What if the key to entrepreneurial success isn't just about making money, but about building confidence and aligning your finances with your personal values? This episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast dives into how shifting your mindset around money can transform not only your business but your whole approach to wealth and life. Our guest, Shari Rash, founder of GWA Wealth and host of “Everyone’s Talking Money,” brings a wealth of experience in financial advising, with a special focus on empowering women to own their financial journeys. Her unique perspective comes from years in both corporate finance and building her own practice dedicated to closing the confidence gap women often feel around money. In this episode, Shari Rash and Marcia Dawood candidly discuss the obstacles women face around financial confidence, practical ways to get comfortable with both small and large money decisions, and the major wealth shift underway as more women take control of assets. If you’re ready to rethink your approach to wealth and entrepreneurship, this conversation is packed with relatable stories and tangible advice you can put into action—making it an essential listen for driven, values-minded listeners.
What if the key to entrepreneurial success isn't just about making money, but about building confidence and aligning your finances with your personal values? This episode of The Angel Next Door Podcast dives into how shifting your mindset around money can transform not only your business but your whole approach to wealth and life.
Our guest, Shari Rash, founder of GWA Wealth and host of “Everyone’s Talking Money,” brings a wealth of experience in financial advising, with a special focus on empowering women to own their financial journeys. Her unique perspective comes from years in both corporate finance and building her own practice dedicated to closing the confidence gap women often feel around money.
In this episode, Shari Rash and Marcia Dawood candidly discuss the obstacles women face around financial confidence, practical ways to get comfortable with both small and large money decisions, and the major wealth shift underway as more women take control of assets. If you’re ready to rethink your approach to wealth and entrepreneurship, this conversation is packed with relatable stories and tangible advice you can put into action—making it an essential listen for driven, values-minded listeners.
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Marcia Dawood:
Well, Sheri, welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast.
Shari Rash:
Thanks for having me.
Marcia Dawood:
Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you today. I love your podcast. Everybody's talking money. I love that we are having more conversations around women and getting them to feel better about money and about the mindset around money. So how did you get started talking about this topic? How did you become a financial expert? Tell us all the things.
Shari Rash:
Yeah, so I am. There's not many people in the financial services industry that actually I think went to college for it and wanted to be in it a lot of times. Financial services like find you versus you finding it. I happen to find it. So I graduated college with the intention of being a financial advisor, got my licenses, did everything I was supposed to do, and then I realized that no one wants to give their life savings to a 22 year old fresh out of college. That's breaking news. So there was a lot of what am I doing with my life Kind of things. And you know what, a lot of questioning.
And finally I realized I had to make a pivot if I ever wanted to earn money, make money and all of that. But I wanted to stay in financial services. So I ended up more on the corporate side, actually helping advisors. But I wanted to be an advisor. And I feel like my desire to be an advisor really helped me in the position that I was in for 13 years because it was like, tell me all about your clients. I want to understand your clients. How do you run your business? So I learned so much during that time and I traveled the country, I helped advisors grow their business and. But there was always like the voice in the back of your my head going, sheri, although you enjoy this isn't exactly what your plan was.
So I created my firm, GWA wealth, seven years ago with the intention of helping women with their money. There are so few female advisors out there. Only about 16% of financial advisors are female. So if women want to hear the same voice coming back at them, they. They have to search pretty hard to find a match. So I wanted to work with women and help them understand their money. And just inherently, because I am female, I just think about money and its effects on us. So that's really how I started to get into it, is that the industry is shifting in that it's telling advisors women are going to be controlling $3 trillion in the great wealth transfer over the next 10 to 15 years.
So by default, advisors are now starting to focus more on women. But it's mostly because of that great wealth transfer. And so there's more and more resources on how to speak to women about money. What are their issues, what are their concerns? But it was, yeah, duh. I already knew all of this just from being a woman myself and speaking with my friends and all about money. But. But really focusing on women and how we think about money has been day one, my focus. Because women are underserved when it comes to money in general, but especially by the financial services industry.
Marcia Dawood:
Yeah, that makes so much sense. So what were some of the things, like, when you started becoming a financial service provider early on? Like, what were some of the things you were seeing that women were being held back by? What were some of their thoughts?
Shari Rash:
It was just, I'm not good at this. I don't know what to do. I always hear, oh, my. My husband handles everything. I have to be careful at cocktail parties or gatherings of. What do you do for work? Oh, I'm a financial advisor, financial planner. And it's. It's either, oh, we already have one of those.
And it's cool. I'm not trying to pay for free, be a client. So I either hear that or I hear, oh, my husband manages everything and he has a spreadsheet and does a really great job. And it's. That always just struck me of like, why, why aren't. Why is that the answer back? My husband manages everything and he has a spreadsheet that always. I was always curious about that because in my head, it's it to me, that's them saying, I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm. I'm never going to know what I'm doing or I don't have an interest in knowing what I'm doing.
