Help Me, I’ve Got Money

Nearly seven years ago, I moved to Spain with a brand-new baby. I had a military housing appointment, and in case you wondered, military appointments are not designed around infants. This meeting was long, bureaucratic, and boring, but I needed a place for my baby and me to live. So there I was, on the floor of a cubicle, holding my daughter—who didn’t really want me to hold her—in my lap. I discussed my housing needs as I leaned back, peered up over the desk from the floor, and apologized every few minutes to the woman across from me for the chaos of my situation.

The woman helping me was Spanish and worked on the US base; she radiated the specific patience of someone who has seen everything. She looked at me around the desk, put the papers on the floor so I could reach them, and just let me be a person with a baby in a meeting without making it strange. At the end, she said something I have never forgotten: “You apologized a lot. You don’t have to do that. You are in Spain now. In Spain, you are allowed to be with your baby when you want and not be with your baby when you don’t want to be. No one cares, as long as you are happy and relaxed.”

I had already hired a nanny. That day had just been an off day, the schedule not yet in place. But hearing her say what she did was permission and kindness I didn’t even know I needed. There was no judgment. Having help did not make me a “bad mother.” Neither did sitting on the floor of a cubicle on a military base, holding my child while trying to figure out where we would live. It was just a choice; one that I could make today and change my mind about tomorrow.

Flash forward to sometime in the last twelve months. I was in the US, making a presentation as a conference keynote speaker, when someone asked how I managed working, traveling, and keeping up with everything else. I said what I always say, mentioning that I have help from my nanny. Someone else in the group said, “Why have children if you’re just going to pay someone else to raise them?”

I had prepared for that moment. I had thought through what I believed and why. And yet, I was silenced. A part of me knew that not everyone would agree with my choices, and so my silence was like that of a stoic—calm and collected. Inside, though, it hurt. It still hurts today. Even though I have no desire to change that person’s opinion about nannies; they can choose not to have one. But sometimes it’s still hard, to the point of pain, to carry the weight of our decisions when shame is added to the mix.

There is a gap between knowing that paying for help can create time, capacity, and relief, and actually doing it consistently and without apology, and without feeling any lesser for it. That gap is emotional, but it can also become a financial planning issue—one where advisors support clients, especially women, not only by making the numbers work, but by helping the decisions feel permissible.

Let’s start with what we know. The research on swapping money for time is consistent: spending money to save time improves wellbeing. So the real problem isn’t whether paying for help is useful; it’s why it can still feel so hard to accept. Whillans et al. (2017) surveyed more than 6,000 people across four countries and found that people who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction than those who did not—across income levels, and for large and small purchases alike. The dollar amount was not the variable that mattered. The act of buying back time was.

In another study, Hershfield et al. (2016) asked people whether they’d prefer more time or more money. Most people chose money. Notably, people who chose time were happier, even after controlling for how much time and money they already had. So if paying for help can lead to greater life satisfaction when it saves people time, why do they still choose money over time?

People know, abstractly, that time is precious. And yet, we can also undervalue it—in our purchases and in our planning—especially when paying for help comes with questions about whether we really need it, whether we should be able to manage without it, or whether buying time somehow says something about who we are. The question is not whether buying time through paid help is a good idea, but about why we resist it and why that resistance tends to be especially complicated for many women—including me.

Brian Portnoy, my colleague at Shaping Wealth and author of the great book The Geometry of Wealth, has a concept I find useful here. Brian argues that money is more powerful as a pain reliever than as a happiness producer—that it’s more effective at protecting us from the things we hate than at buying the things we love. The anti-goal, as he frames it, is the goal you don’t wish to achieve. Not “I want to spend quality time with my kids,” but “I want to stop feeling trapped by the laundry when my kids ask me to play.”

For me, the anti-goals are putting away the dishes and picking up baby socks. I genuinely don’t mind washing dishes, but putting them away might be the worst possible way for me to start or end the day. And baby socks—I can’t explain it, but they represent everything that can feels endless and invisible about domestic work. These examples are small things, but small things accumulate. Eventually, they can start to feel very heavy, metaphorically as well as physically.

When one of my kids would ask me to help them build LEGO creations, play Nintendo, or read a book together, I used to feel the full weight of the undone domestic pile pressing against that moment. And sometimes I said no. Not because I didn’t want to be there, but because I felt the responsible adult move was to clear the pile first. Hiring help cleared the pile. It also cleared the guilt. And it gave me back the yes.

