Capital Diva. Your career. Your money. Your terms.

About Capital Diva

Last updated: August 22, 2026

Capital Diva exists for one reason: the highest-return money skills most American women were never taught aren't about investing or couponing — they're about earning. Negotiating an offer. Documenting a promotion case. Pricing freelance work. Reading a pay-transparency law and using it. These skills are learnable, they compound for decades, and they're weirdly under-documented compared to, say, the 40,000 identical articles about lattes.

So this site publishes playbooks, not pep talks. Every article aims to leave you with three things: a number (real salary data, sourced and dated), a script (words you can actually say, with notes on why they're built that way), and the trade-offs (where the tactic fails, because everything fails somewhere).

Who writes this

Capital Diva is written by Simone Hartley, a former corporate marketing manager from Atlanta who negotiated her own pay from $52K to six figures over a decade before going independent. Simone's authority is documentation, not credentials — she's not a financial planner or attorney, and the site doesn't pretend otherwise.

Our sourcing standards

  • Salary and wage figures cite their source and year — most often the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose surveys are the closest thing American pay data has to ground truth.
  • Where a topic touches law or taxes — pay-transparency statutes, FMLA, self-employment tax — we describe the rules factually and link to the official source (IRS, DOL, EEOC, state labor departments) rather than interpreting them for your situation.
  • This site does not give investment advice, recommend securities or cryptocurrency, or promise financial outcomes. Careers and earning skills only. See the disclaimer.
  • When we get something wrong, we correct the article and update its "last updated" date. Corrections are welcome at hello@capitaldiva.com.

Where to start