Claire Wasserman is the founder of Ladies Get Paid, an author, and a career coach with a master's certificate in financial psychology. She bootstrapped her business to seven figures, built a community of over 100,000 women, and got a $300,000 advance for her book. She is also, right now, raising twins in Los Angeles on food stamps.

In this episode, she sits down with me for the most honest money conversation we have had on this show.

Claire and I walk through her whole earning journey, from trading salary for equity at a startup that later sold for $12.9 million, to the seven-figure years of brand sponsorships and thousand-person conferences, to the $300K book advance.

Then the part almost nobody says out loud: how the pandemic broke her business model, why a family medical crisis drained their finances, and how they ended up $150K in debt

Claire reveals what it actually feels like to swipe an EBT card, the half-price apartment her grandfather wrote into a building's deed, and why the shame around food hits differently than every other benefit.

She gets into how childcare math forced her and her wife to renegotiate everything including their sleep, her lightning round of negotiation advice, and why she thinks being in the middle of healing makes her a better coach.

Download Ashley's free "Get Paid What You're Worth" negotiation guide (https://www.thefiscalfemme.com/get-paid).

Learn more about Claire's work and coaching at ladiesgetpaid.com, subscribe to her Substack, and follow her on Instagram at @clairegetspaid and @ladiesgetpaid.

Check out Ashley's Money Club (https://www.thefiscalfemme.com/money-club) to join a community of women unabashedly going after their money goals.

Take this quiz to get a personalized Wealth Building Blueprint (https://bit.ly/4v94g2C)

Erika Velazquez Alpern has built the same business twice under the same name. The first time, she shut it down when the math stopped working and went in-house at Morning Brew. The second time, she waited until she had a signed contract in hand, because despite what you may think, many entrepreneurs are risk averse.

She spent her career in brand and media at places like The Guardian and The Boston Globe, and today she is a fractional CMO, the founder of Tactile, and a mom raising two kids and a pup in Brooklyn. In this episode, she sits down with me to break down how she actually affords the lifestyle.

Erika and I walk through the real math of working for yourself: the six-figure salary she left, the anchor client that paid her more per month than her full-time job did, the $170,000 her business brought in its first year back, and how it feels when a good month approaches $30,000 and a slow one barely clears $5,000.

Erika reveals what raising two kids in Brooklyn actually costs, starting with $3,500 a month for a private twos program and camps that run $600 to $800 a week. She gets into the marketing money she has watched businesses light on fire, exactly what she would do with a $0 budget, a $1,000 budget, and a $10,000 budget, the dream job she turned down because the math didn’t make sense, and the thing about her finances that would surprise you most.

Download Ashley's 'Become Your Own CFO' bundle (https://www.thefiscalfemme.com/cfo-bundle) for everything you need to manage the money you make in a strategic and financially savvy way.

Learn more about Erika's work at wearetactile.com, and come to one of her events. Follow her on Instagram at @erikaalpern.

Check out Ashley's Money Club (https://www.thefiscalfemme.com/money-club) to join a community of women unabashedly going after their money goals.

Take this quiz to get a personalized Wealth Building Blueprint (https://bit.ly/4v94g2C)

This episode kicks off the sister series. My guest is my little sister Ariel, the person who inspires more of my content than anyone else. She's a homeowner, a sales rep, a mom to my adorable nephew, and living proof that anyone's money story can turn around. Because hers started with a call to tell me the bank was broken. It was not the bank.

Ariel and I relive the full journey, from the negative balance to the $300 that made her feel rich, to the night out that ended with her trying to pay with a pet store card. We get into the money experiments I've run on her over the years: the credit cards in the freezer, and the 401(k) contribution I set to 15% that she didn't fully notice until years later. Today there are six figures in that retirement account.

Ariel reveals what it's actually like having a money expert as a sister (annoying, then useful), a brand-new secret she'd been keeping even from me, and she gets her very first money homework assignment on the show. This is the first of many. We've got her home purchase, her tiny wedding, and the great pet insurance debate all coming in future episodes.

Download Ashley's free guide to save $1,000 in one month

Take this quiz to get a personalized Wealth Building Blueprint.

Check out Ashley's Money Club to join a community of women unabashedly going after their money goals.