Are You Living Your Financial Life With Intention?
Hi,
Welcome to this week’s Get Ready Newsletter.
This week, I’ve been thinking about intention, especially the importance of reviewing the financial decisions, risks, and assumptions that quietly shape our lives.
So many financial decisions are shaped by forces we do not always see: our money stories, habits, biases, marketing messages, family patterns, retirement assumptions, and even the way risk shows up in everyday life.
Financial readiness helps us slow down, ask better questions, and make decisions with more clarity before life happens.
I’ve seen too many decisions go sideways because no one paused long enough to ask what was really driving the choice.
The Question to Ask Before Life Happens
Are you living your financial life with intention?
That question came up in two very different podcast conversations this week.
In one conversation, Dr. Severine Bryan and I talked about money stories, financial setbacks, community, and why having a plan makes goals feel achievable.
In another, Ceres Chua and I explored the hidden psychology behind money decisions, including unconscious bias, marketing language, anchoring, sufficiency, and the stories we carry about money.
Different conversations. Same theme.
The more we understand what shapes our financial decisions, the easier it becomes to choose with intention rather than react out of habit, fear, pressure, or outside influence.
From the Get Ready Before Life Happens Podcast
Anything Is Possible With the Right Financial Plan
Dr. Severine Bryan, Accredited Financial Counselor and host of The Dr. Sev Talks Money Podcast, joined me on the Get Ready Before Life Happens Podcast to talk about how our money story shapes our decisions, how to process financial setbacks without shame, and why community, clarity, and a plan can help turn goals into reality.
The key takeaway: With the right financial plan and clear intention, your goals become achievable, not abstract.
A clear plan helps turn goals into actionable steps. Understanding your “why” creates focus and direction. And when setbacks happen, reflection, support, and self-forgiveness help us rebuild with clarity.
Tony’s Take: When we approach our finances with intention, process our setbacks, and stay connected to community, we create the space to rewrite our money story and move forward with purpose.
🎙️ (watch or listen)
The Hidden Psychology Behind Your Money Decisions
Ceres Chua, Money Psychologist and Financial Coach, joined me to talk about the unconscious forces shaping how we spend, save, and define sufficiency.
Much of our financial decision-making happens below the surface. Marketing language, anchoring bias, money scripts, and emotional triggers can quietly influence what we believe, what we buy, and what we think we need.
The key takeaway: before making a financial decision, pause and ask whether emotion, bias, or outside influence is driving the choice.
Tony’s Take: When we understand how mindset, bias, and marketing influence shape our decisions, we gain the clarity to choose intentionally and define what “enough” means for us.
🎙️ (watch or listen).
In the Conversation
This week’s theme also connects to my guest appearance on The Retirement Fiduciary Podcast with Adam Koós: Insurance Blind Spots, Scam Red Flags, and Financial Readiness.
A life insurance policy can drift off track long before anyone notices.
People buy a policy, file it away, and assume it will work the way they expected. Yet life changes. Interest rates change. Insurance costs change. Policy loans can slowly erode the policy. Surrender charges can limit options. Current assumptions dramatically change the trajectory of a policy as compared to original projections.
That is why policy review matters.
A few key points stood out:
• Before buying insurance, start with a risk assessment.
• If you own permanent life insurance, request an in-force illustration every 2 to 3 years.
• Cash value life insurance is often sold in ways that make it sound like it is something other than life insurance.
• AI is making scams more personal and harder to detect.
• Financial readiness means making sure your family can find what matters when it matters most.
Why it matters: Financial risk often grows in the places people rarely review: old policies, missing documents, unclear responsibilities, and assumptions that no longer fit.
Tony’s Take: Ask as many questions before making a financial decision as you would before buying a new TV. Curiosity is a superpower that helps you gather the information you need to make an informed decision.
🎙️ Watch the conversation on (YouTube)
Recommended This Week
Mindset
When Your Money Becomes a Movement: Inside OurSheconomy's Campaign to Fund Women Intentionally
When women investors demand gender-lens funds, asset managers create them. When women entrepreneurs get funded, they hire other women. When women occupy C-suites and board seats, corporate policies shift. When women control capital, priorities change—not just in households, but in boardrooms and policy chambers.
Tony’s Take: Money becomes more powerful when it reflects values. When people align financial choices with the world they want to help build, money becomes a tool for agency and impact.
📖 Lynette Kahlfani-Cox for Invest for Better (LinkedIn)
Worth Listening
More Than Money with Colleen Bowler: Why Connection Comes Before the Plan
Overview: Colleen Bowler and Lorie Jones discuss the human side of financial planning, including habits, mentorship, collaboration, and why a plan should reflect a person’s life, dreams, and values.
