145. The Moment She Stopped Asking for Permission: How Financial Confidence Changes Everything

Are you confident in your financial future—or have you been leaving the money decisions to someone else?

For many women, finances can feel overwhelming, intimidating, or simply easier to avoid. Whether you're married, divorced, widowed, or building your next chapter on your own, understanding your financial picture is one of the most important forms of self-care. Yet many women reach midlife realizing they don't fully understand their assets, retirement plans, or long-term financial options.

In this episode, I'm joined by financial advisor Bridget Borel to discuss the emotional side of money, the stories we've inherited about finances, and how women can begin building true financial confidence. Bridget shares why money is about much more than numbers, how our early experiences shape our financial behaviors, and practical steps women can take to become more informed, empowered, and engaged in their financial lives.

If you've ever felt overwhelmed by financial decisions, unsure where to start, or worried that you're not "good with money," this conversation will help you take the first step toward creating a new money story.

In this episode:

[01:00] Bridget explains why money is emotional, not just mathematical, and how our feelings often drive financial decisions

[02:00] The importance of understanding your personal money story and how early experiences influence your relationship with money

[03:00] Why many women disengage from financial decision-making and the risks of handing over complete control

[04:00] How financial awareness serves as an important form of self-care and personal empowerment

[07:40] Bridget shares her experience of always feeling like she needed permission and how midlife can become a catalyst for change

[09:40] How societal conditioning and limiting beliefs influence women's financial confidence

[10:50] Bridget introduces her "Confidence Equation" and explains why confidence comes from agency plus skills

[12:00] Practical first steps for understanding your current financial picture and identifying your future goals

[13:15] Sara reflects on her own divorce experience and how her perspective on financial planning has evolved over time

[16:00] The difference between being financially supported and being financially informed

[17:00] Lessons from women who discovered too late that they didn't understand their family's financial situation

[20:00] How to start having productive money conversations with your partner through regular "money dates"

[22:00] Why working with a financial advisor can help uncover the questions you didn't know to ask

[24:30] How couples can define financial security and retirement based on their shared values and goals

[25:30] Why financial planning should be an ongoing conversation that evolves as your life changes

[27:55] Creating a new money story and taking small, consistent steps toward greater financial confidence

Connect with Bridget Borel:

Bridget Borel, CFP® CDFA®, is the founder and lead advisor of Clairwell Financial Planning LLC. We partner with women in mid-life and beyond to re-align their financial lives after divorce and other major transitions. Let’s simplify wealth management and build a beautiful life.

 Email: bridget@clairwellfp.com

Website: clairwellfp.com

Instagram: clairwellfp

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Bridget.Clairwell

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bridget-borel-44177240/

Substack: https://clairwellconversations.substack.com/

"The Confidence Equation" article https://clairwellconversations.substack.com/p/the-confidence-equation

Second Saturday Divorce Workshops: https://luma.com/c9u84tsy

Book an intro call: https://calendly.com/tpfp/15-min-introductory-phone-chat

Strangers: A Memoir of a Marriage by Belle Burden https://belleburdenbook.com/

Awake: A Memoir by Jen Hatmaker https://jenhatmaker.com/awake/

Connect with me, Sara Poldmae:

• Website: https://risingwomanproject.com

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drsarapoldmae

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to share it with someone who needs to hear it. Don't forget to follow, rate, and leave a review—it helps more women find this space so we can all rise and thrive together.

Transcript

Sara Poldmae: 0:01

Sarah, welcome to Menopause Rise and Thrive. I am Dr. Sarah Poldmay, and this podcast is your go-to guide for navigating perimenopause and menopause. If you are feeling a little overwhelmed, trust me, you are in great company. Each week, I'll bring you expert advice, raw, honest conversations and simple tips to help you stay grounded and maybe even find some humor in the process. Let's rise, thrive, and tackle this wild ride together. Hi, ladies, welcome back to Menopause Rise and Thrive. I am always so excited when I get to have a dear friend on the show, and today Bridget is joining us. Bridget Burrell is a financial whiz. She helps women, especially in transition, with their money matters. So today, Bridget and I are going to talk about financial confidence. Welcome to the show, Bridget. Thank you so much, and I'm excited to be here too.

