Your Financial Plan Won't Work Until You Fix This

You know what you should be doing with your money. You're still not doing it. That gap has a name — and it's the most overlooked factor in whether your financial plan actually works.

In this episode, I walk through the four financial behavior patterns I see most often in my practice — the Protector, the Avoider, the Regulator, and the Sacrificer — where they come from (most of them were set before you turned 7), and the specific actions that change them. I also share two real client stories and my own.

In this episode:

• The four financial behavior patterns and how to identify yours
• Why $500K in savings can sit earning almost nothing (Megan's story)
• Why a $200K income ceiling had nothing to do with skill (Lisa's story)
• Where I got my own money patterns — and why I'm telling you
• Five actions that actually move the needle
• The stat: women who address these patterns are 53% more likely to invest regularly

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About Hazel Secco, CFP®, CDFA® 

Hazel is the founder of Align Financial Solutions. As a fee-only, fiduciary advisor, she specializes in helping independent women navigate career transitions, equity compensation, and building toward a Work Optional life.

Disclaimer: All content in this podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and does not constitute individual investment, legal, or tax advice. Investing involves risk. Always consult with a qualified professional regarding your specific situation.

Transcript

Why Smart Women Stall

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Here's something I see all the time in my practice. A woman walks in, she's smart, she's accomplished, she's done her research. She knows she should be investing. She knows she should be having the money conversation with her partner. She knows that she should stop sitting on six figures in a savings account, earning next to nothing. She knows all of it, and she's still not doing it. Hi, and welcome back to her Ani's Money Talk, where we believe in living wealthy and living well for independent women. I'm your host, Hazel Secko, certified financial planner, mom of two little ones, and the founder of Aligned Financial Solutions. If you're tuning in for the first time, welcome. This podcast is for women who want to design a work optional life through intentional financial planning. And I'm glad you're here. If you've been following along this season, we've covered serious ground. We talked about what a work optional life really means for women, how to calculate your enough number, the shift from scarcity to abundance thinking, making value-aligned financial decisions, and last week, why working with fee-only financial advisors can be such a game changer. But here's what I need to say. And I'm going to be direct about it. I'm not a mindset coach. I'm not a therapist. I am a financial planner. And as a financial planner, it is my job to understand not just the numbers, but the financial behaviors that determine whether those numbers actually move in the right direction. Because the gap between knowing what to do with your money and actually doing it, that gap has a name. It's called behavioral finance. And it is the single most overlooked factor in whether a woman achieves financial independence or stays stuck in the same place year after year. That's what today's episode is about. The specific financial behavior patterns I see in my practice, where they come from, and most importantly, what it actually looks like to change them. Because I've watched women change them. I've set across the table from women who went from paralyzed to invested, from avoidant to in control, from giving everything away to building real wealth for themselves. It happened because they understood what was driving their behavior. And then they took different action. Let's get into it. So in behavioral finance, there's a well-documented gap between financial knowledge and financial action. You can give someone all the right information and they will still not do the thing. This isn't a character flaw. It's not a lack of discipline. It's a pattern, and patterns are predictable. After years of working with women on their financial plans, I see four behavior patterns come up over and over again. And I want to walk you through them because I guarantee you're gonna recognize yourself in at least one. The first one I call the protector. The protector accumulates cash. She saves aggressively, she's cautious, she avoids risk, even calculated. Well researched risks that would serve her long-term plan. On paper, she looks responsible, but what's actually happening is that her money isn't working for her. It's just sitting there. I had a client, let's call her Megan, who came to me with over half a million in savings account, earning less than half a percent. She understood compound interest. She understood that inflation was eating into her purchasing power every single year. She could explain all of it back to me. But every time we talked about deploying that money into a diversified investment strategy, she couldn't pull the trigger. She felt physically uncomfortable. Now, here's what I want you to understand. Megan isn't irrational. Her brain learned at some point in her life that financial security means having cash you can see and touch. That was useful information at one point, but it was costing her hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential growth. That's a financial behavior with a measurable cost. The second pattern is the avoider. The avoider doesn't engage with her finances. She's not opening the statement. She hasn't logged into her retirement account in months. She knows there are things she should be doing and she puts them off. Not because she's lazy, but because the whole thing feels overwhelming. So she does nothing. This one is incredibly common among high-performing women, by the way. Women who run teams, manage complex projects, handle enormous responsibility at work, and then come home and cannot bring themselves to look at their own 401k. It's not that they can't handle the complexity. It's that somewhere along the way, money became the one area where they don't trust themselves. So they disengage. The third pattern is what I call the regulator. The regulator uses spending as an emotional tool. Bad day, she buys something. Big win, she buys something. Stressed, she buys something. The spending isn't about the stuff, it's about the feeling. And here's