Erica: Welcome to the Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors podcast, the podcast where we get real about the challenges that women face in work, life, and leadership. I'm your host, Erica Rooney, HR executive, keynote speaker and executive coach, and I'm on a mission to get more women into positions of power and keep them there. This is the space where we call out the paradoxes: being told to lean in but not too far, to speak up but not too loudly, to be ambitious but not too ambitious. Does that sound familiar? We're over all that. Here, we break down the sticky floors that keep us stuck, from imposter syndrome and perfectionism, to glass ceilings, once and for all. So if you're ready to rewrite the rules, own your power, and take your career and life to the next level, you're in the right place.

And today's guest, oh, she is a powerful advocate for women's financial empowerment. She has a personal story of resilience that has inspired her to help others reclaim their financial power. She's also the author of the new book, Fly, a woman's guide to financial freedom and building a life you love. Steph Wagner is the national director of women and wealth at Northern Trust. She's a former private equity professional and a divorce financial strategist. Steph is intimately a woman who understands the complexities of money, and now her mission is to educate and empower women to take charge of their financial lives, and it's deeply personal. Steph, welcome to the show. How are you?

Steph: I am great. Thank you, Erica, for having me. I love that intro. Thank you.

Erica: I like to make them fun and snappy.

Steph: Absolutely.

Erica: But I am so interested in your personal story, because you had a successful career, and then you later navigated through a financial crisis. It's an incredibly powerful story, so I would love to hear a bit about that so we can share it with the listeners and understand where you started.

Steph: Absolutely. Way back when, if you told me I'd be sitting here today, I would have said, what are you talking about? My world was all around corporate finance. I had graduated from college, jumped into investment banking, so blessed to get into this crazy world of PE before I even knew how crazy and amazing it was at the same time. But it was also incredibly challenging for a woman who had already started a family. Private equity is very difficult today, but imagine in the late nineties. There was literally no women. I had no mentorship, no one to talk to. And it was really fast tracking within my career. One of the most pivotal moments in my career was, I was about six months pregnant, had a two year old at home, a husband that traveled 150 nights at least a year, and I was asked to get on a deal the next day, to go to rural Alabama and look at an opportunity. I just sat there and thought, how am I gonna do this? Something has to give. Not to mention I wasn't too wild about getting on a small plane.

Erica: Rural Alabama of all things.

Steph: Exactly. And I quit. Literally the next day I said, something's gotta give. And what's so interesting is I never actually thought, maybe my husband and I should talk about this and come up with a plan together. It was just up to me, and I think that's how my brain was conditioned to think. It's my responsibility for my family. I think so many women, even today, twenty some years later, still struggle with that feeling of being torn around choosing their family and the rest of their lives. So I left. And I had a very false sense of security because my boss at the time said, Steph, you will always have a job. Probably one of the kindest yet most challenging things I ever heard, because it gave me a false sense of security. I didn't just lose my earning power that day, and I didn't expect to be out of the workforce for what would end up being about fourteen years.

It was the beginning of despite my background, I really leaned out day by day, more and more, of my entire financial life. Life gets busy, let's face it. It's so hard to juggle family demands, especially when, for the most part, I was a single mom, because my ex husband, or at the time my husband, traveled so much. So it was, you deal with the money stuff, we both had aptitude for it, but let's divide and conquer. Well, all that worked until one day it didn't. Until one crazy, I have a pretty crazy story, so you have to read the book to really unpack it, but I learned that he had been living a double life, having an affair, in love with another woman. Literally overnight, as I learned about this, everything fell apart. It was really the beginning of my wake up call of, how did I let this happen to me? I loved money, I loved finance, I had this thriving career in it, and now suddenly I don't even know if my name is on the deed to our house. I don't even know what we own. I don't even know if he'd even been doing a good job.

A lot happened, as you can imagine, throughout this journey, but it was the beginning of being completely emotionally and financially devastated, and knowing I had to rebuild my life, not only for myself, but for my three young children. Regaining that financial independence was one of the most challenging things I've ever done, but yet the most rewarding, because it truly began to forge a path to what really was my life's purpose, which was using my story, which has a lot of dramatic twists and turns, and using my background to help other women. Because if I was feeling this loss and overwhelm despite my background, what is the average woman feeling? Regardless of whether she is in the workforce or not, not everybody knows about money and how to deal with their personal finances. I think a lot of assumptions are made about us, that just because we have this amazing career, we know this stuff or should know this stuff. And we don't. Too many of us don't.