Bridget Borel: 1:00

Yeah, there's a lot of emotion behind money. There's a lot of power struggles with money. There's a lot of all the things, right? And I know that money can be a big source of contention in relationships, but I always want to frame things on my show is as if, like, we have so much choice in the matter, right? So I would love to talk to you about, you know, financial stuff in this, in the framework of like empowerment, and how it can really transform your life. So let's dive in. Absolutely, so one of my little maxims that I throw at clients, or whoever is listening, really is money isn't math, and math isn't money. So, I think you know definitely when you're working with a financial advisor, you want this person to be technically sound, and you also want to be emotionally seen and understood. Every part of our lives that is touched by money. There's an emotional component, so absolutely 100% When we are making those decisions, we are hopefully incorporating some rational analysis in those decisions, but absolutely emotions come into play, and sometimes there's these underlying stories. I talk with clients a lot about what their money story is, and you know, getting into like, what are their early money memories? Is that money, is that story serving you? And if not, what do we need to do to rewrite it? And I think, particularly with your audience and the women I work with, who are largely divorces, we're looking at this critical watershed moment in life, where you're kind of reconsidering could be everything about you, your entire identity, and money

Sara Poldmae: 3:00

is part of that, and our relationship with money, and how we use money. So, yes, all of the things, all of the things. So, one of the things that has always shocked me is that women often ignore money, that is a very womanly trait that I'm hoping that even if just a few listeners out there take a little bit more empowerment in their, in their financial situation, whether they are still married, going through divorce, single, doesn't matter really, but money is something that we should pay attention to, and I rarely like to use the word should, but in this case I am going to say you should pay attention to your money, and so what shocks me is I've seen so many of my good friends go through divorce and literally have no idea what their assets are while they're going through the divorce process, and I think that

Bridget Borel: 4:00

can apply whether there's a divorce in the picture, whether you're single, no matter what. Like, we should know what money we have, right? Or what money we'd like to have. It's definitely.. I would say it's a part of self care, and just it is important to.. so I'll give you another word, it's an important part of taking care of ourselves, if we want to get rid of the should, but I absolutely see that in so many clients and friends, and there is unfortunately this narrative, especially in our culture, of you know, that women are expected to be taken care of by a spouse or by family, and you know, unfortunately, it is - it's absolutely part of the whole patriarchy of, like, let's keep you small and dependent upon someone else. And it can be very damaging, so even if women are high income earners, or you know, have their own family money going into a relationship, whether that's the case, or they are stay-at-home moms, not working, compared to, you know, or lower income compared to their spouse, there is this common thread I see of women being okay with handing over the reins of their finances, and it's not, it's not all the time, it's not all the time. There are definitely women who are, you know, the money lead in their family

Sara Poldmae: 5:35

that every day in clinic. So, oh yeah, for women in midlife is a concierge clinic. It is not cheap to work with us, but I tell you, it's worth every penny, because we will hold your hand through the perimenopausal transition. But the most common objection that we hear in clinic every day, when they're, when they're deciding whether to join our care, is that they need to ask their husband, and I value the idea of teamwork, and that yes, you would have to discuss large, large purchases with your teammate, right, but you know, sometimes it's like I'll ask my husband when he gets back from his golfing trip in Scotland, and I'm thinking, okay, well, somewhere international come from judgment, it's just more like, oh, the irony, like the right, that's like the most common objection we hear is that they have to ask their husband, and then they come back and they say, yeah, well, it's just not the right time to spend this money, women are falling apart at the scenes, and they can't spend the three or $500 a month for six months or a year to basically create a new version of themselves, and I just find that to be so disappointing, and I often find that it is because of exactly what you're saying, is that you know we, we take a back seat in the financial decision making process to the point where sometimes the decisions are about whether you're going to be well or not, and you're still letting your partner, you know, hold the reins there, and that's mine, except some of these women are, you know, carrying around these Gucci purses, and I hope this isn't getting too up off topic, but I think it points exactly to the idea of being taken care of, so you just sit there, you know, wifey, and hold that $3,000 purse that I gave you, but don't think that you're actually going to be taking charge of your health and wellness with our financial funds in the bank,

Bridget Borel: 7:40

right, and I will, I will say this, and that I recognize in, in my own history, and you know, I'm divorced. I remember feeling in my marriage that I always had to ask permission, yeah, for whatever, and that wasn't entirely my husband's doing it was a lot of my own way of thinking of myself and my own role in the marriage, and I think you know perhaps getting to midlife where we're tired, you know, we've raised kids, we've, you know, worked, worked at home, you know, maybe we're in the throes of dealing with menopausal symptoms, and it's kind of like, you know, we get to this point where we can't take the BS anymore, and that includes our own, and so let me just say, say that one more time,

Sara Poldmae: 8:44

because

Bridget Borel: 8:44

we talk about everybody else's bs, but how about like stopping listening to our own bs? Right, absolutely, and this is something that I feel like I embrace the non-duality of this topic, in that absolutely 100% there's this limiting patriarchal message of, you know, that women are are receiving throughout their lives, and

Sara Poldmae: 9:13

both, both parties are receiving it.

