Amelia Misenheimer Consulting

Amelia Misenheimer Consulting Helping successful entrepreneurs invest in real estate to create passive income and financial freedom

A friend told me at the gym last fall that he had been talking with ChatGPT about investing.He said it the way people co...
09/03/2026

A friend told me at the gym last fall that he had been talking with ChatGPT about investing.

He said it the way people confess they cheated on a test with notes written on their hand. Lowered voice, quick glance around, the whole production. He was finally making real money with some excess to invest, he wanted to do it correctly, and I had been running investing classes for women at the time so he was not in the room for those. He went and found his own room. Then he felt bad about it.

He had nothing to apologize for.

He was not embarrassed about the money. He was embarrassed about not already knowing, which is the same sentence I hear from women running businesses at half a million a year. Different rooms, identical sentence. I should know this by now.

Nobody knows this by default. There is no class. Most of us got handed a form at 22, told to pick a percentage, and everything after that came from a podcast or a friend or a book written for somebody in a completely different situation.

So a tool that will explain any of it, at any hour, with no judgment in its voice, is a real thing to have. I use it constantly. I ask it to explain concepts to me like I am a sixth grader and it does, and I walk into decisions steadier than I did before.

It also has a hard limit, and the limit is not where most people assume it is.

I wrote the whole thing out this week, including the three questions I would never put to a chatbot and the ones I ask constantly.

Link in comments.

08/29/2026

I spent a weekend with friends, some new and some I have known for years, and we covered everything.

Revenue coming in and bills going out. Employees and what they cost. What it takes to ship something to an island. Dream homes, and the repairs we all need to make on the homes we already own.

Not one of us said a word about what we paid in taxes last year, or what we are putting into a retirement account, or where our money goes once it leaves the business.

I have been the person who brings it up. I can be blunt, and I have put my foot in my mouth more than once asking something somebody thought was inappropriate. What surprises me is not that people refuse to answer. It is how often the answer starts the same way. I've never been asked that.

Nobody has asked about their tax strategy. Nobody has asked whether their company should be offering a retirement plan. These are people running real businesses with real revenue, and the question has never once come up.

There is no good moment for it. Not over dinner, not over a lunch where things are supposed to stay casual. It stays awkward until enough of us do it anyway, and the shame around what our money looks like only holds as long as nobody says anything out loud.

The next time you are sitting across from somebody whose business you respect, ask them what they did about their taxes last year. Worst case, they tell you nobody has ever asked.

I wrote the longer version on Never Go Broke, including the part about why you cannot take her answer and run it in your own business. Link in comments.

08/14/2026

Think about the independent stores you grew up with. The hardware store, the diner, the shop on the corner that had been there since before you were born.

Most of them did not fail. The owner got tired of working and there was nobody there to buy the business.

That is happening right now at a scale most people are not tracking. According to the SBA, one in twelve US businesses closes every year, which works out to hundreds of thousands of exits. Compare that to the roughly 10,000 small business sales that happen in the same stretch of time. BizBuySell counted 9,586 in 2025.

Right now 52.3 percent of US business owners are 55 or older, and one in four is past 65. Thirteen percent have a written transition plan.

I spent a decade building a property management company from 35 units to more than 450 properties for over 100 investors before I sold it. That job became my identity for ten years. What I learned on the other side of it is that the sale was not the thing that gave me freedom. The investments I made all the way through that decade were.

Most of us have some picture of what life looks like after the business. Time with kids and grandkids. The trip you keep saying you will take. Whatever it is, something has to fund it, and for the overwhelming majority of owners that something is not going to be the sale of the company.

I wrote this week about the three ways a business ends, what each one actually pays, and what to build alongside the business so the ending is your choice instead of your only option.

Link in comments.

On October 28, 1974, it became illegal to deny a woman a credit card or a mortgage without a man's signature backing her...
08/09/2026

On October 28, 1974, it became illegal to deny a woman a credit card or a mortgage without a man's signature backing her up.

Fifty years is not ancient history. It's a mother, or a grandmother, who is still very much alive. It's within the lifetime of most people reading this.

I think about that date every time someone tells me women should get better at investing. The data already says they're good at it. Fidelity found a 0.4 percentage point return edge over men across 5.2 million accounts. Vanguard found women saving a higher share of pay than men at the same income level.

The gap was never a skill gap. It was a door that stayed closed longer than most of us realize.

Tell me in the comments if someone in your life remembers banking before 1974. That's not as long ago as it sounds.

08/08/2026

A friend of mine found out about an investment opportunity in a private company during a round of golf. One of the guys mentioned it between holes, just talking about his life. My friend wasn't even looking to invest. He heard about it and got curious anyway.

His wife wasn't there. She was home with their two kids, planning next week's groceries, thinking through the start of school, and figuring out what happens if somebody gets sick. None of that happens standing on a golf course.
She never had the same shot at that opportunity, and it had nothing to do with what she knows about money.

I hear this all the time. Ask a woman if she's good with money and she'll hedge. She'll say she should know this by now, as if not knowing the difference between a Roth and a SEP IRA is a moral failure instead of a gap nobody bothered to close.

