How Huntress Wealth Helps Women Align Money with Their Values

0:00I'm the one who was like, well, I'm not going to wait until I die to use my money. And I also don't want to blow it all now.

0:11Stephanie Guttman: Welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast, your gateway to the dynamic world of angel investing. I'm your host, Marsha Dawood, and together we will demystify what it means to invest in early stage companies, who's behind it, and how anyone can be a part of it. If you've ever wondered how you can affect the change you want to see in the world, then tune in to learn more. In this episode, I'm talking with Stephanie Gutman, founder of Huntress Wealth, to explore why defining enough is the real key to financial wellness. From her early days working three jobs and investing at 18 to demystifying what truly empowers women's wealth, Stephanie shares her unconventional path through corporate finance, startups, and now entrepreneurship.

0:54Stephanie Guttman: We discuss insights on balancing freedom with future planning, why most women aren't leveraging their full financial power, and how an entirely new approach to money mindset can help you align your finances with what you really want. Enjoy the show.

1:13Well, Stephanie, welcome to the Angel Next Door podcast. Thanks for having me, Marcia.

1:19Stephanie Guttman: I am so excited to talk to you today about everything Huntress Wealth. Oh my gosh, so many things. Your background is so interesting. Okay, so start us off, Tell us a little bit about your background, but you have to go back to your childhood and tell me the things that you said. So interesting. Yeah. So I don't know if you've heard the Steve Jobs, like Stanford commencement speech. It was like notable, made the rounds like this is before LinkedIn was a thing. So like you heard about it. Well, I was there not for my graduation, but for my sisters. And she or but for my sisters. And the thing that stuck in like my little like preteen like mind was that you can't connect the dots forward.

2:08You connect the dots backward. And I say that introducing my experience and how I came to be here because it does not make sense going forward. It is a really broad career path that I've had. And so I studied finance in undergrad. I went into corporate finance. I was writing like 10Ks, doing all the SEC reporting. I did a rotation, like managing a$30 million product line, like all of this like very corporate stuff. Wanted to be closer to the business, both the strategy and the doing next to each other. So I knew I wanted to go smaller. And so I went to business school, which everyone will tell you don't have to do to go smaller.

2:48But I'm actually really glad I did. And I came out of business school and ran an accelerator affiliated with school. And so I've had that stint of Fortune 500 down to like little tiny before their companies, they're just ideas like Sage. And then I went and worked with startups. So series A and then even my path within that started in marketing, moved over to sales, eventually led the whole revenue motion and then finally became a founder myself. So it's a long journey. I've been an investor since I was 18. I like worked three jobs in high school and opened an IRA. Like I've always been that person, but I realized how uncommon that is.

3:31And now everything that we're building ties back to people feeling confident with their money, using their money, moving through the world and creating the world they want to see around them with their money.

3:43Stephanie Guttman: I love that. So when you were young, you were obviously very influenced by Steve Jobs' speech. but you were doing things that were very different than what most other teenagers were doing by having multiple jobs you really started to understand taxes right oh yeah I did volunteer tax preparation when in college so wow okay it was part of a school curriculum but then I kept doing it so yeah wow okay you got all this incredible background about finance at every level right Right. Household finances and then all the way up to corporate finances. So so then what are some of the patterns that you started to notice?

4:28Yeah, I'll say just going to money story a little bit. For me, money was a sense of control. My parents, I grew up upper middle class and but my parents would pay for basics and everything beyond that was on me. Or if I wanted to buy the swimsuit they definitely did not approve of. That was me. So the sense of money equals freedom was like put in my brain very early on. Hence like the three jobs in high school. It's that kind of let me do whatever I want. So it was that sense of freedom. And back then I didn't know that would set me up to have this sense of freedom and mobility in life. Like starting investing when you're 18 definitely translated, right?

5:09Having this money has created opportunities. It's allowed me, like starting investing when I was 18 has given me the foundation to like go be an entrepreneur now, right? I feel confident in my personal runway. I feel confident in my medium and long-term goals, right? And being a startup founder now is additive, right? Even if I'm throwing a bunch into it, right? I feel like this sense of like confidence and baseline that has afforded me. So it's that freedom all the way through that's been there the whole time. Interesting.