Erica: Well, I've written down about 27 things already that I want to dissect. But the first being, I still don't think there's enough women in the private equity sector, because I have been in the private equity sector, and it is bananas, filled with a bunch of old, pale, stale white males, and they're all the same. But the second thing is, I think there are so many women out there who might hear this story and say, no way, this would never happen to me. And to that girl I say, you better go get yourself a friend who is a divorce attorney, because it happens all the time.

Steph: And I think it's important, I talk about this a lot. Divorce was my catalyst. It was the beginning of my wake up call. But it doesn't have to be divorce. It could be the loss of a spouse. It could be a medical crisis. It could be the failure of a business. It could be job loss. It could really be anything that creates this transitional moment in our lives where suddenly we are on the brink of a financial crisis, or it could come. We are unfortunately a very reactive society. We wait until something happens, and then we say, oh my gosh, I've got to take action. You can't afford to do that with your money. That's where I'm really passionate about getting the word out, that it doesn't have to be divorce. We have to really, and the pandemic, I think, changed a lot of our thinking, to realize life can change on a dime, and we've gotta be prepared.

Erica: The other thing, though, is I heard a stat one time, and I don't remember the number, but the point of the statistic was that women outlive men. That is the fact of the day. And men handle the majority of the finances in traditional homes, in most homes. If I'm very honest, my husband handles our finances. I, though, have complete visibility into what it is. Every month we go over the budget, what's coming in, what's going out. I've got all the passwords to all the things. And actually, I have my own secret bank account.

Steph: There you go.

Erica: And he knows about it, but doesn't have access to it. That's my business.

Steph: As long as there's transparency, whatever works.

Erica: Exactly. But all that to say, I heard the stat that so many women get to the end of their life, and they see what their husband has left them with, and they are disappointed. They trusted their husband more, they thought he was doing more with their money, and now he's gone, and what do I do?

Steph: Right, what do I do. Well, you're absolutely right. In fact, a couple shocking statistics that I don't think we're talking enough about. We talk about the average woman living to be in her early eighties. Well, the truth is, women who have access to good health care, good eating habits, healthy lifestyle, you can expect to live into your nineties, maybe even a hundred. And we're on the brink, studies and experts show, that you're gonna see an unprecedented amount of people living into their hundreds over the next thirty years, a growth of something like 300%. It's unbelievable. 70% of those people are gonna be women. So here's the real crisis. If we're not looking at this today, if we're not in the game, and to your point, you don't have to run it, you don't have to do it all yourself, you can still divide and conquer a little bit, but have transparency. Sit down like you do with your husband and really understand what you own, what you owe, what's coming in, what's going out, and all the nitty gritties, so that if something happens you're prepared. But more importantly, you have confidence that you have the foundation to have that longevity, not with your life, but with your money, so you can make the most of every chapter. Because let's face it, a lot of people are leaving corporate America, maybe shutting down a business, and thinking about that next chapter, maybe in their fifties or sixties. If you're living to be 90 or 100, that could be three decades or more where you've got lots of stuff to do and chapters to thrive in. You better be financially prepared. Because if you're 95 and suddenly you scratch your head and say, I'm running out of money, who's there to pick up the pieces? Your children. And who wants to be a burden to them?

Erica: I saw something on LinkedIn the other day. It was a post of a woman probably in her mid forties with a picture of her father in his mid seventies, saying he was going back to work because he outlived his savings. I was devastated for him, because he's been out of work for twenty years, so his skills are low, there's ageism at play, which we all know is rampant. So you have to be on top of these things. But one thing that I thought was super interesting about your work is you said that the emotional challenges around money are the same, whether you've got $2,000 or $20,000,000. And so when I hear that, I'm like, okay, there are some sticky floors up in this one. Maybe that's fear, or avoidance, or misplaced trust. What do you see from a sticky floor perspective in women that is holding them back when it comes to being all in on their finances?

