Aging with Purpose and Passion

Sherry Finkel Murphy - Financial Security; Steps Every Woman Can Take Today

• Beverley Glazer • Episode 118

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In this empowering episode of Aging with Purpose and Passion, host Beverley Glazer sits down with financial expert Sherry Finkel Murphy, founder of Madrina Molly, to explore how women can take actionable steps towards financial security and financial independence at any age. Sherry challenges misconceptions about women and money, offering practical advice that helps foster confidence in financial planning and wellbeing.

Together, they dive into:  
• Sherry’s journey into financial planning and empowerment for women  
• The role of personal narratives in transforming financial education  
• Overcoming ageism and redefining professional paths  
• Key steps to financial wellbeing and independence  
• The power of storytelling in financial education  
• Practical advice to help women achieve financial independence  

If you're ready to take control of your financial future, this conversation offers actionable steps and inspiring stories to help you build lasting financial security and confidence. 

For Similar episodes on financial empowerment, Check out: 'Mastering your Money' Episode 67, on Aging With Purpose and Passion and you may also like Older Women And Friends, which explores the contributions of older women and the wisdom they share. 

Resources for more information:

 Sherry Finkel Murphy, CFP®, ChFC®, RICP®

Website: https://www.sherryfinkelmurphy.com/

https://www.facebook.com/MadrinaMolly/

https://www.instagram.com/finkelmurphy/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/madrina-molly/

Beverley Glazer

Website: https://reinventimpossible.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/beverleyglazer/

https://www.facebook.com/beverley.glazer

Facebook Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/womenover50rock

https://www.instagram.com/beverleyglazer_reinvention/

Are you ready to see what's possible for you? See if Bev can help

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Speaker 1:

Welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion, the podcast designed to inspire your greatness and thrive through life. Get ready to conquer your fears. Here's your host. Psychotherapist coach and empowerment expert Beverley Glazer. Therapist, coach and empowerment expert Beverley Glazer.

Beverley Glazer:

Glazer, are you concerned that you just may outlive your money and you worry about your financial future? Well, welcome to Aging with Purpose and Passion. I'm Beverley Glazer and I'm a transformational coach and therapist, and I help women achieve the success that they know they deserve in their lives and in their careers, and you can find me on reinventimpossiblecom or you can text me in the show notes. Below is the founder and CEO of Madrina Mali, a community and platform for financial planning and education for women through powerful storytelling. She's a certified financial planner, a professional charted financial consultant, retirement income certified professional, and she's a trusted voice for women, helping them to live boldly and plan with purpose. In today's episode, sherry Finkel-Murray will tell you how to take charge of your financial future, no matter what age or stage you are in your financial and personal life. So let's dive right in. Welcome, sherry.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Thank you so much for having me.

Beverley Glazer:

Sherry, let's go back a bit because, as you know, as a coach and as a therapist, I love the backstory. The backstory is all about pretty well why we do what we do. We don't just come out into the world and say I'm going to do this. So for you you were born in Long Island Was your family always interested in business and money and finance, or concerned about money? What was it like for you as a child?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Well, I was a latchkey kid and I think that while we learn our money narratives early and I certainly have a money narrative one of the strongest influences on me is the work narrative. My mom went back to work as soon as she possibly could after I guess after we were toddlers, and I think that it was never a question in her mind that she would return to work. It was how to best juggle raising children and working. And she really only stopped working. She's still with me, by the way. She really only stopped working. She's still with me, by the way. She really only stopped working at about 82.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

But so that work narrative was established. Dad had his own hardware store on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and he worked six days a week, off on Tuesdays. So what does that do to a childhood when you don't really have the traditional home on weekends experience, but in the good news department, middle class though we were, I knew that money was a facilitator. Money was not to be hoarded, money was not to be spent unwisely. It was meant to facilitate life. And when I dove into my own narrative around both work and money, I realized that that is what I pattern.

Beverley Glazer:

Yeah, and you also pattern the words of your mom. Your most little girls are brought up, or I shouldn't say most. It's changing today. Thank goodness that Prince Charming is going to save you in that way. Worse, right, right. Your mother said don't wait for a man. If you do wait for him, your dreams are not going to necessarily come true. That's right.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

She said if you wait for a man to bring you the good things in life, you're going to be waiting a long time. And that was in response to wanting to purchase real estate, wanting to own an apartment, and she did that a couple of times she said you know, if you want it, you have to own it. When I went into sales it was scary to be on a variable compensation plan. But no risk, no reward, right, right, right. So so she gets the props for um, telling me to go for it.

