Founder story
My first lessons about money didn't come from a textbook. They came from watching my father at the kitchen table.
My first lessons about money didn’t come from a textbook. They came from watching my father at the kitchen table.
Dad was an entrepreneur, accountant, business consultant, and business broker. He taught me bookkeeping when I was thirteen. I also grew up listening to conversations about businesses, financial statements, difficult decisions, successes, and mistakes that I wouldn’t fully understand until years later.
But that kitchen table taught me something else, too.
My father was often better at helping other people solve financial problems than he was at giving our personal finances that same attention. I watched bills pile up. I felt the difference between good months and thin ones. And I learned early that money is never only about money. It changes the atmosphere of a home.
Years later, Dad and I would spend long breakfasts and cups of coffee talking about those years. We talked about what he had learned, mistakes he had seen and made, and what he would do differently if he could do it all again.
Then I discovered that our family’s financial story went back another generation.
My great-grandfather was a successful entrepreneur in Michigan who built several businesses. Over the generations, much of that wealth disappeared. But so did something equally important: the knowledge behind building and preserving it.
Eventually, life handed me financial challenges of my own. I had the knowledge my father had given me, but this time it wasn’t enough. I had to learn more, rebuild, and figure out what came next.
I began to wonder how much financial knowledge families repeatedly lose simply because no one intentionally passes it on.
It wasn’t built on the belief that everyone should already know how to manage money. It wasn’t built on the assumption that we’re all starting from the same place.
It came from something much simpler:
Start where you are. Understand what’s in front of you. Figure out the next wise step. Then keep building.
That’s what I want Break the Cycle Finance to feel like: a place where we can talk honestly about money, learn from what previous generations got right and wrong, and build financial knowledge worth passing forward.
Because generational wealth begins long before there’s a fortune to inherit.
It begins when financial wisdom starts passing from one generation to the next.
And this time, I want it to stay in the family — mine, yours, and the generations that come after us.
The short version
Founder, Break the Cycle Finance
Daughter of an entrepreneur who was also an accountant, a consultant, and a business broker. She learned bookkeeping at thirteen, rebuilt her own finances after a season she never saw coming, and believes in honest numbers, steady steps, and second chances.
She writes and teaches for families building a stronger foundation than the one they started on — one conversation at a time.
If Rebecca's story sounds like yours, the platform is where the teaching lives.