Unknown: 9:16

Oh, yeah,

Sara Poldmae: 9:17

we're all taught this, right? Right, us, and just because we don't want to play along with the system anymore, it's not entirely fair to ask our partners to all of a sudden shed those beliefs. We can have conversations and hope that that's something that they get to, but again, I'm like, it would be a disservice to the relationship to expect all of that to dissolve on his end, just because we're ready to step out.

Bridget Borel: 9:39

Sure, and it's it's the air that we breathe, right? So I think one of the first things that we can do is a be honest with ourselves, of am I contributing, do I feel limited? What you know, and this is kind of going back to that idea of a money story of what. What is my money story? Do I have, you know, do I have a scarcity mindset? Do I feel like I need to spend to, like, cover up bad feelings or whatever that is. Let's recognize. Yes, I can say the patriarchy plays a part of it, but what is the role I play, and am I getting in my own way?

Sara Poldmae: 10:20

And I think that's something about moving from the stories that we have and stepping into the ownership of our lives, right? So we can't really fully step into owning our own lives unless we're willing to let go of the life that we led in the past. So, yes, how do we move from those old stories to a new one, and how do we move from fear to agency? I think those are the meat of the discussion we need to have for the women listening,

Bridget Borel: 10:50

right. So, there's a an article on my blog post, I think I titled it the confidence equation, where a therapist friend of mine had said that confidence equals agency plus skills, and I just love that, because I think with respect to money and viewing money as something that we can use and a tool, and to build a better life, that we have to believe that we have the ability, we have the agency, we are able to take direction in our lives, so that's the agency piece, and the skills piece. I mean, we're not dumb, we can figure this out, like so much of money management, it's pretty simple, but our emotions cloud it, so the skill part is just really taking little steps and getting started, and then that just builds upon itself, and we gain that confidence, and that that helps us go to the next level. So, really, as far as like, how do we start to change that story or build a new identity, it's just taking a step, it's identifying. Okay, what is an area? Where am I now? Let's first start with that. Let's get honest with ourselves of what is my financial picture now. What is happening? What's coming in? What's going out? Am I on track for, you know, whatever my goals are, and if you're in a transition like a divorce or a spouse died, then that all gets reconfigured, so you're kind of having to not necessarily start from scratch, but it's changing your picture dramatically. So, where am I now? Where is it that I want to be? And sometimes we haven't taken the time to really think about that, so giving ourselves time to think about where we want to go, and honestly, but not hypercritically, and that's the other piece, is you know, we don't want to beat ourselves up in this process. What do I need to do to get there? Yeah, and then taking tiny little steps in that direction, and then it again, it just snowballs upon itself and builds upon itself, and suddenly you're, you know, a year or two down the road, and looking back and thinking, wow, how the heck did I do that? Look at me, yay, yeah,

Sara Poldmae: 13:17

and it's so true, like I have to say, like it was only very recently I went through a divorce, maybe 15 years ago, and through that, it was pretty amicable. We didn't have a ton of assets to decide where they would go, and stuff like that. So, money wasn't the biggest, you know, biggest thing that we navigated through in our separation agreement. It was more about my daughter, who's always been my primary, you know, hey, and I look back now with things that I know now that I didn't know then, and I wonder if my willingness to not really look at the money more carefully may have been a detriment to her, not necessarily to me. I've always been someone that thinks about money more as, like, you know, you know, how's my year look? I never really looked until recently at, like, what is it going to look like in the future, you know? I would put some money in retirement, but when my financial planner talks about those things, I just kind of glaze over. I'm like, okay, I just, I'm gonna put this much money, and I kind of listen to his advice, but I don't. It's only been the past couple years that I've really started to think about, hmm, you know, what happens if my current husband, who's significantly older than me, what happens when he passes away, what happens if I'm ready to retire and he's still around, like, you know, you just start to think about all these things, and it's amazing how long it took me to think about those things, but he did start, it was empowering.

