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Have money in an IRA or 401(k), but still aren't sure how much should be in stocks, bonds, or different funds?

That's asset allocation, and it's often the point where investing suddenly starts to feel complicated. But you don't necessarily have to build and maintain that investment mix yourself.

In this episode of The Rhythm of Money, we look at two ways asset allocation can be done for you: using a target-date fund or working with a financial professional who can build an allocation around your individual situation.

You'll learn how target-date funds work, what they do automatically as you get closer to retirement, and where their limitations are. Then we'll look at what you need to know before trusting a financial professional with your investments, including how advisors get paid, what it means to work with a fiduciary, and the questions that can help you understand the recommendations you're being given.

The goal isn't to turn you into a portfolio manager. It's to help you understand enough to make informed choices about who or what is managing these decisions for you.

CHAPTERS

01:15 What Is Asset Allocation? (Stocks vs. Bonds) 
01:55 Target-Date Funds Explained 
03:35 Pros and Cons of Target-Date Funds 
06:07 Should You Use a Financial Advisor or a Fund? 
07:09 How Financial Advisor Fees Work 
08:55 Why You Need a Fiduciary Financial Advisor 
09:45 Questions to Ask Your Financial Advisor
11:38 Questions Your Financial Advisor should ask you

PLACES TO EXPLORE FOR FINANCIAL ADVICE

Facet
Flat-fee financial planning with CFP® professionals.

Betterment Premium
Investment management with access to CFP® professionals for eligible Premium clients.

Advisor.com
A service that matches consumers with fiduciary financial advisors.

Datalign Advisory
A financial advisor matching service.

These are simply places to begin your own research, not a complete list of financial planning options, nor recommendations.

The Rhythm of Money (https://TheRhythmofMoney.com)
Living Your True Note

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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You can have the right investment accounts and still have no idea what actually belongs inside them.

In this episode of The Rhythm of Money, we break down the basic building blocks you're likely to encounter inside a 401(k), IRA, or brokerage account: index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, stocks, bonds, target date funds, and balanced funds.

Contents

 00:00 What Goes Inside an IRA, taxable account, or 401(k)?
 01:37 The Difference between Accounts and Investments
 03:52 Actively Managed Funds vs. Index Funds 
 05:58 Total Market, S&P 500, International & Bond Funds
 07:50 ETFs vs. Mutual Funds Explained (holding index funds)
 10:50 Risk Tolerance vs. Risk Capacity
 14:10 Stocks vs. Bonds and Investment Timeframe
 15:00 Your Somatic Response to Investing Choices
 15:55 Dollar-Cost Averaging vs. Lump-Sum Investing 

You'll learn why broad index funds are often a strong starting point, how ETFs and mutual funds differ, why bonds can play an important role even when their returns are lower, and how your timeframe affects the amount of investment risk you can reasonably take.

We'll also look at the difference between investing money regularly from each paycheck and deciding what to do with a lump sum that's already sitting in cash.

The goal isn't to turn you into your own portfolio manager. It's to make the investment landscape familiar enough that you can understand the choices in front of you and make better use of the guidance available to you. It's full of information, and it's worth listening to more than once, as well as using the contents timestamps as a reference as needed.

Next week, we'll take the next step: how the mix between stocks, bonds, domestic and international investments gets determined, and two ways to get help setting that allocation without having to figure it all out yourself.

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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You’re saving and investing, but do you know which account should get your next available dollar?

This episode orders priorities, exploring 401k matches, IRAs (and how to think about traditional versus Roth without getting stuck), brokerage accounts and your cash reserve. Along the way, we talk about the Roth five year rule, the backdoor Roth option if you're above the income ceiling, and the flush of dread that may show up if it seems you've had it in the wrong order all along.

The goal isn’t to overhaul everything at once. It’s to know what comes next.

In this episode:
01:53 Why account order matters
02:45 401k employer match
04:10 Traditional IRA vs Roth IRA
07:44 Taxable brokerage accounts
09:40 How much cash to keep
10:25 Creating an investment priority order
11:15 Using the Money Reset for somatic regulation
13:54 One financial action for this week
14:55 What comes next: choosing investments

The Rhythm of Money: Living Your True Note
Practical financial education for women who want more clarity, confidence, and intention in the way they manage and grow their money.

https://TheRhythmofMoney.com

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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How much cash should you actually keep available, and when does saving become something that should happen automatically?

In this episode of The Rhythm of Money, we look at the role cash plays in a healthy financial life, not just as protection against emergencies, but as a source of flexibility, choice, and room to move.

