My professional life started at a grocery store, bagging groceries and fielding the occasional urgent question about fish sticks. What I loved most was getting to be a small part of people's lives.

I watched families grow and kids grow up.  I saw regulars go through injuries to recoveries, through good days and bad. I may have "just" been selling produce, but in a small way, I was part of how their lives moved forward, and that stuck with me.

In college, I landed serendipitously at the campus tech help desk. My boss used to say, "I can teach you the technical stuff, but I can't teach you patience." I enjoyed figuring out what had gone wrong, but I loved when I could help someone understand why it happened, so the next time it wasn't scary. Helping people go from "I hate this platform" to "huh, this could actually help me" is still my favorite kind of win.

Budgeting has always been a foundation of mine, too. As a kid, I'd ask about how mortgages work over Saturday-morning cereal, and I watched as my mom turned my dad's single income into family trips, college tuition, and a solid retirement. She showed me that a budget can be empowering rather than punishing. That awareness helped me buy my first home in my mid-twenties.

When I packed up that home for a career move, I faced an endless mountain of "stuff," and I found that I truly enjoyed sifting through it all, keeping what mattered and let the rest go be useful to someone else.

I would love nothing more than to work with you to figure out what works for you in any or all of these areas.

One of my guiding beliefs: you don't think the way I do, and that's marvelous. It means we get to work together to figure out what you need, and how to get you there, in ways that work for you.