Tara Saxon
Founder & Certified Money Coach at The Intentional Wealth Co.
Tara, could you please tell us the reasons you started exploring the human side of money rather than traditional financial advice?
I lived the gap between financial knowledge and financial behaviour myself, and it nearly broke me.
Over two decades in banking and finance, starting at Arthur Andersen, then infrastructure and project finance at NAB, and senior roles at American Express, BankWest and HSBC. Commerce degree, master's in applied finance, fluency in risk modelling and capital markets. On paper, the last person who should have ended up financially vulnerable.
But that's exactly what happened. Everything shifted when I became a mother and stepped away from the income that had been propping up an unsustainable lifestyle. That was the moment I found myself sobbing on the floor of my living room — broke, humiliated, and holding every credential the industry could offer.
That was when I understood it. Financial literacy hadn't protected me because my money behaviour wasn't driven by rationality. My decisions were emotional, inherited, and deeply ingrained. I had been operating on patterns I didn't even know I was carrying.
The experience pulled me toward the more personal side of money. I wanted to understand why smart, capable people make poor financial choices, and what I found was a whole world of behavioural conditioning, intergenerational patterns, and unprocessed trauma sitting underneath the advice people couldn't seem to act on.
Thank you for sharing such a personal experience. You actually often talk about how our money behaviours are shaped long before adulthood. How much of our relationship with money is shaped in childhood?
You see, research shows that most of our core money beliefs are set by the time we're about 12 years old. That's the window when our brains are at their most absorbent, when we want to take in everything around us and draw conclusions about how the world works. Of course, that includes money.
You might not remember a single word about money in your household growing up, but I’d bet you remember the feeling in the air when the bills arrived. Maybe you watched one parent work themselves to exhaustion and never seem to get ahead, or there was chaos around spending, or some unspoken rules about money.
Either way, you drew conclusions about what you deserved. Those conclusions became an operating system around money, running quietly in the background ever since.
There's growing evidence that stress and survival responses can actually be transmitted across generations, so the pressure your parents or grandparents carried can show up in your own nervous system. You can be hyper-vigilant or avoidant, or even hold a deep feeling that money isn't safe, despite the fact that your own beliefs are completely different from theirs.
So when a woman in fintech can't understand why she freezes during a compensation negotiation despite a brilliant track record, it often stems from a pattern set decades before she ever walked into that room.
If our relationship with money is shaped by patterns we may not recognise, maybe that’s why many high-achieving and financially successful women may still struggle with confidence around money. What do you think? How would you explain this disconnect?
Financial confidence is really coming from internal calibration. I see this constantly in my work, when women who own property, earn high incomes and hold leadership positions, yet wake up at 3 am running worst-case scenarios. Or sometimes they decide to stay in roles or relationships that don't serve them because they've outsourced their sense of security to the paycheque.
This happens because deep self-trust won’t come simply from external success. Many high-achieving women built their careers from patterns like scarcity or perfectionism, and achievements became a way to manage anxiety.
Such fast-moving environments like finance only amplify that feeling, because they are built on a culture of high performance. There's enormous pressure to look like you have it handled, so the gap between how a woman appears and how she actually feels about money stays hidden, sometimes for years.
Honestly, from my experience, I've found that the women who seem most "together" are often the ones carrying the heaviest private pressure. They may hide perfectly behind the mask, but underneath, there will be some story like: "If they find out I don't really know what I'm doing with money, I'll lose everything." That problem requires a completely different kind of work to resolve than just building technical expertise.
It is truly important to highlight such features of the finance industry. Many women may have faced the same problem, so why do you think leaders usually underestimate the psychological side of financial decision-making?
The industry convinced us, and even itself, that financial decisions should be — and are — purely rational. It’s not hard to believe when the entire financial infrastructure is built on models, trade terminals, data and so on. Those things definitely matter, but they only tell half the story.
Humans are still operating these systems, and a real person is sitting behind every decision. Their relationship with authority, their risk tolerance, and even their nervous system's response to pressure shape the actions they take.
I have actually seen this firsthand during my years in banking, when brilliant people made an irrational decision because something deeper was driving the behaviour, like avoidance or over-commitment, which they tried to disguise.
I think that many leaders view naming what they feel as a form of weakness. In such performance-driven cultures, there is an unspoken rule not to talk about what's happening beneath the surface.
The organisations that get this right and are willing to look at the psychological dimensions of decision-making end up with stronger leadership and actually perform under pressure.
There is a really valuable insight that sharing feelings may be relevant to the financial industry. To sum up our discussion, what would be your recommendations for women building careers in finance who don't feel confident about money?
I’d start by saying that if you feel that way, you’re not broken and you’re not alone. That mindset is one of the most common things I see, and it’s a sign of real self-awareness. You are not weak if you admit there are some things you don’t know or find hard to navigate.
I recommend focusing on several things. Firstly, separate your professional expertise from your personal relationship with money, because they are not the same. You can be exceptional at managing a fund and still carry unresolved patterns in your own financial life.
Then it is helpful to get curious about the story running underneath your behaviour. When you notice yourself avoiding a decision or feeling anxious, just pause and ask: "Why exactly do I feel like this? Is it mine, or did I inherit it?”
Finding that pattern will help you to interrupt it later.
Alongside your mind, pay attention to your body, as financial confidence isn’t a purely cognitive exercise. You need to learn to regulate your response to stress. That will help you to feel safe enough to make bold decisions.
And finally, find spaces where you can be honest. The pressure in finance is really intense, and confidence comes when you align your beliefs about yourself with how you show up. Support from someone who understands both professional and personal worlds may help.
To shift your mindset, you need to understand why you think and feel the way you do and build something different from there.
