Profile: Jeanne Wolz

“I’m Jeanne Wolz, a life and business coach, a mom to an imaginative toddler, a former public-school teacher, and a recovering perfectionist. After a journey from working 17-hour work days to 10-hour work weeks and still feeling unaligned, I decided that it was time to stop listening to “the experts” on how to create a meaningful and nourishing work life and start listening to myself. I’m interested in how to decouple ourselves from capitalist definitions of self-worth and success, and what can happen when we rewrite our lives from a space of deep inner wisdom.”

Jeanne grew up around conversations about money. The strongest message she received as a woman in her family was to be “good with money,” which meant to save it. Though her uncle was a stock broker and even encouraged her to invest as a teenager, most of the discussions she overheard in her family about investing were between men. The conversations were also usually about how to make as much money as possible–and since that was never a big goal for her, the conversations never felt relevant. This led to feeling she didn’t belong in a room holding her own with people that were having deeper investment conversations. So, she shied away from the subject. Even after she was married, Jeanne did not feel that she knew how to exist in the investment world.

Then she had an “aha” moment when she realized that as a self-employed person, she needed to take responsibility for her own retirement. By this time, for Jeanne, investment was no longer about becoming rich, but rather about moving up her retirement to have greater control over her time. The only path forward that she could see though was to invest blindly in the stock market and that option was at odds with her values. Jeanne was at an impasse. That is when she found IFB, which she recognized as a way to dive deep into values-aligned investing in partnership with other women. Through IFB, she learned how to use investment also as a way to help create the world she wanted to see.

After completing her Core Circle experience, Jeanne leveraged IFB’s partnership with ValuesAdvisor to find a new financial advisor. She is kicking off that relationship now. She feels empowered. “If it weren’t for IFB, I would not have the confidence to have the money conversations that I am having now. I can hold my own in my discussions with my financial advisor, and that is huge! Even my partner notices the change. He watches me and says, “Wow, look at you!”