5:42Stephanie Guttman: So what did you notice about starting basically a retirement savings brokerage account at 18? By the time you were 30, it was probably at least well on its way, right? Yeah, so the Fortune 500 that I went to work at, I'd say the workforce trend's pretty conservative. And I don't mean that politically. I just mean like very steady, modest. Like I went to so many like retirement parties of people who like started working there when they were 22, 45 years before. like wow it's just like a very steady environment so a lot of the people that chose to work there like i was working with 22 23 year olds that were maxing out their 401ks i thought they were crazy i was like i don't know how you're finding 23 000 out of our 55 000 paycheck like i didn't or i guess back then it wasn't 23 it was like 18 whatever it was and i was like how but like we're not able to go to dinner because you're doing that it was this balance of now versus later that already showed up then.

6:45So I feel like I was doing it, but it didn't feel special, if that makes sense. Like the, I was swimming with all the fishes and I wasn't like the outlier in that way because of that working environment that I was in. The prompt when I was 18 was from my dad. He's always been, he was like an engineer. So he like tinkers and like he's got the spreadsheets. He's actually a financial advisor now which is a little ironic but he was like this is what an ira is you should go do it and like there there was a little skepticism i was like why would i tie this up for 40 years dad and he's just go through the motion understand how to open an account how to fund an account how to pick an investment after you do that use that as like the training ground and do the minimum that you have to do i don't care if you keep contributing but go do something So that like fear of knowing what's on the other side goes away.

7:42And it's just like a habit that you know how to do. So when you're ready to do more, you can. And so coming out of undergrad, having this like finance education, like how to value a stock, how to construct a portfolio. Like these are things that I learned. I didn't have, and like index funds didn't exist back then. I think people think it's just this thing that they don't know about and no one taught them. But like our parents didn't have the index funds. They didn't have ETFs, right? They actually had to construct portfolios, which is why if they had enough money, they had like a stockbroker on a phone that would literally buy stocks for them on a trading floor.

8:23It didn't. Now you can get diversification. But 20 years ago, you had to learn how to do that. And so I knew I needed to buy at least 10 stocks, hopefully 20. And so it's like my dollar amount per stock was literally like 200 bucks per stock. Right. But it's like, I'm diversified.

8:40Stephanie Guttman: I got this. Right. And so it became, it's really treating it as this like playground and this learning ground well before it was a strategy. It was like learning tactics before it became a strategy. Interesting. Now I just kind of don't. So let's talk. You mentioned something earlier about how people were maxing out their 401k, meaning that they were putting in the maximum amount allowed no matter how much money you make, whether you're a millionaire or whatever, or you're making 50 grand. So what do you think? Tell me more about that mindset of you can't really go to dinner, but you're saving for the future.

9:21Stephanie Guttman: Like where do you think the balance lies? yeah i think it's important to know what you need to do so being in the the world where there were people going to that treatment certainly there were people not doing anything too right like that kind of being a status quo for a 20 something right there was the whole range i'm the one who was like well i'm not going to wait until i die to use my money and i also don't want to blow it all now. And so I created this friendship back then that mapped out what my life could look like. And if I earn this now and get a steady three or 5 % raise for the rest of my life, which like clearly there are step changes as you go to school and take new jobs or lose a job, right?

10:11That's not that consistent, but just a 3 % raise your whole life. And then if I put X percent away, how much will I have? Will I have enough to buy a house when I'm 30? Will I be able to afford to buy a car every five years? 10 or 10. That is something I'm pretty conservative on.

10:30Stephanie Guttman: 10. Like if I let's do that, I had no idea where I was on wanting kids or not, but let's just assume the average two kids, right? Like when might I have those? When might they go to college? Like how much money will I have in this phase? And it's like projecting it out, right? It's like basic compounding but it's like when you really see it and it's that answer like do i have enough or like how much do i need to put towards retirement to be on track i can tell you those there's one woman that's early in my head that was put like maxing out she could probably retire now like we're almost 40 if she's been maxing out the whole time she's good now she might not be able to access it for another 20 years so she might have to keep working so it's that balance of should it go in retirement Should it go in brokerage?