Steph: Well, the number one thing is shame. Shame around, I don't know enough, which may not necessarily be true, but if you don't know what to do with it to create wealth, that's where the insecurities lie. Or maybe I have so much that all of a sudden, there's a life event, and suddenly you're sitting here, whether it's inherited, whether there's a massive liquidity event in a business, whatever the case may be, and suddenly you're going, wait, this is way too much responsibility, what if I screw this up? So it's on both sides of the coin, no pun intended, but it really is. And again, it's shame. The problem is we're not talking about this topic enough. We go out with our friends, we're at happy hour or dinner, and we're more apt to talk about sex and politics, believe it or not today, than we are about money. And that's understandable, because it'd be a little weird, even if I was the guest at the table as a finance expert, to say, hey, just curious, how much should my mortgage be relative to my income. That's a little bit of an awkward thing. But we still need to start having conversations with our families, with each other, sharing stories, because we all feel alone and isolated, like we're the only ones experiencing the shame. But the reality is, and your stat is right, the overwhelming majority of women didn't grow up talking about money. It was a taboo topic. So if we didn't talk about it when we were young, it's understandable that we're not talking about it today.

I also want to highlight the fact that when you look at the evolution of women and wealth, there are things that have contributed to the shame that are outside of our control, that we need to build awareness around and stop these limiting beliefs, the sticky floors. I love your concept of sticky floors, because so much is between our ears, that we have to unpack and understand the why behind if we wanna make a change. In my lifetime, I'm in my fifties, still. In my lifetime, as a single woman, I would not have been allowed to get debt without a male cosigner. The banks actually had the ability to charge me more interest, because they thought I was more at risk than a male counterpart. The fact that in the eighties, husbands still had unilateral control over jointly owned property. Why? Because there was this feeling of, well, he can handle it better and make better decisions. So when you think about that, it's no wonder that some of this doubt and inadequacy and lack of security or confidence around this is ingrained or baked into our psyches. But we have to stop, talk about this, and take action to build confidence, because when we do, we actually make even better investors, to be quite honest. The emotional side is the starting point. You have to examine why did I lean out, despite the fact that I had an aptitude for this, that this was something I loved. Life got busy, and it was divide and conquer, but it was a conscious choice, because I didn't want to fight about it. I grew up with a lot of conflict around money, and I didn't want that to be in my marriage. Well, a lot of other things happened.

Erica: So you were fighting about money, but

Steph: That's the least of my worries, to be honest with you. Let's just say part one of that book has a lot of, I'm very honest and raw, and I think that's the way you have to be in life, really authentic about what happens, so that other people can learn from your experiences, your mistakes, and just your own personal growth. My hope is that it'll inspire others to take action.

Erica: Hey there, listeners. If you have ever felt like you're stuck in a place, held back by self doubt, perfectionism, or that pesky inner critic, you're not alone. We all face those sticky floors that keep us from reaching the heights we dream of. But guess what, it's time to shatter those limiting beliefs and toxic behaviors to uncover infinite possibilities. My book, Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors, is your ultimate guide to smashing through barriers, overcoming limiting beliefs, and stepping into your full potential. This book has been endorsed by none other than the great Mel Robbins, best selling author and motivational powerhouse. It's also been featured in Success Magazine, so you know it's packed with insights that work. Inside, you'll find real life sticky floor stories, practical strategies to help you navigate your own sticky floor moments, and a whole lot of inspiration to keep you climbing. Grab your copy of Glass Ceilings and Sticky Floors today at www.ericaandersonrooney.com.

Well, one of the shocking stats for me was always that women couldn't get a mortgage by themselves until 1974. My husband was born in 1973, so I was like, good God, put that in perspective.

Steph: Yep, yep.

Erica: I think it's important too that so many people unpack all of the things that they have been taught, because we come from an era where women couldn't get mortgages, women were expected to be at home, divorce was not a thing, everybody stayed in it. It wasn't until our generation that you started to see women having to take control. When I think about these stories I was told, my grandmother used to tell me to go study at the law library, because that would be the best place to get my MRS degree.

Steph: Yeah, yeah.

Erica: Now, thankfully, I got to learn these life lessons about finances through my mother's divorce, and she taught me this one lesson: never be dependent on a man for money, whatever you do. But even with all these different stories coming together, when I did get married, I made a lot less money than my husband, and somewhere in my psyche it was just like, well, he should handle it all then.

Steph: Right.

