Tara Saxon - Certified Money Coach

Something I've noticed after years of this work.

The people who are hardest on themselves about money are almost never the reckless ones.

They're the responsible ones. The over-thinkers. The ones who lie awake running the numbers, who feel a flush of guilt over a coffee, who can tell you the exact balance of every account because they check constantly.

The genuinely careless rarely feel the shame. It's the careful ones who carry it.

If that's you - the one quietly judging yourself for not having it all figured out, while doing more than most people around you - I want you to hear this.

You're not behind. You're not failing. You were just never taught this, and you've been holding the weight alone for a long time.

That's not a character flaw. That's a gap in what you were given.

And gaps can be filled.

(𝘔𝘺 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘰𝘳𝘴, 𝘥𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘳𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘰𝘰𝘯.)

Quiet money moment.

Most people think a money decision happens in the moment they spend.

It doesn't. It happens much earlier - in the quiet story you've already told yourself about what you can have, what you're allowed to want, and what people like you do.

By the time the card comes out, the real decision was made years ago.

That's the layer I work in. Not the spending. The story underneath it.

Here's a number that should stop every employer in the country:

The average financially stressed employee loses around 12 hours a week to presenteeism. Physically at work. Mentally somewhere else entirely - on the mortgage, the overdue bill, the conversation they're dreading with the bank.

Twelve hours. Almost two full working days, every week, lost not to absence but to a mind that cannot fully arrive.

(AMP's Financial Wellness research, which has tracked this every two years since 2014.)

Most organisations respond to this the way they respond to most wellbeing problems. A webinar. A resilience workshop. A mindfulness app added to the benefits portal.

None of which touch the actual issue.

Because financial stress is not a mindset problem you can meditate your way out of. It is a specific, material pressure that hijacks attention, narrows thinking, and quietly degrades the quality of every decision a person makes between nine and five.

You cannot yoga your way out of a number you can't make rent against.

The same research found the people carrying this most heavily are not who many leaders assume. It's amplified for women, for single parents, for part-time workers - the people often holding the most together with the least slack in the system.

This is why I keep saying financial pressure is a psychosocial safety issue, not a personal one. It walks into the workplace every single day, sits down at the desk, and shapes what your people are actually capable of.

The organisations that understand this are the ones that will hold their best people through the years ahead.

The ones that keep mistaking it for a personal failing will keep losing twelve hours a week and wondering where it went.

I had a small realisation behind the wheel this week, driving between regional towns, and I got unexpectedly emotional about it.

I love this. Not the work alone. The being 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲.

I've loved the Australian countryside since I was a girl. The wide open space. The particular pale blue of a winter sky out west - colder and clearer than the coastal blue I live under now. The feeling that my lungs work better the further I get from a city.

When I first got my licence, I drove an ancient bright yellow Volvo with no air conditioning and the window permanently down. At the time I had a vacation job at Arthur Andersen, in Corporate Recovery, and they'd send junior-est-of-the-junior me out to the country to serve Supreme Court documents on directors who'd gone to ground. So there I'd be - just turned eighteen, techno blaring, arm out the window, clapped-out yellow Volvo - on official business for the Supreme Court of Victoria.

I'd crank the music, hang my arm out the window, and feel something I didn't have a word for yet.

The word, I know now, was 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗼𝗺.

It took me years to understand that freedom is one of my core values - and even longer to understand that almost everything I do professionally is, underneath, about helping people build it. Financial freedom. Freedom from inherited patterns. Freedom from the quiet pressures that shape decisions people don't even realise they're making.

So here's the thing I want to say plainly, because it sat in my chest this week until it nearly spilled over.

When I work in regional Australia, I am not flying in from the city to deliver something and leave. I am coming home to a landscape that is genuinely in my blood. I love being of service to people in these communities - not because the work is here, but because I want to be here.

The country lights me up. It always has.

And I think people can feel the difference between someone who's passing through and someone who actually wants to be in the room.

I want to be in the room.

Quiet money moment from the road.

I'm working from Duntryleague in Orange this week — a heritage property and golf club that genuinely takes the breath away. Victorian grandeur, sweeping grounds, the kind of regional Australian beauty that reminds you why people keep coming back out here.

But the conversation I keep coming back to is a different one.

It happened recently with a local government employee in Narromine — someone whose work means he sees the whole community moving every day.

He wasn't talking about himself. He was talking about what he's watching happen.

Drought is looking likely again. Diesel prices are eye-watering. And a lot of the grant funding that previously supported small business development, professional growth, and solo operators has quietly dried up over the last year. The combination is starting to bite — and the people working inside local government are watching it happen in real time, often before it shows up anywhere else.

The fashion store on the main street. The motel down the road. The B&B that hosts visiting tradespeople. The café. The freight operator.

