Financial Planning and the Two Numbers Every Woman Should Know

You know the feeling. You walk into a meeting with a financial advisor, you walk out an hour later, and somehow you feel worse. More behind. More confused. More like you’ve been sitting across from someone who was speaking a language you should probably know by now but definitely don’t. Most financial planning content for women does exactly this: it buries you in jargon, skips straight to the portfolio, and leaves you feeling like the problem is you. This episode on financial planning is not that.

Nicole Meihofer spent years doing high-level financial planning for families with nine-figure exits; the kind of work that most people never get access to because they don’t already have generational wealth. She did it at Merrill Lynch, in private banking, surrounded by clients who had everything. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, she started asking a different question: why should this level of planning only be available to people who already have it figured out? She left in 2018 to co-found a firm built around democratizing that access. Last year, she launched Pearlvest Capital, a woman and minority-owned wealth management firm, and the conversation she has with every single client starts not with your portfolio, but with a question most advisors never get around to asking.

The Financial Planning Question That Changes Everything

What does enough actually look like for you?

Not your parents’ version. Not the number you absorbed from watching someone else’s life on Instagram. Not what your friends seem to need based on the houses they’re buying or the vacations they’re posting. What does enough look like for you — in your actual life, for the things that actually matter to you?

Here’s what Nicole said that stopped me cold: most women have never actually answered this question. We’re running on a number we made up based on a life we’ve half-imagined, filtered through other people’s expectations. I’ll be honest — I had to sit with that for a second, because that’s exactly what I had done. I made up an arbitrary number based on the life I wanted to have, and I had never once sat down and actually answered Nicole’s question. The math never math’d, and I hadn’t even noticed because I never checked my work.

This is where Nicole’s framework starts. Not with your brokerage account. Not with your debt-to-income ratio. With two numbers that, when you actually know them, change the way you see every financial decision you make. This is the heart of what real financial planning for women can look like when it’s done right.

Number One — Your Monthly Thrive Number

Not survive. Not break even. Thrive.

What does it cost every single month for your life to actually feel like yours? For the routines to work, for the commitments to be met, for the things that restore you to be funded? This is not a budget conversation. Nicole stopped using the word “budget” entirely — and the reason matters. Budget has guilt baked into it from the moment you say it out loud. It implies a ceiling, a correction, something you’re probably already failing at. The framing she uses instead orients around a question: what does it cost to thrive?

The thrive number isn’t about excess. It’s about enough — your enough, not the one handed to you by a spreadsheet or a parent or a Pinterest board of someone else’s life. When you know your monthly thrive number, you stop guessing. You stop the low-grade anxiety of not knowing if you’re spending too much or too little. You have a baseline that’s actually tethered to your real life.

That’s the foundation. Everything else builds from it.

Number Two — Your Investment Number

This is the one that changes your time horizon.

What do you need invested — over time, with compounding doing its work — for your income to eventually come from your money instead of from a job? For the women in this community who want to give generously, to fund organizations they believe in, to be creating legacy in your community in ways that outlast their careers — this number is not optional. It’s the math that makes the vision possible.

Nicole was direct about this: you cannot show up as the philanthropist you want to be, you cannot fund the causes that matter to you, you cannot do the generous things you imagine doing someday — without knowing this number. That’s not a limitation, it’s a plan. Knowing your investment number turns “someday” into a strategy.

The Investment vs. Expense Mindset Shift

This is the part of the conversation I keep coming back to, and I think it’s the part you’re going to share with someone.

Nicole’s reframe is simple and it will rearrange how you look at your bank statement: stop asking whether something is an expense and start asking whether it’s an investment — in your mental health, in your capacity, in the quality of a life that actually functions. The financial planning for women conversation almost never goes here, and it should.

Let me walk through the examples we talked about, because they’re specific and the specificity is the point.