Erica: He should take over it all. It wasn't until I started making more money, and we weren't having to budget as much, that it was like, okay, let's talk about what we're doing, let's be smart about this. I'm lucky that I have a very open and progressive husband, and he wants me to be involved, probably because he just doesn't want me swiping my Amazon card.

Steph: Well, it's a team effort. You wanna make sure the right hand is in sync with the left, and you guys are working together towards goals and how to accomplish those goals, so that inadvertently, one person isn't creating an issue without knowing it. One thing that you said, and kudos, life, the examples of your mom and the pain she went through and the transition, she used it as a learning opportunity for you. It's interesting, my life story was really centered around, I made the decisions I made for a totally different reason. It was because I grew up in such a miserable environment with a lot of trauma, quite frankly. I was the only child, and I witnessed a very unhealthy relationship that was a lot of abuse, emotional and physical. When I met my college sweetheart and we started to think about the future, and we both had great jobs, doing really well, and that something had to give moment, it was really centered not around, I want someone to take care of me so I can take care of our kids. It was, gosh, I wanna give my children something I never had. If that meant sacrificing my career, at least for a while, I never expected it to be a fourteen year sabbatical, but so be it, because I wanted something better for them.

I think that also plays into this, we put ourselves last so often. Looking back, it was probably the worst thing I had done for them, because in many ways, yes, there's beauty in some of it, but at the same time, I was putting them, and myself, at financial risk without knowing it, because I didn't know what lay ahead. I have no regrets. Often people say, do you regret it, do you regret it, and I'm like, I don't believe in regrets. I believe that everything serves a purpose, and that we learn from our ups and our downs. All of that contributes to the work that you do, getting rid of those sticky floors, so we can keep propelling forward and thinking big and accomplishing our goals. So no regrets, but definitely a lot of lessons learned.

Erica: Well, I wanna take a little bit of a left turn and talk about your new book, because this is a guide that really promises financial freedom and building a life you love. So what is the core message that you hope women will take away from it, and what is that one important action step you want them to take after reading?

Steph: I'd like to say that this book is a women's empowerment book disguised as a finance book, because I honestly believe in my heart the correlation between your financial well being and your ability to live a truly authentic and meaningful life, something that is centered around what brings you joy and ultimately a life you love, is so intertwined. You can't even think about your vision for the future and what you wanna do and how, and what brings you joy, if you're worried every night about how the bills are gonna get paid. So that is a core message, the correlation between the two, and understanding that if you begin to do the work, if you really do the work and unpack some of the self limiting beliefs around money, around yourself and your abilities, and what's keeping you small, that's when you begin to explore and see the possibilities. So number one is really seeing the intersection between the two, and it really first requires getting control over your financial life.

Now when you say what's the first step, how do you do that. Number one, I think you have to be really real with yourself. That's why this book is really three parts, and it starts out memoir. It's all about my wake up call to financial independence and the importance of it, all the way back to when Wayne and I met, and the evolution of this, and the understanding of even how our childhood plays into it. Because when you say, what does that have to do with money, everything, it really does. It begins to give you a sense, if you really examine where you are, where you're from, how you were raised, it allows you to start to ask questions about yourself and why your behaviors are the way they are, whether it's in life or with money. So that's the first part, examining, because if you can't survey the landscape of where you are emotionally and you just jump to the financial part, there's a lot of baggage there that you have to unpack first. You're not gonna make the progress you need to make. That's the first part.

Then you've gotta really understand what you have to work with. You can dream big, but I always say a vision without action is just daydreaming. Action without vision is just passing time. But when you put the two together, you can change the world. That's the core of this. I want folks to dream big. I want a lot of self awareness here throughout this book, a lot of really thinking and pondering what got you here, where do you wanna go, and now how do you need to get there through the financial steps that you need to make. That's the core message, I think, of this book. It's not just a bunch of rules about how to get more responsible with money. I'm tool based. I want you to think for yourself. I want you to build confidence around this, but see that it's much more than just having assurance you're not gonna run out of money when you're later in life. It's so much bigger than that. I want you to thrive at every chapter, emotionally and financially.

