Michelle Taylor almost didn’t get the chance to build a career, let alone a company. At 17, she was diagnosed with leukemia. That fight, she says, taught her the one lesson that now anchors her work: money is a tool, not an identity.
Today, Taylor runs Women in Wealth, a platform built to close the financial gap between men and women. Her clients span the spectrum with some being business owners plotting an exit, while others are stay-at-home moms trying to make a household budget work. Her message to all of them is the same that financial confidence isn’t a personality trait; it’s a skill which can be taught.
The timing of her mission matters. A March 2025 JP Morgan study found that roughly 60% of men say they take the lead on long-term financial planning, compared with about 25% of women. Meanwhile, the country is in the middle of the largest wealth transfer in its history, with an estimated $124 trillion moving between generations over the next two decades. Women stand to inherit and control a growing share of it. The question, researchers say, isn’t whether women will have the money. It’s whether they’ll feel ready to run it.
Closing the Financial Confidence Gap Starts With Removing the Emotion From Money
Taylor traces her whole philosophy back to a hospital room. “I think learning how to separate what true wealth is happened in this struggle,” she says of her cancer treatment. Health, in her world, became the real measure of wealth. Money, she realized, was simply a tool for building the life she wanted. It didn’t define that life. That distinction changed how she saw every dollar afterward. “It helped me take the emotion out of money and look at it with a bit more clarity,” she says.
That clarity became her business plan. She wanted women to understand the financial tools already at their fingertips, and how to use them without losing sight of what actually mattered. Women in Wealth, she says, “was the conduit for that and reaching as many women as I possibly could.”
Her client list proves how wide that mission has stretched. She coaches business owners plotting an exit in the same week she coaches a stay-at-home mom trying to make a household budget stretch. On paper, the two women have nothing in common. In Taylor’s experience, they have almost everything in common.”
The approach is the same because regardless of the stage of life or the career, the issue is often the same for so many women,” she says. It rarely starts with a spreadsheet. It starts with a conversation: asking a follow-up question about a topic you don’t fully understand, or simply asking for what you deserve. “It’s something most women struggle with because of the lack of access to a strong financial foundation,” Taylor says. “If you can’t see something, how can you aspire to be that very thing?”
After thousands of conversations, she’s noticed a pattern. Every woman assumes her own finances are messier than everyone else’s. “No one is confidently doing it all right, and we all say the same thing,” Taylor says.
Financial Planning for Women Requires a Different Kind of Advisor Conversation
Ask Taylor where the financial industry still falls short, and she doesn’t hesitate. She believes women were built for this work. “We are better suited to talk about goals and the driving purpose of what this hard work is for,” she says. “We ask great questions.”
The irony isn’t lost on her: she just argued for taking emotion out of the numbers, yet the goals behind those numbers are almost always emotional. That’s where she believes women advisors and women clients, have an edge. “It doesn’t matter what the goal is,” she says. “Whether I agree with it or want the same things has no bearing. It does matter to the client though, and they need to chase and work towards something that matters to them, not what they are told matters.”
Uncovering that “why,” she argues, is what makes the plan stick. “The emotion behind the why matters more than the rate of return ever will,” Taylor says. “That’s the biggest difference between the way men and women plan their financial goals.”
That gap shows up starkly with her exit-planning clients, an underserved niche in wealth management. The mistake she sees most often among female founders: waiting too long. “They start too late or don’t believe they can ever get there,” she says. Selling a business is a huge decision, and Taylor has watched women hesitate to name what they want, expect, or deserve from the sale. Her advice is blunt: get clear on those terms early and don’t settle for less. “Have a team around you to facilitate these conversations even if they don’t plan on selling for several years,” she says.
Taylor says she practices the same principles at home with her husband, Jason. Money, in their house, is a team sport. Every quarter, the couple sits down for what she calls a “state of the union,” reviewing what worked over the past few months, planning the next few, and adjusting course when needed.
Their children are often in the room, even when the finer points go over their heads. “They are exposed to those conversations because they are always absorbing even when they don’t realize it,” Taylor says. It’s a habit she recommends to every client, regardless of income or life stage. “Overcommunicating as a couple and a family is the key to changing the narrative,” she says.