Beverley Glazer:

And you did, and you were going to go into law. Was there a reason that you decided not to?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

I think I didn't have a compelling reason of my own. I was headed to law school because everybody said oh, Sherry, you'd make a great attorney, and I don't think I knew anything at the time about what attorneys did. Maybe they thought I was argumentative. I don't think I knew anything at the time about what attorneys did. Maybe they thought I was argumentative, I don't know. I don't know Opinionated, but right up until the moment that I was going to law school and then I did a left turn into technology which set me on an extraordinary path, especially in the early 80s.

Beverley Glazer:

And it was a very successful path it was, and why did you quit?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

And therein hangs a tale. It's so hard to shorten it into just a few minutes, but I had a very successful technology career, a very successful sales and sales leadership career, and while I was in and out of the workforce I even funded a sabbatical in my mid-40s to handle what was a difficult perimenopause. When I was 48, the company that employed me as an executive was acquired by a behemoth and they stood me in the corner, paid me my retention bonus and said you can stay or you can go, but we only invest in the ones we grow here, which was a clear ageist, you know. Oh my gosh, I cannot believe you are not interested in the expertise I bring. That's crazy, especially since I had arrived at a place where my aging father finally recognized the company's name. So that's always, you know, you look for that approval. You don't even realize you're looking for that approval. And finally I was. I was acquired by a company large enough that he knew the name.

Beverley Glazer:

But what did that do to you? Emotionally, I mean, here you were doing really well and you loved your job, and then all of a sudden you're useless, only because you know you have no value, you're too old. What did that do to?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

you. That's infuriating, isn't it? I think that I went right to anger from. You know, I didn't pass through the first stage of grief and realized quickly that I don't belong here any longer. And with some consulting from my financial planner and some of life events coming at me fast and that is just a truth, that life events come at us fast I made another left turn and recreated myself recredentialing in my 50s as a certified financial planner practitioner. Just to give you the litany, my father declined. He had a five-year decline into dementia and eventually passed at 94, certainly a situation many of us are experiencing. I pulled the plug on a marriage at 50 and had to rebuild After a couple of years. I repartnered.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

That is a blended family that has its own complications, and I provide both elder care, light elder care. My mother still lives independently, but she's 97. And she's 15 minutes away from me when I'm in New York. And then I have grandchildren, two of whom are in Ohio, and so I'm on grandma duty when I'm in Ohio. So I describe myself as a woman with her mother's spare walker in the boot and her grandchild's spare child seat in the back of the same SUV. Very cute.

Beverley Glazer:

So life comes at you? Yes, and a lot of us are in that situation.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Absolutely, absolutely. It sometimes feels lonely, until we realize that this is the first time in history that four and five generations are living contemporaneously, and so more of us than not are experiencing this. It's how we choose to experience it that, I think, makes the difference.

Beverley Glazer:

And where did you get the name of your company? So, madrina Molly.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Yeah, madrina, molly, I'd love to tell you it's very romantic. It's not. Clients in my financial planning practice called me the fairy godmother of good ideas, and one of my Latina clients called me the Madrina, the Madrina de buenas ideas financieras, and so it became a madrina, which is a very intentional role. To be a godmother is a choice and I see myself generatively as a mentor to clients and to friends and to the next generation and possibly the generation after that, because nobody's going anywhere. So that's the Madrina part of it, and Molly is a nickname. It is not only the name of a dear aunt, but my now husband and I compared notes around a job that involved molybdenum. So I would love to tell you that Molly is a romantic name for something, but in fact it's short for molybdenum.

Beverley Glazer:

Plain and simple and honest.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Plain and simple. I was telling him of a job I had in college where I did telex conversions from the Spanish for a molybdenum conversion plant in Chucky, chucky, chucky, camada, chile, and and so in lies the tale. So nice alliteration. But Madrina Mali is, is a persona who is intended to mentor her peers. So not all mentoring is hierarchical or even generational. A lot of it is peer mentorship and hey, I'm in the same boat.

Beverley Glazer:

Yes, and that's the purpose of your platform. Tell us about this now. This is financial education through storytelling. What's that about?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Well, as you might guess and I think if we think about it we recognize this like health care, the domain of financial planning is built around the data from men in the 20th century. It is not built around the experiences of women and how we are in and out of the workforce, what we are paid, how much longer we live, et cetera. So some of the aspects are very different and that does not yet appear in the domain. But, as we just agreed, we're all experiencing this. So how do we make the most of it? And there are, and it's growing. There are about 24, 25,000 women certified financial planners. That is not enough to handle the cohort by a long shot, and most of those are young women coming into the financial planning industry. So that's the great news.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

The rough news is that the 50 plus cohort cannot necessarily find who they're looking for. But let me point out something that cohort might not be controlling the family planning. The relationship may belong to the significant other. And so what do you do if you want education but you don't want to change financial advisors? And that's one of the gaps that Madrina Mali, through a membership mechanism, a subscription model, can solve. You can get the information, you can interact with a certified financial planner and understands you, but nobody has to switch investment advisors, nobody has to switch insurance advisors, etc. And so there's some gap filling going on there.