11:18Should I spend it? And until you plan out that future, you can't know. You're just guessing. And that's where this sense of uncertainty or flying blind comes in. And it's not like somebody didn't give you the answer. It's that you have to know what you want first.

11:38Stephanie Guttman: Yes, that's what I talk all about in my new book, Unapologetic Wealth. Yeah, totally. I do love what you're talking about, though, with this concept of enough. And I love the idea that you put this all down in a spreadsheet and started really thinking about the future at a young age because it is so important to think about, well, what are the things that we value? What are the things that we care about? How do we want to align ourselves and our money with our values and then be able to think about that idea of what is enough? I think sometimes people see the numbers go up in the bank accounts or the brokerage accounts or whatever accounts it is.

12:17And then they think, well, I don't want to go down.

12:20Stephanie Guttman: But wait a minute. You could actually use that money to do something to move forward. It's not going to go like this. It's not going to go in a straight line up all the time. It could ebb and flow a little bit. And that's okay. Yeah. So talk to me a little more about that. Yeah. Yeah, the sense of knowing how much is enough, but like even getting to that deeper sense of especially as women, and it's not women only, but I think women are more likely to talk about it. Feel like money is this sense of safety. We've been taught it's our independence, it's our power. And it is. But I'd say it's not it that on its own.

12:59Right. And so that big bank account, if it's doing nothing for you, isn't actually helping. And we talk with, all I've done is talk with women about their money for a long time, but with this business for the last year. And it frankly doesn't matter how much you have, right? That's like probably one of the big like learning lessons that we've had so far is we assumed we'd be helping people who had maybe 200K saved up in a retirement account, not much else liquid. A financial advisor doesn't really want to work with them because they don't have this like chunk of liquid assets. By the time they get a million or two, they're off to a financial advisor because they're like, have enough.

13:42There's that enough word again for a financial advisor to help them and be worthwhile and all of that. And so it's like we're like, that's who we're building for. But the more we learned, there's certainly people in that path, right? But there's also people who are well past that path that still never sat and defined what enough is. And so they still don't feel safe. They still aren't using their money in a way. Again, it's back to just like affecting your values in the world. And when we say that, a lot of people, especially for women, they assume like we're talking ESG and value investing, impact investing.

14:18And that's cool if that's on your list, but it doesn't. That's not exactly what I'm talking about. It's do you want to go start a company? It's do you want to invest in other companies that you believe in? It's do you want to retire early and go sit pina coladas? I don't care. It's what's make happen what's important to you. Just waiting and that like number isn't going to solve problems. How you feel about that number might solve problems.

14:46Stephanie Guttman: Oh, that's so interesting. The number isn't going to solve the problem. How you feel about the number can solve the problem. I like that. We'll have to use that as a quote. Okay, so now explain more about what gave you the idea to start Huntress Wealth and what is it that you're really trying to do? because you're not like the average like wealth manager or financial planner. You're much more than that. So please help us understand. Yeah. So it's a really common misconception that we do wealth management. I think it's because like people get hit up so much, especially like high earning or senior women, like get all the LinkedIn DM, all the emails are trying to financial advisors trying to reach them.

15:28So the quick assumption, we're not financial advisors. We certainly considered becoming one, but we think we can help more broadly not giving financial advice. Because again, it's how you feel about money as much as it is about actually making those decisions. And so much of financial decision making does not qualify as advice either. So that's another interesting notion. If we tell you an asset allocation or specific security or recommend another advisor, we're giving advice. If we're not doing those things, I can tell you how to go calculate how much you need for retirement. That's fine. Right.

