Darcy Holmer graduated from Macomb High School in 1986, knowing two things for certain: she loved to read, and she wanted to see the world.

The reading came first. She describes herself as a voracious reader almost from the time she could hold a book, the kind of kid who would disappear into stories about people living in distant countries and come out the other side wanting to actually go there. She was the youngest of two girls — her older sister the extrovert, Darcy the introvert, content to travel through pages.

The world would come later. And it would come in ways she couldn't have mapped.

After high school, she enrolled at the University of Illinois, studying finance, quietly harboring an ambition to study abroad. The obstacle was money. Study abroad wasn't common in the late 1980s, and it wasn't cheap. But Darcy had a secret advantage: her mother.

For years, her grandparents had given government savings bonds for every birthday, every Christmas, every special occasion. When the investment club craze of the 1980s took hold, her mother got curious, joined a club, and made a decision. She cashed in the bonds and invested the proceeds in a mutual fund — Darcy still remembers its name, New Perspectives. "Reinvested dividends did what normal saving could not have done," she said. The pot grew.

When a study-abroad program in Alicante, Spain appeared, Darcy went to her parents with a proposition: it wouldn't cost them a dime. They said yes.

Three weeks into the summer language program, she called home from an expensive telefónica and told her father she wanted to stay an extra semester — a business program in Sevilla, fully funded by her savings, which would help her get a job when she graduated. Then she called her dean and made essentially the same case. Both said yes. She got the credit, stayed, and came home changed.

"I was totally bitten by the bug," she said.

That bite got her hired. At a University of Illinois recruiting event, she came across Abbott Laboratories — a company offering a financial development program with overseas rotations. She had nine hours of accounting instead of the required twelve, having taken Shakespeare instead. "They were so impressed with the study abroad," she said, "because it wasn't that common back then." They hired her anyway, on the condition that she take one more accounting course.

She lobbied hard for the overseas rotation and landed in Germany, outside Frankfurt. There, as part of a larger Abbott cohort, she met the Swedish colleague who would eventually become her husband. Before her assignment ended, she slipped him her Chicago office number. He called when he came to the States.

What followed was a career that wound through Hungary, Chicago, and eventually Moscow — where her husband was tasked with opening Abbott's Russian office in 2002. The assignment was supposed to last two to three years. It stretched to nine.

The paradox of Moscow, she says, was that her life had never felt smaller. "You think about somebody going overseas, and you think, wow, their life's getting so big," she said. "But in reality, my life had never been smaller — we were in this gated compound, and I could spend two weeks there without leaving." With the boys in school at the Anglo-American School of Moscow and her husband building the office, she went back to school online, earned an MBA and a master's in public health, organized food drives for the city's street children, and launched a recycling program for their housing community of some 800 homes. The Russians, she noted with a laugh, couldn't understand why she was doing it for free.

Then stress drove her to do something she had spent a lifetime avoiding: exercise.

"Cookie dough was a major food group in my life," she said. "I mean, seriously. I'd drink Slim-Fast shakes and then eat cookie dough." The exercise changed that. As she started to feel better, her eating shifted. Her energy shifted. She became a certified personal trainer, then a life coach, drawn to helping other women experience what she had stumbled into. Her older sister's parallel journey — a 130-pound loss through walking and changed eating habits after a serious health scare — reinforced her belief in exactly this kind of incremental, unglamorous transformation.

Finance kept working its way back in. "As I was working with women about achieving different life goals, guess what kept coming back into the mix?" she said. "Money." She got certified as a financial coach, and over time — through Turkey, Switzerland, and finally Mexico City — developed a philosophy weaving together three strands of well-being: the inner self, the physical body, and financial confidence.

In December 2023, that philosophy became a book: The Personal Power Program: A Woman's Step-by-Step Guide to Thriving in Self, Body and Money.

Today, she and her husband live in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where she volunteers with a financial empowerment program called Self Help, running financial literacy workshops and one-on-one coaching for individuals and families building stronger foundations.

Her message to anyone feeling stuck is simple and earned: "Take the smallest step possible that you will take and do it — then go from there and take another one. People don't go from A to Z. They go from A to B to C."

The girl who once chose skiing over a high school trip to Spain — knowing full well she'd get to Spain eventually — eventually made it to Spain, Germany, Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Switzerland, and Mexico. The map kept expanding.

It tends to, when you keep taking steps.