New Journey, New Mission

In leaving an established advisory firm and starting Sunnybranch Wealth, I made the leap into entrepreneurship. The journey has been alternatively exciting and illuminating, but the biggest point driven home so far is the power and freedom money brings.  

With a 14-month-old and another baby on the way, many may not view this as the ideal point in life to try something new. Thanks to careful planning, saving, and luck of circumstances, however, our family is well-positioned to navigate through this shift and the process of getting a new business up and running.

Before starting Sunnybranch Wealth, this financial security has benefited us in ways large and small over our lifetimes. A highlight reel would include travel around the world before kids, job flexibility in the early stages of our careers, the ability to pay for fertility treatments as we built our family, and taking off over four months together when our daughter was born. The smaller pieces we are grateful for but don’t feel acutely – money stresses we don’t experience when the car needs to be fixed, when a limb of our cedar tree falls (again) in our neighbor’s yard, when medical bills come due, et cetera.

Although we are actively involved in local charitable and political work and give to the causes we support, I continue to feel that we aren’t living up to the full responsibility of the privilege we have, and continue to, experience.

This feeling was one of my primary motivations for founding Sunnybranch Wealth. The two things I love most about my work are helping people reach a place of financial certainty, and then helping them to realize the freedom and opportunity this stability creates. For the people Sunnybranch works with - clients with assets of over $1,000,000, a large part of this opportunity is the chance to create meaningful change within their communities.

This doesn’t necessitate becoming an organization’s largest donor. It means identifying the causes about which you are most passionate, finding organizations whose missions resonate with your passion, and supporting those organizations at a level that feels impactful for you. With healthy financial habits, wealth grows over time and donations will increase. Finding a level of giving that means something to you is an essential first step in building a lifetime commitment to philanthropy.

So, to avoid living the idiom that “the cobbler’s children have no shoes,” my husband David and I are sitting down this weekend to officially identify our family mission statement and the level of giving that is impactful for our family. We’ll discuss topics we’ve talked through before but never formalized. I’ll be walking through our process with you on the blog, sharing what the Sunnybranch Wealth process looks like in real time. Stay tuned!