8 Years In: What Guiding Clients Through Divorce, Aging Parents, and Sudden Wealth Taught Us
When Stephanie and I started Mana in July 2018, we knew far less than we'd like to admit. We had the credentials and the training, and no shortage of conviction about the kind of firm we wanted to build. Almost everything we've learned since about what this work actually asks of us came later, from clients, while they were living through the hardest and most consequential transitions of their lives.
You can't study for that kind of knowledge, there's no exam for it. It comes from sitting across from real people while their lives change in front of you, and eight years in, it's the thing I'm most grateful we were handed.
So rather than mark this birthday by telling you how far we've come, I want to tell you about three big life transitions we've seen many clients walk through, and what each one taught us about how to do this work.
When a client's parents started aging
Around 2022, four years into building Mana, something started showing up in our client meetings.
Our clients began mentioning their parents. Sometimes directly, sometimes almost in passing at the end of a call. Their mom was repeating herself. Their dad had stopped opening the mail. Nobody in the family had ever talked about money, and now there was a house, an account somewhere, a will that may or may not have existed, and no one knew where any of it was.
One client called us after his stepmom told him his father had wandered out of the house the night before. His dad had been living with Alzheimer's for a few years, but this news struck him hard. Wandering from the house was a visible sign of the decline, and it told him a new phase of the disease had begun. He called because he trusted us to sit with him while he and his siblings worked out what came next, and there was a lot that came next.
We've watched some families do this well, like Olympic runners passing off the baton in a relay. Those clients came from homes where money got discussed openly, where a parent had already laid out where everything was and what they wanted. They still grieved, but they weren't also decoding a stack of unlabeled paperwork in the middle of it.
Other families weren't as lucky. They had none of that, and every practical step landed at the same time as the emotional one.
We also saw the version that stays with you. Family meetings where a parent, while they still could, walked their adult kids through the whole picture and handed down not only the assets but the clarity. Watching how much lighter that made everything afterward showed us what we could do for these families if we got involved early enough.
That's why we specialize in multigenerational families today. We kept finding ourselves in the middle of these transitions, saw how much we could add, and admitted to ourselves how much we loved the work. I know this one from my own life, too. I became part of the sandwich generation myself, and being in it changed how I sit with the clients who are living it. The specialty came from our clients, and from living it firsthand.
When a client came into sudden wealth
When we first started advising founders and early employees, we came in armed with beautiful spreadsheets. We'd modeled the option exercises, the tax drag, the concentration risk, the diversification plan. We were ready to do the technical work, and we were hoping to impress.
The technical work turned out to be the easy part.
We have a client who has been an exceptional early employee more than once, with equity across several major startups, a few of which went public. She came to us from a traditional advisor. We showed up with all the modeling, and it took us a while to find our rhythm with her, because the modeling wasn't what she valued most.
What she and her partner kept coming back to was the context. Planning tools exist in a lot of places. What they couldn't find anywhere else was someone who gave them the time and space to figure out why the money mattered before deciding what to do with it. They wanted to be more than a number, and with most of the financial world, that's exactly how they'd felt. The human side of the work was the part their previous financial advisors had skipped.
That client taught us where the real work lives. Understanding what someone truly wants out of their life, before anyone opens a spreadsheet about after-tax proceeds, is the lens that makes every technical decision afterward obvious. The clarity has to come first. Once someone can see what they want their life to look like, the math finally has somewhere to point.
We still bring the spreadsheets. Now they're informed by what matters most.
When a client goes through a divorce
The first time we worked with a client through a divorce, we learned how much we didn't know about holding this particular kind of transition.
Every one of them has been different. But a few patterns showed us how to build the process.
The one we see most often: a woman in the middle of a separation who hires Mana specifically because she wants a team of women guiding her through the biggest financial decisions of her new life. She wants people she can trust in the room with her, people who will help her make the right calls for a life she never planned on navigating alone.
Then there's a version of this I find hopeful. Sometimes a couple splits amicably, and we're left with two people who now want very different things from life. Each becomes our client, each with a whole new life to plan for.
Underneath both, we learned there's a real distinction in how we serve. Working as the fiduciary for one spouse through a divorce is a different job from serving each of two divorcing spouses, and treating them as the same thing does a disservice to everyone involved. Divorce is one of the few transitions where difficult emotions and hard financial decisions are braided together this tightly, and you can't pretend otherwise while you're doing the planning.
We built a process that carries the emotion and the decisions at once. Customized to where each client actually is, and structured enough that a hard feeling never lets an important decision slip. That balance, customized and structured at the same time, is something we only learned because we didn't have the right frame at first.
The two halves of the work
Every one of those lessons pointed at the same thing. This work takes two kinds of skill that rarely sit under one roof.
There's the technical mastery: the tax, the equity, the investment strategy, the planning most firms send out to someone else. And there's the human side, the discipline of helping someone name what they want their money to be for before a single decision gets made.
We had both from the start, at least in spirit. The technical training was on paper, and the belief that the human side mattered is the reason we built Mana in the first place. What we didn't know yet was how central that side would become to everything we do, or how much clients would value it, whether because they'd never been given it before, or because we take the time to teach without talking down to anyone. That understanding is the wisdom our clients handed us over eight years. Building a team that holds both, and holds both deeply, took time and the right people.
We know far more now than we did at the start, and we owe most of it to the people who let us walk beside them.
Mana is an ancient Hawaiian word for power, unrelated to wealth. Thank you, our clients, for the Mana you've brought us.
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Stephanie Bucko and Cristina Livadary are fee-only financial planners based in Los Angeles, California. Stephanie is the Chief Investment Officer and Cristina is the Chief Executive Officer at Mana Financial Life Design (FLD). Mana FLD provides comprehensive financial planning and investment management services to help clients grow and protect their wealth throughout life’s journey. Mana FLD specializes in advising ambitious professionals who seek financial knowledge and want to implement creative budgeting, savings, proactive planning and powerful investment strategies. As fee-only fiduciaries and independent financial advisors, Stephanie and Cristina never receive commission of any kind. Stephanie and Cristina are legally bound by their certifications to provide unbiased and trustworthy financial advice.