16:05There's a whole lot that comes before that advisory word. So we're not financial advisors. We just started this with the mission of we want women to hold equal power. And so it was this like deep research study of why we don't. And certainly there's external forces, right? Like a lot of the world happens to us on this inequality. But what can we do individually or collectively to help change that balance of power? and the answer for me was get more money in the hands of women but also get more women using their money yeah it has to be a collective like tipping point of women having agency over their money and using their money to just shift this window toward equality so that's what we're doing i thought the simple answer to that was like oh just show them their money we'll do a net worth app it'll be great that's where we were when this oh that's the idea that's not the answer like that there's lots of free net worth apps out there you don't need us for that but women on average on balance aren't using them and so there has to be a different way to approach this that like the problem wasn't how much you have again it's how you feel about it and so So we're one part mindset.

17:33So it's like checking in how you're feeling about your money, helping you think through things that you want, even understanding your values is like one of our engagements. Right. But then we're also like goal mapping. So we help you understand. Let's say you have this goal in the future. Let's say when you're you want to do like a big blowout 60th birthday party and you want to not just be like your normal travel budget. You want to invite 20 to closest friends and family. Right. in your footing the bill, right? So if you need 40 grand to do that in 20 years, how much do you need to have today to cover that?

18:08Stephanie Guttman: Okay, yeah. And so it, and maybe that's ridiculous. Maybe that's far down on your list priorities and you don't get to that and that's okay. But maybe you've already finished all those other priorities, financially speaking. Like maybe you've already like already saved enough for retirement. it. You just haven't really done that math of like, how much do you need today for it to grow into that number on your timeframe? So it's like, maybe you can fully afford to do that. Go do that. Yeah. Interesting. So basically Huntress Wealth is trying to get women to think differently about their money so that they're using it to align with what it is that they truly want.

18:50Very much so.

18:51Stephanie Guttman: So you mentioned an app. Tell us more about that and how it works. And I believe there's a waiting list right now because it's not completely out yet is that right yeah so we're in private beta you can sign up for the beta on our website hentriswealth.com and so we have the app again is this mindset piece and this planning piece what's still to come is this actions piece where if you choose to have the ai turned on we can recommend like highest impact actions based on what's nothing, right? If everything you have is sitting in cash, but if no, you really, these are applying towards long-term goals, you should really go invest it.

19:30Again, we can recommend account types. We're not going to tell you what to go invest in, right? That's where that advice piece kicks in. If you do want that advice piece, we have an advisory network. So again, we're not advisors ourselves, but through the course of doing this, we've met lots of wonderful advisors who are very mission aligned that you can go find an advisor if you want that level of support. But it's really checking in with your money, getting comfortable, even just privately asking yourself questions about it, right? What do I want? And then starting to map that out and then making a plan together.

20:11Stephanie Guttman: Wow. I love that. Okay. So you did mention something that scares the bejeebus out of me, which is that women tend to again i'm generalizing so bear with me here but they tend to hold a lot more money in cash than men do i think there's studies out there that can prove that and i get very nervous because the amount of wealth building that they're leaving on the table is really terrifying. I think this stat, you should probably go check this before we air it, but I believe the stat is women have 60 % of the wealth that men do at retirement age. And some of it is certainly pay gap. Some of it is career interruption.

20:56There's very structural challenges to that, but it's also this investing gap. And the investing gap is just as big. So it's like you've got a little bit like 18 % on your pay gap, which is real. We should go fix that. We should go get the money. So we're in power. So we fix that. But that investing gap is a bigger gap.

21:18Stephanie Guttman: Yeah. That's what I worry about because think about all the cash that's sitting there that could actually be earning. And it doesn't have to be in ultra high risk stuff. I mean, it can be in things. They're so, to your point earlier about, yeah, our parents and grandparents didn't have index funds, ETFs, all the things. And we've talked about those things a couple of times on the podcast before, but again, I'm not a financial advisor either. So we don't really talk about specific things as much as just overall, but we have access to so many different types of investing, so many different things that we can do with our money.

21:57Stephanie Guttman: And in some cases that could be investing in yourself, like investing in an education, investing in buying a business and all those things. So I find this all very interesting when you think about the whole psychology of what people want to do. So speaking of businesses, so now you have a business, you have flipped your whole script around on the type of a worker or whatever you want to call it, but you're now a founder. Yeah. So instead of being like a W-2 employee or whatever in the past, now you're a full-blown entrepreneur, founder of a company. So tell us what that journey's been like. I feel like I'm earning the title every day.

