Amy Schultz – Co-Founder of Bolder Money
Financial guidance is important for everyone, but not always accessible. Millions of Americans are disqualified from working with financial advisors because they lack investable assets, and they are left not knowing where to turn for wealth-building guidance that could help them catch up to their peers.
Amy Schultz was one of them. She is the co-founder of Bolder Money, a company that is working to provide personalized financial guidance to those who crave financial stability and a safe space to get help with money. Bolder Money is on a mission to close the wealth gaps at scale by addressing the emotional side of money. Bolder’s members can get in-the-moment financial guidance from their own personal money coach, and are never judged for having “non-traditional” financial goals or for facing challenging financial situations.
“We see clients who want to do something different with their lives. It’s not just about the emergency fund, it’s about if I have an emergency fund, I can leave this abusive relationship or if I have an emergency fund, I can leave this toxic workplace. And that’s where I remember feeling like I don’t have this money so I can’t just be with my baby after almost dying in childbirth. I can’t just take the time that I need to heal.”
Amy Schultz was raised in a hard-working environment. Her father was the vice president of his company in Cleveland, and her mother was a nurse manager who retired after 40 years with the esteemed Cleveland Clinic. High achievement doesn’t stop with Amy’s parents: one of her sisters teaches History of Sex and History of Medicine at the University Level, another has a successful career as a marketing director, and her twin sister is also an entrepreneur, opening her second spa location this year. Ever inspired by their work, Amy looks up to her sisters as her mentors, and her muses.
Amy has the ambition of helping people build wealth they otherwise would not have been able to. From the beginning, Amy was inclined towards helping women advance in society and realized during her corporate career how important it is to stabilize their financial gaps and build a community where they can freely discuss their wealth gaps.
Amy started her career as an Actuarial Wealth Consultant because her parents told her that actuaries make a lot of money and there’s always a high demand for those jobs. Since Amy was a math lover and interested in managing financial risks, she sat for the exams to become an actuary and got a job upon graduating college at Mercer, a Human Resources consulting firm.
While at Mercer, Amy was pleasantly surprised by the number of women in leadership but quickly learned that work culture is something we’re all conditioned to adhere to, regardless of gender. Amy worked anywhere from 60 to 80 hours per week, leaving Mercer with significant insight into the importance of aligning wellness programs with the unique needs of working women.
“At Mercer, I thought this isn’t going to be like the toxic experience they’ve been telling me about. And I quickly learned that just having women in leadership doesn’t mean that the work culture is void of toxic masculinity. A lot of times, unfortunately, especially for women working in financial roles, this can mean that women end up assimilating to survive in that culture. This happens through no fault of their own because we’re all trying to get the same promotions.”
After working so many hours at Mercer, Amy realized that this is not how she wanted her career to move. She found that the 9 to 5 working culture was not a fit and that if she wanted a promotion, she needed to always be at work regardless of life events.
“I would be hustling to get through all of my work and then, by 3:30pm, I would just be like, I’m done. I can’t sit here anymore. I also liked to work a lot from home in the morning and then in the evenings, but nobody else was ever doing that. So, I was always on somebody’s radar for not doing enough and I would always get talked “at”–that if “you want promotions working nine to five isn’t going to cut it–you need to work more.””
The pressure to always be working took a toll on Amy’s mental health and her finances. Amy found comfort in shopping, which she now knows is a coping mechanism many in our world use to ease the burden of being overworked and under-treated for mental health challenges.
In 2015, Amy married and began focusing on her mental health. She was diagnosed with anxiety and depression and started trying to find outlets other than work and spending money to enjoy life. Thinking she was on the right track emotionally, she and her husband decided to have a baby.
In 2016, when Amy was pregnant with her first child, her anxiety and depression were worse than ever. The improper support from doctors, combined with Amy’s inability to solve her problem on her own, meant that her situation worsened until she finally found a doctor who was willing to track and treat her anxiety issues. During this time, she opened up about her struggle with mental health, even discussing it at work, and started writing a blog around her experiences.