Tony’s Take: Connection comes before strategy. The best financial plans begin by understanding the person, the story, and the life behind the numbers.
🎙️ Colleen Bowler and Lorie Jones on the Fearless Females Podcast (YouTube)
Retirement Readiness
More Signals I’m Watching
Several retirement resources this week point in the same direction: retirement planning is becoming less about reaching a number and more about making better decisions over time.
Chris Heye’s work for the LIMRA Retirement Income Institute looks at decision risk and protected income, especially as cognitive decline, healthcare costs, long-term care, and caregiving create new retirement risks.
Christine Benz and Jean Chatzky also explored the shift from saving for retirement to creating a reliable paycheck in retirement, including why spending decisions can feel harder than accumulation.
Recent research from Oath, EBRI/Greenwald, ACLI, and the SOA Research Institute reinforces the same idea: retirement planning now needs to include health, purpose, resilience, longevity, caregiving, income stability, and the real-life decisions people will face as they age.
Tony’s Take: The practical question is this: are we planning for a retirement spreadsheet, or for the actual decisions people will need to make as health, time, purpose, and family needs change?
📖 Decision Risk and the Desirability of Protected Income by Chris Heye, Ph.D. for the LIMRA Retirement Income Institute (read)
🎙️ From Nest Egg to Paycheck: Rethinking Retirement Planning with Christine Benz and Jean Chatzky on the HerMoney Podcast (listen)
📊 Oath Money & Meaning Institute Survey (here)
📊 EBRI/Greenwald Retirement Confidence Survey (here)
📊 ACLI Financial Resilience Index (Here)
📊 2024 Retirement Risk Survey Series. The SOA Research Institute (here)
Life Transitions
Planning for Child Free People: Estate, Legacy and Financial Strategies
Overview: A look at how planning changes for child free people, including estate planning, long-term care, professional fiduciaries, legacy, and the permission to spend with intention.
Tony’s Take: Planning assumptions often center on children. Child free planning requires a different conversation about care, roles, legacy, contingency planning, and who will step in when needed.
🎙️Maddie Roche and Melissa Joy on the Women’s Money Wisdom Podcast (Apple Podcasts)
Family and Education: The Cost of College
Why Most Families Never See a Return on Their College Investment
A discussion at the business of college, college fit, scholarships, FAFSA, test optional policies, and why families need to ask better questions before committing to a six-figure decision.
🎙️ Hans Hanson and Larry Sprung on the Mitlin Money Mindset Podcast (YouTube)
Your 17-Year-Old Is About to Sign a Mortgage. Nobody Told Either of You.
Overview: College in 2026 is not the decision it was in 1996. The math has shifted. The loans cannot be discharged. And a lot of families are signing the documents without ever running the numbers.
📖 Stoy Hall (read)
Tony’s Take: Better questions belong at the center of the college decision. College is one of the biggest financial decisions many families make. Families need a clear-eyed conversation about cost, debt, outcomes, and whether the decision supports the student’s future.
Worth Noticing
Money Secret
Overview: Wally Luckeydoo’s Money Secret project gives people a place to share financial experiences they may have carried silently, including fear, embarrassment, pressure, and money memories that shaped their lives.
Tony’s Take: Money silence creates shame. Sharing stories with honesty and compassion can help people feel less alone and more able to understand their financial lives.
📖 Share your money secret (here)
Fraud Alert
Reservation Impersonation Becoming Easier as Data Breaches Grow
Overview: Fraud.org warns that reservation impersonation scams are becoming easier as data breaches expose more personal (travel) information.
Tony’s Take: I received one of these for our summer vacation, and it included all of our reservation information because the hotel’s system had been hacked. Scam prevention now requires slowing down, verifying directly, and building family safety habits before the next message arrives.
📖 Fraud.org (read)
This Week’s Readiness Step
Before making your next meaningful financial decision, pause and ask three questions:
- What is influencing this decision?
- Does this choice reflect my goals and values?
- What question have I not asked yet?
Intentional decisions begin with noticing what is shaping them.
Your Financial Readiness System
This week’s theme connects directly to your Financial Readiness Plan. Readiness grows when your information, people, decisions, and next steps are organized before they are needed.
Final Thought
Financial readiness begins when we notice what is shaping our choices.
Our money stories, biases, family patterns, health risks, and life transitions all influence how we decide. The more we notice those forces, the more room we create for clarity.
Curiosity is where financial readiness begins.
Ask better questions, and the path forward becomes clearer.
Because when life happens, the way you think about money matters.
— Tony
P.S. Have a new podcast episode, book, article, research report, tool, or project that helps people think differently about money or prepare before life happens? Send it my way. I’m always looking for thoughtful resources to consider sharing in a future Get Ready Newsletter.
