Money conversations build clarity and confidence. 

On this episode of Get Ready Before Life Happens, I spoke with Tricia Daniel, TEDx speaker and founder of the Starting Over Wealth Network about how early, open money conversations create confidence, reduce fear, and help families stay prepared through life’s changes. Tricia shares how to overcome shame, communicate with clarity, and build a plan that supports both you and the people you care about.

 

Key Takeaways

 

🔹 Talking about money early helps build clarity, confidence, and preparedness

🔹 Money is a resource, and understanding “what is enough” supports better decisions

🔹 Small, consistent conversations make money feel more approachable and less overwhelming

🔹 Bringing money topics into the open helps release shame and build stronger connections

🔹 A shared plan gives your loved ones clarity and support when life changes quickly

🔹 Advisors and families benefit from focusing on people under care, not just assets

🔹 Taking action on what you learn helps turn awareness into meaningful progress

 

Tony’s Take: A simple conversation can change everything. When you talk about money early and often, you reduce fear, build clarity, and create a path forward for yourself and your loved ones. That’s how preparation becomes a true act of care.

 

 🎥 Watch this episode below: 

 

🎧 Listen to the podcast below or on your favorite podcast app. 

 

Connect with Tricia Daniel: 

 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/triciacdaniel/
• Tricia Daniel Website: https://triciadaniel.com
• Starting Over Wealth Network: https://sown.life
• Expanding To Enough Website: https://expandingtoenough.com
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@triciadaniel

 

Podcast:

 

• The Money Over Easy Show (Apple Podcasts)

 

Resources mentioned: 

 

• Modern Widows Club: https://modernwidowsclub.org/ 
• Listen to my conversation with Megan Kopka, Board Chair of The Modern Widows Club on the Get Ready Before Life Happens Podcast (here)

 

Bio: 

 

Tricia C. Daniel helps women in leadership get comfortable with uncomfortable money conversations. As a 3rd generation financial professional, TEDx keynote speaker, and founder of the Starting Over Wealth Network, she helps women understand how financial anxiety, money shame, and financial behaviors can impact both personal and professional financial decisions, especially when life changes. Tricia equips women leaders with greater confidence in how they think, talk, and make decisions about money.

 

As an MBA with more than 30 years of experience in corporate finance, auditing and public accounting, Tricia brings together financial education, financial therapy principles, and lived experience as a woman who has started over and personally understands how life changes can affect critical financial decisions. Through speaking, writing, workshops, and podcasts, she is making conversations about financial anxiety, money behaviors, and rebuilding wealth easier to have because financial confidence starts long before the numbers.

 

👉 Start Your Financial Readiness Plan: A free, practical plan that helps you create your in-case-of-emergency Financial First Aid Kit, organize what matters, and prepare before life happens. Start Your Free Financial Readiness Plan

 

👉 Support Get Ready. Become a Get Ready Insider and help keep the Financial Readiness Plan free, support the podcast, trusted resources, and consumer-first financial education. You’ll receive access to the Get Ready Library. Support Get Ready here.

 

 

 

Transcript:

Episode Transcript 

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tony: Money is one of the biggest walls between people, and most of us were never taught to talk about money.

Welcome to Get Ready: Before Life Happens. I’m Tony Steuer.

Today, I’m joined by Tricia Daniel.

Tricia, welcome to Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Tricia: Thank you. I’m excited to be here today. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation.

Tony: Me too. You’re doing some really interesting work.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your origin story, and how did it lead you to focus on how we talk about money?

Tricia: I’ve been talking about money since I was three.

Not necessarily willingly. It was just a conversation that naturally happened because I’m a third-generation financial professional.

My father is a financial planner. My grandfather was a financial planner before “financial planner” was even really a term. I believe he was called an agent.

Having conversations about money was very easy for us because my dad started doing it at the breakfast table when I was three.

My parents divorced, and my dad wanted to make sure his daughters understood money and knew how to talk about it.

As a financial planner, he had already watched people walk into his office devastated when a spouse died or after a divorce.

He saw that disconnect back in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.

So every Saturday morning he would roll out a napkin, grab a pen, and start drawing things for us at the breakfast table.

We still talk about money every Saturday.

It was about introducing concepts and making money an easy conversation.

I didn’t realize that wasn’t common until I started going on podcasts, getting into different rooms, and talking with people who told me that conversations about money gave them pure anxiety.

They were stressed out.

They didn’t know where to start.

That’s where I became passionate about helping people make these conversations easier.

I call it Money Over Easy, since it started over breakfast.

