Why Women Leave Financial Advisors | With Dan Pascone and Lacy Garcia | EP #52

Lacy Garcia didn't set out to build a matching platform for financial advisors. She built Willow after living the problem herself: a career that took her from education and nonprofit work into financial services and eventually into an ultra-high-net-worth family office, where she managed a team of experts on behalf of other people's wealth. Then her own life changed. She became the primary breadwinner, then the sole provider, then went through a divorce and started her own business, all while needing exactly the kind of advice she'd spent her career helping other people access.

Even with an industry background, she struggled to find an advisor she connected with. That experience led her to a number that stopped her cold, and it's one worth sitting with: 70% of women leave their financial advisors. Not because the returns were bad. Because the relationship didn't work.

The most common reason women delay getting advice, according to Lacy, isn't a lack of assets. It's the belief that they need to have things figured out before they're allowed to ask for help. She hears a version of the same sentence constantly: I need to get my act together, and then maybe I can go find a financial advisor.

That's backwards. The actual trigger for needing advice is having real financial questions and no plan, or no confidence that the plan you have will hold up, regardless of your account balance. This shows up even among successful, high-earning women executives, who often carry the same hesitation despite a career's worth of professional accomplishment. Our piece on moving from financial anxiety to clarity digs into that exact gap between income and confidence.

Willow only works with advisors who are fiduciaries in good standing, and most hold the CFP designation. But Lacy is blunt about what that actually buys you today: qualifications and credentials are largely table stakes, easy enough to verify with a quick search. What's harder to find, and what actually determines whether the relationship lasts, is empathy, the ability to educate without condescension, and a genuine sense of partnership.

That distinction matters whether you're using a matching platform or vetting an advisor yourself. Our guide to finding a financial planner who's actually worth what you pay covers the questions worth asking before you commit to a relationship, and our video on what a virtual family office actually does walks through what coordinated, fiduciary advice looks like in practice.

Willow's process goes well beyond the usual intake questions about net worth and investable assets. It asks who you are: your life journey, communication style, even things like Myers-Briggs type, favorite hobbies, and birth order. The goal is to identify not just what kind of advice you need, a one-time financial plan versus an ongoing relationship, but who you're actually going to connect with on a first call.

Clients typically see three initial advisor matches, complete with personal bios and photos rather than a generic credentials page, and can request a rematch or give feedback if none of the three feel right. It's less about finding the most qualified advisor on paper and more about finding the one you'll actually stay with.

Lacy confirmed something Dan hoped wasn't still common: the old dynamic of an advisor addressing the husband throughout a meeting while the wife sits by, disengaged, is still happening today, even if it's rarely intentional. A lot of long-tenured advisors have simply never been trained to do otherwise, and no one has ever given them the feedback that would change it.

The fix isn't complicated. Research the client's situation before the meeting, understand whether she's the primary breadwinner, the head of household, or the non-financial spouse, then open with a genuine question and actually listen to the answer. Our piece on having a real money conversation with your partner covers the same dynamic from the couple's side of the table.

Some of the data Lacy shared is worth stating plainly. Women still earn 83 cents for every dollar men earn, and largely because of that gap plus career interruptions for childcare or caregiving, women tend to retire with only about 70% of the income men have. They're also living longer, which stretches whatever they've saved further than a man's retirement typically needs to. Even a woman executive with a strong salary is often earning somewhat less than her male peers while carrying more of these structural disadvantages.

The shape of the client base is shifting too. By 2030, an estimated 45% of American women ages 22 to 45 are projected to be single and childless, a meaningful change from prior generations, while Gen Z women are already investing at a rate of roughly 70%, arriving far more financially engaged than previous cohorts. Research firms like McKinsey have tracked this shift as part of what they call the next wave of growth in wealth management, and it's changing who financial advice needs to serve.

Here's the part worth sitting with: Lacy had every advantage a person could have going into this search. She'd worked in wealth management for high-net-worth families. She understood the products, the jargon, the process. And she still struggled to find an advisor she trusted, and still walked away from some conversations feeling embarrassed and alone rather than helped. If the industry background wasn't enough to protect her from that experience, it's not a credentials problem. It's a relationship problem, and it's one that shows up regardless of how much someone already knows about money.

Lacy's path is the clearest illustration of everything above. She went from managing a team of experts for ultra-high-net-worth family office clients to becoming, in her own words, one of millions: a woman navigating a major life transition (breadwinner, then sole provider, then divorce, then a new business) who needed real financial guidance and found the search itself exhausting and isolating. That gap between what she could offer other people professionally and what she could find for herself personally is exactly what Willow was built to close.

This episode is for women, including high-earning executives, who've felt unseen, talked past, or not "rich enough" in a financial advisor's office, and for couples where one partner has quietly been left out of the financial conversation. If either of those sounds familiar, the fix usually isn't more credentials on your advisor's wall. It's a different kind of relationship.

Whether you're managing money on your own for the first time, navigating a divorce or career change, or just tired of feeling talked past in meetings about your own finances, you don't have to have it all figured out before you ask for help. Book a free Wealth Strategy Call with our team to talk through your specific situation. No pressure, no sales pitch, just a real conversation about where you stand. You can also find more conversations like this one on our Making Sense of Your Money hub.