And buying help doesn’t just benefit the person who gets time back; they also affect the relationships that person is trying to protect. Carlson et al. (2020) studied 487 couples and found that the division of housework is one of the most powerful predictors of relationship satisfaction. When domestic work falls inequitably, it strains communication, which can erode the partnership. In a separate study, Whillans et al. (2025) found that buying time-saving services predicts long-term increases in relationship satisfaction—and that the benefit is strongest when couples use the recaptured time to actually be together.

In other words, it’s not enough to hire a cleaning service and then collapse separately in different rooms. Hiring someone to help with dishes might take care of the task, but the relational benefit comes when that freed-up time is given back to spend time with the people I love. The point isn’t only to eliminate the task. It’s what the extra time makes possible: the ability to be more present, less divided, and more available to spend time with loved ones. Brown and Ryan (2003) found that mindful present-moment awareness is strongly associated with psychological wellbeing, which helps explain why that presence matters. Presence is not only a meditation practice. It is also a function of not being mentally pulled in ten directions at once.

When I know the socks are dealt with and the dishes are handled, I can read to my kids without a running mental ticker tape. In a recent Atlantic piece by Nancy Walecki (2026) on house managers, a woman described her help as “a tab closed in my brain.” That’s exactly what the help I get with the baby socks does for me. I can actually be present with my family and not bogged down by socks.

This is not to say that my kids and my husband do not see me struggle, or that I never say no. I still do. But when I say no, I want it to be for things that matter, not for being held hostage by tiny pink and purple socks. And when I say yes, I want my attention to be with them, not mentally torn between the moment I’m in and the chores still waiting for me. Buying time through paid help, at least in my home, improves wellbeing, relationships, and laundry.

Here is where, for me, the bliss of domestic help ends. As it turns out, even when we accept the research and believe that buying help is worthwhile, many of us don’t apply that logic evenly across our lives. Or, at least, I don’t. Help feels easier for me in some parts of my life and much harder in others. At home, in my personal life, and in my professional work, I have three very different relationships with the same basic idea: letting someone help me. The categories might look different for someone else, but the questions are the same: Where is help easy to accept? Where does it feel like a problem? And why?

I grew up with nanny-like figures in my home. My parents are both engineers—smart, capable, and not especially inclined toward baking things from scratch or knowing the names of random plants on a nature walk. My nannies, however, did know those things. Through them, my brothers and I glimpsed different worlds, different perspectives, different ways of being in a household. My parents gave me love, stability, and care, and my nannies gave me something different and additional. They were not replacement parents. They were additional wonderful adults who gave me, my brothers, and my parents more love and more time.

So when I had my own children, hiring a nanny didn’t feel like choosing between being a good mother and a bad one; or between work and mothering. It felt like choosing between one kind of childhood and a broader one. In some ways, I had lived the research before I knew the research existed: I already understood that help in the house could add love, attention, perspective, and time, rather than take something away.

That does not mean my decision to hire a nanny was cost-free. The conference moment happened and there have been others. Judgment and shame have been felt. But my internal anchor was already set because I had felt, in my own body and childhood, what that relationship can give. I was not choosing between enough and not enough. I was always—and only—choosing more.

That said, I recognize that not everyone has that anchor. For plenty of people, the home domain is where the resistance to hiring help is felt the hardest. The point is not that my experience is the right one. It is that having a personal, felt reference point for what help can actually give made it far easier for me to make that choice, and to continue making it even when others disagree.

In contrast to my love of help at home, I am only learning to love it at work.

I am a writer. That is not a job description. It is how I understand myself.

I have had an editor for years. Erica Mito edited my work for the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com, and she still edits my articles for (Less) Lonely Money today. I have never once felt that having Erica’s help made me less of a writer. Her job is a different craft than mine. As a developmental, line, and copy editor, she helps me see where three paragraphs are functioning like one long run-on sentence, where an idea needs a stronger bridge, where the structure is hiding the argument, or where the piece needs more connective tissue to become clear. But the ideas on the page are mine. The themes are mine. The voice is mine. Erica helps me make the work clearer, more readable, and more cohesive, and I am genuinely grateful. We do different jobs.

