Syama Bunten
Women don’t talk about money the way we should. Not honestly, not openly, and not with each other. But that’s changing. I’m Syama Bunten, founder of Wealth Catalyst. And Getting Rich Together is where the conversation lives. Every week, a different woman, a different path, and a conversation that will change how you think about your own financial power. This community is growing and you belong in it.

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I am here today with the brilliant and beautiful Annie Wright. Annie, you are not only a licensed psychotherapist and executive coach who specializes in trauma recovery for high achievers, but my love, you have clocked in so many hours to help them understand how early relational patterns shape leadership, performance, and success. Something that I believe all humans, not just Silicon Valley leaders, need and want to have access to. It’s also why I’m so excited that you’ve taken your wisdom and your knowledge and have been an incredible speaker and an expert on Forbes, NPR, and NBC, and have a new book coming out so the rest of us can actually get up to speed on what it is to live a happy and satisfying life. Decade of Decisions coming out 2026.

I’m so excited to have you here today, Annie. Thank you so much for bringing your brilliance to Getting Rich Together.

Annie Wright
Gosh, it’s a complete honor and thank you for such a beautiful introduction. I really feel honored and I feel welcomed.

Syama Bunten
Well, good. So before we jump in to all the big stuff happening now, because you have so many big and exciting things, I would love to take us back to a little Annie, a little girl who maybe she did know she was gonna become prolific. Maybe she didn’t. You’re gonna tell me. But take me back to a little girl somewhere between ten and twelve years old, Annie. Where were you in this beautiful world of ours? What was life like around you? And what was money like?

Annie Wright
Oh, you just asked about probably the most pivotal and painful time in my life. So between the ages of ten and twelve, I was a little girl growing up on an island off the coast of Maine, Mount Desert Island, home to Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park. My biological father had left my mother when I was six years old and took us from a middle-class life and plunged us into basically poverty at that point.

My mom did everything she could to recover from that, including going back to work, scrubbing people’s toilets until she could get a healthcare position. My father did maintain some custody rights because he had the better attorney. By the time I was ten or eleven, my biological father, who I’m estranged from, and that’s an important part of this story, he was a very, very mentally unwell individual. And when I challenged his abusive behavior, he decided to disown me. And so at age eleven, right between ten and twelve, he took me to court and legally disowned me. At that point, my mother was stable, but she became the only person who was taking care of me. My relationship to money at that time was really complicated because he still had a lot of it and she had little.

Mount Desert Island is home to the summer cottages of the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies. It was sort of where the old mainline money used to build their summer homes in the early 1900s. And growing up with these cottages, which are really mansions on the coast, and then having a more low socioeconomic local population, there was already this very strange story in my head about the haves and the have-nots. And what it meant to be somebody with money and who the rest of us were.

And then you add on to that my lived experience of growing up for a time with a biological father who ran art galleries in Manhattan and Palm Beach, but who also never paid for groceries or health insurance. I grew up with this completely disorganized view around money, to be completely honest. And it’s important to say too, the way he made his money wasn’t honest. He ended up going to jail for being an art thief. So that’s a part of my history. And it really messed up my little child mind around either the magical thinking of like tons of money and how does one have it, but it always disappears, or you grind yourself to the bone to barely get by. So those were the money stories I had at that time.

But also at age twelve, I did something that was really kind of crazy. I decided, you know what, no one in my family has ever been to college, but I’m gonna get into the Ivy League. I think that’s my ticket off this island. And so I did. I plunged everything I had into it. I took all my childhood trauma, completely sublimated it, with disorganized eating but also an unbelievable drive to achieve and to excel. And I became the valedictorian of my high school, went to Brown, and got off the island. And I remain a huge cycle-breaker in my family for so many reasons. But I do remember thinking, okay, education and money is how I prove my worth and how I get out of here.

Syama Bunten
My gosh. I mean, you have such wisdom on reflection now, but yet this little girl did not know what was going on, right? It’s like there’s this moment when you’re little, it’s like you’re just fielding everything and constantly playing defense. And it’s like, how do I find myself in the midst of all this?