You’ll learn why manually setting money aside can be useful while you’re building a new financial habit, and why there comes a point when automation works better. Instead of reopening the same decision every payday, you can build saving into the structure of your financial life.

We also look at how to decide how much cash to keep based on your income, investments, fixed expenses, and the kinds of financial choices you want available to you.

You’ll learn how to think about:

💰 How much cash to keep available 
🛡️ Why liquidity has value even when you have investments or other assets  
💰 When to move from manually practicing a savings habit to automating it 
🛡️ Why cash reserves can support career, investment, and family choices 
💰 How savings and debt payoff can happen at the same time 
🛡️ How to build a financial system around your priorities instead of reacting month by month

Cash doesn’t have to be money that’s waiting around for something to go wrong. Its job can simply be availability.

And once you know how much availability you want, automation can help make sure that money actually stays.

Chapters

2:00 Manual saving vs. automatic saving
5:09 Why liquidity matters
06:19 Savings vs. debt payoff 
11:07 How to choose your cash reserve 
15:00 Building your financial resilience system

The Rhythm of Money focuses on Somatic Finance, combining practical personal finance with the somatic skills that help you use what you learn within a fully embodied life of thriving.

Living Your True Note

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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A good debt strategy can be the key to not just ending financial anxiety, but improving actual financial results. You can know exactly how much debt you have and still be unsure what to do with it. 

Should you pay off the smallest balance first? Focus on the highest interest rate? Keep low-interest debt while using your money elsewhere? Or address the debt that creates the greatest vulnerability in your life?

In this episode, we move beyond the idea that all debt is automatically bad or should be eliminated as quickly as possible. You’ll learn how to evaluate each debt according to its urgency, cost, required payment, usefulness, and the risk involved in continuing to carry it.

You’ll also update the debt portion of your financial snapshot and use two skills from earlier episodes, the Reset from ep. 2 and Focusing from ep. 8, to stay present when a particular account brings up fear, shame, or avoidance.

By the end, you’ll have a clearer way to distinguish between:

• Debt that requires immediate action
• High-interest debt that may be worth accelerating
• Debt that may be reasonable to maintain
• Debt that feels emotionally urgent but may not be financially first

This episode is educational and is not individualized financial advice.

Chapters

01:05 How to decide what to do with debt
01:50 When low-interest debt may help you get ahead
06:52 Updating your debt inventory and financial snapshot
07:20 Using the nervous system Reset before reviewing debt
10:13 Focusing through debt anxiety, shame, and avoidance
13:18 Debt triage: past-due accounts and immediate risks
14:28 High-interest debt and the true cost of borrowing
15:31 Good debt, strategic debt, and financial vulnerability
19:11 Debt avalanche versus debt snowball

Next time, we’ll look more closely at how to balance faster debt repayment with building financial resiliency, so one unexpected expense doesn’t send you back into debt.

The Rhythm of Money: Living Your True Note 

https://TheRhythmofMoney.com

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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You may be able to afford a purchase and still wonder why it keeps showing up without your intending for it to.

Repeated spending often buys more than the item or service itself. It may create ease, offer relief after a demanding day, reinforce how you see yourself, or provide something you have not found another way to ask for.

In this episode, you’ll focus on one spending category and look at the pattern behind it: when it happens, how often it happens, and what may be influencing the choice. Then you’ll use three questions to explore what that spending may be providing beyond the purchase itself.

This is not an exercise in cutting what's unnecessary or judging how you use your money. The goal is to understand what your spending is doing so you can decide whether you want to keep it, plan for it more intentionally, adjust it, or direct some of that money toward something that matters more to you.

You’ll also practice using the awareness and regulation skills from Season 1 to stay present when financial information feels uncomfortable. Rather than pushing through or backing away, you’ll use the skills we've developed together to remain engaged with it.

In this episode:

• How to examine one spending category without turning it into a judgment about yourself
• What timing and repetition can reveal about a spending pattern
• Three questions for understanding what a purchase may be providing
• The difference between being able to afford something and choosing it intentionally
• How to turn greater awareness into one practical financial decision

Next week, we’ll use the same approach to look clearly at debt and organize what you owe without shame or panic. That clarity makes it possible to replace vague unease with a deliberate strategy and decide how debt fits alongside the rest of the life you’re building.

The Rhythm of Money
Living Your True Note

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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Ever wonder why good money habits don’t stick, no matter how much you want them to? In this episode of The Rhythm of Money, you'll learn the tiny step that actually recalibrates your inner compass around money to naturally point toward getting more of what you want: the Micro Habit. 

