Between Tables is where I explore the emotional, psychological, and practical sides of money, especially for women carrying a lot.
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A client said something to me this week that I keep coming back to.
We were talking about the mental load of managing money. The to-dos that never quite make it to done. The financial decisions that live in that permanent holding pattern between “I should really handle that” and actually handling it. The tabs that are always open.
“Do you know what happens when all of those tabs and programs are open?” they asked. “The computer slows down.”
A-MEN to that.
It’s not simply the tab. It’s the checklist inside it, plus the five surprise sub-tasks that appear the moment you open it. You go to close a tab on estate planning and suddenly you’re staring down: find an attorney, schedule the appointment, locate the old documents first, figure out if the old documents are even still valid, remember to ask your partner what they want, wonder why you’re the one managing this, spiral slightly, close the laptop.
The tab is still open. There are now six more.
After years of doing this work, I’ve noticed most financial overwhelm comes back to the same handful of open tabs. Not dozens. Just a core set that never quite gets closed.
Most of you already have the multiple areas of your financial life somewhere in your head. You know they exist. You know they matter. What you’re missing is not awareness. It’s a clear, organized place to work through them so they can actually close.
That’s what this is. Not seven new things to add to your pile, but a reference document for the seven tabs that are probably already running in the background, quietly slowing everything down. Come back to it. Work through them one at a time. Each one, handled with intention, can stay closed.
1. Clarify Your Vision & Define Success on Your Terms
This is where every financial plan should begin, and where most people quietly skip over because it requires something harder than a spreadsheet. It requires honesty about what you actually want. Not the version of success that looks responsible on paper, not the goals you inherited from someone else’s expectations, not the life that makes sense to explain at a dinner party. Yours.
After over two decades of this work, I know that most of us are better at optimizing for goals we’ve never examined than we are at stopping to ask whether those goals are even ours. We save aggressively for a future we haven’t defined. We defer the trip, the pivot, the change, the thing we actually want, waiting for conditions that will never be quite right, for a number that will never feel quite enough, for permission that nobody is going to give us.
The financial plan is not the starting point. The vision is. What would have to be true in the next 3, 5, and 10 years for you to feel genuinely satisfied? What does financial freedom look like for you, specifically, not abstractly? What are you building toward, and is it actually what you want?
When you have real answers, make them specific. “Save $30,000 for a dream vacation in three years” is a goal. “Save for travel” is a story you’re telling yourself. The specificity is where the plan lives, and the self-honesty is where the specificity comes from.
If you’ve been waiting, delaying, telling yourself the responsible version of your life is the only version available, I wrote about that directly. You Have the Money. Why Are You Still Waiting?
2. Build Your Financial Infrastructure Around What Actually Matters
What most financial planning gets wrong for those with a solid foundation is that it starts with the budget. Track every dollar, categorize everything, restrict and monitor and review. That model works for someone who is overspending and doesn’t know it. It doesn’t work for someone who earns well, lives responsibly, and just needs clarity on whether enough is going toward the right things.
You don’t need to account for every dollar. You need to know your number, what you should be saving and directing toward your goals each month, automate it so it happens before you have a chance to spend it, and then live on the rest without guilt or a spreadsheet.
The questions worth asking are not “where did every dollar go” but rather: am I saving enough for retirement? Am I funding the goals that actually matter to me — the house, the sabbatical, the kids’ education, the business? Am I building wealth alongside a life I enjoy, or am I deferring everything indefinitely? If the answers are yes, you’re aligned. If they’re not, the fix is almost never a budget. It’s adjusting the savings rate and automating the difference.
Build the system that makes this happen without constant attention. Automatic transfers to savings and investment accounts before the money touches your checking account. Retirement contributions maximized, or at minimum capturing your employer match in full. Separate accounts for separate goals so the money is organized and earmarked before you ever have to think about it. Bill payments automated. Then schedule a quarterly review, thirty minutes, four times a year, to confirm the savings rates still make sense, rebalance where needed, and make sure everything is calibrated to where you are now rather than where you were when you set it up.
