Healthy Love & Money: Financial Therapy, Intimacy, Conflict & Communication for Couples

Today, Ed is joined by Kathleen Boyd, CFP®. She’s a Financial Planning and Process Coach with XY Planning Network, and a professor at Oklahoma State University.

Listen in as Kathleen dives into the human element of financial planning, of what it means to navigate love and money.

As a queer black woman who grew up in public housing, she looks back on the intimidation she felt early in her career of becoming an advisor to multimillionaire clients and working alongside mostly white co-workers and managers.

Kathleen highlights the importance of financial therapy in anyone’s financial journey. She calls it a powerful piece of the puzzle that shouldn’t end only with strategy and planning. Failing to address deep-seated beliefs, fears, and desires is one of the biggest reasons even a wealthy person can feel financially destitute.

Finally, Kathleen unpacks the phenomenon known as “singleism,” defining it as “the social and institutional discrimination that single people face simply due to their marital status.”

She and Ed agree on the often unfair advantages that married people have over singles, and even over those in polyamorous relationships. They offer their thoughts on how both the government and the financial industry can fill the gap.

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Today, Ed is joined by Kenneth White, an Associate Professor of Personal & Family Financial Planning at the University of Arizona.

Starting out as a CPA, Kenneth realized early in his career that while he loved the art of money, he hated cubicles. He tried his hand at an investment company before becoming a revenue agent with the IRS. Finally, he decided to pursue his dream of obtaining his Ph.D. in Family Resource Management at Ohio State University, and has been in academia ever since.

Listen in as Kenneth discusses the ongoing research being done on financial well-being and how financial professionals can improve client outcomes. He addresses the common hesitation that one has to be good at math in order to be financially literate, saying that it’s not as important to know how the math works as it is to know what the math means.

Kenneth shares how parents can best pass on life-defining money messages to their kids, and how families that have been historically excluded from quality financial information can go about acquiring that information.

Finally, Kenneth gives his best tips to the next generation of financial professionals, speaking on why altruism is a powerful motivator for one’s career, tapping into client psychology, and why financial professionals need their own financial planners.

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Today, Ed is joined by Cameron Huddleston, an author, speaker, and award-winning journalist with 20 years of experience writing about personal finance.

The mom of three juggled the responsibilities of parenthood while being caregiver for her own mom, who had Alzheimer’s disease. That experience made her realize how important it is for adult children to have conversations with their parents about their finances before a health issue or other emergency leaves them unable to manage on their own.

It was that period of her life that inspired Cameron to write Mom and Dad, We Need to Talk: How to Have Essential Conversations With Your Parents About Their Finances, in which she offers encouragement and guidance to people who desire open dialogue with their parents about a topic typically considered off-limits.

Listen in as Cameron explains how the challenges and goals differ between caring for children and caring for aging parents. She talks about the common roadblocks adult children face when having conversations with their parents about their finances, and why it’s crucial to talk to your siblings first before your parents.

Cameron also talks about the importance of teaching your own kids to get comfortable with open communication between family members regarding finances. Finally, she discusses practical steps to ease into that conversation with your aging parents as early as possible.

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Today, Ed is joined by Jen Gumbel, an estate planning and probate attorney based in Minnesota. She established Organized (after)Life to change how people think about estate planning and legacy.

Jen loves getting into the family dynamics around estate planning, her superpower being her ability to help people walk through legal issues or reduce the legal to-do list they’ll leave for their loved ones.

As she puts it, “I share the tools and information that all of us in ‘death law’ wish every client knew coming in and show people when and why working with an attorney is important.”

Listen in as Jen explains the difference between “legacy” and “wealth” and how our perspective on mortality shapes the decisions we make concerning our assets.

She also encourages beneficiaries to treat their family business as a real business, and to avoid banking one’s financial future on an inheritance to avoid disappointment down the road if the process does not go as smoothly as imagined.

Jen also lists the dos and don’ts of communicating with older clients about the importance of estate planning. In a similar vein, she addresses common mental and emotional roadblocks that often come with facilitating discussions between family members unaccustomed to talking about their finances with each other.

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Today, Ed is joined by Kate Mangino, a gender expert who works to change harmful social norms through writing, training, and facilitation.

She has 20+ years of experience working in the international development sector, writing and delivering curricula in over 20 countries on a range of issues.

Kate’s debut book, Equal Partners, looks at gender imbalances in our personal life and what we can do about it.

Listen in as Kate pulls back the curtain on why “gender” is such a tricky topic to discuss in today’s world—and why it shouldn’t be.

She talks about how married couples can improve gender equity at home by shifting our focus from doing tasks we feel we “ought” to do thanks to our ingrained notions about gender norms, to doing tasks based on what we value the most.

Finally, Kate goes beyond gender, explaining why seeing ourselves and our community through an “intersectional lens” is so important to understanding imbalances of power and expectations in society.

