Joanna Nash remembers a time when the simplest way for her to be heard in a financial meeting was to put on a pair of heels – not for fashion or confidence but leverage.
Early in her career, Nash learned eye level mattered. In rooms dominated by men, she made sure she could look decision-makers directly in the eye. It was a small, calculated adjustment, but it reflected a larger reality: women were present in financial conversations without being centered in them.
“There was a time when I wouldn’t go to a meeting without wearing heels,” she says. “I felt like men wouldn’t listen to me if I wasn’t looking them in the eye.”
That sense of being tolerated rather than trusted sharpened when Nash began working under a male adviser she believed would mentor her. He invited her into a single meeting. Then, she says, he grew defensive.
When clients started looking to her for answers, the door closed. She was never invited back into another meeting with him.
Building something different
Today, Nash is the founder and CEO of Money Mavens, a Chattanooga-based financial planning firm she launched alongside chief operating officer Heather
Brame in August 2024. The firm grew out of years of community-based education, client advocacy and a deliberate rejection of the traditional advisory model – one Nash and Brame say too often overlooks women’s voices and experiences.
From its earliest iteration, Money Mavens was built on a simple premise: financial planning should meet people where they are – emotionally, practically and without judgment.
The gap Nash observed wasn’t subtle. In meeting after meeting, she watched advisers address husbands while wives sat silently beside them. Questions went unasked, eye contact went unmade and decisions were framed as conclusions rather than conversations.
“It was simply a man talking to another man and saying, ‘This is what we’re going to do,’” Brame says. “And the woman was just there. That’s not OK.”
Where Money Mavens began
For Nash, the solution began as a gathering rather than a business plan.
In 2017, she started hosting informal women’s financial groups under the name Money Mavens – a title coined by a childhood friend in public relations and later trademarked. The events were intentionally disarming. They were held Saturday afternoons in comfortable spaces. Attendees wore yoga pants and drank mimosas. Sometimes, there was even a makeup tutorial.
But beneath the casual tone was substantive conversation.
“We talked about raising kids and how that affects your pocket,” Nash says. “What happens if you’re not the breadwinner and something happens to the person who is?”
The women who showed up came from every stage of life: single professionals, widows, married mothers, entrepreneurs. What they shared, Nash found, was anxiety around money and a belief that they were supposed to already understand it.
“It turned into women talking to each other and realizing it’s OK to not understand money,” she says. “There are people who will help you understand it. And if you have the right kind of financial professional working with you, you’re going to feel supported.”
Those conversations led women to Nash’s door as clients – not because she was selling a product but because she was translating a system that had long felt opaque and intimidating.
By the time Nash and Brame formalized Money Mavens as a business, the philosophy was already deeply ingrained.
“We’re not transactional, we’re transformational,” Nash says. “We’re relationship builders.”
Planning for real lives
The firm’s planning process begins with a comprehensive look at a client’s assets, liabilities, goals and concerns – or in some cases fully fledged fears. From there, the team builds individualized strategies that account for life transitions as much as financial benchmarks. Divorce, caregiving, death, business succession and burnout are not treated as side notes but as central considerations.
“Your financial plan should be like your fingerprint,” Nash says. “It should be individual to you.”
Behind the scenes, that planning is collaborative. Twice a week, the team shuts down external meetings to review client cases together, identify gaps and stress-test assumptions.
“It’s detective work,” Nash says. “Everyone is different. The picture you get at the end should be different.”
Brame brings a clinician’s mindset to that process. After leaving a nursing career marked by burnout and the emotional toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, she now helps clients navigate financial systems with the same attention to nuance and unspoken concern.
“I can usually tell when someone is holding back a piece of information,” she says. “And when you get to that underlying issue, you can actually address what matters.”
For many clients, that space to be honest is transformative, Nash says, estimating the firm goes through more tissues than most financial offices. Widows arrive unsure how to pay bills, divorcing spouses fear making irreversible mistakes and couples discover how to talk openly about money together.
At life’s hardest moments
Money Mavens has developed a niche in supporting clients through divorce, particularly women who want to understand not just what they’re entitled to but how decisions made during asset division will affect them long-term.
“There’s a lot to be said for having a financial advocate during a divorce,” Nash says.
The same holds true after loss. Nash says the firm regularly works with widows who were never involved in household finances and are suddenly responsible for everything at once.
