Diane Park

Diane Park spent twenty-three years in human-resources leadership at three mid-cap public companies in the Twin Cities — a regional retailer, a food-processing firm, and a Tier-1 automotive supplier — including ten years as VP of People at the retailer through two recessionary RIF cycles. She sat on the company side of more than two hundred reduction-in-force conversations during that career, watching the same patterns repeat: the same severance forms, the same hesitations, the same five-figure mistakes made because the worker did not have the information at hand in the first thirty days.

In 2022 she crossed the table. She left the corporate-HR track and started a small financial-survival coaching practice working specifically with forced-exit households in their late fifties and early sixties — the demographic this book is written for. Her clients have run the spectrum from low-six-figure to multi-million-dollar households; the worksheets in this book come from her practice. She has two adult children, both Twin-Cities-based, and a habit of conducting client meetings on a screened porch in summer and at a kitchen table in winter. She lives in Saint Paul with her husband Tom, a still-working architect who frequently reads over her shoulder. Macalester College, 1986, with a degree in industrial psychology.