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Today, Ed is joined by Jeremy Keil, fellow financial planner and enthusiast of the psychology of motivational interviewing. Jeremy is here to teach us about the value of motivational interviewing and how he uses it to help his clients move from preretirement into retirement!

Motivational interviewing, which Jeremy calls “a guided discussion about change,” is a powerful way to avoid the often prescriptive approach that financial planners take when advising their clients.

As Jeremy succinctly puts it, “Telling people what to do is usually the best way to make sure it doesn’t happen!”

Motivational interviewing is all about helping clients discover what’s right for them. The idea is to help an individual believe they can change a certain aspect in their life, or a process of helping clients align their behavior with their goals and values.

Jeremy breaks down the philosophy and mechanics of motivational interviewing, encapsulated by two acronyms: OARS (Open-ended questions, Affirmations, Reflections, Summarizing) and PACE (Partnership, Acceptance, Compassion, Empathy).

Finally, he speaks on the often-overlooked but all-important psychological hurdle of finally making that transition from saver to spender which comes with the move from preretirement to retirement.

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Today, Ed is joined by Sarah Stanley Fallaw, Ph.D. She is the author of The Next Millionaire Next Door and the founder and President of DataPoints LLC, a company that provides technologically-enabled financial psychology tools to enhance wealth-building.

“We give you tools to understand your clients’ money mindset,” says Sarah regarding DataPoints’ mission. Listen in as she lays out the basic competencies of financial literacy, pointing to the unfortunate reality that “managing your financial life is essentially a job that very few of us are trained to do.”

Sarah throws back the curtain to reveal what makes The Millionaire Next Door tick. She discusses the traditional career path of the “average” U.S. millionaire and the typical relationship dynamics between high-net-worth families.

She and Ed also dive into how people of different personality traits—in Ed’s case, being incredibly high in agreeableness—maintain a healthy money mindset and the typical gaps that prevent many from growing their wealth.

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Today, Ed is joined by ESG consultant Brittany Damico. She is the Director Of Business Development at Ethos ESG, a data and analytics provider catering to financial advisors, individual investors, and institutions. The company helps with impact-focused lead generation, ESG data and research, personalized portfolio design, and tailored impact reports.

Brittany reflects on the personal journey that inspired her to devote her career to bringing more awareness and funding to impact-driven organizations.

She discusses the goals of SRI (socially responsible investments) and ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investing as “speaking to the human more so than the traditional portfolio theory, which is all about risk in financial performance.”

Listen in as Brittany explains what it means to align your values with your investing. She also shares how the SRI and ESG approach is rooted in the U.N.’s own 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Finally, Brittany discusses the cold hard data on the performance of impact-driven businesses compared with those of “traditional” ones so far, and what she sees for the future of the ESG initiative as more investors make the shift.

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Today, Ed is joined by forensic accountant Tracy Coenen. She has over two decades of experience in accounting and investigations, and has personally investigated more than 500 frauds in a wide variety of industries.

Tracy created the Divorce Money Guide, an online handbook which details the exact steps needed to uncover hidden financial fraud in cases of divorce.

She was inspired to write the Divorce Money Guide after realizing that many people in need of her services were unable to afford them. The handbook serves as a “do-it-yourself forensic accounting product for anyone who is going through divorce and needs to get their arms around the financials.”

Her goal? To help 1000 people a year get better financial outcomes in their divorces.

Listen in as Tracy discusses the typical work she does for her corporate clientele as well as her individual clients who are entwined in money conflicts amid divorce. She explains that, in cases of fraud, her job is to “trace the money, figure out where it went, and testify as an expert.”

Tracy also offers a peek into her criminal defense work and shares her experiences and fascinating takeaways from working with both wealthy clients and clients who struggled financially.

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Today, Ed is joined by Michael Reynolds, a Certified Financial Planner™ and owner of Elevation Financial, a fee-only financial planning and investment management firm serving progressive SRI/ESG investors. He is the host of the weekly personal finance podcast called Wealth Redefined®.

Listen in as Michael reflects on his transition from owner of a digital marketing agency to financial planner, and shares the ways in which he’s applied the principles of financial therapy to his current role. He talks about how growing up in a household that didn’t handle money well led him to dedicate his career to personal finance.

“Money and mental health are so tightly intertwined,” says Michael, “that we’d be doing clients a disservice by ignoring that.” He believes that the financial planning process brings a level of clarity to a couple’s financial life which they never up until now have been able to acquire on their own.

That’s only possible, he continues, if the financial planner is able to find alignment between the system and the human⁠—between the practicalities of personal finances and how clients feel about the process.

Ultimately, the goal of a financial planner is to achieve integration: Helping clients get to the point where they can accumulate wealth and manage money well without sacrificing well-being and positive experiences.

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