Erica: It's so interesting to me, because money plays such a big part in everyone's life. When I think about where I was, making like $50,000 a year, trying to decide if I wanted to drink two buck Chuck wine or eat Chipotle, or when I was making multiple six figures in corporate, my mindset around it has shifted. One of the things that I'm working on now, since I've stepped out of corporate and as a business owner, is not having the scarcity mindset when it comes to money. Because when I was in corporate, that was that regular paycheck every week, loved it. Now it's like, well, maybe I'll get paid this month, maybe I won't. But I'm still trying to work on this, and I heard it on a podcast somewhere, they said you need to have the mindset and the visual that it's like a river. Money flows through you, it comes to you and it goes, it comes and it goes, and that is how it's supposed to be. But so many of us look at money like this stagnant pond that just dries up over time. And I was like, oh, how are you kind of living there?

Steph: It's interesting you said that, because I've always had a very growth mindset and abundance mindset, because to be honest, it was what was inside of me to get through my childhood. I always felt like I had these superpowers inside of me, even as a little girl, to get through what I was witnessing, to come out of that as a survivor, not a victim. And yet, when my life fell apart, and all of a sudden emotionally and financially completely devastated, wondering what in the hell am I gonna do with the rest of my life, who's gonna hire me despite the fact that I was an investment banker, nobody cared. When I was in PE, we had fax, FedEx, and phone, we didn't even have email. I was so irrelevant, and so there was this unbelievable fear that I let take over me again, getting into that scarcity mindset. In that scarcity mindset, that is all it does is hold you back. You must have that abundance. But I think what's most important is pairing that abundance mindset, where it's constantly flowing, with the tools of how to really grow wealth outside of what you earn, and understand how money works, that for most of us in America, definitely in the world, our money has the ability to earn more than we do, for many of us, not everyone, but for the average person. We have to let it, and most of us don't let it, because we don't understand how money works and the power of earning that it has to grow our net worth and create security for ourselves. So I say that because the mindset is critical, but the education, the financial literacy, and the tools to make sound financial decisions is essential to pair with it.

Erica: Let's talk about financial literacy, because that was where I wanted to go next. It's not, of course, taught anywhere. I remember back in the day being taught how to balance a checkbook, so you would actually see your money disappear in real time or be added back. Kids these days don't have that. So where can someone really go to start getting their claws into what financial literacy is? Because there's just so much, four zero one ks, stocks, bonds, interest rates. Where do we start?

Steph: It's the real reason why I wrote this book, to be honest with you, because when I was going through this, despite my background, I knew a part about finance that was totally different than personal finance, and everyone assumed, well, you know this stuff. I'm like, no. It's like medicine, there's a big difference between a toe doctor and an OB GYN. They're both doctors, but you don't want the toe doctor giving you a cesarean, just like you really don't want your OB GYN operating on your bunions. Let's just be real. So number one, for me, I turned to books, I turned to resources, I couldn't find anything that was relatable, that felt like it was speaking to my situation. There was a ton of jargon, which just made me frustrated. I was like, wait a minute, there's, I didn't feel like anything got me and got my situation and was approachable. And again, I had more financial literacy than most, to be fair, just obviously needed more tools. So I wrote the book because of that. I wanna create a place that invites women in to feel comfortable around this topic. I don't talk about how to invest in stocks and bonds. I think that's the critical point, you gotta start in the beginning. You can't jump all the way to, okay, how do I buy a stock, you got other stuff to learn.

So my biggest advice is baby steps, understand the basics first, really get a strong landscape of, get a strong foundation, and I'm just gonna get to how you get there in a second, but your own financial situation. As you dig deep, you're gonna recognize what you don't know. You're gonna sit there and go, I don't know what liquidity means, or wait a minute, what's good debt and bad debt. Those are things that you need to build awareness around. A great resource, honestly, Google's your best friend, I'll be honest with you. Rely on yourself and keep digging deeper and deeper. Then there's a whole plethora of resources out there that are gonna teach you about investing, but there is no one quick one step, one size fits all approach. I think it's committing to yourself that this is an urgent thing that you need to learn, and finding that resource that really mirrors where you're at, because if you're going to something where there's a bunch of jargon, which is what I got frustrated with, it just builds more shame of, I don't know this stuff, and then you don't even wanna look at it, you don't even wanna go back to it. But the best thing to do, honestly, is start talking with your friends, and start talking with other advisers that you may have, people you trust, and talk about this and see what they're doing as well, because community is really huge in this topic as well. You can't do anything alone. That's probably one of my biggest pieces of advice.