Mental bandwidth is finite. The goal is a financial system that runs accurately in the background so you can spend your energy on the decisions that actually require your judgment.
3. Strengthen Your Safety Net
High earners are often the worst at this step. Not because they don’t care about security, but because the income feels like the safety net. When money is coming in consistently and at a level that covers everything, it’s easy to conflate cash flow with protection. They are not the same thing.
The emergency fund exists for the moment the income stops. Job loss, a health crisis, a business that takes longer to stabilize than expected, a season of life that requires you to step back. If you are the primary earner, the math of that scenario is not abstract. It is the entire financial architecture of your family sitting on your ability to keep performing. That deserves a dedicated, untouched reserve. Not an investment account you’d have to liquidate. Not a line of credit you’d have to draw on. Cash. Accessible. Separate. For primary earners, target six months of expenses. In a stable dual-income household, three to six months is reasonable.
Here is the other side that doesn’t get said enough: a safety net can also be too big. Cash beyond what you genuinely need for emergencies is cash that isn’t compounding, isn’t building wealth, and isn’t working toward anything. It’s providing comfort, which is real and valid, but comfort has a cost. If you find yourself perpetually moving the goalpost on what feels like enough in savings, that’s worth examining. At some point, holding excess cash stops being responsible and starts being avoidance.
Review your insurance coverage with the same rigor. Life, disability, property, umbrella. Know what you have and what it actually covers. Make sure it reflects your life as it exists now, not as it did when you last thought about it.
The psychology underneath all of this, the identity tied to the number, the security that no balance ever quite delivers, the goalpost that keeps moving, I wrote about it in depth. If any of this is hitting close to home, that’s the post to read next. Cash Gives Me All the Feels
4. Understand & Grow Your Net Worth
Earning well and building wealth are not the same thing. This is one of the most important distinctions I make with clients, and it’s where a lot of high-achieving women are quietly losing ground without realizing it.
The income is there. The lifestyle is funded. The career is performing. And yet the net worth isn’t growing in proportion to what’s coming in. The culprit is almost always a combination of lifestyle creep that outpaces saving, money sitting in cash or low-yield accounts doing nothing, and investment accounts set to a default allocation that made sense years ago and hasn’t been touched since.
Your net worth — everything you own minus everything you owe — is the number that tells you whether your money is actually compounding or just cycling. It’s not a judgment. It’s a lens. And most women I work with either avoid calculating it because they’re afraid of what they’ll find, or they calculate it and immediately minimize it by comparing themselves to the wrong benchmarks.
Calculate it. Sit with it without judgment. Then ask the harder question: is this number growing in a way that reflects the income I’m generating and the financial decisions I’m making? If the answer is not really, the issue is rarely how much you earn. It’s how much of what you earn is being put to work.
Review it every six to twelve months and look at the trend, not just the number. Which assets are growing? Where is money sitting idle? Is your investment allocation still aligned with your actual timeline and risk tolerance, or is it a relic of a version of your life that no longer exists? These are the questions that move net worth from a scoreboard you glance at into a tool you actively use to steer.
5. Design for Optionality
Financial freedom isn’t only about retirement. It’s about having enough flexibility right now that when life shifts, and it will, you can shift with it rather than be crushed by it.
Stress has a way of convincing us it’s permanent. The demanding career, the aging parents, the kids, the household, the invisible load that never fully sets down. But a lot of that trapped feeling isn’t about the circumstances themselves. It’s about the absence of options. When every financial decision feels high-stakes because there’s no cushion, no flexibility, no accessible backup, the pressure multiplies in a way that has nothing to do with how much you actually earn.
Optionality is what closes that gap. It’s the difference between staying in a job because you’re choosing to and staying because you can’t afford to leave. It’s the ability to say yes to a career pivot, a sabbatical, a season of caregiving, or an opportunity that didn’t exist in your five-year plan. It doesn’t mean having everything figured out. It means having enough room to move.