Annie Wright
It’s just survival. Kids survive in whatever way they can because kids are so powerless in so many ways. We all find ways to adapt to dysfunctional, hostile, or abusive environments. And mine ended up being, let’s say, one of the more socially acceptable and also beneficial ways of adapting, like identifying with a drive. It could have gone a lot of different ways. And for many people it does. I’m a bit of a statistical outlier in terms of where I’m at in life now. But yeah, kids just survive in any way they can, and you get into your early adulthood and maybe you recognize that it was not right or unhealthy, and maybe you don’t. It’s often like asking a fish how’s the water. If water’s the only thing the fish has ever known, you just don’t know.

Syama Bunten
It’s like you have no context. Okay, so here you are in university. Did you have to worry about paying for university? Was there any anxiety around that? How did you manage what you were going through? Did Annie already have the plan? Was it like, okay, I got into Brown, I’m gonna study this, I’m gonna go in this direction? How did you sort of both financially figure out your college career and also, how self-directed were you? What did you know of yourself during that time?

Annie Wright
Well, the reality is my mom was so poor that I got a full ride to Brown. That’s how I afforded it. Yale gave me very little. Brown gave me a full ride. So it was a no-brainer. I think we ended up paying maybe ten thousand dollars. And you have to remember, Maine doesn’t send a lot of students to schools like that. I was the high-achieving kid representing the state of Maine down in Washington DC at leadership conferences. I was a hustler. And I wrote a really fantastic admissions essay.

Syama Bunten
What was the essay about?

Annie Wright
I remember it was called My Mother’s Hands, and it was a reflection on her being a very blue-collar worker and watching her grind so hard to provide for her children. Really meaningful essay. But you asked a really important question, which was how self-directed was I? I was self-directed to the point where I was bound and determined to do all the things I wanted without the capacity to really concretely think about what the impact of those choices would be in the future. And one thing we know about childhood trauma is it inhibits the ability to conceptualize a sound, realistic future for many individuals. And that was me. When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a witch, Indiana Jones, the president, and a children’s book author.

Syama Bunten
I mean, check, check, check.

Annie Wright
And little Annie, so many pieces came true. But you know what’s so funny is I went to Brown and the closest thing I could get to Indiana Jones was you can actually get an undergraduate degree in Egyptology there. Sign me up, right? I also majored in history.

But I knew at the end of Brown I would also want to serve in the Peace Corps because I was super driven towards service and social justice. So I did all those things. I went into the Peace Corps and served in Uzbekistan, but that’s also where, through a confluence of many, many variables, the childhood trauma history really caught up with me. The bill was due and I had to face the past in order to have a future.

Syama Bunten
How old were you?

Annie Wright
I must have been twenty-three years old when all that happened. So young. So young.

Syama Bunten
I’m curious, you know, being so young to have a recognition that something wasn’t right. I feel like most of us, if not all of us on this planet are gifted with crises and moments where we can choose to step through the fire. We all get into the crisis, but not everyone is promised to get through to the other side. And that takes a lot of consciousness and awareness. So at this young age of twenty-three, being faced with that reality, how did you start to navigate it with what tools you had available?

Annie Wright
Well, I think you presupposed too much of me, my friend. I did not know that that was what was happening. All I knew is I was in complete decompensation, plunged into depression and very despairing feelings. I also had no home to go back to at that time. So after the Peace Corps, and we were militarily evacuated out of Uzbekistan for a variety of reasons, another very long story, I ended up in Washington DC working at a healthcare consulting firm. And that was the first time I had benefits and the first time I got myself into therapy and just dipped my toes into the water of feeling feelings.

But here’s where the story gets even more interesting. Working at this company, I became friends with the one other hippie there, and she told me about a place I should probably go visit since I had a portfolio of California clients. It was a place called the Esalen Institute. I don’t know how many of your listeners know about Esalen, but it is ground zero for the human potential movement. I squeezed in a weekend trip there between two consulting clients in Berkeley and LA. Everything is foreshadowing here. And the workshop was called The Courage to Change Your Life.

I drove onto that Esalen property and it was a whole-body yes. I was like, I have never felt more happy in my life. I’m meant to be here. So I did what you only do at twenty-five. I went back. I quit my job. I gave up my Capitol Hill apartment, sold my possessions, and booked a one-way ticket with only sixteen thousand dollars in savings and a carry-on suitcase. And I went to a one-month work-scholar workshop.