These are conversations we need to have more often because they’re so important.

That passion began when I was a three-year-old little girl. I just didn’t know then that I would eventually be talking about it professionally.

Tony: That’s really awesome.

It’s a reminder that financial literacy starts young.

Kids can pick up concepts.

You’re obviously not going to explain complicated investments to a three-year-old, but conceptually there’s a lot they can understand.

And simply having the conversation tells a child that it’s okay to talk about money.

Money isn’t a taboo subject.

As you said, it’s also about being prepared before life happens.

With divorce or widowhood, women in particular may suddenly find themselves dealing with money they’ve never had to talk about before.

Those conversations matter.

Tricia: They’re very important.

I didn’t realize when my dad was preparing my sister and me as little girls how much I would eventually need what he taught us.

Life happened to me.

I started over after divorce, not once but twice.

I’ve been an executive who was laid off during economic downturns.

So I know that anxiety of suddenly losing a job and thinking, “What do I do?”

Thankfully, I had the tools.

I just hadn’t realized my dad had been preparing me all along.

The biggest part of my story now came after I remarried.

I had been divorced for 15 years. I’d been on my own, raised my children as a single mom, rebuilt my life, and was very proud of what I had accomplished.

Then I remarried and blended a family of six boys.

I prayed for boys and realized just how thoroughly my prayers had been answered.

Only 35 days after our wedding, my husband’s spine shifted.

And so did everything in our lives.

Over the last four years, he has gone through five different surgeries, including three spinal fusions. One of those surgeries, as we talked about before we started recording, was just two weeks ago.

Life can change very, very fast.

We think everything is good, but the question is how we walk through what happens next.

I’m incredibly grateful for having learned financial literacy as a child in a positive way.

My dad made it joyful.

So I’ve been able to reach back into that and ask, “How can I walk through this season without fear?”

How can I walk through it with faith and preparation?

And how can I help other people be better prepared when life suddenly changes for them too?

Tony: That’s so important: walking through it without fear.

Money terrifies a lot of people.

Maybe we don’t understand it.

Maybe we have a scarcity mindset.

It’s very easy to develop negative feelings about money.

But money itself really is just a tool.

Tricia: Exactly.

It’s a resource.

It’s a renewable resource.

It doesn’t have a personality. It isn’t going to talk back to us.

But so many of us are taught scarcity.

“There’s never going to be enough.”

Then we start asking, “How much is enough?”

And eventually that can become, “Am I enough?”

“Enough” is a word a lot of people, especially women, struggle with.

That can become especially difficult when life gets hard and fear starts setting in.

Tony: What advice would you give somebody who is feeling that fear?

Tricia: My biggest thing is to start by taking a deep breath and remembering who you are.

When something happens, you’re going to get hit with so many different things.

Remember who you are.

Remember your skills.

Then ask: What do I know is true?

It’s about getting grounded.

You put both feet on the ground and know you’re steady.

Where do you need to be grounded?

What do you know is true?

“This injury happened.”

“This life change happened.”

“This divorce happened.”

Okay. That’s true.

Now what can I actually do about it?

When we start worrying about all the “what ifs” and “if onlys,” we can go down a rabbit hole of worry.

Sometimes interrupting that cycle starts with a two-second pause.

Your fight-or-flight response is kicking in, but you aren’t fighting a lion.

You’re fighting your own fear.

Taking a deep breath and creating that little pause can help calm your nervous system and reset.

Then come back to:

What is true?

What do I need to do next?

What skills do I have?

For me, one of the biggest things is reminding women who they are.

This moment doesn’t define them.

It is something they’re going to get through.

And someday their story may help someone else become better prepared.

That’s what I’m doing now, and it’s what you’re doing with this podcast: helping people prepare for when life changes.

Preparedness isn’t only about some distant catastrophe.

It’s about everyday life.

Life is going to happen whether we’re ready or not.

Being ready matters.

Tony: Exactly.

And disability is a good example.

People often imagine disability means being permanently and totally disabled for the rest of their lives.

But that isn’t always what happens.

Someone may have a temporary disability, partially recover, return to work in some capacity, or fully recover.

There are a lot of things that can happen along the journey.

The same is true with divorce, widowhood, job loss, and other transitions.

These things can happen much earlier than we expect.

Tricia: Exactly.

They aren’t necessarily far-off events.

I’ve talked with women who experienced major life changes in their 20s.

My own story happened shortly after our wedding.

I’ve seen story after story involving younger couples and newly married couples.

