do? Because you're not like a, the average like wealth manager or financial planner, you're much more than that. So please help us understand.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
14:01
Yeah, so it's a really common misconception that we do wealth management. I think it's cause like people get hit up so much, especially like high earning or senior women like get all the LinkedIn DM, all the emails of trying to financial advisors trying to reach them. So the quick assumption, we are not financial advisors, we certainly considered becoming one but we think we can help more broadly not giving financial advice because again it's how you feel about money as much as it is about actually making those decisions. And so much of financial decision making does not qualify as advice either. So that's another interesting notion. That's if we tell you an asset allocation or specific security or recommend another advice advisor, we're giving advice. If we're not doing those things, I can tell you how to go calculate how much you need for retirement, that's fine. Right? There's a whole lot that comes before that advisory word.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
14:59
So we're not financial advisors. We just started this with the mission of we want women to hold equal power. And so it was this like deep research study of why we don't. And certainly there's external forces. Right. Like a lot of the world happens to us on this equal inequality. But what can we do individually or collectively to help change that balance of power? And the answer for me was get more money in the hands of women, but also get more women using their money. Yeah, it has to be a collective like tipping point of women having agency over their money and using their money to just shift this window towards equality.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
15:48
So that's what we're doing. I thought the simple answer to that was like, oh, just show them their money, we'll do a net worth app, it'll be great. That's where we were when this. Oh, that's the idea. That's not the answer. Like that there's lots of free net worth apps out there. You don't need us for that. But women on average, on balance, aren't using them.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
16:09
And so there has to be a different way to approach this that like the problem wasn't how much you have again, it's how you feel about it. And so we are one part mindset. So it's like checking in how you're feeling about your money, helping you think through things that you want. Even understanding your values is like one of our engagements. Right. But then we're also like goal mapping. So we help you understand. Let's say you have this goal in the future.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
16:36
Let's say when you're, you want to do like a big blowout 60th birthday party and you want to not just be like your normal travel budget, you want to invite 20 of your closest friends and family. Right. And you're footing the bill. Right. So if you need 40 grand to do that in 20 years, how much do you need to have today to cover that?
MARCIA DAWOOD
16:56
Okay. Yeah.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
16:57
And so it made you. That's ridiculous. Maybe that's far down on your list of priorities and you don't get to that and that's okay. But maybe you've already finished all those other priorities, financially speaking. Like, maybe you've already like already saved enough for retirement. You just haven't really done that math of like how much do you need today for it to grow into that number on your timeframe. So it's like, maybe you can fully afford to do that. Go do that.
MARCIA DAWOOD
17:26
Yeah, interesting. So basically Huntress wealth is trying to get women to Think differently about their money so that they're using it to align with what it is that they truly want.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
17:39
Very much so.
MARCIA DAWOOD
17:40
So you mentioned an app. Tell us more about that and how it works. And I believe there's a waiting list right now because it's not completely out yet. Is that right?
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
17:48
Yeah. So we're in private beta. You can sign up for the beta on our website, huntresswealth.com and so we have the app again is this mindset piece and this planning piece. What's still to come is this actions piece where if you choose to have AI turned on, we can recommend like highest impact actions based on what's mapping. Right. If everything you have is sitting in cash, but it's no, you really. These are applying towards long term goals. You should really go invest it.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
18:18
Again, we can recommend account types. We're not going to tell you what to go invest in. Right. That's where that advice piece kicks in. If you do want that advice piece, we have an advisory network. So again, we're not advisors ourselves, but through the course of doing this, we've met lots of wonderful advisors who are very mission aligned that you can go find an advisor if you want that level of support. But it's really checking in with your money, getting comfortable, even just privately asking yourself questions about it. Right.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
18:52
What do I want? And then starting to map that out and then making a plan to get it.
MARCIA DAWOOD
18:59
Wow, I love that. Okay, so you did mention something that scares the bejeebus out of me, which is that women tend to, again, I'm generalizing, so bear with me here. But they tend to hold a lot more money in cash than men do. I think there's studies out there that can prove that. And I get very nervous because the amount of wealth building that they're leaving on the table is really terrifying.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
19:30
I think this stat, I should probably go check this before we air it. But I believe the stat is women have 60% of the wealth that men do at retirement age. And some of it is certainly pay gap, some of it is career interruption. There's very structural challenges to that. But it's also this investing gap. And the investing gap is just as big.
MARCIA DAWOOD
19:53
Yeah.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
19:54
So it's like you've got a little bit like 18% on your pay gap, which is real. We should go fix that. We should go get the money. So we're in power, so we fix that. But that investing gap is a bigger gap.