The cleaning person. Nicole has one. Post-inflation, it is not a small number. And she considers it completely non-negotiable — not because she can’t clean her own home, but because of what it gives back. The time. The mental space. The feeling of walking into a home that feels like a sanctuary instead of another thing on the list. When you look at it through that lens, it’s not a line item to justify or feel weird about. It’s a resource. It funds your capacity to do everything else.

The Boat Club. I pay around $400 a month for my Boat Club membership. I’ve referred friends and gotten two free months off, and I would sacrifice a long list of other things before I let that go. Ocean water runs in my veins — I’m not being dramatic, I’m being literal. The water is where I reset. It’s where I remember what my life is actually supposed to feel like. The moment I stopped calling it a splurge and started recognizing it as the thing that makes my life feel like mine — that was a shift. And Nicole validated it in a way I didn’t know I needed.

The massages. The finance bro that lives in my house — my husband — technically has VA coverage that would cover his massages. It also takes two months to get an appointment scheduled and is, frankly, not worth the hassle. My position: go spend the $100 every other week. His back, his mental health, his ability to show up as a person and a partner — that is an investment. The math actually maths on that one.

And then there’s the pedicure moment, which became my favorite part of the whole conversation. My husband painted my toes before an event. Afterward, he looked at me and said, “I don’t understand why you’re not going to get a pedicure on a regular basis. If I can get a massage, you can get a pedi.” And the thing is — he’s right. And it took him saying it for me to hear it. Because I’ll go to the mat for him spending money on his health and not think twice about advocating for myself the same way.

Nicole’s point, and the one that landed heaviest: a lot of the women listening to this show are the breadwinners in their households. They are carrying the financial weight of their families. And they are not treating themselves as such. They are advocating for everyone else’s restoration while quietly skipping their own.

The thing that makes your life feel like it’s yours — I don’t think that’s frivolous spending. That to me is very strategic and intentional living. And it turns out, that’s exactly what sophisticated financial planning sounds like.

The Wolf of Main Street

You’ve heard of the Wolf of Wall Street. Nicole’s framework is built around a different wolf entirely.

Wall Street thinking is about maximizing. Accumulating. The endless scoreboard where the number keeps growing and the goal line keeps moving and there’s no such thing as enough because enough was never the point. It’s a framework built around winning a game that doesn’t actually end.

Main Street is different. Main Street is about building wealth that funds the life you actually want to live — with intention, with clarity about what enough looks like, and with your actual values driving the decisions. The goal isn’t to beat the market or impress anyone. The goal is to answer the question Nicole asked at the start: what does enough look like for you? And then to build toward it in a way that’s strategic, not reactive.

Nicole’s work lives on Main Street. So does this conversation.

Two Things to Do This Week

First: sit down and actually answer Nicole’s two questions. Write the numbers down. Not a rough estimate, not the number you absorbed from somewhere — what does it actually cost for you to thrive every month? And what do you need invested for your income to eventually come from your money, not a job? If you’ve never answered these questions, this is where financial planning for women has to start.

Second: look at one thing you have been calling an expense that is actually an investment in your mental health, your capacity, or the life you want. The cleaning person. The Boat Club. The massage. The pedicure. Stop apologizing for it. Stop framing it as indulgent. Call it what it is.

And if you have big goals — for your community, for the organizations you want to fund, for the legacy you want to leave behind — know that getting strategic about your money isn’t selfish. It’s how you actually get to do those things. You can’t fund what you haven’t planned for.

Connect With Nicole

One more thing: round two is already in the works. We’re going to dig specifically into investing for women, the mechanics, the strategies, the stuff most financial planning content either skips or overcomplicates. Stay tuned.

If this episode hit for you, send it to the friend you’ve been meaning to have the money conversation with. Leave a review on Apple or Spotify, it genuinely helps more people find the show. And if this conversation made you realize you’ve been running on someone else’s definition of enough for longer than you want to admit, good. That’s exactly where it starts.

Listen to the episode