the problem from a financial planning perspective it creates a constant leak in the system. It's hard to build towards a work optional life when money is flowing out every time your emotional state shifts. And I want to be clear, I'm not here to tell you to stop spending money. The issue isn't spending. The issue is when spending is automatic, reactive, and disconnected from your actual financial plan, that is the problem. The fourth pattern, and this one is one I see most in women, and it's the one that concerns me the most as a planner, is the sacrificer. The sacrificer consistently puts everyone else's financial needs ahead of her own. She's paying for her adult children's expenses while her own retirement is underfunded. She's covering more than her share of household costs while her partner builds an investment portfolio. She gives generously to family, to friends, to causes, while telling herself she doesn't need much. I need to be very direct about this one. The sacrificer pattern is not generosity. It's not selflessness. It's a financial behavior that has real consequences. I have sat with women in their 50s, 60s who gave and gave and gave, and now they didn't have enough to retire. They are dependent on the very people they spend decades supporting. That is not the outcome anybody wanted. Now, here's what I want you to take from all of this. None of these patterns mean something is wrong with you. They're all strategies your brain developed based on real experiences. The protector learned that money can disappear. The avoider learned that money is complicated or scary. The regulator learned that spending provides relief. The sacrificer learned that her value comes from what she gives to the others. These strategies made sense at one point, but they may not make sense anymore. And the data backs this up. Research shows that women who actively address their financial behavior patterns are 53% more likely to invest regularly. That's not a small number. That's the difference between building wealth and watching from the sidelines. So the question isn't what's wrong with me. The question is, is this behavior still serving my financial plan? So if these behavior patterns are this powerful, where do they come from? And why are they so hard to change? Here's what the research tells us. Your relationship with money was largely shaped before you turned seven years old. Not from a financial literacy class, from watching, from absorbing, from the emotional atmosphere in your house when money came up. Think about what money felt like in your house growing up. Not what your parents said about it, what it felt like. Was there tension? Was there silence? Was there anxiety every time a bill came in the mail? Or was money just never discussed at all? Like this mysterious force that adults handled behind closed doors. Because those early experiences become the default settings for your financial behavior as an adult. And most people never examine them. I'll tell you mine. I grew up in a household where my mom managed everything the bills, the finances, all of the big people responsibilities. She was the breadwinner, making sure everyone was taken care of. Not just my dad, me, or my grandmother, but her sisters and extended family too. And my dad struggled with a gambling addiction, which meant that money in our house was unpredictable. Sometimes it felt like we were doing fine. I just get nice things and think, okay, we're doing okay. And then other times it felt like we were one step away from losing everything. Like we might have to move at any moment if something went wrong. What I absorbed from that was money is uncertain, money is stressful, and my value to my family is tied to what I can bring to the table. Now I'm telling you this, not so we can have a therapy session. I'm telling you this because understanding where your financial behavior comes from is a critical part of financial planning. It's like medical history. Your doctor needs to know what runs in your family so they can plan accordingly. I need to understand what financial environment you came from so we can anticipate the behaviors that might get in the way of your plan. This is what separates a financial plan that works from one that lives in a binder on your shelf. Let me give you another example. I had a client, let's call her Lisa, incredibly talented, saved diligently, made smart decisions across the board, but she could not break through$200,000 in income. She'd get close and then she'd pull back, turn down the promotion conversation, underprice her services, avoid the negotiation. When we dug into it, she had a deep association between earning more money and being selfish. She felt like if she made more, she was somehow taking from people who had less. She was literally leaving money on the table, money that could have funded her retirement, her children's education, her financial independence because of a belief she'd never examined. Once she saw it clearly, she made a decision. She negotiated her compensation, she raised her rates, she took concrete financial action, and her financial plan went from theoretical to fully funded within two years. That's the power of understanding your financial behavior. It has a direct, measurable impact on your financial outcomes. Here's a number that should get in, get your attention. According to a 2023 study in the International Journal of Behavioral Finance, people with what researchers call an abundance orientation, meaning they believe financial growth is possible for them, are 41% more likely to achieve their long-term financial goals. And women's participation and investing has jumped from 60% in 2023 to 71% in 2024. Women are taking control. The question is whether you're going to be in that number or watching it from the outside. All right, so we've named the patterns, we've talked about where they come from. Now let's talk about what actually moves the needle because that's what matters. I'm going to give you five things that I've seen work in my practice, five actions that actually move the needle. Number one, get honest about what your current behavior is costing you. This is the most important one. And it's where I start with every client. We run the numbers. If you've been sitting on cash instead of investing, I can show you exactly what that has cost you over the last five years, 10 years, 20 years. If you've been avoiding your retirement account, we look at where you actually are versus where you need to be. If you've been overgiving to your