It starts, as these things often do, with a headline.

“She hit seven figures in her business!!!”
“I want to be a millionaireeeeeeeee!”

The captions shimmer like champagne bubbles – celebratory, effervescent, fleeting.

And if we’re honest, millionaire has become such a popular term that many people who are not even millionaires name their products, their offers, and their programs something with Millionaire in the title. It’s shorthand for success, for having made it.

When most people hear the word millionaire, they don’t think “$1,000,000 in net worth.”
They think luxury.
Private jets. Designer handbags. The ability to be, do, and have anything.

But the reality is… a million dollars isn’t private jet money.
It’s not retire-early-and-be-work-optional money.
And in most major U.S. cities, it’s not even “buy a nice house in full” kind of money.

The Mirage of the Millionaire

Here’s the sleight of hand no one mentions: when most people online say millionaire, what they actually mean is a business that grossed a million dollars – not a person who owns a million in assets… and those are *VERY DIFFERENT* things.

Revenue is not wealth.
Most 7-figure business owners are not millionaires.
And when we conflate cashflow with capital, and income with wealth, we start off not even having the same conversation about money.

And even if we use the actual definition of wealth, with a millionaire being someone whose assets minus liabilities equal one million dollars or more — the myth still fractures under pressure.

Because a million dollars no longer buys what it once did.

In 1980, a million made you rich.
Today, it buys you temporary stability in many markets… if you’re disciplined.
With inflation, that same purchasing power is closer to $300,000.

A $1 million portfolio, drawn responsibly at 4–5% per year, provides $40,000–$50,000 in annual income.
Comfortable? Sure.
Work-optional? Not remotely.
Luxurious? Definitely not.

One emergency, one tuition bill, one medical event — and the number that once glittered in your imagination starts to look alarmingly mortal.

The Tuesday That Changed Everything

I learned this the unglamorous way: on a beige Tuesday, under fluorescent light.

My daughter was a newborn. My husband and I, both high earners, sat across from a Vanguard advisor to “plan responsibly.”
He was kind, clinical, and deeply Midwestern – the kind of man who said “inflation-adjusted” with near-religious reverence.

He clicked through his charts, nodded, and said:

“If you plan to pay for college, expect around $400,000 per child.”

I remember the silence after that number–  the kind that shatters your understanding of the world into a million pieces.

What we’d been taught to aspire to – the mythical millionaire status – meant if we wanted options: like retiring early, paying for our kids college, living well, and having ample capital compounding our wealth in the process… I needed to be dreaming and planning MUCH BIGGER than one million.

I walked out of that office understanding, viscerally, that the life I wanted — first-class flights to Japan with my family, champagne on random Tuesdays, the freedom to work when inspiration struck and rest when it didn’t — was not a million-dollar life.

It was a multimillion-dollar life.

The Millionaire Isn’t the Villain — The Myth Is

Becoming a millionaire is an extraordinary milestone.
Fewer than ten percent of Americans ever reach it.
It represents courage, risk, resilience — especially for women who are the first in their family lines to do so.

But when we glorify “millionaire” as the finish line, we hand ambitious women a finish line that’s actually the starting gate of wealth building.

Because when they believe they’ve “made it,” they stop planning, stop expanding, stop compounding.
They preserve the myth instead of building to their fullest potential.

And nowhere is that misunderstanding more celebrated – or more profitable – than in the online business world.

I’ve been inside the machine: the endless talk of scaling, funnels, and big launches.
It’s exhilarating, addictive, and for many women, quietly destructive.
Scale culture worships top line revenue growth…but not profit.
It seduces with the language of freedom while building empires that still rely entirely on your presence.

It’s the corporate ladder disguised as a ring light —
you still show up every day, only now you do it with better branding.

The result?
A generation of women who have mastered active income, but not passive wealth.
They’ve built machines that make money, not momentum whether or not they lift a finger.
They are brilliant, driven, and exhausted – still running, just on a shinier treadmill.

But there’s a moment when the rhythm starts to falter – a quiet realization that you don’t want to scale harder, you want to evolve out of the cycle entirely.

That’s where our game together begins.

At a net worth of one million, you cross a financial Rubicon: you become an accredited investor.
The private markets open.
You gain access to real-estate syndications, private equity, and alternative assets – the same vehicles that quietly compound generational wealth for the ultra-rich.