And so that all that always just struck with me. Like, I always just clocked that. And so I feel like there's just a lot of women saying, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not good at it. And that's not true. It's just you haven't found the person yet or the voice to teach you this stuff, to educate you, which I believe education then creates confidence, then creates the need or want to get involved. So you just haven't found that voice yet or that person to help you start the. Get the ball rolling, if you will.
Marcia Dawood:
So what are some of the things that you hear nowadays that you've gotten more people, a little bit more educated, a little more comfortable? What is it that women tend to gravitate toward when it comes to investing?
Shari Rash:
What I have found throughout the hundreds and hundreds of conversations I've had with clients and especially with women is that it's very hard to make a big decision with your money if you're not confident in the little decisions you're making every day. So many advisors will if they're looking at the retirement, oh, you left your employer. Let's roll it over to an ira. Women in general aren't comfortable with making that decision until they know the small stuff's taken care of. And when I say small stuff, it's is my checking account at the right bank or do I have enough money in my checking account? How much should I have in my savings account? What is an emergency fund? How much should I have in that, like that stuff. So I don't even talk about the big stuff until I handle the small stuff. Because once we have the small stuff handled and most advisors will not talk to you about your checking account, about your emergency fund because frankly they don't make any money doing that. Right, right.
So it just let me talk about the things that I make money off of. And that's why we start with the 401k rollover. Name all of your past employers, all of that stuff. But women do not have confidence in those bigger things. And if they do it with another advisor, it's like they still don't feel good about it. It still feels like achy in my stomach. Something wasn't right and what they could be in is, could be perfectly fine. There could be nothing wrong with.
But the stuff, the stuff that they really have questions on was never addressed. So that's what I found is that you have to take care of that smaller stuff first. Stuff we see every day. When I open up my banking app, I don't on my stomach to hurt. I want to have a plan for my day to day money. And once you do, that's when the bigger decisions, they become so easy because if as long as you're educated about it, you understand it, you, you it's presented in to you in a way that it can be repeated. Like you can repeat it to your friend of oh yeah, I just, I met with Sheri and this is what we did. You're able to explain it like that's when the true confidence comes.
So addressing all of that smaller stuff first is essential.
Marcia Dawood:
That makes so much sense. As women we like to know what's going on. We like to feel comfort level in all of the things it's you're going to ask me to make this like huge decision, but I don't Even have all the information of the most basic stuff that makes so much sense. And what do you see as far as mindset around money with women?
Shari Rash:
It's really the I'm not good at this. I don't know what I'm doing. Some of the issues with my, my, my clients, especially my higher earner clients is I make all of this money. I should just know, I should know what to do and it's, I should be doing the right thing and like beating myself. Beating yourself up about it. It's like just because you make good money that the good paycheck doesn't come with like financial education or financial literacy. They don't go hand in hand.
Marcia Dawood:
Right.
Shari Rash:
So it, it's just I should know better. And it's well, if no one taught you, how are you going to know better? No, we're just expected to know how to adult when we graduate college or we decide our career. We're just expected to somehow know how to do all of this stuff without any guidance, without any roadmap. And it's, don't beat yourself up. What's done is done. Like mistakes or whatever, like it's in the past. It's all data. All we can do is learn from it.
But, but how are we going to learn from it? Let's look at it without the lens of I, I'm like, I'm so dumb. I should have known better. I'll never get this, remove all of that junk because it's so unnecessary and no good comes from it. But the. So just look looking at past mistakes or past decisions as data. But then going forward of we need that I need this education in order to do better, in order to make decisions, in order to set myself up for the future.
Marcia Dawood:
Mm. Yeah. I get nervous that too many women are tied up, have a lot of their money tied up like in cash or they're, they don't feel confident or comfortable with the idea of investing. They aren't. They don't really even know that they could get a money market account that probably has nowadays at least 4% interest on it as opposed to it sitting in a checking account for zero or close to zero. Are you seeing a lot of that?
Shari Rash:
Yeah, I do see a lot of cash and I do see a lot of savings accounts, high yield savings accounts. Because yeah, for quite a few years you could make decent money having your money sit in a high yield savings account. But that's not going to be reality forever. And it's already changing. But we're just living in the past. A lot of women are just living in the past of, well, I'll just keep my money in the savings account. It's earning money. It's.
Yeah. But as time goes on, that's not going to be the case. So we need to do something different. And so that is definitely a real thing. Cash is a big issue because you can see it, it feels good. And also the concept of, like, inflation and you're essentially paying the bank to hold on to your money, that's not talked about. But once you explain it, it only needs to be explained once. Oh, I get that.