Things can happen at any time.

That’s where preparation matters.

Insurance.

Understanding how much cash you might need immediately.

Having some kind of preparedness plan.

Having conversations with your spouse, your kids, your parents, and the other people around you.

Make those conversations part of everyday life so they aren’t all doom and gloom.

They become an expression of how much you care about each other.

Then if something happens, decisions aren’t being made entirely out of fear.

There can be a sense of peace and calm.

Tony: I love that: a sense of peace and calm.

We talked before the show about preparation being a gift of love.

Why do you see it that way?

Tricia: Because when you love somebody, you don’t want them to face fear unnecessarily.

Think about what happens when someone dies.

In the middle of their grief, the family suddenly has to plan a funeral.

They have to make arrangements.

They have to figure out where everything is.

They’re grieving while also trying to make decisions.

When you love somebody, you want to give them as much peace as possible.

If you had surgery and couldn’t speak, you’d want to know your family could take care of things.

You’d want to know the children were taken care of.

You’d want your spouse to know what needed to happen.

When we love each other, we help each other prepare.

We prepare for good things like trips and vacations.

We can also prepare for everyday life.

I see it as a form of caring.

You’re caring for your family by making sure things are prepared and ready.

Maybe that’s for the next week.

Maybe it’s six months.

Maybe it’s the next year or the next 10 years.

You’ve already talked about it.

They know where the resources are.

That doesn’t mean everything happening around them will suddenly be peaceful.

Peace is something internal.

They can walk through the situation one step at a time because they already have some instructions.

Tony: That’s so important.

Anyone who has reached a certain age has probably seen friends or family members deal with the aftermath when someone dies and things weren’t organized.

It can be an enormous amount of work.

Maybe nobody knows the person’s real wishes.

Maybe family members end up in conflict.

Having these conversations beforehand can make a tremendous difference.

When you’re trying to have those conversations, what tips would you give somebody whose spouse really isn’t interested in talking about money?

Tricia: I love that you used the word interested.

Start with:

“I’m interested in knowing.”

Not:

“I need to know where all the accounts are.”

“I need to know every policy.”

Instead, have a conversation over a cup of coffee or tea.

Keep it simple.

“I’m interested in knowing what I could do for you if something happened.”

“If you were in the hospital, how could I make sure things were taken care of?”

“What’s one thing I might need to know today?”

Center it around caring rather than distrust.

Money can bring up issues of trust.

People may hear:

“I don’t trust you.”

But the conversation can instead be:

“I’m interested in knowing because I want to make sure your wishes are carried out and I can help until you’re better.”

Make it tangible.

Maybe it’s:

“If I had $100, what could I do for you?”

And for people who aren’t numbers-oriented, make it creative.

Get colored pencils.

Get a piece of paper.

Draw what it looks like.

My oldest son loves explaining things with pictures.

He says, “Mom, money is like a pizza. You can’t eat the whole thing at once. You eat it one slice at a time.”

So draw your family pizza.

Go through it one slice at a time.

If your family loves camping, use a camping trip.

If you want to buy a house someday, use that.

Make it about something they care about.

For younger children, maybe it’s a game.

Make money a conversation that connects with their world.

If you teach children when they’re young, they begin to realize:

“This isn’t scary.”

“We have a plan.”

“We know what we’re doing.”

If something does happen later, they know Mom and Dad have already talked about this.

That’s what my dad gave me.

I didn’t understand until much later that part of the reason money didn’t scare me was because my dad had already walked me through it.

Keep these conversations short.

Maybe 30 minutes.

Then come back to them regularly.

Tony: I love that.

Talking about money brings it into the open, which removes some of the fear.

It’s often the things we don’t talk about that become frightening.

And your idea works whether you’re talking to a young child, a teenager, or an adult.

You’re talking about money on their terms rather than only yours.

What changes can people make to move from feeling shame around money to feeling more confident talking about it openly?

Tricia: Shame is something I’m very passionate about talking about.

I saw it in my own family.

My mother carried a lot of shame around money, debt, and not being where she thought she should be in life.

It affected her deeply, even physically.

So this is personal for me.

The biggest way to begin breaking shame is to bring it into the open.

Take debt as an example.

A lot of people feel tremendous shame around debt.

They don’t want to talk about it, especially if they’re an executive or somebody in leadership.

Then life changes.

In our own family, we’ve dealt with a lot of medical debt over the last several years.

I’m a third-generation financial professional.

I’ve spent decades in finance and accounting.

I have an MBA.

I have all the credentials and experience.