But I literally had no plan. And in that month I was like, I will heal my emotional issues, I will lose twenty pounds, and I will find my husband. Again, the threat of magical thinking before the trauma recovery really happened is strong. It was strong in my life. But one month turned into two and I got offered another work-scholar opportunity. Then I got something even rarer, which was to be hired on as an extended student, which means you get to stay there for a year and take all the workshops, psychology, spirituality, yoga, all the things. I was working in the Esalen kitchens, then they got wind of my business background and presence and hired me to be the executive administrator. It was there that I started to piece together what had happened to me. It was there that people said to me for the first time, that wasn’t normal. That’s not right. That is childhood abuse. That’s where the awareness happened. That was the first real layer of the healing. And bonus, I ended up meeting my husband at Esalen.

Syama Bunten
So you were right! I’m telling you, you think the magical thinking is over here, but…

Annie Wright
Here’s the thing. I say this all the time. Dreams do come true, just not always on the timeline you expect, right? The magical thinking part was a month, but you know.

Syama Bunten
I love that. And so while you were at Esalen, were you going through savings? Were you getting paid? Did you have to pay for the massages? Because they have great massage there.

Annie Wright
Staff members got discounts on that. I didn’t opt into the massages as much as I opted into the workshops. But I had burned through that sixteen thousand dollars. And again, magical thinking. What was your plan, Annie? Like, I’m financially sober now and we’ll get to that part of the story. But yeah, I was burning through savings. When you’re an extended student, you earn a stipend. Your housing is provided for, your food is provided for. It’s such a nominal amount. You could get some scones and some cappuccinos at the bakery up the road, but it wasn’t anything really.

And at the same time, it was at Esalen that I became super clear that I wanted to be a therapist. I had hitherto thought I’d become a lawyer, but when I had two books on my little tiny desk in my tiny ocean room, it was Clarissa Pinkola Estés’s Women Who Run With the Wolves or the LSAT prep book. My whole body would cringe every time I tried to open the LSAT pages. And yet when I would open Women Who Run With the Wolves, it was another full-body yes. And it was just enlivening. When you break down the word psychology, it breaks down into psyche logos. I was like, how cool is that? I want to be a knower of the soul. So I started graduate school while I was at Esalen, working forty hours a week and commuting up to San Francisco on the weekends for my graduate school classes. I ended up in the Bay Area to finish my licensure journey. And that’s when the financial scaries really set in.

Syama Bunten
Okay. So you meet the love of your life at Esalen. Where did he fit into all of this?

Annie Wright
So into this story too. My husband’s name is Kyle. Kyle was likewise an extended student, working on the grounds department. We fell in love, but the problem is we fell in love a few months before I was due to leave Esalen and go up to the Bay Area to finish licensure. He always quotes the Good Will Hunting line, I had to see about a girl. So he left Esalen to move up to the Bay, and that’s where we started to build our life together.

But back at that time, and this is really important when it comes to a money story, I didn’t know what I was doing when I signed for all those graduate school loans. I did not know realistically what the path to paying them back would be. I didn’t have an awareness of how expensive the Bay Area would be. I also didn’t know that marriage and family therapist interns barely got paid minimum wage to collect their hours. I remember being at the tail end of my journey as a graduate student about to do her internship, and I went to the career services office and said these jobs are only paying like ten or eleven dollars an hour. What am I supposed to do? And what I heard back from that staff member, and I’m sure they meant well, was, well, can’t your parents pay for it for you or your husband? We were not married at that point. And just to be clear, Kyle was also earning minimum wage. Both of us grew up with poverty in our backgrounds. And I was like, these are my options?

My story to becoming a therapist was truncated by financial fear. I was still working all the time I was in graduate school, working four or five jobs just to pay rent and living on student loans. But after graduate school ended, I didn’t know if I could make it as a therapist. So I took a job at a nonprofit just for a steady paycheck and to stabilize. But I could never get rid of that tug in my gut telling me, girl, this is your path. This is what you’re supposed to do.

