My Story

I began my marketing career as a graphic artist in my home state of New Jersey thirty years ago.  After cutting and pasting my way to a position at a top direct marketing firm, I switched direction and moved into human resources where I met my future husband, Mark.

Toward the end of 1991, Mark and I began to identify the life we wanted to build together. We were in a committed relationship and planned to be married and living on the West Coast the following year. Our discussions centered on creating and sharing a life together, which included the big stuff as well as small decisions pertaining to both money and lifestyle.

We loved visualizing what our future could look like and knew it was important to not just dream and talk about it, but to take action.  One month after getting married in Camden, Maine, we left our home in Lambertville, NJ and moved across the country to Tiburon, CA, a beautiful town north of the Golden Gate bridge that we visited while on vacation a few years prior.  It was during that vacation that we fell in love with Northern CA, and thought it would be a great place to live.  We were right. If you’ve ever been to San Francisco and taken a ferry across the bay to Tiburon – you know what I mean. It’s killer gorgeous. We stayed a couple of years and then rambled up north to wine country in Sonoma County where we have lived for the past 15 years.

In addition to the logistics and expense of moving a household across the country, we needed jobs and a place to live. There was a lot of strategizing that needed to happen to make these changes in our lives go smoothly and work successfully.

Once we made the 3,000 mile leap and began to make friends in a new, unfamiliar area, our ongoing discussions surrounding how to create our future developed into an annual celebration of life planning. For the next several years we would continue to develop and fine-tune this process. Although not a planner by profession, I have always had a natural tendency toward planning. Mark however has been a planner his whole life, he tells me he began developing strategies when he was ten.  So naturally we were a good match, and I a good student.

Moving to California together was in line with our philosophy of a healthy lifestyle, both physically and spiritually. Mark returned to tax accounting, while I found the job of my dreams at an integrative medical center. Here I crafted my skills in events coordination and marketing by promoting twenty alternative healthcare practitioners. While discussing with an acupuncturist the physical manifestation of stress on his patients, which he claimed were often due to money worries, the ‘financial wellness’ light bulb went off in my head.  I booked Mark for a series of talks integrating financial wellness, spirituality and money. These talks became the springboard for a new business; Spiritus Financial Planning. And once again, Mark and I would be working together. He is the numbers guy and I handle the marketing, and this time, we would be working from our home offices.

The ongoing discussions about creating our future developed into an annual celebration called Year Ahead/Year in Review. Friends and workmates were curious about it and finally, prompted by our enthusiastic niece, Rachel, I began to write a step-by-step guidebook based on our life planning process that Mark and I created early in our relationship and continue to use today.

The guidebook is called Year Ahead/Year in Review, Your Guide to Dream Big, Plan Smart and Live Well.

We are lucky enough to continue to work together in our home offices, and spend our spare time dreaming and planning of building our retirement home on our beloved Orcas Island.

So I’m thinking – now I am an author, publisher and I guess a blogger too.  I can’t honestly say I planned on that – it’s funny how these things happen…