We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Kate Duffy. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Kate below.
Kate, appreciate you joining us today. Before we get into specifics, let’s talk about success more generally. What do you think it takes to be successful?
Success is deeply personal, and my definition of it has changed as I’ve grown.
In my 20s, success meant freedom and independence. I was determined to buy my own home right after college, cutting back on even the smallest indulgences—like my favorite mini York peppermint patties, which were just $0.20—to make it happen. In my 30s, I chased what I thought success was supposed to be: the marriage, the career, the house, the dog—all the milestones society tells us to check off. But at some point, I realized I was living a version of success that wasn’t truly mine. I felt lost, questioning what success actually meant for me.
Through my personal and professional experiences, I’ve come to see success as alignment—when my work energizes me and plays to my strengths, when my relationships are filled with love, honest communication, and compassion, and when I’m living a life I enjoy while securing my financial future. A few years ago, I adopted the mantra “live retirement.” In my work, I’ve seen so many people delay happiness, sacrificing their present for a future that isn’t guaranteed. So I asked myself: What do I want my life to look like in the future, and how can I start living that now? That shift in perspective has been the most valuable success of all.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
I’m 12 years old when my mom walks through the door after work—juggling dinner, homework help, laundry, and emptying the dishwasher, all at once. I gather the courage to walk into the kitchen and declare that I need a job. Even at that age, I wanted my own money, my own independence. I didn’t want anyone, not even my parents, telling me what I could or couldn’t do with it. My first job at a local bakery was my first taste of earning, and to me, earning meant freedom. Money and what it represented was important to me at a very young age.
At 15, I found myself begrudgingly working for my father’s painting and wallpapering business. Mornings started before dawn, and by 6 a.m., I was out the door, paintbrush in hand. Over those summers, I became a skilled painter (a talent I still have today), but I was also the only teenage girl on the crew—hair done, nails painted, of course. I remember the way customers would assume I was there to set up, clean up, or serve lunch to the guys. But my parents never saw limits—if I was capable, I could do the work. That lesson stuck. (Though I didn’t necessarily enjoy the work, I liked earning and saving.)
In college, I didn’t have a clear career path, but I knew I wanted to be a change agent in an industry where women were underrepresented. I knew I enjoyed working with money, so I followed in my sister’s footsteps and earned a degree in finance. Over the past two decades, I’ve built a career as a portfolio manager, financial planner, and financial behavioral specialist. But for a long time, I wasn’t a change agent at all—I fell in line, mimicking the “successful” people around me. I worked hard, my life was good, but something was missing. Eventually, I hit a breaking point. I left a firm, colleagues, and clients I had worked with for nearly 14 years—an incredibly difficult decision. My next role, though painful, ended up being the most transformative, leading me to the field of financial psychology.
I’ve worked with multigenerational wealth families, first-generation entrepreneurs selling businesses for millions, corporate executives, and everyday people just trying to figure out where to start. Money is still a deeply personal, often taboo topic, tangled with emotions, family history, and beliefs passed down through generations. My work helps people uncover why they make the financial decisions they do and how to change their relationship with money in a way that aligns with their values. That’s what I’m most proud of—not just doing that for clients, but my own journey of redefining success through both personal and professional challenges and rewriting my relationship with money.
Today, I help individuals and families design the life they truly want and align their financial plan to support it. Money isn’t just a currency; it’s a representation of power, security, freedom, and identity. My goal is to make conversations around money easier, helping people build not just wealth, but a meaningful and fulfilling life—whatever that looks like for them.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
For a long time, I believed I wasn’t particularly attached to money from a self-worth perspective—until I realized the opposite was true. Despite working in finance for 20 years and understanding that money is simply a tool, I hadn’t acknowledged the emotional relationship I had with it.
Looking back, I discovered the story that linked my self-worth to my net worth. When I was a child, my father told me, “Never let anyone tell you what you’re worth.” He learned that from his own father. As a boy, my dad took on odd jobs to help support his family. When he asked his father, “What should I charge to paint this picket fence?” his father responded, “You decide what to charge. You determine your worth. Don’t ever let anyone else do that.”
It was meant to be an empowering message—one that, as an adult, I now understand clearly. My value as a person isn’t based on what I earn, what I own, or how others perceive me. But as a child, I missed that nuance. Instead, I internalized the idea that my worth was tied to money, as if a dollar amount reflected who I was and what I meant to others. That belief shaped my relationship with money for years, even as I built my career.
The realization hit me during a challenging professional period when I found myself earning less than I did my first year out of college. It forced me to confront the deeply ingrained connection between money and self-worth. Unraveling that belief became a process of shedding old narratives, and in many ways, the journey itself was an awakening. My belief that money was tied to my value as a person was replaced with a conviction that money, while it tugs at emotional heart strings, is a tool and I can manage my emotional relationship with it.
Have you ever had to pivot?
Ah, yes. I think of financial planning as life design, and that perspective became crucial when I reached a crossroads in my career. I mentioned earlier that I wanted to be a changemaker, and a couple of years into the pandemic, I had a gut-wrenching realization: the work I was doing no longer felt meaningful. It was draining me. I was helping people with their finances, but the conversations felt transactional. It became clear that I wasn’t just feeling unfulfilled—I was feeling stuck.
I don’t just want to chase the dollar—I want to change people’s lives for the better. I firmly believe that when you’re doing work you’re truly aligned with, the money follows. But I also knew that fulfillment shouldn’t come at any cost. The thought of continuing down the same path, feeling that same emptiness, was unbearable. So, I started asking myself: If not this, then what?
That’s when I stumbled upon the field of financial psychology. I remember reading about it and feeling something click—I had finally found a part of the industry that valued what I valued: the human and emotional side of money. Attending my first Financial Therapy Association conference sealed it. I walked into that room and immediately thought, these are my people. For the first time in a long time, I felt inspired again.
Following that conference, I threw myself into the search for a role that aligned with this new vision. Over the next year and a half, I interviewed with 18 different firms and teams, hoping to find a place that truly fit. But over and over, I kept encountering the same old models, the same transactional approach to finance. It was discouraging. I questioned whether what I wanted even existed. But with every “no,” I refined my vision further. I got crystal clear on what I was looking for, the kind of work I wanted to do, and the kind of people I wanted to work with.
Then, finally, I found someone who saw what I saw—someone who believed in the work I wanted to do. That moment changed everything. Saying yes to that opportunity felt like stepping into the version of my career (and life) I had been fighting for all along. Looking back, I realize that all the struggle, all the searching, all the “no’s” were necessary. They forced me to get clear, to commit, and to refuse to settle for anything less than the work that truly fulfills me.
And now? I get to do work I love, in a way that aligns with who I am. And that is everything.
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