Still couldn’t live on ten or eleven dollars an hour. So I became extremely good at business. I started reading every marketing book, every business book, because I thought, why don’t I build a private practice internship, charge higher rates, have a supervisor take me on, pay them for supervision, and maybe I can make this work. And I did. I was one of the first to do this back in 2012, and it was kind of unheard of. I got really successful. I started writing online every two weeks, long-form essays, and it really brought a lot of referrals to me. Those referrals are how I ultimately built my therapy center. But this all also coincided with my financial sobriety journey, the reckoning with what my reality was and what it meant to be a responsible financial adult. That really started around 2012, the year the student loans came due and the year I graduated grad school.

Syama Bunten
Okay, so much right here. Kudos to you for being a savvy businesswoman. I feel like 2012 is such an interesting time in the world from a media standpoint, a publishing standpoint. It was like the creativity boom of ways to get to market. If you had the tenacity and the vision to do it, you could really make it work.

Annie Wright
Hello. And it’s the tech scene, the IPO standpoint, what was happening then. I’m built of nothing but ambition, grit, and determination. One hundred percent self-made. It was hard. They don’t train you how to be a business owner or how to be professionally successful as a therapist. They teach you how to be a great therapist, which yes, I am. But it was because of my business acumen and my hustle that I was able to eventually financially provide for myself, and then provide for myself very well, to a point that no one in my family history has ever been able to do, male or female. Thank goodness for business skills.

Syama Bunten
It’s amazing. And so how soon after you decided to go in this direction did you have your first real breath of relief? I feel like in the beginning of things, as money comes in, it can feel too good to be true. Like, am I gonna lose it? Is it gonna go away? How did you start to organize where it went? How did you think about the direction of it?

Annie Wright
Well, let me answer that in two parts because they’re very different questions. My financial sobriety journey was forced to start by those student loan payments coming due. I think I had something like one hundred twenty-five to one hundred fifty thousand dollars in student loans for a graduate degree. That is nauseating. And my husband, at that time still my boyfriend, we were both financially illiterate, period full stop. Nobody in our families was financially responsible. So I actually enrolled us in Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University. And I signed up for YNAB, You Need a Budget, which I am evangelical about in terms of how it helped me learn to budget and save and understand. Financial Peace University was also helpful, though I’m not quite as values-aligned with that teacher.

I really started to understand what I needed to tackle, what the defensive lines of insurance were. And I started to organize me and Kyle in our little financial life. Let’s go get life insurance before all the things add up on our chart. We started young, started together, had pennies to rub together, and were living on student loans. We started off with a highly negative net worth, and we are very financially secure now because of what we’ve done together, primarily because of what I’ve done with him as a stay-at-home husband and dad.

When I budgeted, I budgeted to the bare necessities, like rent and food. I had to budget the overhead expenses of my little private practice and budget for those student loans. When did I stop feeling scared? Syama, I believe in full honesty. I sold my multi-million dollar company at the top of 2025, and the time I’m speaking to you now is the first time I feel like I have breathing room and I’m financially secure. And it’s nuts if you look at the numbers on paper. I pay a financial planner who’s worked with me since 2019 to alleviate my fears that it won’t all disappear. Because here’s the thing: when you are the first person in your family to break the poverty cycle, first to go to college, first to have financial security, there are not enough data points yet in your history to suggest it’s still not all gonna go away. I’ve done a tremendous amount of trauma therapy on my childhood financial trauma. But what’s also true is I built our wealth within a span of only seven years. And that’s not enough time for the nervous system to necessarily catch up and trust it’s not gonna all go away.

I will say I am a masterful steward of my money. I really am exceptional at earning and saving, but I also love to spend and I want to have a really rich, abundant life with the things that feel good to me. And yeah, I do trust that if we lost everything, I could build it all again tomorrow. There’s a really great quote, I think it was Brian Tracy, who said, make a million dollars not for the million dollars, but for who you become in making it. On the other end of this financial sobriety and massive business-building journey, I am a completely different woman in 2025 at age forty-three than I was in 2012. My psychological healing and my financial healing have fed each other, and I don’t think one can exist without the other.

Syama Bunten
Wow. So in the building of this business and simultaneously building family, it’s not like you decided to do one thing at a time.