22:37It's funny having for so long identified as an investor, right? Like corporate stock market for a long time running that accelerator right and that investor's mindset i've angel invested in a few companies right i've also been an investor i've always viewed working in startups like my time and certainly my equity right is an investment in those various startups and and so it's interesting. I'm being on the founder side and it is such a mental game, I have to tell you, right? If all those business was, if I thought this business could exist without external funding, if I thought we could bootstrap this and still reach a million, two million women in households, like I would do that having a separate like building the business and then building the investment right are like two very different layers of the job and oh my goodness it is it's not the risk of the business that I worry about right it's the uncertainty of like how fast can I go, how much of this can I do?

23:59That is like the big question mark.

24:02Stephanie Guttman: So what is the most, yeah, what's the thing that's costing the most that you need in order to grow and scale? Is it the tech build out or? In the world of AI? Yeah, we have a CTA who's working with us part-time and we have Claude helping him. And it is amazing how fast and how much we can do lean, right? So it's myself, my co-founder is Senya, and then Esau part-time. And we have an app in beta. Like I was just testing our, like, there's like this developer version of the app for the app store, like TestFlight. Like I was just like testing our app in TestFlight this morning, right? Like we, there's so much we can do and it's marketing and it's getting the word out, right?

24:52And like we've known that. We've been branding for a year. We've had an app since January. So the building the story and creating the concept of a consumer financial planning app, like that doesn't really exist. You've got budgeting apps and you've got investing apps, but there's not really this build a plan now and so creating that concept in people's minds have been the groundwork and that's the area of your brain that we have to go in and so that's it's the battle ever day no i'm kidding no yeah but it's a how fast we can do that directly relates to how many people we can reach and so doing so organically is the name of the game now but the more we can fuel that the faster it's going to go, the faster we're going to learn, the faster we're going to build the right thing.

25:46Stephanie Guttman: It's so interesting how you said that that's the part of people's brains that you need to win. And that is so true because I've talked to so many people, women and men, and talking to them about this concept of money mindset and how you feel about your money, looking at it in a different way, having different conversations with your partner or your children about it is really something that they, it's not like people wake up in the morning and they say, hey, I'm going to have some limiting beliefs today about money. But at the same time, people aren't necessarily like waking up one day and thinking, hey, today is the day.

26:25Stephanie Guttman: I'm going to go ahead and do something about my money and not have it sit in cash like that. They're not doing that either. Right. So it's almost like we have we do have to win that part of their brain in order to get them to take action. And it's I look to the financial advisory industry a lot as an entrepreneur, as a founder. I'm a big believer in looking at what people are already doing. And I don't want to go reinvent something completely. It's what can we nudge about that existing behavior? and so we talk with financial advisors a lot too and it's not that they like don't want to help people earlier stage it's that like the business model doesn't work for them to do that and that's fine right like they they know the audience they're serving but even in the audience with more assets they experience people's discomfort with money all day which is why financial advisors were also excited about what we're doing because they want a client who has clarity and confidence and knows what to ask and knows what they want.

27:38Right. And so it's been a really lovely surprise, like with the poll from the financial advising industry, but who they work with are people approaching retirement. So the five years out from retirement is the magic number because people want the answer to the question, can I retire? That's what they want to know. So they start whenever they think they might be able to retire is when they call them up. So that could be the 60-year-old that's calling up, like waiting for that social security check to hit. Or it could be the 45-year-old who's had a couple exits. And am I done? Can I be done? Can I play investor all day and make the job?

28:19And it's so five years out from retirement is the magic. Most people start working or thinking about working with a financial advisor at that point. The other is like the unexpected life transitions that some of them, almost all of them come with so much emotion, right? Whether that's having a baby, that's a lot of emotion, right? Losing a parent or other loved one, that is such a mind. I don't want to say a cut word for a podcast, but it's like such a tough time, Right. And then divorce. And so all of these are like heavily emotional points of when they're going to an advisor aren't therapists, but most of them are getting trained in like basic concepts on how to handle someone going through these transitions.

