We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kristine Beese. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kristine below.

Kristine, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

Someone gifted me the book, Invisible Women, which talks about the importance of disaggregating data by gender when it comes to design. It was fascinating and as an engineer, I was devastated to know that car design was so dangerous for women because male crash test dummies that are used for safety testing, do not replicate women’s bodies at all. Because of this women are 75% more likely to be injured in a car accident!!

Now I have spent my life in male-dominated spaces: elite athletics, engineering, finance and then managing money (95% male). And I started to wonder what unintended designs were harming women when it came to their finances.

It turns out that women have a LOT LESS wealth than men do, and the gap is growing. I decided a critical part of gender equity was money, and that I wanted to help women learn about money and have the tools to make the best decisions for their financial lives.

In Canada, an overwhelming 87% of women want help with their finances and more than 3/4 of them said the finance industry didn’t help them.

As humans, the BEST tool we’ve found for helping women with their money is the financial plan

The World Economic Forum stated, “Planning for retirement should look different for women and men given the different life cycles. If women follow the same retirement plan as men, they will fall short in retirement.

We decided to build a financial plan designed for women’s lives. We rebuilt the financial planning process from the ground up and made every design decision based on what served women best.

Our goal is to serve one million women in Canada. And our Mission is to get a financial plan into the hands of every woman in the world.

Kristine, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Kristine Beese, P.Eng. is the CEO of Untangle Money and helps women reduce their anxiety and gain clarity about their money. With over a decade of experience in the finance industry, Kristine shares the strategies employed by high-net-worth individuals with the masses. She believes healthy conversations around wealth include knowing where you are today, where you want to go, and how you will get there.

As a woman and a mother, Kristine learned through her experience in male-dominated industries that women experience the world differently from men, especially regarding wealth and finance. As a result, her work is developed for women using women-specific data.

Kristine is a former national pairs figure skater who brings tenacity and bravery to her role as a founder. A problem solver by nature, her international experience in engineering, capital markets and wealth management helps her look at problems from a first-principle perspective. Kristine holds an MBA from the Ivey School of Business and an engineering physics degree from Queen’s University.

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

I had to unlearn the built-in assumptions from the finance industry which creates tools for wealthy individuals and then tries to apply them to the middle income.

One of the assumptions I had was that everyone wants a fully funded retirement. What I mean by that is that they want to live the same lifestyle they do today for the 30 years they are retired. It turns out that there is a lot of judgment in that assumption. The judgement of people not willing or able to put away that much of their money. The judgment is that this style is the best way to retire (a very western concept), and you should sacrifice now for later.

I had to learn that there are a lot of tradeoffs that can be made, and you can move the goalposts without judgment. Here’s what that looks like: maybe you want a Golden Girls retirement. A global trend we see is women pooling their resources together and renting or purchasing an abode with their friends. Not only does this lower your cost of living (which extends how long your money lasts for), but the best thing about this built-in social network is that suddenly the household maintenance hours went down as well. The quote that hit home to me was from a woman who said: I’ve never done such little cleaning in my life because everyone pulls their housework weight.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

My background as a competitive athlete has definitely proven my resilience, and mental strength (or delusion), is something that I’ve been leveraging a lot lately. I will be tenacious in the face of overwhelming odds.

As a figure skater, you fall a ridiculous number of times before you are able to do an element. I was a pairs figure skater, and here is what that learning curve looked like:

The strongest male skater I knew would skate with me as fast as we could, then he would launch me into the air with all of his strength. While flying through the air, I would rotate three times and attempt to land on one foot. Hundreds of times, I failed to land on one foot. Hundreds.

There is a certain amount of belief, determination and foolishness that goes into thinking that this small adjustment that you are thinking of trying will somehow make this time different, and you won’t end up crashing into the ice.

And yet this is the process. And you assess, make adjustments (big or small) and try again. All the while staring overwhelming odds in the face.

And one day you land on your feet.

To date, entrepreneurship is the closest thing I’ve experienced to this process of learning a new physical skill.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.untangle.money
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/untanglemoney/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/untanglemoney/
• Linkedin: https://ca.linkedin.com/company/untangle-money
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/UntangleMoney