They're all reading the same signals.

Locals coming in less often. Bookings down. Discretionary spend pulled back. Professional development paused. The small purchases people used to just make now sitting in the maybe-later column.

What struck me about the conversation wasn't just what he was seeing.

It was that he was seeing it long before it would appear in any official data.
This is the part of financial pressure that corporate wellbeing dashboards almost never capture.

By the time a head office reads about regional softening in a quarterly economic update, the local government employee, the business owner, and the community already know. They've been adjusting for months. They've been holding the line for their teams, their customers, and their families while the data catches up.

This is why the regional work matters to me.

Not because regional Australia needs to be told what financial pressure feels like — they live it before anyone else does.

But because the people working inside regional councils and regional workplaces see things first. And what they see is

Came home last week from being out for a few hours to find the cupboard door in the garage hanging open and a familiar trail of dry kibble leading from inside it across the floor.

I followed the trail with a sense of mounting dread.

There, in the middle of the garage, lay the surplus food bucket. On its side. Lid off. Empty.

Around it, sprawled in various poses of regret, were both cats — bellies distended, eyes glazed, breathing slightly heavier than usual.

They didn't move when I came in. They couldn't move when I came in.

This was not their daily food. This was the backup. The bucket I keep in the cupboard for when the automatic feeder runs low — several days' worth of dry food, designed to be portioned out over weeks. Gone in a single afternoon.

They weren't starving when they got into it. They had a feeder. They had food going in already, on schedule, exactly as the system was designed.

But the lid came off the future stash, and the future stash became the present feast.

I cleaned it up — sweeping, kneeling on the concrete, picking up small kibble pieces with the look of a woman who has Other Things To Do today — and thought about how often I see this exact pattern in the women I coach.

The savings account that gets dipped into every time something feels urgent. The retirement contributions paused for a one-off reason that turns out to recur. The emergency fund quietly drained for things that aren't emergencies. The line of credit that was meant for genuine flexibility and slowly becomes lifestyle inflation.

In every case, the lid came off something that was meant to stay on.

And the system designed for future security became a source of present comfort.

The cats can be forgiven for not understanding the difference.

The rest of us are still working on it.

This Wednesday and Thursday I'll be in Orange, working with a local government client across the central tablelands on financial wellbeing for their workforce.

I can't wait! Orange is one of my favourite cities to visit and on the threshold of Winter it is gorgeous beyond measure!

A few people have asked why so much of my work this year is happening outside the capital cities.

Here's the honest answer:

The most considered financial wellbeing conversations I'm having right now are not in boardrooms in Sydney or Melbourne. They're in regional councils and workplaces where the leadership team knows the names of every single employee and their kids — where the financial pressure carried by the workforce is not a statistic on a dashboard, but the woman at the front desk, the operator in the depot, the manager quietly thinking about their mortgage at 11pm.

These organisations understand something that takes most corporate buyers longer to admit.

Financial pressure does not stay in the kitchen. It walks into the workplace, into the meetings, into the safety briefings, into the decisions that shape how an entire community functions.

And when the workplace acknowledges that — properly — the shift in how people show up is immediate.

Wednesday and Thursday this week is Orange.

Then on 1 June, I'm hitting the road for 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿 — a four-town tour through Dubbo, Narromine, Condobolin, and Nyngan. Four towns, four conversations with leaders and teams who are quietly carrying the financial weight of their communities while still being expected to deliver results.

Link in the comments if you'd like to know more about The Intentional Leader tour.

If you're working in or with regional Australia and wondering what good financial wellbeing work actually looks like at the workforce level — keep an eye on this page over the next fortnight. I'll be sharing what I'm seeing, what's working, and where the gaps still are.

𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗜 𝗹𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁.

Not because regional Australia needs me to come and rescue it — that would be insulting. But because regional Australia is often showing the rest of the country how to do th

A different kind of Mother’s Day post.

The cards are beautiful. The flowers will arrive - or be snipped from your own garden. Brunches will be photographed. And somewhere in the middle of all that, millions of women will quietly carry a truth that doesn’t get a hashtag.

Mothering — and especially mothering alone, or mothering while financially stretched, or mothering while running a business, or mothering while trying to build something that future generations of your family will actually inherit — is a relentless, behind-the-scenes financial undertaking that shapes almost every decision a woman makes in a year.

I am the single parent of four children. The financial reality of that lives with me every day. It shows up in how I price my work, how I negotiate, how I think about risk, how I decide what to invest in and what to walk away from, how late I work, how early I wake, how I choose vendors, how I read contracts.

It is not a complaint. It is the architecture under the floor.