Beverley Glazer:

Okay, and sometimes, though, older women who have been very fearful of taking hold of the financial planning, is left to have to do it, and they know nothing about it and they're embarrassed. What would you say to women like this? They just go to a bank, a bank manager. If they have to, it may be with their children. How does Malina Mali fill that gap?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Madrina Mali is in the business of reminding women how right we've done things, not how wrong we've done things, not how wrong we've done things. I like to joke that if I want to be made wrong, I can call my mother like. Just enough with making ourselves wrong. So after we get over the box of tissues because invariably financial shame involves tissues I point out to women who have lived life that if you've managed a household, if you've raised children, if you've mastered the budget, you have done financial planning. The rest is just details. And I have to assume that if women really wanted to become investing experts, they would have already. So I teach just enough to get rid of that financial shame.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

I think that my clients do far more right than not, and I think part of the message is that when it comes to finances and this is a bit of a I'm going to call it a hink in the industry and this is a bit of a I'm going to call it a hink in the industry in that if you go to a financial advisor, their method for gaining your trust, their method for gaining you as a client, is to say sometimes, literally I can do it better than you can, I can manage your money better than you can, and I'm not certain that's an accurate statement.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

I think there are tools and techniques that financial planners use that optimize money. They can make it righter perhaps, but the big goal is to avoid pitfalls. In other words, if you do things mostly right, you will get where you need to go, and there are probably two or three things to not do. That would be the kiss of death to a financial plan. So that's a long way of saying let's stop making ourselves wrong. I think you need to be reminded of all of your financial accomplishments first.

Beverley Glazer:

Okay, so what's a common misconception that women have about themselves, about managing money just in general? Is there something common? Is there a common thread there?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Yes, yes, only 16%, by the way, of the cohort has financial education, and I think that the biggest challenge is not having, for not having, formal financial education. They think they aren't doing it right, as I said, and in fact they do many things right by following the instructions on a corporate 401k or making sure that they save more than they spend. What they may be missing is just a model, and I kind of have to break it to them that, actuarially, one day they will be single. I would not wish them to become suddenly single, but actuarially they will be single one day. So no time like the present to know just a little bit more about putting things in order, and I would argue that financial planning and longevity planning is about putting things in order, which means that it's not math. It is absolutely not math and that would be a big misconception that they need to know.

Beverley Glazer:

What I love, what I absolutely love, sherry, because you know I'm about story and you bring story into this financial planning. How do you do that Storytelling into this?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

financial planning. How do you do that storytelling? I think we all live in this place where we're doing some things simultaneously. One is, we're trying to figure out the best way to get through 15 or 20 years get to the finish line if you will and we are all having a similar experience in the corporate workspace with ageism and realizing that maybe we are not going to be able to stay with the same employer all the way to 65 or 67. And maybe we should be creating our own thing now.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

And as any good financial planner, I have plenty of anonymized stories of talented women who maybe have a sideline. I can think of one who is a magnificent fiber artist have a sideline. I can think of one who is a magnificent fiber artist and I said why don't you take 10 years, no pressure, 10 years to turn this into a business that produces $25,000 per year? You can do it in Etsy, you can do it selling kits, you can do it doing custom work. You can do it. Whatever is the right combination. Is that a goal you can achieve? Because then you can spend the next 10 years supplementing your retirement with something you love, and that, in fact, I do the math. She doesn't do the math. I do the math that says that would get you over the hump, that would solve for the shortfall. Now what I'm really doing in the background is I am deferring spending down her IRA. I am, by adding that additional income, I'm letting the compounding of the stock market happen longer. But she doesn't need to know that or be intimidated by that, and it has less to do with math than it has to do with time. Anything we do to avoid spending down is going to make for a happier retirement when we get there and oh, by the way, we're all living a lot longer than we had planned.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

I like telling people to think thanatologically, and I don't know about you, but if I'm 50, thanatologically, the number of years I have left to live, as opposed to chronological age, that's 32. And if I get to 65 in a healthy fashion, I get five more years beyond that. So from 50 to 87 is 37 years, 37 years. Where were you 37 years ago? I know where I was. I mean, that's a lifetime ago. So think of how much you can accomplish if you don't view yourself as a deteriorating asset, but instead view yourself as someone you should invest in. Invest in your skills so that you can communicate with your grandchildren and your healthcare provider online. So that you can communicate with your grandchildren and your health care provider online. Invest in your health, do the walk, you know, fix the numbers.