The difference is invisible but enormous.
A millionaire works for her money.
A multimillionaire lets her money work for her.
One still thinks in revenue.
The other thinks in returns.

It’s the threshold between hustle and harvest – and once you cross it, you never see the game the same way again.

Not all Entrepreneurs Should be Using the Same Wealth Building Strategy

This is where I began developing Feminine Financials – not because it excludes men, but because it reclaims a rhythm that is inherently ours as women.

Masculine money is linear: produce, scale, conquer.
Feminine money is cyclical: earn, allocate, receive, regenerate.

Masculine energy asks, How fast can I grow it?
Feminine energy asks, How can I make it flow elegantly, sustainably, beautifully?

Most entrepreneurs never stop to notice the difference.

They build like entrepreneurs — not investors.
Maximize top-line. Minimize taxes. Reinvest in growth.
It’s the reflexive rhythm of entrepreneurship — the “more, more, more” loop that keeps cash in motion but rarely lets it compound.

And to be clear, that rhythm makes perfect sense if you’re intentionally building an asset to sell.
If you’re a founder constructing a company for acquisition — an app, a tech platform, a scalable product — that’s a calculated risk.
You’re trading short-term liquidity for a potential windfall, a liquidity event that could change your balance sheet overnight by millions and millions of dollars.

But most women I meet aren’t building companies with the intention of taking it to an exit.
They’re building lives – personal brands, coaching companies, creative studios, consultancies.
Businesses that can be wildly profitable, deeply fulfilling, but are not designed to be sold.

And that means the wealth strategy must be different.
This type of business will never see an eight-figure exit from selling their busines, so their wealth must be built through the assets you build with your profit.

That’s the pivot from entrepreneurial energy to sovereign wealth –
from constant motion to conscious orchestration.
Not bigger numbers, but deeper reserves.
Not endless expansion, but elegant compounding.

Because for many the focus on “scale” stops being strategic and actually becomes a huge blocker to wealth creation.

The Recalibration of True Wealth

Here’s the simplest truth no one is saying out loud:
Wealth isn’t what you earn.
It’s what continues to earn when you don’t.

Active income — no matter how high — is a current.
It flows in, it flows out, and the moment you stop paddling, it stops moving.

Wealth is different.
Wealth is capital that funds things — tuition, travel, art, real estate, legacy.
It’s money that sends dividends, not invoices.
It’s the quiet engine that pays for your life while you’re living it.

If you make a million and buy a house and a car, the money isn’t “working.”
It’s gone – converted into lifestyle, not leverage.
True wealth begins only when your assets start producing income that replaces your effort.

That’s why the goal was never to make a million.
It was to keep a million – and let it multiply.

Your Financial Sovereignty number isn’t what you can earn this year.
It’s the amount of invested capital that allows your desired life to fund itself indefinitely.

Maybe that looks like three million in compounding assets,
throwing off $150,000 a year while you sleep.
Maybe it’s ten million across properties, index funds, and private deals —
quietly paying for your children’s futures, your Tuesday flights to Paris,
and the version of you who works because she wants to, not because she must.

That’s the moment income becomes a wealth ecosystem.

The moment money flips from being something you have to actively work for… to something actively working for you.

Designing Your Financial Sovereignty Number

This is where real wealth begins:
not with spreadsheets, but with clarity about the life you’re actually building.

Pour a glass of champagne tonight and open Zillow.
Find the kind of home that makes your chest expand.
Price the schools, the travel, the art, the freedom you want to fund.
Start constructing a tally of the cost of your most expansive life.

Because those numbers?
They’re not indulgent. They’re data points.
Coordinates of your truest life.

And when you translate your desires into math, you realize something radical:
your financial goals must match the size of your desired reality, not the limits of your conditioning.

If that number feels big — good.
That’s your next initiation.

Because wealth isn’t a figure to chase.
It’s a field to expand and attune to.
A relationship to deepen.
A devotion to your destiny.

For one woman, that number might be three million.
For another, seven million and a trust for her grandchildren.
The metric doesn’t matter.
The awareness does.

Becoming a millionaire is the starting line in wealth, not the finish line.
It’s the point where you finally have enough leverage to begin investing and compounding assets in interesting ways.

A million buys temporary comfort.
Multimillions creates a life of full financial sovereignty.

So take some time to dream.
Turn your vision board into a spreadsheet with numbers.

And then? Let’s create it.

This is the work we do in my Capital and Creation mentorship, and you can learn more about working together here.