“They’ll come in and just cry,” she says. “They’re like, ‘Where do I start?’”
One client Brame worked with had lost her husband unexpectedly and had never managed finances on her own. Even buying a new car felt overwhelming because her husband had purchased the last one for her.
“I told her, ‘You’re going to take the money he left you and let him buy you one more car,’” Brame says.
The reframing changed how the client felt about the decision – and unlocked more than a purchase. It allowed her to move forward with longer-term planning, including housing and health care contingencies.
“We feel like it’s her success story,” Brame says. “We just get to be part of it.”
Learning the system
Nash’s fluency in financial systems was earned, piece by piece, across a winding professional path that began far from wealth management.
She entered the workforce through publishing, starting as a receptionist at a local company and gradually moving into account management and business-to-business sales. The work sharpened her communication skills and introduced her to the mechanics of client relationships, but it was only after she joined a family firm that she stepped fully into the investment side of the business.
After a stint working with insurance products, Nash began questioning an industry structure that often left consumers exposed – sometimes catastrophically late in life.
“If I’m going to make a recommendation,” she says, “I want to be able to stand behind it.”
That insistence sent her deeper into the technical side of the business, pressing actuaries on contract language and working through certifications to understand how products behaved over time.
Her goal, she says, was never volume but confidence for herself and her clients.
That same rigor now defines Money Mavens’ fiduciary model. The firm works with dozens of providers, but recommendations are built only after comprehensive fact-finding and collaborative review. Client situations are dissected, tested and debated internally before plans are presented, with an emphasis on suitability rather than sales.
“It’s a puzzle,” Nash says. “And the picture should never look the same twice.”
From care plans to financial plans
Brame’s path into the firm came from a different direction entirely – one shaped by caregiving, crisis and an intimate understanding of burnout.
She grew up in Memphis and moved to Chattanooga as a teenager, raising her son with limited resources while navigating personal instability. When the child’s father died suddenly during her first semester of nursing school – with no insurance, no savings and a mortgage purchased just before the financial crisis – Brame had little choice but to keep going.
“I had a baby to feed,” she says. “There wasn’t time to stop.”
She completed nursing school, later earning a master’s degree in nursing leadership, and spent years working overnight hospital shifts. But the emotional toll of caring for critically ill patients during the COVID-19 pandemic eventually became unsustainable.
“You have to recognize when you’re burned out,” Brame says. “Even if you want to be the best nurse in the world, sometimes, you can’t be.”
When she called Nash looking for a way out, the transition began cautiously. Brame joined Money Mavens initially to handle marketing and operations, hesitant to step into the planning side of the business. But the process of assessing risk, building safeguards and anticipating future needs felt familiar.
“It’s a care plan,” she says. “Just for finances.”
Today, Brame plays a central role in client planning, often identifying concerns clients struggle to articulate. Her clinical background, she says, makes it easier to sense when something important is being withheld – and to gently surface it.
That sensitivity is especially critical for clients navigating loss, divorce or long-term caregiving responsibilities. Many arrive overwhelmed, unsure where to begin or afraid of making irreversible mistakes.
“We’re doing for people what we wish had been done for us,” Nash says.
Beyond the office walls
The firm’s work extends beyond individual clients into the broader Chattanooga community. Money Mavens regularly partners with organizations like The Chattery and The Kitchen Incubator to provide free educational sessions for entrepreneurs and side gig workers, covering topics ranging from bookkeeping and taxes to benefits planning and business structure.
The goal, Nash says, is helping people understand what they should expect from the professionals they hire and how financial decisions intersect across their lives.
For both women, the work is personal.
Nash speaks openly about the years she spent navigating single parenthood, caregiving for a terminally ill parent and rebuilding after divorce – experiences that shaped her belief that financial education should not be reserved for the already fluent.
“There were so many things I didn’t know,” she says. “And I kept thinking, ‘Why weren’t we taught this?’”
Building Money Mavens, she says, has been a way to answer that question, not just for clients but also for her own children and the people who now work alongside her. Many of the firm’s staff members, Brame notes, were clients first.
“That matters,” she says. “It tells you something about how this place runs.”
Asked what she’s most grateful for, Nash doesn’t point to growth or assets. She points instead to the office itself – the people inside it and the evidence that what once felt missing now exists.
“All the things I wished I had,” she says, “we’ve created here.”
For clients who once believed they would never be financially OK, that presence has made all the difference.