I sometimes look back on my former life and think of it as a beautiful prison.

On paper, everything looked perfect. My husband and I lived in a glass-box condo in downtown Chicago. He was a founder at a thriving healthcare startup. I worked for one of the largest international law firms in the world. We were young, healthy, educated, and successful. To an outsider, my life probably looked enviable.

But I was crumbling on the inside.

For years, I felt an unrelenting weight on my shoulders. Joyful things felt heavy. Work felt heavy. Weekends felt heavy. And because everything looked so good from the outside, it took a long time for me to trust the fact that something was wrong.

One day, in a moment of desperation, I pulled out a piece of paper and started free-writing. What did I actually want?

That list was the beginning of the end.

Over the next few years, my life came apart. I got a dog. I moved west. I went backpacking in the national parks. I left international tax law and moved to financial planning.

In 2019, my husband and I divorced. The life that had looked so impressive from the outside dissolved.

It was not clean or easy. Reinvention rarely is. I lost virtually everything in that divorce.¹

And standing in the wreckage of my post-divorce life, I realized that I was going to have to figure the money thing out for myself.

And so I started studying. I read everything I could about investing, trying to understand how the world’s best money managers think about the markets.

Not because I wanted a hobby. Not because I wanted to work on Wall Street. But rather because my rate of return could have a dramatic impact on the quality of my life—both today and in the future.

Specifically, a four percent return, an eight percent return, and a 15% return are not remotely the same thing.

For example, if you have $100,000 invested,

If you have $500,000 invested,

Over time, the difference becomes even more dramatic. If $100,000 compounds for twenty years at four percent, it grows to about $219,000. At eight percent, it grows to about $466,000. At 15%, it grows to more than $1.6 million.

Those numbers are not promises or guarantees. If you’re able to get 15% on your money year in and year out, it puts you in the ranks of the best hedge fund managers on the planet earth. Markets are not generous on command. Risk is real.

But the math landed in my bones: return matters.

Return can determine whether money is merely preserved or whether it becomes powerful. It can determine whether you have options. Whether you can buy time. Whether you can leave, stay, build, rest, hire help, take a risk, start over, or give generously. Whether you can leave money to your kids.

I had spent two decades working in the financial world, but this was different. This was personal.

I began to see investing not as something separate from life, but as one of the mechanisms that could make life more spacious. More resilient. More self-directed.

At the same time, I have no interest in reckless risk. I had already learned that a life can look good and still be fragile. I did not want an investment approach built on hype, panic, hope, or blind faith in the market. I wanted a process. I wanted a way to participate when conditions were favorable and to step back when risk was rising. I wanted my money to work, but I also wanted it to survive.

That tension still shapes how I invest.

Today, I live in a log cabin in Wyoming. I married a man who comes alive outdoors. We have a beautiful young son, a spacious life, and the same little dog from that original list.

My life is not perfect, but it’s aligned. It feels like mine.

I write about investing, markets, stocks, ETFs, cash, bonds, income, and risk. I share what I am buying, selling, and watching. I explain the reasoning behind my investment decisions because I think people learn best when they can see a real process unfold in real time.

And underneath the market commentary is always the deeper question:

How do we use money to build lives that feel freer, steadier, and more our own?