Meet Rachel Lawrence 👋🏻
Rachel is passionate about money ideas that work in the real world for real people, using your core values to guide financial and other life decisions, backing up financial planning principles with research and evidence, tackling systemic issues in ways that can be good for both the world and our bottom lines, and like a true Enneagram 7, finding ways to have fun while doing it all.
Areas of financial planning expertise
Setting and prioritizing financial goals
Budgets that work for real people
Paying off (& staying out of) debt
Planning for retirement or financial freedom
Buying a home
Taking or returning from career breaks
College funding
Investing, including ESG and SRI
Employer benefits & equity comp
Integrating many types of coaching
Starting or growing a family
Life, disability, and long-term care insurance
Freelancers and small business owners
Healthcare professionals
Public service employees
Tech company or startup employees
LGBTQIA+ community
Current military or veterans
“I've known that working with money was my calling since senior year of high school.”
During a business class stock picking competition, I would stay up until midnight every night using my dial-up modem to research the newest public companies, finding the ones I thought would be most valuable and buying them the next morning right as the stock markets opened. The competition ended just before the Dot Com crash and I won handily (lucky for me). Although I wouldn’t recommend that strategy now, I’m grateful it planted in me the seed of figuring out personal finance and investing, which has blossomed into…. well, to be honest, kind of an obsession. (This is apparently what can happen when you mix first generation wealth building with neurodivergence 🤷🏼♀️)
As it turns out, I’ve poured my entire career (20+ years) into financial planning and coaching, starting with data entry and paperwork, then building financial plans and implementing the recommendations for other advisors. I started taking my own planning clients in 2007, got my CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™ certification, an Accredited Investment Fiduciary® designation, and a few years later, a Masters degree in Personal Financial Planning (I told you it’s become an obsession).
In 2012 I made the leap from traditional firms with high minimums to a new way of working with regular Americans: fintech (aka financial technology) startups. Since then, my mission has been to find scalable ways using technology to bring financial planning to those who need it the most - in particular, women and their allies. Now I get to accomplish some of this through my work with clients at Reverie, and I’m also finding ways to impact thousands of people at a time through my consulting firm, Plan Ventures, where I do projects for fintech and coaching companies on topics like scaling coaching services and automating financial planning advice.
When I’m not working to bring good money habits to the masses, you can find me reading sci-fi, fantasy, or psychology books, watching reruns of New Girl (our dog maaaaaay be named after Winston Bishop), skiing or hiking with my partner and kids, traveling the world on a budget, and fighting the patriarchy. (Oh and I used to go by Rachel Sanborn Lawrence, in case you’re looking for that name.)
OUR MISSION
We help women and their allies actualize their power to make good financial decisions for themselves. *
* Including when to ask for help.
The fun stuff!
Two truths and a lie. Can you guess which is which?
I lived in Haiti and spoke fluent Kreyòl from ages 4 to 6.
I’m the world’s worst karaoke singer but I love to do it anyways!
I dumped a stranger’s dead body into a frozen river near Duluth, MN.
Favorite F words
Food: ice cream (there’s nothing a little bit of ice cream can’t fix)
Flower: red poppies, like the ones that grow wild in France
Feminist: bell hooks aka Gloria Jean Watkins
French word: reverie, meaning daydream or vivid waking dream
F*#&: I’m making up for all the years I refused to swear
