Mel Meagher spent twenty years inside the financial services industry watching the same thing happen, over and over. Smart, capable women, the kind who ran teams, raised families, and built impressive careers, would sit across from her and confess, almost in a whisper, that they had no idea where their money actually went.

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She'd worked as a financial planner, a stockbroker, and a seminar delivery specialist, moving through everything from the big institutions to smaller boutique firms. She had the technical side down cold. But what she kept noticing wasn't a knowledge gap. It was shame. Women who were succeeding at everything else in their lives felt like frauds the moment the conversation turned to money, convinced that everyone around them had it figured out while they were quietly drowning.

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About ten years ago, Mel had her own reckoning. She realised she'd never really fitted the shape of being employed. She wanted something more, she knew she was done working for someone else, and she wanted to be fully present for her young children rather than trading her time for a salary. So she took everything she'd learned about money, paired it with what she'd come to believe was the real work, the work of understanding why smart women make the money decisions they make, and built Talking Money.

Talking Money isn't a budgeting service. Mel has never been interested in scorched earth spreadsheets or telling anyone what they should or shouldn't spend on coffee. Her approach starts somewhere else entirely: with a woman's values, her aspirations, and the money story she's been carrying since long before she ever had a bank account. Mel's belief, built over two decades of watching it play out again and again, is simple. Whatever financial strategy you put in place on the outside won't hold if you haven't dealt with what's driving your behaviour on the inside. Get the inside sorted, and clarity, awareness, and efficiency around money follow naturally.

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Through Talking Money and her second brand, The Rebel Money Coach, Mel now works with motivated, dynamic women who are done feeling consumed by money and ready to claim their worth, activate their sense of abundance, and step fully into their own power. Her self-paced program, the SHINE Method, exists for the women who want to start that work in their own time. Her retreats, workshops, and one on one coaching exist for the women who want to go deeper.

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Mel considers public speaking her super-power, and it shows. She has spoken to corporate audiences, professional associations, women's networks, and universities, and appeared as a guest speaker for organisations including Business Chicks. Her insights on the psychology of money have been featured in media outlets including Marie Claire Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Finance) and a Diploma of Financial Planning, is a former Certified Financial Planner, and has been a member of the Financial Planning Association since 1997.

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Mel lives in Brisbane, keeps herself fit and healthy, and believes good company, good food, and good wine are non-negotiable. But ask her what she's really building, and she'll tell you it isn't a business. It's a growing group of women who no longer lie awake at 2am doing mental gymnastics over their bank balance, who've stopped feeling ashamed of a subject nobody ever actually taught them, and who now understand that money was only ever meant to be a tool for the life they actually want to live.