When Alice Finn watched the 2016 financial thriller Equity, she was struck by a scene at a professional women’s mentoring meeting. Main character Naomi is asked, “What’s that thing that really makes you want to get up in the morning?” She replies, “I like money.” While Naomi goes on to explain that her initial interest in finance was sparked by having to start working at a young age to help her brothers get through college, she then turns the tables. “It is okay to do it for ourselves—for how it makes us feel. Secure, yeah. Powerful, absolutely. . . . Don’t let money be a dirty word.”

Alice can relate. A former lawyer, including for NASA, she made the leap to wealth management in the 1990s when she realized she enjoyed working with numbers and had a passion for helping people break down complex financial concepts. In her first company, she was the cofounder, CEO, and chief investment officer of top-ranked Ballentine, Finn, and Company Inc. She has been named one of Barron’s Top 100 Independent Financial Advisers, and one of the Top 100 Wealth Advisers in the United States by Worth Magazine.

While growing her company, Alice, who is based in Eastern Massachusetts, began to see that despite our advances, women often undermine their own wealth and investment strategies for a number of reasons, including fear of being seen as too powerful, aggressive, or masculine. To help women focus more on investing wisely for the future, she founded her current company PowerHouse Assets LLC and wrote Smart Women Love Money: 5 Simple, Life-Changing Rules of Investing, which was published in 2017. She sat down to talk about making a bold career switch, the common money mistakes women make, and how to be smart about protecting your future.

Robin Catalano: What motivated you to go into finance?

Alice Finn: I am an attorney by background. I wanted to do international law, so for my first job I worked for NASA, doing their international agreements. After that, when I became an attorney in the private sector, I realized I was not passionate about it, and I envied my entrepreneur clients.

I made grid of what I was most interested in, what I was good at, my skills, the lifestyle I wanted. I knew I wanted to have children, so I wanted to have a job where I could spend time with them. I was always good with numbers and I was interested in investing. That and my tax and estate planning background from being a lawyer brought it all together.

RC: Tell us about how you started PowerHouse Assets.

AF: In my previous company role, I saw that women weren’t paying attention to their own investments. Some were ignoring the need for any kind of planning, and some were letting their husbands make the decisions without understanding what they were investing in. I also noticed that some women who wanted to get back to work after having raising children were gravitating toward home parties for jewelry or clothing or cooking tools, most of which are run by women who are looking for flexible work. I thought if we could borrow from the home-parties model but provide something educational instead of selling things, we would be providing a valuable service.

I started PowerHouse Assets to bring women together in “Powerhouses” to learn the five principles of investing that I also discuss in my book. It is so important to get your money working for you. We can talk all we want about the wage gap, and that’s good to recognize, but if you don’t take the money you have and invest, you’ll fall behind exponentially, compared to the wage gap.

RC: Ideally, when should a woman read this book? When should she start investing?

AF: Women should read it any time, including before their first job, so they know when they head to it that they should pay off debt, in general, as soon as possible, because it’s negative compounding. And if your company offers a match to your 401k, invest the maximum and get the company match—that’s 100 percent return on your money.

For different stages of their life they’ll have different strategies, but the five rules are applicable no matter what. As long as you follow them, you’ll have a really good foundation for how to create an effective portfolio and grow your wealth.

RC: What is the biggest mistake women consistently make with their finances? Why do you think this is?

AF: Most don’t pay enough attention. We’re so busy, we’re doing so much, we end up feeling like it’s something that’s too complicated, so we don’t try to understand or delegate to someone who does. In my experience, it’s not just older women who do this; I don’t think the younger generations are any more knowledgeable about investing. In my son’s high school, when he showed up to join the investment club, there were sixteen boys and no girls. On the flip side, he told me that the community service club only had girls in it.

I think there’s a growing movement to resolve the problem of women not taking charge of their own finances, but it’s been slow in coming.

RC: Many otherwise intelligent and accomplished women feel intimated or nervous about investing. Why is this, and how can we change it?

AF: It’s a question I’ve thought about a lot: Why is it that with everything women have accomplished, everything we’re doing, that we’re not going for the money—which is power? Some of it comes down to the fear that you’ll be seen as too powerful, too ambitious, and that’s not “feminine.” This is an example of what the famous psychologist Matina Horner called a “Fear of Success.”

There’s also a sense that the financial world is too complicated to understand without special training. But I worked for NASA—I know it doesn’t have to be rocket science. The typical approach on Wall Street is to sell you on black boxes with these incredibly high fees. But when people buy into these, they don’t know that over time they can as much as half of their net worth to fees. This is an example of negative compounding. With my old company, I was working with ultrahigh-net-worth individuals. The way I invested for them is the way everyone should invest: in public stock markets using equity funds, which have better returns but only a fraction of the fees.