Beverley Glazer:

You have a lot of runway to do it and I think that's another positive message through storytelling you know what I love about hearing this is because I do this not in a financial way, and the way you're looking at it can take the whole idea of who we are, make it positive and make it work for you financially with something that you love and I think all women can relate to that. So you're taking the finance out of the planning and doing the work which I think women can really really relate to, particularly if you hate numbers.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Absolutely, absolutely. And the only message is start now, start now. The earlier you start, the happier you will be, because we put so much pressure on ourselves when we need to start something new, to have instant results. And we are much happier and much healthier if we fall in love with the process. We fall in love with the process of getting up and saying I am wealthy today, I'm going to live like a wealthy person. How do wealthy people act? If I'm going to live like a healthy person, I'm going to live like a person who I don't know works with technology. I make those decisions to be that person and I become that person just by living.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

So maybe the goal the goal of end dollars or the goal of and I think it's interesting with respect to this cohort is many women go into it and they fear. So there's a lot of stress. They fear that they won't have enough, but they won't put a sort of stake in the ground that says have you done the math to calculate how much is enough for your lifestyle? And oh, by the way, what is the lifestyle? So they neither know how much it costs for them to live or how much they actually need. They're just very invested in this. I'm wrong, I'm doing it wrong, I'm a hot mess, and whether that's money, health, career, it's the same.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

I would love to turn that on its head. I would love to turn that on its head and say no, no, no, there is plenty of time to write any ship. You wake up this morning and there's time to. Well, I don't care if you call it turning over a new leaf, whatever. Um, you know, you got this because you have 35 to 40 years before old age and remember those crazy actuarial numbers are averages. So 50% of women are going to live longer than that. We need a hobby and healthier and healthier. We need to be healthy and we need a hobby or two Exactly.

Beverley Glazer:

What's one important tip that you can tell women to take control of their financial future right now. What could you tell them? One short tip.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

One short tip to take control of your financial future would be to know what it costs you to live happily. Meaning what it is that you need per month to live is going to determine everything going forward, and everything else is just finessing from there. So go find out what that number is. Yes, and face the music.

Beverley Glazer:

Don't run away from it. Don't run away from it.

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

It isn't a good number or a bad number, it's your number and that's okay. And then you get to make really smart decisions from there, none of which need to be oh, you can't have. It's here's how you can have. And maybe it involves not waiting to take the big vacation, because just as we're put on hold for our children, we may be put on hold for our parents one day. So maybe we want to take that big vacation sooner in exchange for working longer, staying in the workplace longer. Of course, in the background, I'm thinking hmm, that means we're letting the nest egg grow another year. We're not taking it out as quickly. That's good for the financial plan.

Beverley Glazer:

Excellent, excellent and fun, I have to add, for yourself as well. Thank you, thank you, sherry. Sherry Finkel-Murphy is the founder and CEO of Madrina Mali, a community and platform that delivers financial longevity planning education for women through powerful storytelling. Planning education for women through powerful storytelling. She's a certified financial planner, a professional chartered financial consultant, a retirement income certified professional, and she is a trusted voice for women, helping them to live boldly and plan a financial life of purpose. Here are a few takeaways from this episode.

Beverley Glazer:

Reinventing your financial future is possible at any age. Start now and you can change your path. Understanding money gives you control of your life, and you don't have to be a financial expert to take charge of your financial life. Don't be afraid to ask questions. If you're relating to this episode, make one small financial commitment to yourself, whether it's saving a bit more or tracking your spending or simply changing your mindset from being a victim and then doing something to make a change. For similar episodes on financial empowerment, check out Mastering your Money, which is episode 67 on aging with purpose and passion, and if you like these stories, you may also like Older Women and Friends podcast, which explores the contributions of older women that make valuable, valuable contributions and wisdom. They're all there to share and that link will be in the show notes as well. Where can people find more about you, sherry and Madrina Mollie? Do you have the links?

Sherry Finkel Murphy:

Yes, you can find me at madrinamolliecom and you will see that there's a link to my personal page for corporate services, for consulting and for membership and there's a link to the blog on Substack.

Beverley Glazer:

Terrific. And all these links. If you didn't catch them, they're going to be in the show notes and they're also going to be on my site too, that's reinventedpossiblecom. And now, my friends, what's next for you? Are you just going through the motions or are you really passionate about your own life? Get my weekly self-coaching tips to empower you through your journey, and that link, of course, is going to be in the show notes as well. You can connect with me, Beverley Glazer, on all media platforms and in my positive group of women on Facebook, and that's Women Over 50 Rock. And if you're looking for guidance in your own transformation, I invite you to explore reinventimpossiblecom. I want to thank you for listening. Subscribe so you don't miss out on the next one, and send this episode to a friend. And always remember that you only have one life, so live it with purpose and passion.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for joining us. You can connect with Bev on her website, reinventimpossiblecom and, while you're there, join our newsletter Subscribe so you don't miss an episode. Until next time, keep aging with purpose and passion and celebrate life.