Annie Wright
Not only that, but I launched my therapy center when my daughter was three months old. Who does that? Well, an ambitious therapist in 2019 when real estate was extremely scarce in Berkeley prior to the pandemic. Berkeley is the most therapist-saturated place in the world. I had my eye on a very particular area, a very particular building. They had these corner suites that only came open every couple of years. Well, guess when one came open? On my mat leave. I had this super colicky baby after a very high-risk pregnancy, the space came up, and I was like, well, this is really terrible timing, but I guess I’m gonna bet on myself. So I did it.

In the early days, my husband Kyle was building the office furniture and soundproofing the doors. I was laying our daughter Alice down on a little mat for tummy time while I filled the file folders and refilled the tissue boxes. It was a family business. She grew up with the therapy center. And then came the pandemic, and it was just us and her and all of this. I ended up retiring Kyle in December 2021 because daycare was at a zero-sniffle policy, and what is a one-and-a-half-year-old but constant sniffles? We were averaging like two days a week at daycare. My career was taking off. So we took that leap. He has worked for me at my company since, and he is the reason I can have a career of this size. He is a huge part of the reason why I can be successful as a working mom. We have built quite a bit from nothing together, and I really want to honor him for that.

Syama Bunten
That’s so powerful. Can you double-click on the conversations you two had together? I feel like to the women listening to the show, a lot of people think it’s gonna be scary, but it ends up being really liberating. What was it like?

Annie Wright
In our relationship, I embody more of the attributes that are more typically ascribed to men and masculinity, the drive, the ambition, the hunting, the building. That is me at my core, although I identify as a woman. My husband is a natural-born nurturer. He is most happy tending to the people and the places he loves. That’s actually not me in my genetics. So combine that with the fact that I was earning about six times what he did, and he doesn’t have the ambition-drive gene the way I do. It was a pretty easy decision for us. We were gonna gamble on this constellation because it made sense for us, and it still makes sense for us. We’ll reevaluate it when it doesn’t. We have a seven-year-old, she still comes home sick, public school has a lot of vacation. He’s with her at a bakery right now, probably at the library. It is still working out for us.

Syama Bunten
My God, that’s incredible. So now take me to the height of the business. You’re at this level now where you’re able to look back at the lifeline. Everyone thinks that money or success should be this hockey stick, and it’s like, no, actually, there are so many things that happen on the way to the top.

Annie Wright
A hundred percent. And I think this is very salient to where I am now because I did have atypical success. If you want to talk about timing a market, launch a therapy center in 2019 and then go through a global pandemic. My business exploded. I would never wish the pandemic on anyone, but it blew up my business. When you look at the top-line revenue of my business over the course of six years, it was nothing but a constant up. And so did my pay. That was atypical for a business. However, it did allow me to sell the business.

But now that I’ve sold the business, my cash flow looks nothing like what I was taking home as the earner. So I’m actually in a period where I’m having to wrestle with that, and that’s okay. It’s okay that it’s not a constant growth path up, that there might be these ebbs, or that sometimes entrepreneurial people take a hit for a couple of years so they can build their next thing. That’s a new level of my own money learning. But my business growth success was quite vertical. And I was raising a toddler and building something I had never done before. You could fill an encyclopedia with all the things I did not know as a business owner and entrepreneur. And quite frankly, if you want to get a PhD in running a business, do it in the state of California with W-2 employees in a professionally licensed organization. You will learn every mistake ever. But I am grateful for the hardship of those years, raising a highly sensitive child and running a very hard business model. It really carved out capacities in me that I did not know I was capable of.

Syama Bunten
Okay, so walk me through some of the dominoes that fell and signaled to you it was time to sell the business. How did you decide it’s time now? What were some of the dominoes that helped you realize you were ready to take on something different?

Annie Wright
I can trace this back to 2017 when I went to a mastermind called Next for therapists who were doing really, really well as individual practice owners. I had only been licensed for a year, but I was doing really, really well. I remember being at a watershed moment where it’s like, well, you can start to double down on your personal brand. I started writing online in the spring of 2015, long-form high-quality mental health articles every two weeks, including through maternity leave and my cancer surgery. I had built up a pretty big readership. But at the same time, I was getting referrals like picking grapes off trees. So I thought, why don’t I build a therapy center first, and then I’m sure I can double down on the personal brand later.

