If you’re a woman who is about to take a career break to have children, Kimberlee Davis has a message for you. “Don’t let your partner become your plan,” she says. “You have to be the CEO of your own life.”
She is talking about financial plans, including retirement plans, and all things money. Davis, a financial advisor in Newport Beach, California, and podcaster has just published a new book on the subject, “Fiscal Feminist: A Financial Wake-Up Call For Women.” It was, she tells me, partly inspired by her own story. “Learn from my mistakes,” she told me via Zoom. She put her highly successful career on hold to raise three children, and followed her husband to a foreign country for his career. She found herself “trapped” over there, as she puts it. She was left high and dry when her marriage broke down in her 50s. “It was a time when I really didn’t know how it was going to end, and it was a really frightening time,” she told me. Even though she had a bachelor’s and a law degree from prestigious Georgetown University, and had previously worked as a corporate lawyer and a banker, she struggled when she tried to get back into the workforce after her career break. It took her four years to get back to work full-time, being rejected from 80 jobs — including one to be a saleswoman a …