Managing your finances

[lavanzee]

I want to start off my question here by letting everyone know that I'm not a nurse, I'm a certified financial planning professional. I have become very interested in learning how I could use my expertise to benefit nurses because of what I have gone through since the premature birth of my daughter last December.

Due to my own preeclampsia, my daughter was born 2 1/2 months early. She was soon after diagnosed with several holes in her heart and an abnormal heart valve. She had open heart surgery at three months of age and since then has been struggling to overcome chronic lung disease. Suffice to say, I have spent a heck of a lot of time hanging around the hospital this year.

While I was still on maternity leave my employer laid me off (a whole 'nuther story). It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because it has given me much more time to devote to my daughter's needs. It has also got me thinking about what I'm going to do when she is in a place where I can start working again. (I live in San Francisco, so being a permanent stay at home mom really isn't an option).

What I want to do is create my own financial planning practice shaped around the needs of nurses who are not necessarily on staff at a facility. One nurse that I got to know at my daughter's NICU told me about how her experience working per diem before she was hired on as a staff nurse put her behind financially because when she didn't get as many hours as she expected she would often rely on credit cards to cover the gap. Now she is working on staff, but still has a bunch of debt that she needs to dig out of. So this got me thinking, hey, this is one way that I could be of service and sort of pay back karma owed to the group of people who have done the most to help my little girl get better.

But I realize that I need to know more about what type of things that agency or travel or independent contract nurses need the most help with. So I'm hoping that this forum can help. Would you be willing to give me some insight about the types of financial topics you would most wish to have an expert help you with?