A small financial action creates evidence. That evidence changes what you expect from yourself, until you're no longer just "trying" to save or invest; you’ve become someone who naturally does those things.

Indigo Dutton, retired investment advisor and author of Micro Habits for Major Happiness, adapts her method specifically for your financial life. You’ll learn how to:

• Choose actions small enough to avoid resistance.
• Make your financial habits precise.
• Attach them to reliable moments in your week.
• Build a lasting pattern of follow-through.

Note Before You Begin: This builds on the goal we identified in S2E1 Even if you don't have a plan yet, bring one change you’ve been wanting to make.

What’s one Micro Habit you could repeat this week? Share it and this episode with a woman in your life, and let's support each other!

Follow for weekly episodes on money behavior, practical saving, investing, and retirement.

Get the free Deep Receiving recording and reminders at TheRhythmofMoney.com.

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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What you believe is possible with money is already shaping what you spend, save, finance, and prepare for today.

In the first episode of Season Two, Indigo Dutton shares a story from her work as the island project manager for a Native Hawaiian land trust community. Families were offered an extraordinary path to homeownership, yet many had already made financial decisions that prevented them from qualifying. Some had stopped believing that owning a home was possible. Others believed it would require far more than it actually would.

Their experience reveals an important truth: your financial choices are shaped by the future you believe is available to you, including how large or limited you imagine that future to be.

You’ll consider:

• Why improving your net worth needs a meaningful purpose
• How present spending can quietly close off future opportunities
• Why “more money” usually isn’t a strong enough financial goal
• The three questions that turn a vague wish into a future you can plan for
• How your goals can begin influencing everyday money decisions

This episode also marks the transition from the inner foundation of Season One into the practical financial work of Season Two. In the episodes ahead, we’ll work with spending plans, cash flow, saving, investing, retirement, financial resilience, and the choices that gradually expand what your financial life can support.

You don’t need to have completed Season One to begin here. But if money anxiety, financial avoidance, or old patterns arise as you move forward, the earlier practices remain available to support you.

What do you want your money to make possible?

Follow The Rhythm of Money so the next episode arrives automatically. Subscribe for weekly reminders and get the Deep Receiving weekly attunement recording for free at https://TheRhythmofMoney.com

The Rhythm of Money
Living Your True Note

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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This is the Season 1 finale of The Rhythm of Money, and the final guided practice.  This is where financial safety and money somatics get you ready to transition into Season 2’s concrete financial work.

After you finally look at your full financial picture, comes the part that matters just as much, letting your body catch up and stabilize in the feeling of money competence that you’ve shown yourself through your actions.

In this episode, we let the nervous system catch up with what has changed. You’ve engaged your financial life more directly, and now this final guided segment gives your body a chance to feel that you’re still here, still whole, and more able to work with money than you may have realized.

This is also the bridge into Season 2, where we begin moving into more concrete financial choices: budgeting, saving, investing, cash flow, retirement, resilience, and the actual structures that help money become something you can actually build financial resilience with.

After this episode, the guided practice will be within the Deep Receiving attunement recording I’m gifting you below, and future episodes will no longer include that segment inside the episode itself. 

Deep Receiving is a grounded yet expansive attunement with music and spoken affirmations for safety, receiving, and capability with money, and is my gift to you.

You can access the download here:
https://therhythmofmoney.com/

If you’ve ever felt like standard money advice doesn’t quite reach you, you’re in the right place. The Rhythm of Money is where the necessary inner shifts take place along with outer decision making… Living Your True Note.

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional. 

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This is the episode the whole season has been building toward, the one where you actually look at your financial life. Today we put together two simple, honest pictures of where things actually stand right now, not a budget, not a complicated spreadsheet.

We walk through exactly what to gather: what you own set against what you owe, and what comes in each month set against what goes out. Before any of that, there's a guided practice to help your body meet this work from steady ground instead of dread, because the bracing before looking is almost always the harder part, not the looking itself. By the end, you'll have a plain plan for the hour you'll set aside this week to make both pictures real.

A note for anyone joining partway through the season: this episode rests on the ground built in the episodes before it. You're welcome to listen here first, but episodes one and two are a recommended place to start.

If you appreciate this episode, please rate/review the show. It helps the next woman find it, and helps the show itself.

This podcast is for education and reflection, not personalized financial advice.  New episodes arrive every Wednesday. Follow or subscribe so you don't miss what's next.

This is The Rhythm of Money. Living Your True Note.

No financial advice is offered or implied. For guidance specific to your situation, consult a licensed financial professional.