In 2017, Amy gave birth to her son via emergency C-section. She experienced a placental abruption that triggered disseminated intravenous coagulation (DIC), which meant her blood lost the ability to form clots. This resulted in extreme internal blood loss, adding to an already complicated birthing process.
After the delivery itself, the struggle continued as she gasped for breath and received what would end up being six liters of blood for her body’s restoration. Amy was put under anesthesia and placed on a ventilator as her lungs failed from excess blood product. Her family waited and prayed for her to survive.
Amy woke up 13 hours later to the worried face of her father, in excruciating pain on the ventilator.
“I was praying for God just to let me die because I thought I was suffocating. I was so confused. My husband would try to show me pictures of the baby, and I would think, “I don’t even know what’s happening. I don’t know who that is.” And, in the end, I could nurse him–I had many miraculous recoveries.”
And the miracles continued from there! Soon after that, Amy decided to skip her 9 to 5 job and started dedicating time to her newborn son. But how could she afford her lifestyle as the breadwinner at her house without ending up with massive debt? She did return to work, but the question was planted:
“I did go back and every day I was just kind of researching like how do you afford to leave your job? How do you afford to stay at home? How do you afford to get out of debt, all these things? I really started obsessively researching money–How do I get better at this? And that’s how I found Money Coaching.”
After researching everything about Money Coaching, she hired a Money Coach, streamlined her goals, and found herself going through a transformation journey where the most important thing was to manage your finances the right way. She loved talking about it with her friends, listening to their stories surrounding value for money and created incredible engagement on Social Media. It clicked! She realized that the emotional relationship with money is the most important thing that determines how you spend, save, and earn and she started emphasizing the right thinking that leads to financial stability.
Amy’s Money Coaching worked well, and she started attracting women who were worried about their finances but did not want to hire a financial advisor. She made a safe space for her clients to come together to express themselves. She worked to reframe goals and patterns of worry about debt and money management and witnessed shifts.
Later, she gave birth to her second son, and it was a safe delivery. After COVID hit and the daycares closed, Amy managed her young sons at home, which made her exhausted as she also had to manage her clients simultaneously.
“And I was like; I worked so hard for this–how can I walk away from that.”
At that moment, she met Sid Singh, who would become her co-founder, and they co-created the framework of Bolder Money. As a practicing Money Coach, Amy had her breakthrough around value and money:
“So, for me to support myself as one-person coaching so many people, I had to just keep raising my prices as my demand went up. And so it got to the point where I was only helping people who, from a Money Mindset perspective, were like, yes, absolutely, I’m ready to invest thousands of dollars in help. I wanted to help the millions of people who didn’t feel they could do that.”
Amy and Sid started group coaching, then text-based coaching, and finally came up with the framework for Bolder Money. Despite going through moments of fear and insecurity, she stayed firm on her decision, stopped taking on new clients, and put Bolder Money as her main focus. She prioritized Women’s Empowerment and made her money management approaches available to women who desperately needed to implement her teachings for their budgets and their mindset.
Amy’s Vision for Bolder Money:
“My ambition right now is to be a person who makes real change in not only how our society views and talks about money, but also in terms of the wealth that people have and how it is distributed among different groups of people.”
The purpose of Bolder Money is to help a) those who are struggling to manage their money and b) those who are seeking financial guidance find a way to build wealth.
Amy encourages women to be their best advocates regarding their mental health and finances and strongly urges women to prepare to take risks in their careers.
“You can change your career a million different times, and it’s okay. It doesn’t have to be that you stick with something only because you’re good at it. You can learn something else that may require a new talent.”
From taking challenges in her career and expanding herself in a male-dominated industry to a highly sought-after Money Coach who is giving back massively, Amy Schultz is a true emblem of leadership and courage. Amy is a woman with a strong head and heart, and it is truly awe-inspiring to see her reaching new horizons as her career progresses.
When Amy was a little girl, she would read about women’s rights leaders, and hope she could be as strong as them one day.
Dear Amy, you are not just strong like them, you are one of them.