The Job I Made Up: Reflections on Being a CFP®-Death Doula

 

As far as I know, and as of July 2026, I'm still the only professional offering financial planning and end-of-life doula support as an integrated, interdisciplinary service.

That means that while I draw from established standards of practice in both professions, I’m mostly figuring it out as I go.

It's a curious place to be.

This work is both professions as much as it is neither. It lives in the spaces between them, where there isn't a roadmap to follow. Every client, every conversation, every collaboration teaches me something new.

It has been a little over a year since I incorporated Golden Thread Collaborative, and it feels like an appropriate time to pause, look around, and share what I've learned so far about building a profession that didn't exist.

 

The Surprise

When I tell people what I do, the response is almost always some version of: "OMG...that's so needed."

People seem to understand instinctively that money is hard, death is hard, and they're especially hard when they collide. The idea of someone helping make both a little less awful—in the same brushstroke—resonates almost immediately.

That has been the easy part.

The surprising part has been discovering where the real work actually lives.

When I started this practice, I assumed the hardest parts would be the usual entrepreneurial challenges, along with walking beside people who are facing some difficult, sometimes impossible-feeling, experiences.

Turns out, neither has been particularly difficult. At least not yet.

The hard part has been my own work.

It's been unwinding my impulse to fix situations instead of witnessing them; stopping well-worn platitudes before they tumble out of my mouth; confronting my own assumptions and biases; learning how to hold professional boundaries while connecting deeply with people, which is complicated by my instinct to befriend everyone.

It has also meant staying sharp across several completely different professional worlds. I maintain continuing education in personal finance, death and grief, and transition coaching. None of those requirements overlap. I spend a significant portion of my time reading, researching, and working through case studies with colleagues across all three disciplines, then integrating all of it into something that is still emerging.

Apparently, my career path has been less "five-year plan" and more "golden retriever trying to fit three tennis balls in its mouth while joyfully wagging its tail and searching for the fourth.”

 

The Biggest Shift

The biggest surprise has been realizing that this isn't really a financial planning practice.

It's also not really a doula practice.

Or a coaching practice.

It's something else.

When I first launched, I knew I wasn't going to offer traditional financial planning services like retirement projections or investment management, though I did expect financial planning to remain a meaningful part of the work.

However, so far, no one has asked me for help with anything particularly technical.

Instead, people want help understanding what they have. They want someone who understands the numbers to help them think through financial decisions using more than just data and logic. They want a place to untangle the emotional stories they've inherited about money. They want help finding resources when it feels like there aren't any left. They want someone willing to sit beside them while they think out loud.

Somewhere along the way I started calling what I do ‘scratch paper planning’, and released myself from the expectation that my work will involve anything more complicated than what I can sketch on the back of a napkin.

For the detailed projections, tax strategies, and investment recommendations, I strongly encourage clients to work alongside a traditional financial planner.

Partnering with other planners has turned out to be a gift for everyone involved. Most planners don't have the time, interest, or training to spend hours exploring mortality, identity, grief, family dynamics, and uncertainty, but they understand that clients need time to do this so that they’re more ready to make grounded financial decisions.

So mostly what’s been asked of me is helping people think and feel through their circumstances, which led me to another realization.

I've stopped thinking of Golden Thread Collaborative as a financial planning practice.

Or a coaching practice.

Or a doula practice.

Increasingly, I think of it simply as a conversation practice.

That feels like the most honest description of what actually happens here.

 

The Conversations

One assumption that was wrong was who I thought would find me.

Originally, I imagined working almost exclusively with middle-aged adults navigating a terminal or life-threatening diagnosis.

Some of those people have absolutely found me, but so have many others.

I've had conversations with people who are healthy but are also anxious about death and/or money and simply want a place to ask questions no one else seems comfortable discussing.

I've worked with people living with serious illness who still have enough time to be deeply intentional about the life they have left and are navigating impossible-feeling trade-off decisions.

I've worked with spouses, adult children, siblings, and caregivers trying to support someone they love without losing themselves in the process.

I've worked with people rebuilding after loss or after surviving an illness that permanently changed how they see themselves and the future.

And increasingly, I've found myself talking with other helping professionals, including financial planners, attorneys, accountants, therapists, coaches, medical professionals, and doulas. Some want to refer clients. Others want to become better equipped for the conversations they're already having.

What all of these people seem to share isn't a diagnosis.

It's uncertainty.

They're looking for a place where they don't have to arrive with answers, or pretend they already know what to do, or “be strong” for others.

Here’s one example of the kinds of conversations I’m having, shared with permission.

I'm working with a middle-aged man living with advanced terminal cancer who has already outlived his doctors' expectations. His treatment isn't curative, but it is extending his life.

While holding that reality in one hand, one of the very first things he told me was that he does not want to die of cancer, and he does not want to die in bed.

He’s also determined to make his happiness a priority now.

But what is happiness, and what actually makes him happy?

What are the alternatives if he doesn’t want to die in bed from cancer? How does he prepare for those possibilities? How does he communicate those wishes to people in a way that becomes a meaningful part of his life’s story, a reflection of his values, and perhaps even a final gift to the people who love him?

What does it mean to prioritize his happiness when his family system has grown accustomed to him putting everyone else first? How does he decide what resources to put towards his pursuit of happiness, and what to preserve for the people he loves and cares for?

That has become the heart of this work.

It’s not solving or advising—it’s staying with uncertainty long enough to think and feel through the complexity of what arises emotionally, philosophically, spiritually, logistically, and financially. Then, together, we meet whatever rises, drawing from whatever perspective is most useful in that moment.

Sometimes that’s scratch paper planning. Sometimes it’s grief work. Sometimes it’s coaching. Sometimes it’s simply another human being willing to stay in the conversation.

 

Looking Back

This past year has also made me realize how beautifully I've woven together the threads of my own life, without even realizing that’s what I was doing.

My science degree taught me how to think critically.

Health care taught me to stay steady in difficult moments and familiarized me with the body and its paradoxical resilience and fragility.

Birth work taught me how to witness death. Together, birth and death have taught me about transformation, and that both are less about beginnings and endings than about crossing thresholds.

Community organizing taught me that systems matter, and that systems discriminate.

Finance taught me that money is rarely about money, especially when uncertainty enters the room.

Grief work taught me presence.

None of those experiences looked connected while I was living them. Today they feel like threads that were subtly weaving themselves together all along.

Someone once said to me, "You never know what you're preparing yourself for."

That’s stayed with me.

Because how could I have known that a childhood crush on a TV doctor would foster a fascination with medicine that would eventually translate into a career in finance?

Or that pretending to be a therapist during countless hours of solo play as an only child would become a career built almost entirely around listening?

Or that attending births would eventually lead me into death work, where I would discover that birth and death have far more in common than most of us realize?

Looking backward, the path seems inevitable.

Living it felt anything but.

“If you get an opportunity, take it. If it changes your life, let it.”

That quote has helped me embrace the identity shifts and life changes I’ve experienced over the years. I hope it resonates with you, too. Maybe it can give all of us a little extra courage to lean into whatever is being asked of us.