The numbers back it up. Fidelity tracked 5.2 million retirement accounts from 2011 to 2020 and found women's investments returned 0.4 percentage points more per year than men's. Warwick Business School found the gap closer to 1.8 points. Women aren't picking better stocks. They're trading less, panicking less, and letting good decisions sit.

The discipline is already there. What's missing is the golf course, the informal room where the good deals get mentioned before they ever reach an advertisement.

I wrote the full breakdown this week, including a piece of legal history from 1974 that's closer than most people think. Link in comments.

If you've ever felt like you should know more about money than you do, I'd start there.

08/01/2026

Something my parents did that I didn't realize was rare until I got older. They never split information by whether you were the boy or the girl.

My brother and I got the same seat at the table. Same access to the business, the numbers, the mistakes. Nobody decided one of us needed to know less.

I think about that a lot now, especially when I meet clients on the other side of it. I have one whose father invested in real estate his whole life and never brought her into any of it. When he passed, he'd already sold almost everything so she'd get cash instead of property, because cash felt easier to leave behind. She'd always wanted to own real estate herself. If he'd held onto even a few of those properties, they'd be worth far more today than the cash she actually got.

He wasn't trying to hurt her. He just never had the conversation, and by the time it mattered, the choice had already been made for her.

That's the whole reason I bring this up. Not to make anyone feel behind, but to ask, who in your life would benefit from you talking about money and business out loud, before the choice gets made for them?

07/31/2026

I want to tell you about growing up inside my parents' business, because I think it explains a lot about why I do this work now.

My parents took over a failing manufactured housing dealership before I was born. Nobody dreams of selling mobile homes. But it gave us a real way of life, built by two people who never separated the office from home.

When I was a baby, they'd tuck me into a corner of the office and keep working. My mom actually lost track of me once, mid deal with a client, and didn't notice until she heard me playing under a desk. That's the day daycare started.

As my brother and I got older, we stamped floor plans, answered phones, and heard everything. Employees who stole from my parents. Employees who called from jail. Houses that caught fire. None of it was hidden from us.

One memory that's stayed with me my whole life. I was 7 or 8, going with my parents to collect overdue rent. There was a go-kart in the yard. The tenant had every excuse for why she couldn't pay, it was almost Christmas, her kids needed gifts. My mom pointed out her kids already had toys I didn't. Before anyone else could speak, the woman's own son stepped forward and said, "You can take the go-kart if we can stay in our house for Christmas." My brother and I ran that thing until the wheels fell off.

Growing up with that kind of access, to the wins and the hard parts, is something a lot of people never get from their parents. I think it's a real part of why I ended up doing wealth strategy work today.

I wrote more about this, including a lesson I learned at 14 that's shaped how I see people ever since, in this week's Never Go Broke. Link in comments.

What's something your parents let you see about money or work that you didn't realize was shaping you until years later?

07/25/2026

I was building a property management company. I was busy — working with clients, hiring, training, growing — and I told myself the business was the plan for my future.

I had set up a personal Traditional IRA and a Roth IRA during those years, so I felt like I was doing something. But nothing new was being built through the business.

Then I started trying to figure out how to be a more competitive employer for the people I was hiring. That's when my accountant walked me through a SIMPLE IRA.

I could open an account. The company could match my contributions. I thought those kinds of tools were only available to large companies offering full retirement plans. They weren't.

The setup was far more attainable than a full 401(k) program. And it gave me an extra benefit to offer my employees — which was something I cared about as a small business owner.

Here's the reframe I want you to sit with:
When you were an employee, your company matched your 401(k). You're the company now. You can give yourself that match. Your business gets the write-off. Your future gets funded.
Most solopreneurs I've talked to have never been told this door exists.

The full article breaks down the three business retirement accounts available to solopreneurs — the SEP IRA, the SIMPLE IRA, and the Solo 401(k) — plus the math on why any of them matters and how Roth versus Traditional fits in.

It's free to read, link in comments.

Had you thought about setting up a retirement account through your business, or has that felt like something only bigger companies do?

07/23/2026

Let's talk about the Revenue Treadmill.

You're chasing revenue. Watching the bottom line. Reinvesting everything back into the business. And somewhere in the back of your head, you know the business is the plan, except most businesses don't sell. They close when the founder gets tired.
That's not pessimism. That's the data.

The shift isn't about working less or caring less about the business. It's about running two tracks at the same time. One track is revenue — what the business earns today. The other track is wealth — what you're building personally, outside the business, that doesn't disappear if the business does.

A $1,000/month contribution to a SIMPLE IRA, invested at a conservative 7% for 20 years, becomes roughly $521,000. Add a $250/month business match — which is a 3% match on a $100,000 salary, exactly what a SIMPLE IRA allows — and that number becomes $651,000.
That's $130,000 in additional retirement money. That's also $130,000 in additional business deductions.

The two tracks don't compete. They compound.

Are you running both tracks, or has the business been the whole plan?

07/20/2026

This is for you if you've built a six or seven figure business and most of what you own is still tied up inside it.

This is for you if you've genuinely never sat down and run the numbers on what happens to your income the month the business slows down.

This is for you if you're tired of hearing five different opinions about what to do next and none of them agree.

You don't need a finance background to be in the room on July 22. You need an hour and your favorite beverage.

$27, live online, 10 AM ET. Save your seat. Link in comments.

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