So why does accepting help at work feel hard if I’ve had an editor for years? The important nuance is that Erica’s support was normalized. At Kitces.com, everyone worked with an editor. No one was lesser for having their work edited, and no one’s writing was considered less theirs because an editor had helped make it stronger. The structure of that environment made editing the default, so it didn’t feel like a confession of inadequacy.

But writing articles isn’t the only writing I have been doing. I have also been writing a book (on and off for about two years), and that has felt different. And more to the point of this article on help, it took me until this year to hire a book coach. Erica (fingers crossed!) will still edit the book. She is the editor I trust most with my voice. But I need someone to help me test my book ideas and push me to consider market, audience, and positioning.

This level of help has brought up a different question for me. If someone helps me test the shape of the book, challenge the ideas, and think about the reader, does the finished book still feel fully mine? I know the answer should be yes. But the fear underneath the decision to get help is more vulnerable: that if I need help writing the book, maybe I’m not actually the writer I think I am.

Would someone question me, like they did at the conference, but this time about a topic where I felt vulnerable and had no positive life experience to anchor me?

I also have a personal trainer, David. David stands behind me and tells me to do yet another squat when I would very much like to stop doing squats. And never once have I feared that someone would say to me, “Sure, she looks strong, but that’s just her trainer.” Nobody has suggested that my muscles are somehow less mine because a professional helped me build them.

So why am I afraid someone will call my bluff on the book?

I sought a trainer for accountability, an outside perspective, and because gyms are boring. I wanted someone who would see my body differently than I do, push me past the ceiling I’d set for myself, bring expertise I don’t have, and keep things interesting.

In the gym, the logic feels obvious: when you don’t know what you’re doing and want to get better at something, you get help from someone who knows more than you do.

The interesting question is why this seemed obvious in the gym and not, for a long time, in my work. The answer, I think, is that I did not identify as an athlete. My identity was not threatened by having a trainer. I was just a person who wanted to be healthier and stronger, and David was a resource. Full stop. My identity as a mother is not threatened by a nanny because my own childhood taught me that additional caregivers do not replace a mother. I was, and still am, very much mothered by my mother.

The larger point is that inconsistency across domains is not hypocrisy or flippancy. It is evidence of how differently shame and fear operate depending on where the stakes feel most exposed. How we see ourselves in a given domain shapes how we see help in that domain. And the domain where help is hardest to accept is often the domain where the potential financial and emotional return is highest. At least for me, that makes getting this right very important.

Individual psychology is part of the story. But it isn’t the whole story. There is also a structural and cultural layer, and it matters especially for women.

For many women, the question of buying help doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but within a larger expectation that they will be the helpers. Of children. Of aging parents. Of partners. This isn’t about blaming individual men or families. It’s about naming a pattern, and I’m not talking here about a personality trait. I am talking about a pattern reinforced by cultural expectations and structural realities. And COVID-19 made that pattern especially visible. Giurge et al. (2021) documented significant gender differences during the pandemic, finding that women continued to carry more of the daily work required to keep households and families functioning. This matters because, with so many people suddenly working from home—when the invisible work of domestic labor should, in theory, have become more visible—there was an opportunity for that work to redistribute more evenly. It did not. The expectation to help is cultural. It is structural. It is persistent.

The career consequences of this are also well documented. Glassdoor’s latest report (Martin and Doss 2026) offers some of the latest data, finding that the gender pay gap grows from 12% for workers with no experience to 19% with ten years of experience and 25% with thirty years of experience. In other words, the gap more than doubles over the course of a career, often widening during the same decades when many women are navigating both peak earning years and significant caregiving demands. Said another way, women may be reducing their paid work or stepping back from advancement opportunities to take care of those around them at precisely the stage when their earnings would otherwise have the most long-term potential.

An unhelpful cultural response to this data has been to rebrand the structural problem as a personal choice. As O’Connell et al. (2026) wrote in The Purse, after acknowledging that “the wage gap that widens for women in their 30s is largely structural,” the Glassdoor report reframes that structural issue as women “thriving after 35,” having “decoupled their worth from job titles,” and “choosing differently,” rather than “settling for less.”

But repackaging a structural problem as a personal time-management recalibration helps no one. So my question is this: Are women really “choosing” to be the helpers, or are they following a social script—whether they want to help, can help, need to help, or should help?

