Steph Wagner spent her career in private equity building other people’s wealth. Then she realized she’d stopped managing her own

She turned down the trip. The next day, she quit her job.

“I lost my earning power that day,” she said in an interview with Moneywise (1). “I always thought I could get it back, but I began to slowly give away my agency around money.”

What followed over the next 13 years looked like a comfortable life from the outside. In reality, it was a slow retreat from financial independence, one decision at a time. Before long, her entire financial life belonged to someone else — her husband.

When she discovered that he was having an affair, the marriage ended. And so did the financial arrangement she hadn’t quite realized she’d made.

“I love this stuff and I let this happen to me,” she said.

Wagner — now national director of women and wealth at Northern Trust and author of Fly!: A Woman’s Guide to Financial Freedom and Building a Life You Love — tells that story not to shock, but to reach the woman who might recognize herself in it (2): The woman who handles the daily transactions but hasn’t looked at the investment accounts. The one who defers, out of habit, to a partner who seems more committed. The one who figures she’ll get back to it when everything clams down.

“How is the average woman feeling who never learned about this stuff, who buries her head in the sand? How is she feeling at moments like this?” Wagner asks.

The gap between knowing and doing

What makes Wagner’s story unusual isn’t that she stepped away from managing her finances. It’s that she did it despite knowing better.

She started her career in investment banking, eventually moving into private equity when the field was still in its infancy — and almost entirely male-dominated. She understood compounding, valuations, deal structures and still, she handed over the keys to someone else.

That gap — between financial knowledge and financial engagement — is one she now sees as the central challenge facing women and money, not only for those experiencing a crisis, but in ordinary life as well.

A 2025 study by Canada’s investment regulator, CIRO, found that only 43% of women identify as investors compared to 53% of men (3). The gap is widest among younger women, many of whom say they simply don’t know where to start.

When women who work with a financial advisor were asked what mattered most to them, the top answers weren’t returns or strategies — rather, being spoken to plainly and being treated with respect prevailed. That says something about what women have typically experienced on the other side of the adviser’s desk (4).

None of this is accidental, Wagner says. It has roots.

The messages that arrived first

Before any woman opens a bank account or makes her first investment, she has already absorbed years of signals about who money is for and who it isn’t.

Historically, those signals were written into law. Canada’s Human Rights Act only came into force in 1977, meaning that for generations before, women had no federal protection against being denied credit on the basis of their sex or marital status (5). Moreover, a woman could be turned away from a loan, or needed to bring a male cosigner, simply because of her gender.

The practical consequences — limited access to credit, mortgages, business financing — shaped the financial lives of entire generations.

The more subtle signs are there, too. Research by Ylva Bäckström at King’s Business School has found that the differences typically observed between women and men in financial confidence and risk tolerance weren’t innate — they’re situational, shaped by environment and experience (6). Women aren’t naturally less capable with money, they’ve been restricted from it.

Wagner calls this accumulation of signals “money message” — the assumptions, lessons and cultural cues that arrive long before a woman has a dollar to her name. Unlearning them, she argues, matters just as much as any spreadsheet.

“It’s been ingrained in us that [money] is complicated,” she said.

Tools, not rules

Wagner’s approach to rebuilding financial agency reflects everything she went through to develop it. It isn’t built around discipline or deprivation — but rather, staying in the game.

She starts with the full picture: what you earn, what you spend, what you owe and what you’re building. For many women, just clearly laying that out — without judgment — is itself a meaningful step.

On budgeting, she takes a position that surprises people.

“I don’t believe in budgets,” she said. “I feel like budgets set us up to fail.”

Instead, she uses a three-bucket framework she calls 45-20-35. Forty-five percent of take-home pay goes to fixed costs: housing, transportation, utilities, insurance. Twenty percent goes toward the future — savings, investing, debt repayment. The remaining 35% is for living: The spending that makes daily life feel sustainable rather than punishing.

The point isn’t precision, it's proportion. If the buckets are roughly right, the rest has room to breathe.

She’s also deliberate about what she refuses to give up. When asked about her own spending, she laughed.