But life happens.

The question becomes: How do we step through it?

For me, part of breaking shame is putting everything in front of you.

Create a notebook.

It doesn’t always have to be a spreadsheet, because spreadsheets can feel overwhelming to some people.

Gather the bills.

Look at them.

Talk about them.

Create a plan.

And again, you don’t need to do everything in one sitting.

Maybe it’s 30 minutes.

Have small discussions.

When you can say something out loud, it begins to break the power it has over you.

Shame thrives in silence.

I think of shame as a silent battle you’re having with yourself.

The moment you tell a friend, consultant, coach, spouse, child, or somebody else you trust, you’ve brought it into the open.

It no longer has the same power over you.

Tony: I love that: shame thrives in silence.

A lot of us grew up watching our parents argue about money.

Or we’ve made our own money mistakes.

I talk about having problems with credit cards when I was coming out of college.

Most of us have something where we think, “I wish I had handled that differently.”

That’s okay.

It’s part of learning.

What are some of the curveballs you see people navigating most often with money?

Tricia: I think the curveball is really about what you do with those experiences.

Take your credit-card story.

Take medical debt.

You can turn it into:

“This is my story. This is what happened. And this is what I did next.”

That’s where you begin breaking the shame because you’re speaking about it.

The first time I publicly shared my story about divorce and rebuilding, it was difficult.

I knew I had rebuilt.

I knew I had stood back on my own two feet.

But shame had kept me quiet.

Once I changed the narrative and shared it, somebody came up to me and said:

“I did too. Thank you so much.”

That person felt freer because I had shared my story.

That’s when the curveball becomes something meaningful.

Maybe I went through this because now I can help somebody else become prepared.

Maybe I can help someone else with their financial readiness.

It can hurt at first.

But when someone says, “Because of you, I was ready for this,” that’s incredibly powerful.

Tony: That’s awesome.

And it points to the importance of community.

If someone is going through divorce, talking with somebody who has already gone through it can be valuable.

For widows, there are organizations specifically designed to create that kind of support.

One other question: How can people begin thinking about legacy in a meaningful way that reflects their values and what matters to them?

Tricia: Think about what lasts beyond you.

My dad said something very powerful recently.

He has spent decades around financial advisors, and he sees how often the conversation becomes focused on assets under management.

How many assets do you have?

How much money do you have?

For people who don’t have that level of assets, that can even feed shame.

My dad said:

It shouldn’t only be about assets under management.

It should be about people under care.

How are you taking what you have and making sure something meaningful lives beyond you?

Legacy isn’t only about what you accumulated.

It’s about what you taught your children.

What you gave your community.

What you shared with other widows or people rebuilding after divorce.

Whether the financial resources are little or large, you can use them to help other people.

Then those people can carry those lessons forward.

That can continue long after your own voice is gone.

Legacy is much bigger than a monetary number.

It includes all those nonfinancial resources that live on after us.

Tony: I absolutely love that: people under care.

And I think it applies to anyone managing money, selling products, running an organization, or leading employees.

The people you’re responsible for are more than numbers.

Tricia: Absolutely.

I had that conversation with my dad over breakfast just a few weeks ago.

He’s been doing this since the 1960s and is still going.

He has watched clients start young and grow older.

He has watched businesses grow and be sold.

He has watched people go through major transitions.

Those are long-term relationships.

These are people under your care.

It’s much bigger than a number representing assets.

Tony: I love that.

It’s a long-term relationship rather than simply a transaction.

I learned something similar through outdoor leadership training.

When you’re responsible for a group of people, leadership really is about the people under your care.

If you take care of them, you’re being a good leader.

It’s easy to say and not always easy to do.

Tricia: No, it isn’t.

And as a professed introvert, that has been a hard lesson for me.

I love being behind my computer screen.

That’s easy.

But over the last several years, I’ve learned the power of caring for people and sharing your story.

The first time you tell your own story can be incredibly hard.

But once you do, people relate to you.

And that can make you a more powerful leader.

Tony: Definitely.

Before we wrap up, you have a financial care package that you offer on your website.

Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Tricia: Yes.

It was inspired by some of the fires we had on the West Coast and flooding on the East Coast.

People’s lives were suddenly thrown into turmoil.

So I created a Financial Care Package.

It gives families some of those first resources to think about for the first week, three months, six months, and up to a year.

It’s a checklist designed to help people walk through those initial things and have some of those easier conversations.

The idea is to have something ready for your family at a moment’s notice, whether you are there or not.