Well, turns out building a therapy center is very hard and it took a lot of time away from the personal brand. Just like I had originally gone to the nonprofit out of fear and couldn’t ignore the tug that said this isn’t what I’m meant to do, the same thing happened here. I’m super proud of the therapy center I built. A wonderful team of clinicians, still a wonderful team of clinicians doing great work. But I knew there was more inside of me that I had to start to produce and give back and really live out my life mission. So when that tug became too painful to ignore, I knew it was time. I always listened to those tugs. I listened to the full-body yeses.

Turns out selling a business is almost as hard as building one. But I did secure a deal after the first one fell through and I sold in January 2025. Best decision I ever made. And now I’m in version two of my career. I feel very proud of what I’ve done. I feel proud to be a successfully exited entrepreneur who can work with entrepreneurs and small business owners and have the literacy to talk about some of these issues that only business owners know. At the same time, my mission is very clear about what I’m meant to do in this world.

Syama Bunten
Amazing. So let’s talk about the mission. You claim not to have always been self-directed, but it’s clear your spirit has had direction. Whether or not you knew the direction was happening is up for debate. But your spirit has had a really distinct way of communicating with you and leading you down paths and ideas, and certainly things have just unfolded in magical ways.

Annie Wright
A hundred percent. Although I will say that I’m a big fan of creating vision boards. I treat them like art forms. Because I do think a clear vision and a conviction that you can do it, combined with hard work, will get you anything you want. Everything on my vision boards has come to pass.

As far as my life’s mission, here’s the thing. I trust in the universe. The universe has been helping me the whole time. I’m also a trust-in-God-but-tired-camel kind of girl. Say a prayer but move your feet. And what’s also really important to know is one of the tertiary stages of trauma recovery work is making meaning of your experience. So there’s part of me that believes I was meant to go through that. And now the way I make meaning of what happened to me is to turn around and make sure that those who it also happened to, those who had lousy, unfortunate childhoods, can still have a really amazing adulthood if they do the trauma recovery work. Because so much more is possible when we do. And my hope is to empower generations of women and girls that have been bound by these various concentric circles of challenges and suffering, the relational trauma we experience in our homes, the trauma we experience at the hands of oppressive social systems, the patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism. My work is to work on the individual level, helping people start there, because a more psychologically empowered woman can become a more financially empowered woman, can become a more politically empowered woman. So I take my mission very seriously to help as many people as I can recover from relational trauma.

Syama Bunten
It’s so noble, Annie. There’s such a sense of let’s heal ourselves, let’s help each other, and let’s live for the version of ourselves and the vision of our lives that we want. And all of that is within reach and possibility. It’s incredible that you’re dedicating your life to supporting others in achieving that for themselves. So let’s turn our attention to your book and to how you want humans to start to engage with you and see Annie Wright in this next version of yourself. This is the next leap, the next big expansion on a body of work you’ve created. What does this next chapter look like and how do you want people to come find you?

Annie Wright
I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about that. The ideas and the vision are still forming to a certain extent. I have clocked well over fifteen thousand hours as a practicing therapist. I am one of the most highly trained trauma therapists in my professional cohort. I am at the head of my cohort for this particular niche. I’m very rigorous. I’m not a pop psychologist, I’m not a TikTok health guru. I am a rigorously trained clinician. I’ve done so much one-on-one work, but now the challenge for me is how do I amplify that work to more people? And that will be through books, through online courses, through my Substack, but it’s really in creating deliverables that can help people start to see themselves and their stories more clearly and help them get the appropriate kind of support to do the healing that’s required in order to have a beautiful adulthood.

My writing has always been about that for ten years. But now the question is how do I translate my clinical acumen and my skills at writing to creating a curriculum, a sort of relational trauma recovery school, with various means of entry that can help people lead good lives, love themselves, undo the trauma, have healthy relationships, have great boundaries, believe in themselves financially, know what they want to do professionally, and live while they’re still alive. So many people with unresolved trauma continue to just survive versus live. And I want my body of work to outlast me. I get emotional when I talk about it. I want to leave this body of work behind for my daughter. Because I’m not a perfect mother. And if she needs the tools and the skills to recover from anxiety or develop healthier attachment styles, I want her to have that work. And I want the work to last beyond me. My next chapter is really about translating the work into ways that can help even more people.