Building it requires more than an emergency fund. It means liquid assets beyond what’s locked in retirement accounts, a debt structure that doesn’t trap you, income that doesn’t depend entirely on one source, and a spending pattern that isn’t so inflated it closes every exit.
I wrote about this in depth: the five pillars, the mindset shift from survival mode to choice, and the specific financial moves that start building optionality from where you are right now. If this one resonates, that’s where to go next. How to Create Optionality in Your Life
6. Plan for the Unexpected & the Inevitable
Nobody wants this tab open. Thinking about our own impermanence is, as I’ve written before, a bit like a punch in the stomach. And yet this is one of the loudest tabs running in the background for most of the women I work with, not because they don’t know it matters, but because the emotional weight of actually doing it keeps them stalling.
Here is the baseline. You need a will, a revocable living trust, a financial power of attorney, a healthcare directive, and current beneficiary designations on every retirement account. These pass outside of a will, which means an ex-spouse or an estranged family member could still be named on a retirement account you haven’t looked at in a decade. Check them.
But the legal documents are only part of it, and honestly not the hardest part. The harder work is the letters, to your executor, to your guardians, to the people who will step in and try to make sense of your financial life and your wishes in the worst possible moment. The letters are where your intentions, your values, and your voice actually live. The documents tell people what to do. The letters tell them why, and who you were, and what you wanted for the people you love.
I wrote about this in depth — the framework we used, what to include, why I avoided it for months and what finally made me sit down and do it. If this tab has been open for you, that post is where I’d send you. Consider this your nudge. The Most Important Letters You’ll Ever Write (And Hope No One Reads)
7. Invest in Yourself & Your Future
Your financial plan is not only about money. It’s about you. Your career, your health, your growth, your capacity to keep showing up. These are all part of whole-life wealth, and this is the step most financial guides treat as an afterthought, tucked in at the end like a motivational footnote. It’s not an afterthought. It’s the foundation everything else is built on.
Your ability to earn, adapt, and stay relevant is one of your most valuable financial assets. Human capital, your skills, your expertise, your reputation, your relationships, compounds just like money does. The difference is that most women are diligently tracking their investment accounts and completely ignoring the asset that generates everything going into them.
Ask yourself honestly: what would make you more indispensable in your field? Are there skills, certifications, or experiences worth pursuing? What relationships have you been meaning to invest in that keep getting deprioritized? If your industry shifted significantly in the next three years, what would that mean for you, and are you positioned to adapt?
This also means your health. Not as a wellness platitude but as a financial strategy. Preventive care, mental health support, rest, the boundaries that protect your energy, these are not luxuries you earn after everything else is handled. They are infrastructure. A depleted woman cannot execute a financial plan, lead a career, or show up for the people who depend on her. The investment in yourself is not separate from the financial plan. It is what makes the financial plan executable.
And then there is the hardest question in this entire guide, the one worth sitting with periodically: are you in work that is actually moving you toward the life you want? Not just work that pays well. Not just work that looks impressive. Work that is worth the hours you are giving it. Building a strong financial life in service of a life you don’t want is its own kind of loss, and it’s a loss that tends to arrive quietly, long after the choices that created it.
The Permission Slip
Seven tabs. Not seven new ones to open. Seven that are probably already running, quietly consuming the mental bandwidth you need for everything else.
The work is to close them, properly and with intention, and then have the discipline and the courage not to replace them.
When a tab closes, you are allowed to let it stay closed. You do not have to immediately optimize what you just resolved. You do not have to find the next thing to worry about. You are allowed to absorb the open space.
That is not laziness. That is the whole point.
The mission is not more tabs. The mission is fewer. Done well. And then left alone.
If this post resonated and you want to go deeper, I’d point you to a companion piece: ten questions every woman should be able to answer about her own financial life, and what to do if she can’t. Financial Confidence: 10 Money Questions Every Woman Should Be Able to Answer
Related: “You’re Welcome”: Money, Marriage, and Emotional Load Women Carry