From Inaction to Action: Why Women Need to Start Talking About Money
Most money advice tells you what to do. I help you understand why you are not doing it yet.
That distinction is everything. And it is the reason I built Ada Invest.
Where I come from
I spent more than 20 years in finance and fintech. As a licensed equities trader, an enterprise sales leader at SAP and Fintech companies, and a customer success leader at Workday where I achieved a 98.9% renewal rate across 50 enterprise clients. I built careers in London and Amsterdam, was laid off more than once, doubled my salary by changing jobs, and invested in property to create security beyond my paycheque.
I also watched my father lose everything in the 1990s Spanish recession. I was 12 years old. That moment became the root of a lifelong obsession with financial independence and eventually the foundation of everything I now teach and write about.
What I learned from both sides of that experience, the professional and the personal, is that financial outcomes are rarely about information. They are about behaviour. The women I work with are not uninformed. They are senior professionals, founders, and executives who earn well but feel like something is missing in how they manage and grow their money. Knowing is rarely the problem. Acting is.
Why I started Ada Invest
What I saw, over and over, was that the gap between the people who built real wealth and the people who did not had very little to do with intelligence or income. It had everything to do with access, confidence, and conversation.
Professional women were earning well. They were ambitious, capable, and successful by almost every measure. And yet when it came to their own money, many of them felt lost, behind, or simply frozen.
That is the gap I built Ada Invest to close.
For organisations investing in the financial wellbeing and leadership capability of their people, this is not financial education. It is behavioural change. The women in your teams already know what they should be doing. What they are missing is the structure, the confidence, and the permission to act. That is what I build.
The book: Still Thinking? Act.
My book Still Thinking? Act. Smarter Money for Women (2026) came out of years of conversations with women who knew something needed to change but could not quite take the first step. I wanted to write something that felt honest rather than prescriptive, human rather than technical.
The book follows three characters whose money struggles will feel familiar to anyone who has ever felt capable at work but uncertain about their finances. It is built around my WEALTH framework, covering Worth, Earnings, Assets, Lifestyle, Time, and Holding Steady. But more than a framework, it is an invitation to look at the relationship you have with money and ask whether it is serving you.
Because here is what I have learned: the numbers are rarely the real problem. The story underneath the numbers is.
From inaction to action: where to start
If you are reading this and recognising yourself, here are three things you can do today.
The first is to name your number. Do you know your net worth? Not your salary, not your savings balance, but your actual net worth, total assets minus total liabilities. Most people have never calculated it. That single number, however uncomfortable it is to look at, is your starting point.
The second is to identify your archetype. Are you an Overthinker who researches endlessly but never acts? An Avoider who has not opened certain statements in months? An Achiever who is earning well but has nothing to show for it? Knowing your pattern is the first step to changing it.
The third is to ask one honest question. What is the one financial thing you have been putting off, and what would it mean for your life if you finally dealt with it? Write it down. Say it out loud. That moment of naming it is where action begins.
Who I work with
My clients are professional women across Europe, typically in their thirties and forties, who are earning well but feel like their financial life has not caught up with the rest of what they have built. They are smart, successful, and often quietly exhausted by the gap between where they are and where they want to be.
I work with them one to one, in group settings, through monthly webinars, and at intimate dinner events where we can have the kind of honest money conversations that rarely happen anywhere else. I also speak at corporate events, women's leadership conferences, and employee resource groups across Europe, in English and Spanish, on financial confidence, the gender pay and pension gap, salary negotiation, and ownership mindset.
Every engagement starts with a simple survey and ends with a plan that belongs to them, not a generic template.
The bigger dream
I want to change more women's lives than I can reach one to one. That means speaking on bigger stages, building programmes that train other coaches to have these conversations, and creating a movement rather than a practice.
If you are a woman who has been avoiding the money conversation with herself, I definitely want to talk to you.
The cost of waiting is real. But so is what becomes possible the moment you stop.
Ana Herrero-Wallace is the founder of Ada Invest, author of Still Thinking? Act. Smarter Money for Women, and creator of the WEALTH Coach Certification. She is based in Amsterdam and works with professional women across Europe. Available for keynotes, masterclasses, curated dinners, and annual programmes. Book a free 15-minute call at adainvest.co/talk or reach her at ana.herrerowallace@gmail.com