A WOMAN’S GUIDE TO
FINANCIAL
HEALTH
It Starts with Trusting Your Intuition
by Lisa Marshall
O
ne midnight, serving behind the counter of a Dunkin’ Donuts, Jen Smith could see
the future—and it terrifi ed her. She was working the graveyard shift at a job she hated, living in a cramped apartment and knew nothing about entrepreneurship or investment strategies.
When a homeless woman clad in
rags wandered in for a warm cup of coffee, Smith shivered. “The only thing standing between her and me was one paycheck and that counter,” recalls Smith, 45, of Fort Collins, Colorado. “I realized that I was in a vulnerable spot, with no backup plan.” Fast forward two decades to today; Smith now boasts a $2 million net worth and the fi nancial independence to work only when she wants to. When you ask for her secret, she makes little mention of how to create a winning stock portfolio. Instead, she says, her decisions about how to earn and how to spend have come from a deeper, more esoteric source. Says Smith: “I asked myself: ‘What
“A wealthy woman absolutely has money, but she also has happiness, courage, balance and harmony. A wealthy woman is generous, clean, wise and therefore, beautiful. It’s my wish that you will carry these eight qualities within you wherever you go and that they will serve as your guideposts to make sure you are always walking toward wealth, rather than walking away from it.”
~ Suze Orman
is it that I love to do?’” Then she went to work investing in herself and a succession of six small businesses, starting with $1,500 per bootstrap operation. Initially, she earned her way working with animals while investing her dollars with an eye toward environmental stewardship. In 2007, she founded a personal fi nance blog,
MillionaireMommyNextDoor.com. Along the way, she discovered that, “Mindfully identifying what truly makes you tick, and then aligning your decisions with your own personal
values, is key to fi nancial well-being.” Smith is among a growing number
of women looking beyond the traditional world of personal fi nance to summon emotions, spirituality, intuition and personal values in the pursuit of economic abundance. Many books, blogs and magazines, too, have begun to explore the unlikely intersection of right-brain, inner voice consciousness and personal fi nance. “Our culture has always been very
much focused on facts and research, but people are starting to realize we
May 2010
29
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