What Drives Us

The gap that started this

There is a lot of financial education available in Ireland. Most of it is aimed at people who are already in work, already comfortable with financial language, and who don't have a CV gap to explain. Very little of it is designed for women who have stepped back from paid employment to care for children, parents, or partners — or to manage their own health — and are now navigating the return.

The return to work involves a cluster of financial questions that arrive all at once: What does this payslip mean? Should I opt into the pension scheme straight away? Is this benefits package actually good or just presented well? How do I negotiate salary when I feel like I'm already on the back foot? How does our household budget change now?

These aren't questions that require individual financial advice. They're questions that require clear, practical information — delivered in a way that connects with what women in this situation already know and have already done.

What you already know

Running a household budget through a career break — especially one that involves childcare, medical costs, or caring responsibilities — is financially complex. You've made decisions under constraint, tracked spending across multiple categories, planned for irregular expenses, and absorbed financial shocks without a corporate budget to fall back on.

That's real financial competence. The problem is that it doesn't translate automatically into workplace financial literacy, because the language and framing are different. Our workshops bridge that gap directly — starting from what participants already understand and building from there.

Why group format

Individual financial advice is regulated in Ireland, and rightly so. But the questions women returning to work tend to have are not questions that require regulated advice — they're questions about how things work, what the terms mean, and what to consider. These are exactly the kinds of questions that benefit from a group setting, where other people are asking similar things and where the shared experience of the career break itself provides useful context.

The peer support element isn't incidental — it's part of what makes these sessions work. Knowing that other people in the room have managed the same juggle, faced the same uncertainty, and are asking the same questions changes how the material lands.