Syama Bunten
I love that, Annie. We’ve talked about money today in a lot of serious ways. How do you navigate it through business? How do you navigate it through a shaky childhood? All the different stories around money. But certainly money can also be really fun. You talked about putting a bucket aside just for fun and making sure you’re able to enjoy your money. So what goes into the fun bucket? And what is your most fun, fabulous way you’ve spent your money lately? What has brought you joy?

Annie Wright
It is two words. International travel. I wish I had a less expensive hobby, but that is the thing that lights me up. We’re back to Indiana Jones. We’re back to the little girl on the island who used to look at her globe and dream about seeing the world. I am fed by travel. Not so much domestically, but internationally. I have always loved different cultures. I love adventure. I love putting myself into uncomfortable positions. My favorite thing in the world is traveling with my husband and daughter.

We also spent our money on our dream home. It is the most beautiful home ever. I’m deeply fed by it. I’m a homebody who also likes to ride camels in the Sahara Desert with her four-year-old. I’m like that very weird dichotomy. Don’t ask me to leave my house after five, but sure, I’ll go to Bosnia and Herzegovina. No problem. We spent a lot of money on this house because it is stunning and I am deeply fed by aesthetics and our forest and all the beauty of it. We also prioritize spending on our health, really good food, vitamins, et cetera. Because it’s hard to enjoy your life when you don’t have enough energy or health to enjoy it.

And honestly, if I’m talking about a really guilty pleasure, sometimes I’ll buy both the Audible book and the Kindle book so I can switch back and forth depending on if I’m in bed or doing a course. And people are always like, well, you could just wait for it at the library. I’m like, I don’t like to wait. If I want that book, I want that book now. That’s another place where I spend a lot of money. Audiobooks.

Syama Bunten
I love that. And then my last question is really around, I know you’re in this space of developing and defining the next chapter, but what is it that our audience can do for you? What do you need? Who do you need? How can we show up for you?

Annie Wright
Oh my gosh, you’re so sweet. Look, I would just love for people to come to the website, AnnieWright.com, read what I write, and see if it speaks to you. I do my work in the world with driven and ambitious women who come from relational trauma histories. And sometimes you don’t know what that is until you see yourself in my writing. You’re like, that’s me, right? There’s a wealth of free information on my website, quizzes, and you can also come and join my Substack. I’m developing a signature online course. I’m going to be launching monthly masterclasses all through 2026. I just want to deliver transformative information and education in a way that moves the needle for folks. So come to the website. It’s all there. And maybe I’ll see you at the keynotes I’m doing at counseling associations across the country. I’d love to get a TED talk one of these days. But yeah, I would just love for people to see more of themselves in what I write so that they can take the next right steps for themselves.

Syama Bunten
I love that, Annie. It’s been such an honor and a gift to spend this time with you and hear your story. Thank you for opening up about all these important conversations and really being vulnerable about who you are and the woman you’ve become, and what your hopes and dreams are for the world. It’s been a gift to have you here today. Thank you.

Annie Wright
It’s really been a gift to be able to share, Syama. So thank you so, so much. I do truly believe that the more open I am about my story, the more I might be a little lighthouse of hope for people who wonder if that’s possible. I really appreciate all the lovely reflections you’ve given me and also just the chance to share my story. I haven’t shared it in as much depth on any other podcast before. So I really appreciate the opportunity.

Syama Bunten
Thank you for listening. This is the conversation we come back to every single week. Real women, real wealth, and what becomes possible when we stop being silent about money. If today’s episode moved you, don’t let it stop here. Wealth Catalyst is where women go to take it further. Our Freedom Tour salons are gathering women in 32 cities this year. Intimate evenings in homes and private spaces where women talk honestly about money, risk, and what they’re building.

And if you’re ready to go even bigger, join us at the Wealth Catalyst Summit, a full-day event in San Francisco this October. Find your city and claim your seat at wealthcatalyst.com. We’ll see you there.