MARCIA DAWOOD
20:07
Yeah, that's what I worry about. Cause think about all the cash that's Sitting there that could actually be earning. Yeah. And it doesn't have to be in ultra high risk stuff. I mean it can be in thing there's. So to your point earlier about. Yeah, our parents and grandparents didn't have index funds, ETFs, all the things. And we've talked about those things a couple of times on the podcast before.
MARCIA DAWOOD
20:31
But again, I'm not a financial advisor either, so we don't really talk about specific things as much as just overall. But we have access to so many different types of investing, so many different things that we can do with our money. And in some cases that could be investing in yourself, like investing in an education, investing in buying a business and all those things. So I find this all very interesting when you think about the whole psychology of what people want to do. So speaking of businesses. So now you have a business, you have flipped your whole script around on the type of a worker or whatever you want to call it. But you're now a founder.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
21:13
Yeah.
MARCIA DAWOOD
21:15
So instead of being like a W2 employee or whatever in the past, now you're a full blown entrepreneur, founder of a company. So tell us what that journey's been like.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
21:24
I feel like I'm earning the title every day. It's funny having for so long identified as an investor. Right? Like corporate stock market for a long time running that accelerator. Right. And that investor's mindset. I've angel invested in a few companies. Right. I've also been an investor.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
21:43
I've always viewed working in startups like my time and certainly my equity. Right. Is an investment in those various startups. And so it's interesting being on the founder side and it is such a mental game, I have to tell you, right. If all those business was. If I thought this business could exist without external funding, if I thought we could bootstrap this and still reach a million, 2 million women in households, like I would do that. Having a separate, like building the business and then building the investment. Right.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
22:30
Are like two very different layers of the job. And oh my goodness, it is. It's not the risk of the business that I worry about. Right. It's the uncertainty of like how fast can I go? How much of this can I do? That is like the big question mark because.
MARCIA DAWOOD
22:51
So what is the most. Yeah. What's the thing that's costing the most that you need in order to grow and scale? Is it the tech build out or
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
23:00
the world of AI? Yeah. We have a CTO who's working with us part time and we have Claude helping him and it is amazing how fast and how much we can do lean. Right. So it's myself, my co founder, Yesenia, and then Esau part time, and we have an app in beta. Like, I was just testing our. Like, there's like, this developer version of the app for the App Store, like, test flight. Like, I was just, like, testing our app in test flight this morning. Right.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
23:34
Like, we. There's so much we can do, and it's marketing and it's getting the word out. Right. And like, we've known that. We've been branding for a year. We've had an app since January. So the building the story and creating the concept of a consumer financial planning app, like, that doesn't really exist. You've got budgeting apps and you've got investing apps, but there's not really this build a plan app.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
24:02
And so creating that concept in people's minds has been the groundwork. And that's the area of your brain that we have to go win. And so that's. It's the battle every day. No, I'm kidding.
MARCIA DAWOOD
24:13
Yeah.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
24:14
But it's a. How fast we can do that directly relates to how many people we can reach. And so doing so organically is the name of the game now. But the more we can fuel that, the faster it's going to go. The faster we're going to learn, the faster we're going to build the right thing.
MARCIA DAWOOD
24:34
It's so interesting how you said that that's the part of people's brains that you need to win. And that is so true, because I've talked to so many people, women and men, and talking to them about this concept of money mindset and how you feel about your money, looking at it in a different way, having different conversations with your partner or your children about it is really something that they. It's not like people wake up in the morning and they say, hey, I'm gonna have some limiting beliefs today about money. But at the same time, people aren't necessarily, like, waking up one day and thinking, hey, today is the day I'm gonna go ahead and do something about my money and not have it sit in cash like that. They're not doing that either.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
25:21
Right.
MARCIA DAWOOD
25:22
So it's almost like we have. We do have to win that part of their brain in order to get them to take action.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
25:31
And it's. I look to the financial advisory industry a lot as an entrepreneur, as a founder, I'm a big believer in looking at what people are already doing.