adult children, we calculate what that's done to your own retirement timeline. This isn't about guilt. It's about information. You cannot make good financial decisions if you don't have accurate data about where you stand. Most people don't want to look. I'm telling you, look. Because the cost of not looking is almost always higher than whatever number is on that page. Number two, connect every financial action to your plan. One of the biggest reasons women stay stuck in unproductive financial behavior is that they are making decisions in a vacuum. They're thinking about individual purchases, individual savings, contributions, individual investments without connecting any of it to a larger plan. When you have a financial plan, a real one, with a number attached to your work optional life, every decision has context. Should I invest this money? Because does investing this money move me closer to my number or not? Should I pay for my adult child's rent? Because what does this to my retirement timeline? It changes the conversation entirely. Decisions get easier when they're measured against something specific. Number three, automate the behavior you will. Here's what I know after years of doing this work. Willpower is not a financial strategy. If you're relying on yourself to remember to invest, to save, to contribute to your retirement account, you're making it harder than it needs to be. The most effective thing I do for many of my clients is help them set up systems that remove the decision point entirely. Automatic contributions, automatic transfers, automatic rebalancing. The behavior happens whether you feel like it or not. That's by design. This is especially important for avoiders and protectors. If your pattern is to disengage or to hoard cash, automation takes you out of the equation. The money moves, your plan progresses, you don't have to white knuckle your way through it. Number four, have the conversations you've been avoiding. I can't tell you how many financial plans are being quietly undermined by conversation that hasn't happened. The conversation with your partner about high expenses are split. The conversation with your adult children about financial boundaries, the conversation with your employer about what you're worth. These conversations are uncomfortable. I get it. But here's what I tell my clients the discomfort of a 30-minute conversation is nothing compared to the cost of avoiding it for another five years. If you are a sacrificer, this one is especially for you. Having boundaries isn't selfish. It's the foundation of a financial plan that actually works. And number five, get professional support. I'm biased, obviously, but I'm also right. Working with a family financial planner, someone who is legally required to act in your best interest and who doesn't earn commissions on what they sell you is one of the highest impact decisions you can make. And I just don't mean for the investment strategy or the tax planning, although that matters enormously. I mean, because a good planner sees your blind spots, a good planner will notice when you're making a decision out of fear instead of a strategy. A good planner will hold up a mirror and say, you're doing that thing again. Let's talk about it. Remember what we covered last episode about Feam Lee Advisors. This is part of their value, not just the technical expertise, the accountability. The person who knows your plan, knows your patterns, and isn't going to let you sabotage yourself without at least naming it. Data, systems, conversations, and support. That's what changes financial behavior. That's the formula. Now, let me bring this all together. Today we talked about the four financial behavior patterns I see most often in my practice: the protector, the avoider, the regulator, and the sacrificer. We talked about where those patterns come from and why they're so persistent. And we covered the concrete actions that actually change the financial behavior. Getting honest about what your current patterns are costing you, connecting every decision to your plan, automating the behavior you want, having the conversations you've been avoiding, and getting professional support. Here's what I want you to walk away with. Your financial behavior is not a personality trait. It's not who you are. It's a set of learned patterns. And patterns respond to action. The women I shared with you today, Megan, Lisa, they're not more disciplined than you or smarter than you. They just got to a point where the cost of staying the same became higher than the discomfort of doing something different. And then they acted. So here's this week's freedom step. And I mean it because nothing changes without action. I want you to pick one financial task you've been avoiding. One, not five, not a whole overhaul of your life. One task. Maybe it's logging into your retirement account and actually looking at the numbers. Maybe it's researching a fee-only financial planner in your area. Maybe it's having the money conversation with your partner. Maybe it's running the math on what your cash savings has cost you by not being invested. Pick one. Do it this week. That's it. Because here's what I've learned. The first action is the hardest one. And once you take it, the next one gets easier. That's just how momentum works. Next week, we're tackling a question I get asked constantly when should I actually hire a financial planner? Because there are specific moments in your life, stock compensation decisions, retirement planning, major tax events, career transitions, where trying to figure out yourself isn't just hard, it's expensive. I'm going to walk you through exactly when it makes sense to bring in a professional and what to expect when you do. I also want to remind you, this journey towards financial independence is about creating a life where you have choices, where you make decisions based on your values, not your fears, where you can be generous without sacrificing your own security. That life is available to you. Not someday, not when you're perfect, right now, starting with whatever that one freedom step is for you this week. If today's episode hit home, I'd love to hear about it. Send a message on Instagram or email me. I read every single one. And if you haven't already, please subscribe and leave it, leave a review. It helps other women find these conversations and what we're building here really matters. Until next week, I'm Hazel Secko, and this is her Anis Money Talk. Keep living wealthy and living well. You've got this.