Bridget Borel: 14:42

Yeah, and I mean, I don't think you should beat yourself up about that, in that you've been building this tremendous business, so in a lot of ways you, I don't want to say you had to keep blinders on, but you were focused, and that business itself. It, I assume, is part of your legacy to yourself and to your daughter. So I'm not gonna let you beat up on yourself, Sarah. No, you've done

Sara Poldmae: 15:12

great. Yeah, not necessarily beating up, just.. but I wonder, yeah, always take what you know now and think back to the decisions you made 15 years ago, and right now that I know what I know, maybe I would have done things differently. So it's not necessarily,

Bridget Borel: 15:24

definitely,

Sara Poldmae: 15:25

you know. Oh gosh, Sarah, like, what were you thinking? Not at all. Yeah, I'm actually very proud of the way I handled my separation after seeing so many of my friends go through it, and it getting quite ugly, you know. My eye has always been on the prize to treat him with love and kindness, because he's the father of my children, and some, and he's a good guy, like not all of my friends had good guys to divorce from, right? Right. So, but yeah, it just amazes me how little ownership we often take of our finances as women, and I do think that a big part of it for many women, including myself, was the stories being told, but I do want to bring up the being taken care of part, because I'd love to just unwrap that a little bit. I want to say that there's nothing wrong with wanting to be taken care of, but I do think, and maybe we can talk through this a little bit more, because I think that if we say, oh, you shouldn't be taken care of by a man, I don't think that's fair either, because I think that sometimes in a more traditional marriage, where the woman's at home, the husband is taking care of not her, but the family, and her being part of the family financially, but she's providing other parts of the, the, you know, equation, so being taken care of and wanting to be taken care of, I don't think is wrong. I just think that we want to make sure that we also understand the full picture. Would you agree with that? Absolutely, and I would, I would add to that, that the idea of being taken care of

Bridget Borel: 17:00

is, it's nuanced, yeah, and that it doesn't have to mean a lack of partnership and either equality or equanimity, and so I brought this is kind of a good segue, I brought a couple of books that have been kind of hot in the divorce kind of realm, but I feel like both of these authors, so Awake by Jen Hatmaker and Strangers by Galburne, they're both memoirs of the divorces that they went through, and each of them, each of these women kind of let even though they both had money of their own, they both kind of let their husbands take care of everything to the extent that they really didn't have any idea of what was going on, and when I say take care of everything, I mean, like managing the bills and the cash flow of the house and their investments and the larger financial pictures and tax returns, all of those things, not that they weren't, you know, taking care of their family in their own ways, and then they both going through their divorce had this kind of awakening of oh crap like what did I do here and it's interesting to me seeing that that arc and I see it a lot with my clients too of a client you know, a woman who was not a family CFO, and for whatever reason has kind of embodied this idea that she's not smart about money, and like, stop. I have one client who's got a PhD from an Ivy League, and you know, immigrated here by herself from Europe when she was a young woman. I'm like, you are smart. This doesn't have to be your field of expertise. You don't have to know everything. You can manage this,

Sara Poldmae: 19:09

not about our intellect as to whether we can manage it. It's usually the stories we've been taught, or the fear, or just, you know, sometimes we're comfortable, right? Yeah, I

Bridget Borel: 19:18

mean, yeah, like, I don't like working on my taxes either, so you know there were times, and when I was married, it wasn't so much that that management of money wasn't so much of an issue for for us, because we had kind of gone back and forth over the years of taking care of those things, but when my husband at the time wanted to take over, you know, doing the taxes and investments. I was like, okay, cool, you'll see more water. It's not, it's not fun, per se, to get on the tax return, but I think it is, you know, going back to your initial point of. Yes, this is something we should be paying attention to. It is a disservice to ourselves, and by extension to our children, to not be aware and take some kind of active engagement in our financial lives. Yeah, and but it's not. It's also not. It's not an either or. We can, if we haven't been doing this, we don't have to suddenly be doing all of it. We can start taking steps in, you know, if you're, if you're currently married, or you know, partner, you can say to your partner, if they're the family CFO, you can say, 'Hey, I really want to understand what's going on. Yeah, can we take some time to walk through this, and you can have money dates where you pick a certain set of tasks to work through, and just take it a little bit at a time, and we gain that confidence, like I was talking about

Sara Poldmae: 21:00

earlier, through building that right, and if someone's used to being in control of everything, sometimes having help, I think, from the outside to ask more maybe specific questions in the beginning, or you know, navigate through what answers do you really want that you, you know, sometimes it's good to ask for help from your therapist or your financial, but whoever, to find ways to ask questions in a non-threatening manner, because I think sometimes if you are nervous, or you hear, let's say, you hear this podcast, and then you're like, "Oh my god, I know, I know nothing, I've got to go figure it all out. Bridget said I should really know about my money, and then you go to your husband, and like, demand, like, I need to know everything. Your husband, who's used to taking care of it all, may feel a little threatened, like, what you don't think. So, I think you know, if you're going to have those larger conversations, you haven't had them in many years, it could make sense to ask some somebody from the outside to help you navigate how to ask those questions. Absolutely, they're not the enemy at this point. If you're still married,

