About Mrs. Wealth Cook

I am a mid-career professional and mom to 2 little kids. I’ve gone from $0 networth to 7 figures in less than 15 years, and hope you help you accomplish the same. This blog isn’t about me. It’s about you.

My journey to financial empowerment started at age 21. While I was fortunate to grow up in a middle class household where my parents paid for my college tuition, after graduation I was on my own. While I had thought my parents were very good with money, I soon learned the hard way that much of what I thought about my family’s financial stability was a lie.

Like in many families, my father was the CFO of our household. My mother was kept out of household financial decisions (outside of spending too much money on lots of clothes and other items.) My father was not in the best of health and at 55 and decided to retire early. In the following 10 years, they continued to spend as if my father was still earning the same amount as he had been in his professional job. Instead of downsizing when their kids left, they remodeled the house and added a room.

Then, my father was diagnosed with cancer.

I didn’t know a lot about finance at the time, and I assumed my father had everything planned out. After all, he was an actuary for a living. What I later learned is that–like most people–he was unable to factor in his own mortality or health conditions, and once diagnosed with terminal cancer and told he had two years to live, any financially wise decision making went out the window (understandably so.)

He lived 10 years past the date of the first cancer diagnosis. After he passed, I found out for 2 of those years, he didn’t file or pay taxes at all, leaving my mother with $80,000 in tax debt including penalties that should have been avoided. He paid for my wedding despite my protests and attempts to confirm he had the money for this (he wanted a big wedding with his family and friends invited, so I accepted the wedding was as much his party as it was mine — but knowing what I know now, we should have kept it much smaller.) He didn’t have a burial property picked out and paid for, despite his terminal cancer diagnosis. This left us scrambling to find overpriced plots last minute after he died. My mother spent thousands on the funeral.

It wasn’t until the weeks after my dad passed away and the dust cleared that I uncovered the somewhat dire financial situation — the $80,000 owed to the IRS. The $200,000 home equity loan that needed to be repaid on the $500,000 house. My mother’s lack of interest in sticking to a budget.

We continued to make big mistakes. I was in a very bad mental place at the time, having just gone through a traumatic childbirth, with my father dying a week later. My mother had to select what to do with her social security. I told her to talk to SS and get a CFP to confirm my advice–but generally it would be best to wait a year to elect the benefits, so they would be worth more. That was the wrong advice–as social security is very complicated and she had already elected spousal benefits earlier, so the survivor benefits didn’t actually function in the way any article about survivor benefits told me that they did. She lost out on $25,000 plus interest. All because I gave her bad advice.

I will forever regret so many bad financial decisions made. I created this blog because it doesn’t have to be this way. Everyone is at different stages of their financial journeys–some are in debt, others are mid career with no retirement savings, and many hand over their financial future to an advisor who may or may not be advising in their best interest (just because a family friend has access to sell insurance products, does not mean they are selling you something in your best interest.)

I am not a financial planner or tax advisor. Please consult your CFP and/or CPA before making any financial moves based on the information in this blog. But I promise to deliver well-researched, no BS information about personal finance. It doesn’t have to be that hard. You can manage most of your finances yourself–you don’t need to pay someone 1% of your portfolio to do this, or high fees hidden in the costs of products you are sold.

Wealth Cook is the place for the ingredients of a healthy financial life. I hope you enjoy the content. If you have any questions you would like answered, you can leave a comment below.