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Last week I got the email. Expand Your Empire is a finalist in this year’s 2026 Stevie Awards for Women in Business across six categories. Everything from Mentor of the Year in Finance to Financial Tools for Social Change. The winners get named in November, and the main way a show like this gets in front of judges or new listeners is ratings. If this show has changed how you think about your own capital, please go rate it right now with five stars wherever you listen. That is my ask for today.

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Borrowing Money to Lend Money

A few years ago, I took out two home equity lines of credit. One on a rental property and one on the house I actually live in. Then I turned around and lent that money directly to people who were flipping houses.

If you say that out loud to someone outside real estate and watch their face change, borrowing money so you can lend money sounds like the textbook definition of reckless. But here is what it actually was. There was a real spread between what those lines of credit cost me and what I could charge as a private lender. That profit gap was mine to keep as long as I had underwritten the borrowers and the deal correctly. I trusted the people I lent to because I had done the work to know exactly who they were and what they were getting into. None of it ever went bad.

It was not reckless, and it was not incredibly brave either. It was risk aware. I saw exactly what could go wrong before I ever signed anything, and I built the deal around what I saw.

A risk-averse version of me does not get that far. She hears the words borrow to lend and she is already out of the room.

Risk Awareness vs. Risk Aversion

I do not think women are naturally risk-averse. I think women are some of the most risk-aware people in any room, and we have spent our whole lives being taught to treat that awareness as a reason to stop instead of information to act on. Those are not the same thing. Risk aversion is seeing danger and shutting down. Risk awareness is seeing danger clearly enough to understand exactly what it is, and then deciding deliberately whether and how to move through it. One is a shutdown. The other is a skill.

Why the Shutdown Isn’t Cowardice

That shutdown is not cowardice. It is math.

For most of the 20th century, a woman could not build credit in her own name. If you were married, you needed your husband’s signature to open a card or get a loan. If you were single, banks routinely discounted your income and asked who was going to vouch for you. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act passed in 1974 and expanded in 1976, which finally made all of that illegal.

When you have no independent access to capital, seeing a risk clearly and refusing to act on it is the only rational move available. Awareness with no tools behind it has nowhere else to go, so it turns into aversion. Your mother or your grandmother needed protection from financial dependence, and shutting down at the sight of risk was how she accomplished that. But you have access now, or the ability to build it in a way that she never did. Your awareness does not have to collapse into a stop sign anymore.

What Awareness with Real Tools Looks Like

Here is what awareness with real tools behind it actually looks like in practice.

First, cash is a position, not the absence of one. It is a bet that a dollar today buys as much as a dollar next year, and it is a bet you are placing whether you mean to or not. If you are sitting on a large cash balance earning 4% while prices are rising at 3%, you are losing 1% a year quietly with no statement that ever says that in plain language. A paid-off house is a concentrated bet on one zip code. A retirement account in index funds is a bet that public markets keep doing roughly what they have always done. A risk-averse woman does not see any of that as a bet at all. A risk-aware woman does, and she knows the whole difference.

Second, the losses you can see get weighted much heavier than the ones you cannot. A deal that loses money becomes a story you tell for ten years. A deal you never did becomes nothing. It has no anniversary, no line on any statement, and nobody asks about it at dinner. The $10,000 you lost on a bad investment feels like proof that you took too much risk. The $300,000 you might have built over a decade by doing the thing you kept talking yourself out of never registers as a loss at all because it was never real enough to lose.

Ruin vs. Loss: What Happened When My Deal Went Sideways

Look at what happens when things actually go wrong. I have put deals together where I had none of my own cash in them at all, borrowing other people’s money to get a house flipped. One of those I purchased subject to the existing financing that was already on it. This particular time, the bank found out and made me refinance before I was ready. I lost the low interest rate I had been sitting on, and that property does not cash flow the way it used to.

Notice what that story actually proves. It is not that I got lucky and nothing ever goes wrong. Something did go wrong out of every subject-to deal I have done. The real question was never whether it could happen. It was whether I had structured the deal so that when it did happen, it could cost me something without costing me everything. I lost a rate. I did not lose the property. That is what awareness with tools behind it looks like when things go sideways.

Risk Tolerance vs. Risk Capacity

There are two separate questions hiding inside the word risky, and aversion only ever asks one of them.

Risk tolerance is how much volatility you can stand emotionally. Risk capacity is whether losing that specific amount would actually damage your financial life. A woman with $2 million in liquid assets who loses $10,000 on a deal has taken a rounding error in her capacity. If she still loses sleep over it, that is her tolerance failing, not her capacity. Flip it around. A woman with $80,000 total to her name puts $20,000 into something speculative because a book told her to get comfortable with risk. She might feel fine walking in because her tolerance is high, but her capacity was never there to support it.

Aversion only asks about tolerance. Awareness asks about capacity too.

Advice like never risk what you cannot afford to lose is excellent about ruin and close to useless about ordinary loss. Ruin is a loss that changes your life. You cannot make the mortgage, you have to push retirement back five years, or you go back to a job you left for a reason. Loss is the ordinary cost of participating. It is the number that stings for a month and then stops mattering. Professional allocators build the whole portfolio so that when a loss happens, it is survivable, while organizing their whole life around never touching ruin.

This Week’s Exercise

Here is the one thing to do this week, and it costs you nothing.

Name the specific opportunity you have been sitting on, the one that you have already run the numbers on twice and still have not moved on. Ask three questions about it out loud or on paper:

  1. What am I actually exposed to?

  2. What would have to be true for this to fail?

  3. If it failed, could I recover?

Notice which question is actually holding you still. It is rarely the first two. Most of the time, you have never let yourself finish answering that third question, because as long as the answer stays vague, doing nothing gets to feel like safety instead of what it actually is.

Which opportunity have you been treating like a threat when it is really just a calculation you have not finished making?