I don't want to do something to hurt myself. I thought I was doing a good thing right now. I'm not. Okay, let's change it. And like, it's just that, that simple of a conversation because you understand why money's being kept in the checking account. Because I can see it, it's safe, not going anywhere. We're not losing money. I'm really not messing up by doing it, and you're not.
But you could do better. And like, once that positioned of, you're not doing a bad thing right now. But let's take what you have accumulated, which is awesome. Let's take something good that you've already done completely on your own, and let's make it better. That's a lot of the conversations I'm having.
Marcia Dawood:
Yeah. And I think it's great that you're having conversations one on one. Obviously, with your clients. You're talking to more women about this, but you also have this amazing podcast and you're starting to get that message out into the world more. Tell us a little bit about, like, the concept behind it, what you're really trying to achieve with it.
Shari Rash:
The concept is it's like what life and money come together. So I can give you all the personal finance advice in the world, right. And I can say I. And we can talk about it all the time. But it's. If you don't have the, yeah, I can do this. You don't have that confidence. It doesn't matter how much advice you get, you're never going to implement it or you're never going to feel good about what you implemented.
So I would say the podcast is about half and half, half the mental side of money and eliminating all that junk that we expose ourselves to in our head when it comes to ourselves and our money. And then what to do with your money. How to create a budget. I don't like that word, but there's no other better solution. So we say, how to create that budget? What is a Roth ira? What are all these things that we can do? But again, we have to have an open mind to it and not have all that emotional baggage. So we need to address the baggage, get rid of it, and then learn how to do these awesome things with our money to really build wealth for ourselves.
Marcia Dawood:
And so you have a lot of podcasts, I noticed, that are where you have a guest, but you also do some where you're talking directly to your listeners, right?
Shari Rash:
Yeah, I would say it's about half and half. Half guest episodes, half me speaking. I put out two episodes a week. So there's a lot of content. The good thing is, you know, if you're listening and you're like, ah, this doesn't resonate, just give it a couple of days, something else is going to come in your feed that you're. That's going to really hit home. My solo episodes are more like the motivating side of it and that. That kick in the butt that we need to start making moves with our money.
And then I'll bring on guests. And I primarily have female guests because I want female voices when it comes to money. There's enough male voice that, that you can hit up, you can hear when it comes to money. So I want wanted our guests to sound like our listeners. What do our listeners want to hear? So it'll be any experts when it comes to money. And I try to bring on people that are different than me that can bring an alternative viewpoint, experience, expertise. Some of my guests are not money experts. They're just mindset experts or they have a really important story.
So I'm really trying to again, where life and money come together. And it's called. The podcast is called Everyone's Talking Money. But what's funny is that no one talks about money.
Marcia Dawood:
Right.
Shari Rash:
What's funny about is that we're trying to get money to be a regular conversation for my listeners.
Marcia Dawood:
Nice. Nice. I love that. Yeah. When I think about money and all the things that you can do with it and how it. If we can get more people to align their money with our values and thinking about it in. You've been talking a little bit like this, but like thinking about it like in buckets, where, yes, you're going to have the money that you're going to keep in a checking account or whatever, because your emergency stash, where you're banking, all of that needs to be accessible to you at a certain level. But then how do we then take it to the next level.
And we had talked earlier about risk. So how do you approach that with your clients?
Shari Rash:
Yes, I also, I love the bucketing approach. Every dollar has a different purpose and that's how I explain it to my clients. Some, some. And think of it like a slice of the pie. Every slice is going to have a different purpose and they're going to be allocated differently and they're going to be in different places. But again, what is the purpose of the money and then how can we get everything to work together? So there, yeah, there's some money that's going to be for retirement and you're not going to use that for 30 plus years and it's going to be allocated based off of that. A mistake many people make is that they only think about retirement, they only think about saving for that. They don't think about 10 years from now, 15 years from now.
So we want to make sure you have a slice of the pie that is for 15 years from now. You. And we're saving and we're investing appropriately that way. And I find that when. And risk, risk and on a financial advisor's head is like, well, how much risk do you want to take with your money? Right. More aggressive, less aggressive, all of that. But each slice of the pie has its own risk. So like, just because someone's 28 years old doesn't mean all of their money should be aggressive because again, what are they using it for? And that's.
I see that light bulb go off a lot when I'm speaking with my clients of I'm treating each slice differently, with a different risk tolerance because it has a different goal. So the goals and risks really go in hand, in my opinion.
Marcia Dawood:
Yeah, no, I completely agree. I love that because you're right, a 28 year old, you'd think, oh gosh, you have like all this time you can be super aggressive with what you're doing, but you also want people to live their life too. I hate seeing people where, oh, I have to save, I'm gonna work so hard. And then, you know, as there was a Gandhi quote saying you end up spending all of your health to get wealth, but then when you're older, you end up spending all your wealth to try to get your health back. Right. So let's not do that and let's actually live our life while we are in our 20s. Live our life while we're in our 30s, whatever it is. And those slices as you're talking about are really, I think super valuable.
