Hi, I'm Tera.
The deeper story was never about houses.
Entrepreneur · Investor · Writer · Speaker · Mother of Four
I've always believed people remember how you make them feel.
I've spent most of my adult life in hospitality. I grew up the kind of person who couldn't sit still when guests arrived — refilling glasses, pulling out the good chairs, watching to see whether a room had everything it needed. What I didn't know yet was that the instinct had a name, and that I'd spend decades turning it into a livelihood. Somewhere between a tidied guest room and a well-set table, I'd already chosen the work.
That instinct became Luxury Getaways — boutique homes and stays I've built across the Pacific Northwest, Arizona, and Coastal Georgia. On paper it's a hospitality company. In practice, it has always been about people. The way they arrive tired. The way they soften when a space feels easy and nothing is asking anything of them. The way a family will remember a few quiet days together long after the thread count and the welcome basket have faded from memory. I've cleaned the floors and closed the deals, and I can tell you the part guests carry home is never the part you'd put in a brochure.
Along the way I became a mother of four — four sons, each one rearranging what I thought I knew about patience, presence, and what a full life actually requires. Motherhood is the most demanding business I'll ever run and the only one I'd never restructure. It reset my definition of success entirely. A win at work that costs me a morning with my boys stopped looking like a win at all.
Raising my son Lucas taught me the rest of it. He moves through a world that wasn't quite built for him, and learning to advocate for him — to insist on his dignity in rooms that didn't always make space for it — changed how I see care, accommodation, and what it means to truly look after another person. He is the reason I no longer believe hospitality is something you perform. It's something you practice, every day, for the people right in front of you.
Put all of that together and you arrive at the belief that runs under everything I do: luxury isn't excess — it's peace. Hospitality isn't performance — it's care. And success means very little if the life around it doesn't feel like your own. I stopped chasing more and started protecting better. Quieter mornings. Longer tables. Work that I'm proud to have my name on, built at a pace I can actually live with.
That same conviction is why I do the financial work I do. Real estate gave my family options instead of obligations, and I'd be doing women a disservice to keep that quiet — so through Girl Retire I write and teach about women and money, ownership, and building wealth that buys back your own time. Retirement, I've come to believe, is a decision, not an age. I want more women to get to make it on their own terms, early and on purpose.
So now I write. More than I ever expected to, honestly. I write about the work, the life, and the lessons I'm still in the middle of learning — and I've organized the whole of it around the seasons. Winters in the Pacific Northwest, summers on the water, spring and fall on the Coastal Georgia shore. Letting place set the pace has been the truest luxury of all. This page, and everything beside it, is where I tell you about it — kitchen-table conversation, not a sales pitch.
A life built around rhythm instead of rush.
For us, a year isn't one place; it's three. We winter where the trees are tall and the rain is honest, spend our summers aboard a boat with the whole family pared down to what fits and what matters, and slip into Coastal Georgia for the warm, slow shoulder seasons.
It started as logistics and became a philosophy — that life feels fuller when you let the weather, the light, and the rhythm of a place set the pace, instead of forcing the same pace onto every month of the year. Everything I build now bends toward that idea.
Building businesses · Creating peace · Living by the seasons
Enter the seasonsEverything comes back to five ideas.
Strip away the businesses and the bylines and you find the same five threads running through all of it — the things I write, build, and speak about, over and over.
If any of this sounds like your kind of conversation —
Start with the writing. It's the most honest version of all of this: the work, the life, and the lessons I'm still learning, written the way I'd tell you across a kitchen table. And if you'd rather just say hello — about a stage, a story, or anything else — I'd genuinely love to hear from you.
— Tera