MARCIA DAWOOD
25:42
Yeah.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
25:42
And I don't want to Go reinvent something completely. It's what can we nudge about that existing behavior? And so we talk with financial advisors a lot too. And it's not that they like don't want to help people earlier stage, it's that like the business model doesn't work for them to do that. And that's fine, right? Like they, they know the audience they're serving, but even in the audience with more assets, they experience people's discomfort with money all day. Which is why financial advisors were also excited about what we're doing. Because they want a client who has clarity and confidence and knows what to ask and knows what they want. Right. And so it's been a really lovely surprise, like with the pull from the financial advising industry.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
26:35
But who they work with are people approaching retirement. So the five years out from retirement is the magic number because people want the answer to the question, can I retire? That's what they want to know. So they start whenever they think they might be able to retire is when they call them up. So that could be the 60 year old that's calling up like waiting for that Social Security check to hit, or it could be the 45 year old who's had a couple exits and am I done? Can I be done? Can I play investor all day and make a good job? And it's so five years out from retirement is the magic. Most people start working or thinking about working with financial advisor at that point. The other is like the unexpected life transitions that some of them, almost all of them come with so much emotion, right? Whether that's having a baby, that's a lot of emotion, right? Losing a parent or other loved one that is such a mind, I don't want to say a covered podcast, but it's like such a tough time, right? And then divorce. And so all of these are like heavily emotional points of when they're going to. And advisors aren't therapists, but most of them are getting trained in like basic concepts on how to handle someone going through these transitions.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
27:58
Right. And so that's the real answer is like it is hard to wake up on any given Tuesday and be like, today's the day I take control of my money. So we've really tried to tackle that with because it's an app, because we're able to have a low cost of entry. This isn't paying $5,000 a month for a financial advisor, right? This is, you can start one little bite sized three minutes of your time a day to work on it because you're not going to wake up one day and do the big project and solve the big problem and know everything you want magically. And so we're trying to turn it from this, like, project into a process so it can fit in between these, like, big inflection point times in your life.
MARCIA DAWOOD
28:41
Yeah, yeah. I'm glad you explained a little bit more about that, how the app works, because one of the things I learned from writing the book is, you know, this isn't this if people read the book. It's not, oh, I'm gonna read the book and then magically my whole life is gonna change.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
28:56
No, I know my money story now.
MARCIA DAWOOD
28:58
Yeah. This is really. It's a long journey yet to a point where you're really starting to think about things differently. And maybe, maybe we won't ever get to that point where everything's like, magically perfect. I don't think, I don't think that even exists. But we can get to a point where we're aware and the more awareness we have, I think that's when you start to actually take action. There starts to be some movement and then that creates the momentum.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
29:24
Yeah. Yeah. There's this. My co founder and I talk a lot about the sense of, like, psychological safety.
MARCIA DAWOOD
29:29
Yeah.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
29:30
And how important that is in engaging with your money. And like, we talk about this in the workplace all the time. Like creating a psychologically safe workplace so you get the most innovation and like, appropriate risk taking out of people. But no one's there to create that environment for you with money. Maybe you've got a good therapist, maybe they're helping do that. But even if not all therapists are doing that. And so a lot of us are like flying blind on feeling good about money, feeling safe about money. And it, it really does take.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
30:03
It's okay if I fail now. Don't fail with 20% of your portfolio.
MARCIA DAWOOD
30:07
Right.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
30:07
Fail in pieces. Right. Like having the right sized experiments to try and lear and separate this, like, identity of I'm good or I'm successful from your, like, investment outcomes or your portfolio outcomes. And so there's this like real big psychological tip that happens when. Let's call it a good year in the market. Right. It's not your average year. Like, markets have up years and down years.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
30:35
Almost none of them are actually the average year. Right. Let's say you have a good year in the market. You have pretty healthy portfolio. A huge psychological tip is when you are. The portfolio went up more in the year than your income. And it's this notion that, like, the investments are working for you. Right.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
30:55
And it's not like that's gonna happen every year, but it's this notion that's like a huge psychological tipping point that I see for people is, oh, that's how the money could cover me right now. You might need more than that to get to the average year that it's covering you, but it's this, like, notion of that's when I see people start to dive in and care about what their portfolio looks like versus just doing the right motions and putting it in the accounts that are available to you.
MARCIA DAWOOD
31:24
Interesting. Wow. Well, I'm really excited for the app to be live and that we can all use it. So we're going to encourage everybody to go and sign up so that they can be a beta user when it's all ready to go.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
31:37
We've already got beta users in. We are just really doing a little bit at a time instead of the wide open.
MARCIA DAWOOD
31:46
Got it. Okay. So anybody, though, who's interested needs to sign up on the waitlist so that they can get in faster. Yes.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
31:52
Sure.
MARCIA DAWOOD
31:52
All right. I love that. Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for being on the show today and telling us all about this and having these fun, interesting conversations about money and how you think about it.
STEPHANIE GUTTMAN
32:03
It is fun, isn't it? Thanks, Marcia. Appreciate you being.