Erica: What would you say to the generation of women who are out there right now that are probably making what I made when I got out of college, twenty, thirty years ago, and they're looking at it from this place of despair, because it's like we've got the tariffs and we've got the taxes, and now a basic townhome is $2,200,000 where I live, what can these women do when the economy is just total trash?

Steph: Well, number one, time is on your side, to these young women. So act now, do not put off what you can do today, because while you may not have the same as someone two decades older to work with in terms of the resources, you have something that person in their fifties doesn't have, and that's the power of time. So start now, start gaining confidence, start where you can gain. Confidence isn't given, it's earned. But start really digging into this and committing that this is number one priority, or a top priority in your life.

Also, I think one thing that we as a society, particularly as we're younger and we're getting that first or second job, we focus too much on our income and what that job offer was and what our paycheck says, and we don't focus enough on the goal of building net worth, and recognizing you could make out of school, early on in your career, $200,000, but if you're spending $220,000, you actually have a lot less than if you're making that 60 or $70,000 job and spending 50 to 60. You have more power than you think, and it's not just about the dollars and the zeros and the commas on your paycheck. I think too often we're fixated on that, particularly as we're young.

Erica: Oh, absolutely. Girl, I was fixated on that until I was all the way in the C suite. I was like, more money, more money, more money.

Steph: And if you don't know how to grow wealth, what's the point, honestly. That's if you don't know how money works, what's the point of earning that extra dollar. If anything, I almost think that's creating a real issue in this country, as we earn more, it's, well, wait, there's always gonna be more. That's why I said that growth mindset, that abundance mindset, if you don't pair it with how do I be a good steward of this abundance, you're setting yourself up for a lot of issues, and quite frankly, potentially to fail.

Erica: Oh my goodness, that is such good advice. Speaking of advice, I know we said we have no regrets, and I agree with that, I have no regrets too. But I'd love to ask you this as our closing question. What is the piece of advice that you would give the Steph who has just uncovered the double life, the affair, and the realization of, I have no idea what's going on with my funds. What advice would you give that Steph today?

Steph: Well, before it all happened, the day before it all happened: never say never.

Erica: Oh, lord.

Steph: Never say never. I think that advice is carrying through in all chapters of my life. I think oftentimes that is our number one limiting belief, it's never say never, it could never happen to me, for good stuff and bad stuff, quite frankly. In the case of that, it was the bad stuff, but there's also things I was kind of not open to, even in this chapter of my life, that I suddenly became open to, and I'm like, wow, isn't that funny, I just learned another lesson.

Erica: Aren't we all just living our nevers?

Steph: Yeah, and let's flip that, and say, what could be possible? And if we think of what could be possible in both meaning challenges or opportunities, we can definitely have more control over what might be on the other side. In the case of me back then, I certainly wouldn't have leaned out, because I married the love of my life, we were best friends, so I thought. Again, divorce is my catalyst, and I wanna say that again, but it could be so many other things. So had I just said, let me be prepared, because what could happen, I would have definitely taken a different approach. Now I will say, I wouldn't be sitting here today doing the work, so no regrets there. I am very grateful and blessed that I found what I was meant to do, and I was so fortunate. But way back then, twelve, fourteen years ago, the good news is I don't even remember the exact year. That means, I set a goal to write this book, and here we are over a decade later, and here it is going out into the world. So no regrets.

Erica: No regrets. And Steph, where can we find your book? Amazon, all the places you tell me?

Steph: All the places. Yeah, and I'm so excited, I was able to do the audiobook, I had to audition for my own audiobook, but I got it. And wow, what an unbelievable experience, so I'm even more excited for that to come out. I called my sons last night and said, I want you to listen to it, then you'll hear what your mom went through. So all the traditional places, like you said, and it comes out November 11.

Erica: That's right, it's coming up, it's gonna be here before you know it. I cannot wait to get my hands on that book, Steph. Thank you so much for being here. If today's conversation lit a fire under you, here's your next move. Don't keep it to yourself. Share this episode with a friend, drop a review, and let's keep the conversation going. Remember that your potential is limitless, and the only thing standing in your way are those sticky floors. But guess what, you got the power to break through them. So go out there, take up some space, and let's shatter some ceilings together.