Maybe some choose to help. And that’s great. Maybe some help out of obligation or because they have no other choice. But treating the data as though women are simply recalibrating our calendars does a disservice to a much more nuanced personal and financial reality.

O’Connell also cited research on the motherhood penalty (Benard and Correll 2010): women who actively worked to protect themselves against discrimination at work by demonstrating commitment and competence—going to meetings or working long hours instead of attending their kid’s play, for instance—were still penalized, this time for being perceived as “hostile” or “less likable.” There is no winning move inside a system that penalizes both the problem and the attempted solution. When I read that, my whole body, mind, and heart went right back to that moment at the conference—I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.

What’s more, the caregiving load doesn’t stop with children. Women are also, more than half of the time, the ones who absorb the cost when parents age. Journalist Kelli María Korducki documented what she calls the “daughterhood penalty” in a 2026 Business Insider investigation: an estimated 61% of informal eldercare hours in the US are provided by women, and nearly 70% of those providing round-the-clock care are women. The financial consequences are not small. Unpaid family caregiving costs American women an average of $295,000 in lost wages and retirement savings over a lifetime. The daughterhood penalty is not only a caregiving story. It is a financial planning story that the profession has left largely unaddressed.

If women are more likely to be the designated helper in every domain of their lives—at home, for aging parents, in relationships—then the infrastructure required for women to function at full capacity costs more. Not because women are less capable. Because women are carrying more. That means help shouldn’t be treated as an indulgence or luxury. It may need to become a line item in the financial plan.

There is a version of financial planning that specializes in “women’s issues,” and I will admit I find this a little odd. Women are 51% of the population. We are not a niche. We are the default.

That said, women-focused planning tends to focus on three real and important facts: on average, women earn less, take more career breaks, and live longer. And these realities have planning implications: larger emergency funds, longer retirement horizons, more careful sequence-of-returns assumptions, and more attention to the compounding effects of time out of the workforce. All of that matters.

But I have almost never seen a financial plan that explicitly includes the infrastructure a woman may need to employ help across the different domains of her life: domestic help, childcare, eldercare coordination, professional support, household management, or other forms of paid help that preserve time, capacity, and wellbeing. When these costs appear at all, they are often treated as lifestyle expenses to be scrutinized and reduced, rather than as planning tools that can support better decisions.

There is another version of the problem where “stop helping” misses what is actually happening in a woman’s financial life. She may be under-earning, under-saving, or under-present in her own life because she is over-helping. But the solution is not always to tell her to stop giving money to her children, stop helping aging family members, or stop supporting the people she loves. Sometimes that advice is right, because sometimes enforcing boundaries is necessary. But often, the desire to help is real and deeply tied to her values and the relationships she most wants to preserve. In that case, the solution is not restraint alone. The solution is infrastructure: planning proactively for the help she will likely be asked to give, may feel obligated to give, and may genuinely want to give, while still living the life she wants to live.

Advisors already help clients plan for large values-based expenses: weddings, college, retirement, legacy goals. Why not include help as part of the same conversation? Not every client will need the same kind of help, and different women will need—or want—different kinds of support. And the cost of support is often far less damaging than the cost of burnout, lost earnings, and resentment.

Women should not have to choose between family and financial security. So ask about it. What kind of help would make the client’s life more convenient and more sustainable? What kind of support would allow her to care for others without abandoning herself?

Research on gender differences in time use and labor allocation suggests that even in couples with relatively equitable arrangements, women often carry more of the coordination, caregiving, and household-management load (Giurge et al. 2021). This means that, in a couple’s meeting, the answer to “How do you intend to care for aging parents?” or “How are household responsibilities divided?” cannot be assumed to represent both partners equally. It is worth asking each partner directly, not as a special accommodation, but as good planning practice.

The following questions are not exhaustive, but they can be a starting point. Ask both partners, and make sure each person has space to answer:

• When you think about your average week, where does time feel most constrained? Is there a domain—home, personal, or professional—where you feel like you’re always behind?

• Are there tasks you currently do yourself that you wish you could hand off? What has stopped you from doing that?

• Have you ever calculated what an hour of your time is worth—professionally or personally? Do you apply that math when you’re deciding whether to outsource something?

• If you had five additional hours a week, what would you do with them? What would you stop doing to get them?

• Is there anything you feel you “should” be doing yourself that you resent doing? What would it mean to stop doing it?