Shari Rash:
Yeah, it really helps. I think it Also helps to like, relieve the pressure of everything. Okay, we are saving for retirement. Great. Check that box. We have a plan set up. We are saving for our future selves. Whether your future self is three years from now or ten years from now.
And it just. And then as money comes in. I'm very much a proponent of life is for living. So yeah, we are baking in stuff for fun. I do not believe in deprivation in order to save money because it just creates what I call the caged animal effect. Like I have a, a mini golden doodle. He's very good boy, but he gets the zoomies. So it's like you put him in the crate and yeah, he's locked up and he'll behave in there like it'll be fine.
Then as soon as you let him out, he's running around the house losing his mind. That's me personally and a lot of people like on a strict budget, yeah, I'm going to behave myself and I'm going to do good and I'm going to save and blah, blah, blah. But at certain point we're going to break out of that cage and we're going to create the caged animal effect and then we're buying everything. We didn't buy that three month period that we behaved ourselves and we just undid all the good. So you have to build in the fun stuff. You have to build in the luxury and the Netflix or whatever it is. That's not a waste. If that's giving you quality of life, then who am I to take that away? I'm not taking away your latte that you get a couple times a week.
If that's one of the best parts of your day, who am I to say that's a waste? So you have to give yourself the permission to go, no, I'm going to keep the fun stuff in there as well.
Marcia Dawood:
Yes. It's like money and value, they're very different. You know what some people value another person wouldn't value. I tell a story in my new book about how I spent like a lot of time agonizing over whether I should spend 5 extra dollars to get a paper towel holder because there was a little arm on the paper towel holder that held the paper towel in place. You could tear it with one hand. Right. Agonized over this $5 decision. Is it really going to be the countertop luxury of having this extra arm? Do I really need it? I don't know, but I.
You think about how many paper towels you use in a day, in a year, So I think in some cases, people need to look at value in a way that's okay. Value is going to be different from for every person. Some people would want the latte. It's very valuable for them. Some people, it's not. It just. It all depends. But I think if people can get kind of aligned with what their values really are and what they care about, then it's.
The money part is actually much, much easier.
Shari Rash:
That's a big thing. I see if someone. If a client comes to me and they're like, you know, I have this money, I spend it, I have nothing to show for it, or my spending just doesn't feel good, whatever it is. But so there's a disconnect. It's okay, well, what do you want your money to do for you? What's important to you? What are your values? And if someone were to say, well, I love to travel, and then I look at their credit card transactions and it's trips to Target and home goods, well, no wonder why they don't. There's a disconnect because they're not spending their money on what they value. Or if it's experiences like, why aren't you going to more concerts? Why aren't you going to museums? That's what you value. So sometimes it's just like that check of like, you should be able to look at where your money goes and be able to see, this is what matters to me.
If being healthy matters, like chiropractor visits, supplements, all of that stuff, massages, like, that's what's important to me. My transactions should mimic that. So it should be very clear when you look at it, what you value. And if it isn't, fix it, which is. It's very easy to fix it. Right? Just stop one and start the other.
Marcia Dawood:
Make it a habit.
Shari Rash:
And just as you're spending money, go, is this. Does this match? Is this align with my values?
Marcia Dawood:
Or maybe going to Target and home goods is really what you care about. Maybe. You seem to me like, realign your thinking. Right? Yeah. Makes so much sense. One last question before we wrap up. And so we talked a lot about the wealth transfer, and I'm so curious as to people's thoughts on what will happen as we see more money going into the hands of women. And when we say money, we're talking obviously a lot of money, trillions of dollars.
Like how. What kind of effect do you think that will have on people in general, but also on our economy?
Shari Rash:
Women. Women control the economy as it is right now. We make the spending purchases. We are very aware of where our money is going when we're spending it. Like you said, the $5 for the paper towel holder. Like we support companies that we believe in and you can already see it happening. I know I can. Like with my friends of buying food products that don't have certain that are more natural.
Like buying makeup products that are more natural. So I think you're going to just start seeing our dollars go towards what we believe in, which also values based investing is huge. ESG investing, environmental, social, governance. I think that's become more prevalent as women take more control over assets. I do think that they are going to seek out voices like theirs when it comes to who is helping me with my money. So I just think it's just going to again be more values based, more the emotions behind money, much more education around that as well. Yeah, I just think it's just gonna. Everything's just gonna get more of a more feminine, aware touch.
Marcia Dawood:
I love that. Well, Shari, thank you so much for coming on the show. We will definitely put links to your podcast. Everyone's talking money in the show notes. And thanks for being here today.
Shari Rash:
Thank you.