Flow Financial Planning, LLC

10/14/2026

Do you find yourself making decisions about your job, your money, and your time without being clear on WHY?

What exactly is it you're gunning for here?

I propose that what you're gunning for should be "Enough."

I wrote about my own journey to Enough, how I actually calculated it (like, arithmetic and stuff), and how so much of the work has happened *after* I hit those numbers.

The sneakily awesome part about the "Enough" conversation is that it *forces* you to do your own financial and life planning. Without that, you have no vision, no target, no way of figuring out what Enough looks like and therefore how close you are to it.

Enough is not without challenges, but it is a VERY nice place to be. Come, join me!

This week's blog post:

The story of how I came to understand how much was enough in my business, and my thoughts on how you, too, can decide your "enough."

10/13/2026

There are a million ways to lose your money.

There are only a few tried and true ways to make and protect your money.

The longer I practice as a financial planner, the more I see my role not so much as helping you Say Yes to making and protecting money,

but more helping you to SAY NO to the infinitude of schemes out there that will take your money. From outright theft/crime to expensive products and services with exalted promises, confusing language, and ultimately too little reward.

10/12/2026

Most of my clients are young enough that, when it comes to estate planning, they're still focused more on taking care of kids than anything else,

BUT

Once you are confident that not all of your $ needs to go to your kids (my husband and I have reached this stage, for example), and you want to leave $ to charity,

**Leaving your HSA, in preference to other investment accounts, to charity can be a baller move.**

(Yes, I find using slang from several decades prior makes for persuasive writing.)

HSAs are *fantastic* in all ways tax-related...except when you die. If you leave it to anyone other than your legal spouse or a charity, the tax treatment sucks. But leaving it to charity helps it retain its crown as Most Tax Awesomest Account Out There.

So, if you have a taxable account, pre-tax IRAs or 401(k), Roth accounts, and HSAs, and you want to leave *something* to charity—instead of to a human in your life—choosing the HSA will generally minimize taxes all around for everyone.

More on this in Christine Benz's good recent article about HSAs. Featuring the word "meh," which frequent readers of mind will recognize as one of my favorite descriptors of many financial tactics.

Health savings accounts offer a trifecta of tax benefits, but they’re less valuable after an account owner dies.

10/10/2026

When my kids were young, one of the books we read to them was about Mercy the Pig. Mercy was a bit of a scamp. And her two owners, Mr. and Mrs. Watson were kind-hearted b***s. (https://buff.ly/0C1TxvV )

Mercy loves to go for rides in Mr. Watson's car. One day, she hops in the car (she always hops in the driver's seat and has to be cajoled/bribed/berated into moving to the passenger seat) and Mr. Watson gets behind the wheel.

Mr. Watson then backs out of the driveway, very quickly, without checking behind him first. The book explains that "He does not look behind him. Mr. Watson is a forward looking man. He does not believe in looking back.”

And I wish all people who have made decisions about company stock (sell or don't sell, exercise or don't exercise) could adopt Mt. Watson's attitude.

Because while it might be dangerous for drivers, it's a really healthy attitude for investors, who made the best decision they could with the information they had at the time, and, regardless of that, can't do a damn thing about decisions made in the past.

Tap into Mercy’s adventurous spirit while engaging children with language arts lessons in vocabulary, creative writing, character studies, and more with these teachers’ guides and activities.

10/05/2026

After talking with many financial planning business owners last week at the conference, and also after listening to Regular People talk about their money for years now, it really strikes how downright ARBITRARY most of our goals and targets are.

"I want to make $1M/year."
"OMG, I just hit $2M net worth!"

Okay, great 🥂 , but...WHAT DOES THAT MEAN.

How we think about money is so crazily UNTETHERED to anything of meaning. Which makes those numbers useless to us (whether running our own businesses or managing our own finances). Unless, of course, we *do* tether them.

And that boils down to: How much money do we need to make/have in order to pay for the life we want now and in the future.

Until you have some sense of how much money that is, it makes very little sense to start creating numerical targets or goals for yourself! Especially once you're past the "scraping by" phase of life (or business).

09/21/2026

Have you just lost (or do you want to leave) your job and now you're wondering how to maintain health insurance?

You're right to have that at the top of your concerns. It's expensive and complicated and scary. And even the experts, it seems, have to think hard about it to figure out the best way forward.

As I was helping a recently laid-off client (with a spouse and kids and another one on the way) navigate her post-layoff health insurance, I decided to turn it into a larger exploration of how to choose your health insurance coverage after a lay-off, balancing:
* cost
* convenience (aka, hopefully avoiding the worst of the administrative stress), and
* access to your desired healthcare providers.

I even consulted with a couple of insurance colleagues because...have you SEEN how complicated this sh*t is?

This week's blog post:

Evaluating your health insurance options after you've been laid off from your job and face losing health insurance benefits.

09/08/2026

I'll be speaking at XYPNLive in just a couple weeks about "The Business of Enough."

The talk is definitely about running your own RIA, *and* it was inevitable that working so personally on the concept of Enough has also influenced how I show up with and for clients and *their* journeys to Enough (even if they don't think of it in those terms).

Kaleb Paddock, Brian Thompson, and I each have a different Enough journey, so to speak, in our respective businesses, and it's been eye-opening and challenging and wonderful for each of us.

We have scheduled, I think, ~30 minutes for all of us to describe how and why we arrived at Enough (I used a spreadsheet! with formulas! Also some upheaval in my employees and breast cancer!) and the challenges that remain even once we're "there"... and then the remaining time for Q&A.

Please come say hi, prepare to see hair that is WAY grayer than this headshot indicates (I more or less turned 50 and said, f*ck it to hair dye), and ask your best angst-filled questions.

09/01/2026

I like the idea of FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) and the general idea of Financial Independence.

And I know it's a super popular concept, especially in tech.

But I think all the awesome-sounding terms we apply to it make it seem more complicated than it really is.

"Financial Independence"? That's f*cking "Retirement," bruh.

That's "I don't have to earn any money anymore." That's what your parents probably did somewhere in their 60s.

FIRE? Again, that's just Retirement...but at an earlier age than we're accustomed to thinking about it.

There is no complicated math associated with this. (Or at least there doesn't need to be.) The calculations don't change. The numbers we use as inputs change (add another 20 years here or there, a lower withdrawal rate, etc.), but it's not some grand reimagining of financial concepts.

It is, however, a grand reimagining of LIFE and CAREER.

08/15/2026

Something I learned later than I wish I had:

If I save up and explicitly set aside, in its own account or sub-account, all the money for a big expenditure (ex., a vacation, a car purchase, a remodel, etc.) ahead of time, the vacation/car/remodel feels "free."

Because I was never counting on that money to serve any other purpose in my life.

07/29/2026

There are many fancy investment strategies out there. Many are sold as a way to reduce your taxes. (To wit: https://www.kitces.com/blog/tax-aware-long-short-investing-tax-overlay-risk-managed-active-investment-strategy-tals-harvesting-value/)

And one thing I think investors/clients should think about more is:

If your advisor implements this strategy, will you have a snowball's chance in hell of understanding your portfolio yourself?

Or will implementing this strategy mean you are *obligated* to work with an advisor (maybe even this specific advisor) forever because otherwise your investments will perform in ways you can't understand or predict?

I want my clients to work with me forever (okay, "forever"...girl's gotta retire someday herself, you know). Because they are happy to opt in, not because they are scared to opt out.

Tax-Aware Long-Short (TALS) investing involves adding leverage to existing portfolio to buy more positions and increase number of potential losses to harvest.