People can find it at SOWN.life, S-O-W-N dot L-I-F-E.

SOWN stands for Starting Over Wealth Network.

It’s a network for women who have started over after divorce, the death of a spouse, or another major life change.

The Financial Care Package is a free checklist available there.

Tony: Fantastic.

For everybody watching and listening, there will be a link in the show notes.

Tricia, let’s move into what I call the Get Ready Hot Take Trio.

These are three quick questions I ask all my guests.

First:

What’s one money myth you’re trying to break?

Tricia: That money is limited.

Money is a renewable resource.

But we’re often taught that it is limited and that there will never be enough.

“Enough” becomes this moving target.

Money is a resource, and it is renewable.

Tony: I love that.

For somebody who is really struggling financially, it can be hard to think that way.

Moving forward may not be easy.

For most of us it isn’t.

But there are ways to keep moving.

Let’s get out the time machine for a minute.

If you could go back knowing what you know now about money and communication, what advice would you give your younger self?

Tricia: Actually do it.

When you hear good advice, act on it.

My dad taught me so much growing up, but I didn’t always do it.

I’ve asked him:

“Dad, why didn’t you make me?”

And he said:

“That was up to you.”

Now I tell my nieces, nephews, and our boys:

“Go do it.”

Invest.

Start.

Whatever age you are, don’t just collect knowledge and store it somewhere.

Don’t hoard the information.

Act on it.

If I could go back, I wish I had taken more of my dad’s advice and actually followed through when I was younger.

There’s no telling how much more I might have built by now.

Tony: It’s interesting.

We ask people for advice, but we don’t always act on it.

And it’s especially difficult when you’re young.

Tricia: Exactly.

When I was younger, it was:

“Okay, Dad. I’m going to the mall now.”

I was more interested in shopping, getting my house, or giving my children things.

Especially after divorce, I’ll admit I sometimes wanted to give my children things out of guilt.

I wish I had shown them earlier that there are different ways to express love.

Now, with boys ranging from eight to 24, I’m working on the language I use with each of them.

How do I show them the value of listening to good advice and acting on it?

Tony: I love that: the power of listening to advice and actually doing something with it.

To wrap up, what’s your number one tip to change the way we think about money?

Tricia: Remember who you are.

Life can cover you with a lot of mud.

Sometimes you have to shed that away and remember:

Who am I?

Who was I created to be?

What are my gifts?

Not hers.

Not his.

Mine.

Remember that childlike joy.

Think back to when you were five, six, or seven.

Find that joy again and begin moving forward.

Tony: I think you said something especially powerful there.

Remember what your particular gifts are rather than focusing on somebody else’s gifts or the gifts you wish you had.

We all have things we’re very good at and other things we’re not so good at.

You can work on weaknesses, but your strengths are your strengths.

Tricia: Exactly.

We often forget what they are because we’ve spent so much time focusing on weaknesses or comparing ourselves with someone else.

Sit down and ask:

“What are my strengths?”

Write them down.

That can be incredibly powerful.

Tony: I’m a basketball person, so Kareem Abdul-Jabbar immediately comes to mind.

His skyhook was basically unstoppable.

He didn’t spend his career trying to become somebody else.

He developed something he could do better than almost anybody.

That was his strength.

Tricia: That’s a perfect example.

I can see the image in my mind.

Nobody else did it like he did.

He had to understand his own attributes, his height, his skills, and put them together.

It became legendary.

And I think each of us has some kind of legendary skill within us.

We have to sit down, figure out who we are, identify our strengths, and start.

Tony: I love that.

We each have a legendary skill within us.

But you still have to start.

Tricia, where can people learn more about you and your work?

Tricia: I’d love for people to visit TriciaDaniel.com, T-R-I-C-I-A-D-A-N-I-E-L dot com.

We’re also relaunching my podcast, The Money Over Easy Show, where we’ll continue conversations like these.

People can also visit SOWN.life, S-O-W-N dot L-I-F-E, for the Financial Care Package and more resources around financial anxiety and starting over.

Tony: Fantastic.

For everybody watching and listening, as always, you can find all of those links in the show notes.

Tricia, thanks for joining us on Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Tricia: Thank you so much for having me. I can’t wait to talk with you again.

Tony: And thank you, everyone, as always, for tuning in to this episode of Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

If you learned something today that changed the way you think about money, readiness, or preparation, please subscribe and share this episode.

You can also join the Get Ready Movement at TonySteuer.com to receive my newsletter and access free resources.

Because when life happens, the way you think about money matters.