Today is the last Friday of the month and my regular listeners know that on the last Friday of the month, I host the happy hour on the podcast where I gather great friends with me to drink cheap drinks and talk about money topics. 

March 12 marked the official one-year anniversary of the beginning of the pandemic in the U.S. Can you even believe it has been a year? What a wild year it has been. The ladies and I took the time to reflect on the year and share our highs and lows that have come from the pandemic.

March is also Women’s History month, and we also share some of the women who inspire us and who we’d love to support even more.

For more information, visit the show notes at https://martinisandyourmoney.com/show-notes/highs-and-lows-of-the-pandemic-with-the-happy-hour-ladies

At the Financial Gym, we call the first meeting you have with a trainer, the “financially naked session”. In this meeting, you share everything about yourself financially so the trainer knows where you’re starting so that he or she can make the plan for how you can get where you want to go. Above all other meetings, this one scares clients the most because they are afraid or ashamed of their financial situation. Over two years ago on this podcast, I shared my financially naked session and it led to a request for more. Now, this is a regular series on this podcast. 

Getting in the hotseat today is our first Canadian guest, Margaret. She joins me to share not only her digits, but how she got her finances into shape and how she wants to help others do it as well.

For more information, visit the show notes at https://martinisandyourmoney.com/show-notes/getting-financially-naked-with-margaret

Getting financially healthy is as much a mindset game as it is a numbers game, and part of changing your mindset includes changing how you view certain words around financial health, like budgeting, investing, and, our topic today, frugality. Before I set out on my path to financial wellness, I thought of frugal people as cheap people. Being frugal was not a goal I had for myself. Fast forward 10 years, and I know that frugal people are fabulous, and frugality is more of a money hack than anything else. 

Joining me today to speak more on this topic, and how you can change your mindset to embrace frugality, is Jen Smith, founder of the blog site Modern Frugality and co-host of the podcast Frugal Friends. She joins me to share how she became a frugal convert and how embracing frugality led to debt freedom for her and her husband.

For more information, visit the show notes at https://martinisandyourmoney.com/show-notes/modern-frugality-with-jen-smith

March represents the opportunity to celebrate Women’s History Month. For those of you who don’t know, I attended an all-girls Catholic high school. From the early age of 14, I saw the value and positivity that could arise from women working in a supportive and collaborative environment. This experience literally defined a large part of my life, by instilling a desire to mentor, promote, and support women. As I always say, it’s not that I don’t love men — I married one, I birthed one, and I’m looking forward to falling in love again with another man in my future — but over my 20-year career, I’ve seen the constant need to build support networks to allow women to grow and thrive in the areas where they would love to grow and thrive. 

Joining me today is a long-time friend in the personal finance space, Stefanie O’Connell, founder of Statement Cards and host of the Money Confidential podcast, to discuss how her professional journey led her to start a company and brand that is essentially a movement to support women during their various life journeys.

For more information, visit the show notes at https://martinisandyourmoney.com/show-notes/the-importance-of-statement-cards-with-stephanie-oconnell