29:09Right. And so that's the real answer is like it is hard to wake up on any given Tuesday and be like, today is the day I take control of my money. So we've really tried to tackle that with because it's an app, because we're able to have a low cost of entry. This isn't paying$5 ,000 enough for a financial advisor. Right. this is you can start one little bite-sized three minutes of your time a day to work on it because you're not going to wake up one day and do the big project and solve the big problem and know everything you want magically and so we're trying to turn it from this like project into a process so it can fit in between these like big inflection point times in your life yeah yeah i'm glad you

29:54Stephanie Guttman: explained a little bit more about that, how the app works, because one of the things I learned from writing the book is, you know, this isn't this. If people read the book, it's not, oh, I'm going to read the book and then magically my whole life is going to change. No, I know my money story now. Yeah, this is really it's a long journey. Get to a point where you're really starting to think about things differently. And maybe maybe we won't ever get to that point where everything's like magically perfect. I don't think I don't think that even exists. But we can get to a point where we're aware.

30:26Stephanie Guttman: And the more awareness we have, I think that's when you start to actually take action. There starts to be some movement. And then that creates the momentum. Yeah. Yeah. There's this co-founder and I talk a lot about the sense of like psychological safety. Yeah. And how important that is in engaging with your money. And like we talk about this in the workplace all the time, like creating a psychologically safe workplace so you get the most innovation and appropriate risk taking out of people. But no one's there to create that environment for you with money. Maybe you've got a good therapist. Maybe they're helping do that.

31:03But even if not all therapists are doing that. And so a lot of us are like flying blind on feeling good about money, feeling safe about money. And it really does take, it's okay if I fail. Now don't fail with 20 % of your portfolio, right? Fail in pieces, right? Like having the right sized experiments to try and learn and separate this like identity of I'm good or I'm successful from your like investment outcomes or your portfolio outcomes. And so there's this like real big psychological tip that happens when let's call it a good year in the market, right? It's not your average year. Like markets have up years and down years.

31:46Almost none of them are actually the average year, right? Let's say you have a good year in the market. You have a pretty healthy portfolio. A huge psychological tip is when the portfolio went up more in the year than your income. And it's this notion that like the investments are working for you, right and it's not like that's going to happen every year but it's this notion that's like a huge psychological tipping point that i see for people is oh that's how the money could cover me right now you might need more than that to get to the average year that it's covering you but it's this like notion that's when i see people start to dive in and care about what their portfolio looks like versus just doing the right motions and putting it in the accounts that are available to Interesting.

32:37Wow.

32:38Stephanie Guttman: Well, I'm really excited for the app to be live and that we can all use it. So we're going to encourage everybody to go and sign up so that they can be a beta user when it's all ready to go. We've already got beta users in. We are accepting people. We're just really doing a little bit at a time instead of the wide open. Got it. Okay. So anybody, though, who's interested needs to sign up on the wait list so that they can get in faster. Yes. All right. I love that. Well, Stephanie, thank you so much for being on the show today and telling us all about this and having these fun, interesting conversations about money and how you think about it.

33:14It is fun, isn't it? It is fun. Thanks, Marsha. Appreciate being here.

33:21Stephanie Guttman: Thanks for listening. To connect with me, visit my website at MarshaDalwood.com. And please subscribe, follow, and leave a review. It helps the podcast get seen by more people. And remember, you can also find the Angel Next Door podcast on YouTube, too. And if you're looking to learn more about investing in the changes you want to see in the world, sign up for Ann and Bill Payne's ACA Angel University classes. Go to the angelcapitalassociation.org, all one word, to find out the schedule. And classes are now available on demand. Many classes are offered, everything from angel investing basics, which include fundamentals, risk, due diligence, term sheets, valuations, returns and portfolio strategy, and even a class on group formation.

34:00Stephanie Guttman: there's even a deeper dive where you can get advanced classes including capitalization tables startup boards and exit strategies if you're not already a member of the angel capital association you can become one for a low price that will give you unparalleled access to discounts free webinars with a huge archive of content networking opportunities and much more we'd love to have you join us