And here’s the part I want to put in front of organisations today, because it matters:
If you employ working mothers — and you almost certainly do — the financial pressure they carry privately does not stay in their kitchens. It travels with them into your meetings, your decisions, your performance reviews, and your retention numbers.
The most valuable thing an organisation can do for a working mother is not a Mother’s Day card or a wellbeing webinar. It is to acknowledge — properly — that her financial life and her professional life are not separate, and to invest in programs that actually help her manage the weight she is carrying.

The smartest leaders I work with already understand this. They have stopped pretending that financial wellbeing is a personal matter their workforce sorts out on weekends. They are putting real resources behind the conversations most workplaces still treat as private.

Today, by all means, give the women in your life flowers.

But on Tuesday, or Thursday, or next Monday, ask the harder question.

What does my organisation actually do about the financial pressure that shapes how the mothers on my team show up?

Because what you put in place between now and next Mother’s Day is what those women will remember when next Mother’s Day rolls around.

To the mothers who recognise themselves in this — see you tomorrow.

You’re carrying more than anyone applauds today. And the work you do — in your homes, and in your jobs, and in your businesses — holds more than most people will ever know.

Back from three weeks on the road, and I’m doing washing with the fervour of a woman being hounded by the gods of chaos themselves.

In my haste, I do yet another load — and when I go to open the machine, I realise with that awful pit-in-the-stomach feeling that I’ve left a tissue in the pocket.

Not just any pocket. The pocket of those pants. The pants that sit so close to pyjamas it’s almost sacrilegious to call them clothing. The travel pants that were my safe haven and comfort companion across multiple 4am flights and three weeks of hotel rooms.

It almost feels like a betrayal that they’d harbour the tissue of doom.

I knew exactly what I’d done. Knew exactly which pants. Knew exactly why I’d done it.

And still — the dread.

Because I know the mess it brings. The little white fragments stuck to every sock, every pair of underwear, every work shirt I’d hoped to wear to something important this week. The kind of mess you’ll still be picking off a pair of rolled socks in a month’s time, going “ah, that old chestnut.”

And here’s the thing I couldn’t unsee while I stood there picking lint out of the lacy parts of my fave black bra.

This is exactly what I see in the work I do every single day:
- The small thing that gets overlooked.
- The decision you didn’t quite think through.
- The conversation you didn’t have with yourself before signing the thing or saying yes to the thing.
- The pattern you’ve been ignoring because it feels too small to address right now.

It snowballs. It cascades. It overflows. And then suddenly you’re six months, twelve months, five years down the track, bearing the brunt of a decision that started as a tissue in a pocket.

You find yourself missing the opportunity. Stuck in scarcity that doesn’t belong to you anymore. Picking lint off the work shirt you needed for the meeting that mattered.

And the irony is not lost on me, friends. I gave up halfway through the pile, rolled the rest into balls, and shoved them in the drawer to deal with another day.
Doing exactly what I caution my clients against.

But we are only human. And needs must.

Pic of the pants before they betrayed me and turned into a hand-grenade of lint-and-mayhem…

Last week I was awarded the ICF Professional Certified Coach credential.

For those unfamiliar — PCC is the International Coaching Federation's mid-tier accreditation. 500+ logged coaching hours. Accredited coursework. Recorded sessions assessed against eleven core competencies by ICF assessors who do not, in my experience, hand out marks for enthusiasm. Mentor coaching with someone already operating at PCC level or above.

In other words — not the certificate that arrives in your inbox after a Sunday afternoon course called 𝘔𝘰𝘯𝘦𝘺 𝘔𝘢𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘺 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘔𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘧𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘞𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯.

But here's the actual headline:
This isn't a credential post. It's a receipts post.

Because the work I'm doing right now is producing results that organisations are already telling me they didn't expect. Senior leaders who say no one has ever talked to us about this before. Executive teams who book follow-up sessions before the keynote feedback forms have even been collected. P&C heads who quietly admit they were sceptical, and who are now asking what a year of this would look like across the business.

A regional NSW Council called my work "the most impactful HR-driven initiative we've implemented in living memory". A naval commodore approached me after a keynote with tears in his eyes and said three generations of his family needed to hear what I'd just said. A delegate at another event booked me that week to coach her entire family, because she decided — in her seat, mid-keynote — that the intergenerational money cycle stopped now.

That's what's happening in the rooms.

The PCC matters because the work doesn't stop on the stage. The keynote opens the conversation. The coaching is where the change moves through the organisation — into senior leaders, into teams, into the patterns that were holding the place back without anyone naming them.

500+ coaching hours behind me. Properly evaluated. Independently verified. Not improvised.

So if you've sat in one of my rooms and wondered what the deeper work might do for your organisation — the door is open. And the work is rigorous enough to walk through it.

Because the people in the room deserve more than a microphone and a personality. They deserve a practitioner — across the stage, the boardroom, and every conversation in between.