RC: If a reader walked away with only one lesson from your book, what would you like it to be?

AF: Get rid of the blind spot. We need to embrace investing. It’s important for our future, and we need to be role models for our daughters. Investing isn’t about getting material goods; it’s about creating choices and opportunities for the future. It’s the ability to buy a home, take care of your parents as they age, send your kids to college, pay for unexpected medical expenses, travel—without constantly feeling stressed or strained.

RC: What are the challenges facing your industry, and how do your address or manage them in your own business?

AF: One of them is the fiduciary rule [which requires retirement advisers to always act in the best interests of their clients’, and put those needs above their own]. The Obama administration worked on it really hard so that it would apply to all retirement accounts—so even a brokerage firm would have to do the best on your behalf instead of selling you the product they make the most money on. It’s since been delayed and watered down.

My advice is to find a fee-only adviser; you pay them a fee directly, not a commission on sales, so the recommendations they make for you aren’t motivated by getting a larger piece of the pie. Know the fees you’re paying them and any underlying fees of the products you invest in.

RC: Have you found it difficult to be accepted in a boys’ club like finance?

AF: It really depends on which part of the industry you’re in. Finance is mostly male dominated, but being a fee-only independent adviser is a great business for women. It’s interesting, it’s lucrative, it’s flexible, and you’re really helping people. If you have your own business, you can create a culture that works for you and not have to adapt to a system or hierarchy you don’t like.

RC: What has changed most about you as a businessperson over the years?

AF: I’m more confident. I think women don’t become confident enough soon enough. I’ve got 20-plus years’ experience, and that comes with a lot of knowledge and skill. I feel thankful I’ve found something I love doing. I’m more sure of myself as entrepreneur.

RC: What do you think are your biggest accomplishments in business?

AF: I’m really proud of my book. It means a lot to me to demystify finance for women and help them make decisions that will move them forward in investing for their future.

Also, I’ve always done the right thing for my clients. I started using index funds in the mid-’90s because the fees are so much lower, which saves the client a fortune over a lifetime. I was lucky I was introduced to the right thing to do early on. It put me and my clients ahead of the curve!

RC: What has surprised you the most about people’s reaction to your business approach or to the book?

AF: I’ve had some people say, “You’re going to put me in index funds?” They think that if you pay more and use a more complex approach, you get better results. You have to convince people that simple and inexpensive is sometimes the best.

I’m also surprised by how uniformly positive the reaction to the book has been. I put it out there and I held my breath; I’d never been a book author before, and it was a whole different world. I’m just proud people are telling other people in their lives about the book—giving it to their daughters, wives, aunts. Men are contacting me, as well. One man in California e-mailed me because he heard me talk and believes what I’m saying and wants to invest this way, but his wife thinks it’s gambling. I told him, “When you’re gambling, the odds are with the house. When you’re investing, the odds are high with you.”

RC: How many hours do you typically work in a week? Is there any particular task that you love…and any that you could do without?

AF: My schedule is flexible. I work about 30 hard-core hours on investing and other things for PowerHouse Assets, and up to 20 more on reading, researching, staying up-to-date on the industry.

I love managing portfolios. I’m a geek when it comes to investing and seeing how different parts of the portfolio are doing. I want to understand the why behind things. I also enjoy meeting with clients and understanding what they’re thinking. I learn from their questions.

RC: Did you ever have a moment where you thought I’m done with this! or This is too hard? How did you work through it?

AF: In the late 1990s, during the dot-com bubble, my clients wanted me to put more money into the dot-com companies because their friends were making so much money with those investments. Relative to my investment philosophy, that was the hardest time for me because I didn’t believe it was different this time or that it made sense to buy stocks that had what seemed to me to be ridiculous valuations. I never thought of quitting, but it took until the dot-com bubble burst for some clients really to believe me when I said it was better to stick with our investment philosophy rather than follow the crowd into the dot-com bubble.

RC: How do you creatively recharge?

AF: I love to exercise. Also, we have a vacation home on Cape Cod, and I love to go there and sit on my deck and look at the ocean, or take a long walk on the beach.

RC: What’s the worst or least useful piece of business advice you’ve ever been given, and what’s the best?

AF: My parents wanted me to be a doctor. [laughs] That would not have been the right career for me.

The best advice was “Figure out what you do that gets in the zone, to the point where time flies and you just get lost in it, and try to make that part of your career.”