• How are caregiving responsibilities—for children, aging parents, or others—distributed in your household? Is that distribution sustainable at your current income, work, and energy levels?

• Are you concerned about making a career decision — having to take a role you don’t want or scaling back hours— because of caregiving or household demands? Have you run those numbers and thought about alternatives?

• Do you have support at work — an assistant, a coach, someone who handles things you don’t enjoy doing so you can spend your time where it is most valuable? If not, would you be interested in figuring out how and when hiring help at work would benefit you and your career?

These questions may lead to longer multi-meeting discussions. Choices surrounding help need to be discussed, and the trade-offs and benefits for both partners need to be considered. When a client is in a relationship, the advisor’s role is not to make one partner’s needs matter more than the other’s, but to make sure the trade-offs and benefits are visible to and understood by everyone involved.

If you have a financial planner and this topic has never come up, that is not necessarily your planner’s fault. It is a topic the profession has not been in the habit of raising. But you can raise it.

Here is how to think about it:

• Think about your anti-goals. What are the things in your life that take up time and energy but give very little back? Not the hard things that are meaningful. Not the things you really love to do around your house, in your relationships, or at work. Instead, think of the things that create friction: the tasks that bring no joy. That is the first place to consider outsourcing.

• Name the domain where help feels hardest. Is it at home? At work? In your personal life? The domain where you most resist help is often the domain where your identity feels most at stake. It is worth understanding why.

• Ask your planner to model what help-oriented infrastructure might cost and what it could make possible. If hiring a part-time assistant, business coach, house cleaner, nanny, or other support would allow you to earn more, care better, or stop doing work you’re not suited for, that cost should be considered for the plan. It may not be just an expense. It may also be an investment in capacity.

• If you have children and/or are in a relationship, consider whether caregiving and household responsibilities are distributed in a way that is actually sustainable. Not just equitable in theory, but sustainable in practice, at your current career stage, income trajectory, health, energy level, and season of life.

• You are allowed to need help and plan for it without apologizing. The Spanish housing official at the beginning of my story was right about this. Not everyone will agree with your choices. You can plan for the support that helps you live, work, and rest in a way that is sustainable for you.

• If your planner has never asked you about this, ask them to. Specifically: “Do we have a line item for the infrastructure I need to work, care for people, and not run out of gas? Should we?”

The Atlantic piece on house managers calls this kind of support a “lifestyle hack going mainstream.” And there is some truth in that framing: these services are proliferating, and more families who can afford them are using them. But I am resistant to the “hack” framing because it makes the problem sound purely logistical. Get the right tools in place. Optimize the system. Move on.

The problem is not just logistical. Being the helper—in your home, in your family, in your relationships—has a cost. That cost is borne disproportionately by women. It compounds over a career and a life. And the financial planning profession has not, for the most part, treated it as a planning priority with the nuance, emotion, and seriousness it deserves.

Too often, paid help is treated as a lifestyle expense. But help isn’t just about convenience or calendar and priority “recalibration.” It can influence career trajectory, mental wellbeing, relationship health, and the ability to keep functioning without burning out. It is not just about rearranging a 40-plus-hour week. It is about creating the time, freedom, and flexibility to live the life each person is trying to build.

I wrote and rewrote this article many times, and every iteration ran into the same wall: there is no clean answer. What feels right in my life—the nanny, the trainer, Erica’s edits, the book coach I finally hired this year—will not feel right for everyone. The domains I identified are mine. Another person might resist help at home and embrace it at work. The cost of help in different areas is more or less afordable and that also matters. The specific shape of this is individual, which is part of what makes this hard to write about. These decisions are personal, emotional, and messy, even when the numbers are straightforward.

What is not individual is the underlying structure. Women, on average, earn less, carry more, and live longer. The cultural narrative around women who buy help is still, in many rooms, a narrative of inadequacy. And the financial planning conversation about this—when it happens at all—tends to focus on not over-giving rather than on planning proactively for what sustainable functioning actually costs.

We are not superheroes. We are not overzealous benefactors. We are normal people doing genuinely hard things for people we love. The answer is not to be told we are great and to keep going. The answer is to plan for the help that makes it possible to keep going without burning out.

Helpers need help. That is not a failure. It is a financial planning category. And it is time we treated it like one.

Thank you to Erica Mito, my editor. Your help is some of the most valued in my life.

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