Bridget Borel: 22:04

right? Right. I, and I would say so. A couple of things I would say to that. I had a client recently who was just trying to better understand. She's she and her husband are both there. It's a second marriage for both of them, and so they had a prenup, which I all about prenups, I think they're great, but she didn't feel like she really understood what would happen if he passed away, and she was just trying to really understand, so that she could structure her own business and her own financial decisions based on what might happen, yeah, because it could happen, and he was a little, I think, put off by that, like, why do you want to talk about me, dying, and so, so, so, and there can be that, you know, that mortality element to it, where you know either one of us could be uncomfortable, yeah, talking about money from that standpoint, but the other thing I wanted to say there was absolutely underscoring the importance of a third party, whether that's, you know, someone in more of like an emotional support role, like a therapist or a financial advisor, one of my biggest jobs is not so much telling clients what the right math answer is, but asking the right questions. Yeah, so I think it's not even necessarily on the client. I mean, I don't want to discourage clients from, like, coming up with questions, but to me it's my responsibility to get at what is the question under the question. So, if someone is asking, am I going to be okay for retirement? Well, okay, what does that mean? What does okay look like, right? To you, do you know? Tell me more about what you want retirement to look like. Tell me more about what feels secure. Yeah, tell me why you might not feel secure right now. And so getting into those questions, to me it's more about everybody asking better questions, and just being curious, staying curious. Yeah, and oftentimes you know, if some, if one person's

Sara Poldmae: 24:30

making all the decisions, and you're not watching that, they may have a completely different idea of what would make you secure in retirement as a couple, and that doesn't make them wrong, and you right, it just means that if you're wildly different, and often people are, you know, like some people are fine with x number of dollars in retirement, some people are not fine with that, so it's more about just making sure that you feel you. Know, relatively good in the, in the conversation, and that you are, are able to get each other on the same page, or make, you know, whatever compromises need to happen, you know, anytime you're having any kind of relationship, that's important, right? So it's not really about numbers, it's more about, you know, how do you want to live, or what freedoms would you like to have won't you retire, or you know, and that can, and that can be a very different story for different people within the same relationship. Absolutely, and I

Bridget Borel: 25:30

think if we're, you know, again getting back to the midlife piece of it, you know, if we are married, we're getting to the point where, you know if we have children there, maybe finishing school and leaving the home, and we've been busy, yeah, getting, getting, you know, careers to a certain point, and getting kids to a certain point, and that bigger picture, more strategic kind of conversation with our partner may have fallen away. Yeah, and so I think it can, it can take some practice, and, and I don't want to make this sound like it's a one and done conversation, like this is an iterative thing, where, yeah, you know, I, my hope is for clients to take this on repeatedly and not in like a, an overdoing it kind of way, right, but that it takes time to process for both of us, so if we're talking about a married couple, like saying to you, to your husband, like, hey, you know, we've talked about maybe having a beach house in retirement, but now I'm kind of thinking maybe it might be nice to be in the mountains, or we talked about owning a vacant vacation home, but now I'm thinking I'd rather, you know, be able to be not tied to one location and want to travel, you know, more different areas, and you know, rent where we go somewhere, or you know, maybe we want to move, you know, just spitballing ideas, and I think that can really be fun, actually, in a relationship where you don't have to hold tightly to any one particular idea, for sure. You know, we can allow ourselves and our partner to explore different ideas and different dreams and different thoughts of what the future might be, and know that we're not, you know, we're not going to get there in one conversation, and that's okay.

Sara Poldmae: 27:42

Yeah, it could be many conversations, it could be just a few. It could be that you do some sleuthing with, with your husband, and you are like,"Wow, he's actually on the same page, and that's like the best of the world. Yeah, like that. Start with just knowing that it could be a lot of.. yeah,

Bridget Borel: 27:56

you absolutely don't want to leave it unsaid.

Sara Poldmae: 27:59

No, no, 100% Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I love the idea of kind of getting rid of the old money stories, creating something new, maybe taking some time to kind of envision what you want, maybe bringing that to the table when you're having the conversation, maybe you think about that first, but I love all of this, I love, you know, the organic conversation we just had. Absolutely, thanks so much for that time, Sarah. Yeah, absolutely. Bridget, I am going to make sure that the audience has all of your links in the show notes. Bridget really loves working with women, especially in midlife, so if you are looking for a financial advisor, or maybe haven't even ever thought of having one for yourself, for some reason. Definitely get in touch with Bridget. We will also, Bridget, please send me the book titles, as well as the authors, so I can include those in the show notes. And it's been so great having you on the show, and I look forward to seeing you at our next book club. Yes, great, thanks so much. All right. Have a good one. You too. Bye.