Is Financial Therapy the Next Frontier in Banking? // Money Isn't Everything 1x14

Hey, Mary Wisniewski here, Cornerstone Advisors editor-at-large.

Today on the show, I’m speaking with Lindsay Bryan-Podvin. She’s the founder of Mind Money Balance, and she has many titles, but among them are financial therapist, author, and speaker.

Through December of this year, she’s also Cash App’s financial therapist.

I was so excited about this conversation because I’m really, really, really curious about financial therapy.

I am sensing that one way fintechs, and also credit unions, may start to stand out in the pack is by working with financial therapists.

In this chat, we explore what the profession is and what it could mean for the industry.

We also explore how emotions and money are deeply linked, and the importance of making compassion part of the product.

One note, I call Cash App “Square” in the conversation. My bad. We’re only talking about Cash App and her work there.

Here’s our conversation.

Lindsay, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for being on Money Isn’t Everything.

Yeah, I’m so happy to be chatting with you, Mary.

You have no idea how happy I am to be chatting with you.

Although maybe you do because I just told you before this.

I’m super excited because you’re a financial therapist, and I keep hearing about entrepreneurs in the fintech space wanting to start applying this kind of thinking, if not bringing this kind of talent to their company.

So, I’m excited to mine your brain about the profession.

I thought that’s where we’d start.

As a financial therapist, you are exploring the emotional side of money, and I think it’s so important because people have physical reactions to money.

To me, I think about how I enter a doctor’s office and I start sweating, and I feel like these are the kind of threads that come out for a lot of money decisions.

I thought we could start by you setting the stage of the significance of studying and practicing the emotional side of money.

Yeah, of course.

So, as you already explained, money is emotional.

We all have different relationships with money.

When it comes to what a financial therapist is and what they do, just like there are therapists who can specialize in things like childhood development or couples issues, a financial therapist is a mental health therapist who has specialized training in the psychological, emotional, and systemic side of money.

These are the people who are there to help individuals with those emotional stressors that come up with money.

Financial therapists are there to provide a space to discuss money without judgment, using techniques from the therapy room, but also with a baseline knowledge of financial education, to help their clients have a holistic, healthy, intersectional relationship with money.

So, if we think of financial experts like CPAs and CFPs being more of the how-to, financial therapists are more there to focus on the why.

So, less how to make a budget, how to save for retirement, how to save for an emergency, and much more, why?

Why is it important for you to save for those things?

What’s getting in the way of you saving for those things?

Why is it challenging for you to use some of the tools that are available to you?

So that’s really what we are there to do.

I think that’s super fascinating.

How did you get drawn into this world?

Oh, I fell into it.

Yeah. I mean, that’s the story of many of us.

But how did you fall into it?

Yeah. I try to shrink down and make more succinct my story, but essentially, I’m a clinical social worker.

I have a background in mental health, and in my first job with my master’s degree, I got my first paycheck and was earning less than I did as a waitress.

Really quickly, because I come from relative financial stability and financial privilege, I realized the impact on my physical and mental health of living paycheck to paycheck.

All of a sudden, I was not sleeping through the night.

My anxiety and depression that had been really well managed started to flare.

I was starting to get colds and flu all the time.

I just knew that money management was more than dollars in, dollars out.

There was also this piece of intentionality.

The messages that I got about being a social worker were like, you do this because you care, not because you care about money, and you’re not here to make money.

So, that internal battle of wanting to do good in the world and also not wanting to live paycheck to paycheck was a struggle.

Eventually, I moved on to a better-paying job, and the issue of money kept coming up in my clinical work.

My training basically told me to help people call an 800 number so their electricity didn’t get shut off, but it was not about how they got there in the first place or how to prevent it from happening again.

I just really believed that the intersection of money and mental health was something that needed to be explored.

I also knew that I didn’t want to go and become a CPA or a CFP.

I knew I wanted to stay in the field of mental health, and I wanted to practice within that scope.

So then I sought out additional training in financial therapy and in financial social work so that I could keep doing what I love doing, but with an emphasis on the mental and emotional side of money.

I think that the fact that this profession exists is also a nod to something that banks and credit unions are increasingly becoming aware of.

They’ve invested in a lot of these budgeting tools, like here’s a pie chart of your money, here’s a way to improve your money, but then it doesn’t really work.

It doesn’t really improve financial outcomes, and it can actually be really depressing to engage with it.

So, this seems like a vibrant opportunity to think about it in a different way.

What would be a starting place you would advise a banker or credit union, or even a fintech startup that hasn’t delved into this world yet, of how to think about this when they’re saying they want to improve someone’s financial livelihood?

Such a great question.

When I think about somebody who has an interest in helping consumers manage their money better, it’s thinking about meeting their consumers or clients where they’re at, which is something that we say all the time in therapy.

So, it sounds a little cliche, but let me paint a picture for what I mean when I say meeting your clients where they’re at.

For me as a financial therapist, that means that I have different tiers of meeting people where they’re at.

I partner with Cash App to help people understand how to take advantage of some of those tools and how to look at their spending insights and how to be mindful of where they’re spending their money.

For other people, I help them through generalized workshops on financial wellness with my partnership at the University of Michigan.

Then for other people, it’s personalized one-on-one financial therapy.

So, if I’m imagining myself as a bank or as a credit union, thinking through those different tiers and seeing whether or not there might be areas to lean into.

It doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to reinvent the wheel.

Helping to educate your consumers about what products and tools you already have available, and potentially even just thinking about advertising them more or showing them how they can be used.

Because when we leverage these tools from a place of empowerment versus from a place of punishment, that’s when we tend to get buy-in.

What I mean by that is, you can have a savings tool or a budgeting tool, but if we are talking about it from a place of, “You need to spend less money. Stop spending your money. You’re bad,” it’s hard to engage with a tool like that.

But if we’re using that tool and we’re saying, “Look at where you’re spending your money. Does this feel good for you? Does this feel supportive of you? Is this spending in this particular area in alignment with your savings goals? And if not, what are the modifications that we can do?”

So, it’s less about an overhaul and much more about how can we help consumers understand the tools that are available to them and accessible to them, and potentially frame them around a more compassionate, more positive, more kind side of money instead of from that shame-based place that has typically dominated the personal finance narrative.

I love that you just mentioned the value, like does this expense line up with your value?

Do you think something like that should be part of a digital banking experience, kind of a mindful check-in?

I don’t think it would be for everybody, but do you think it should be among the offerings?

Yeah.

I mean, I’m all about any type of tool that we can use to help leverage people to do that type of check-in so they can be in a relationship with their money that is exactly that, that is more mindful.

Because, like you said, it’s not about the only thing that you can do mindfully with your money is save.

Of course, we can mindfully save.

If we’re spending, making sure that we’re taking that additional extra moment, or two, or five, to make sure that the money that we are spending, we’re less likely to have that regret come with it.

Regret, yes.

As that song is, I’ve had a few.

A few more.

Yeah.

That’s another piece of financial therapy, naming that money mistakes are normal and that we’ve all made them.

To your point, Mary, we’re going to make them again.

This idea that we are infallible humans and we never slip up again, I think, is a really hard standard for us to try and uphold.

I’m curious about how you think about this.

I’ve noticed on TikTok it goes two different ways.

One way, it makes people want to spend more, but on the other hand, I’m seeing things like debt confessionals of like, “Hey, I don’t want to have shame about this debt, but I’m going to story this and share it with people.”

Do you think this is a healthy thing, to be more open about what’s really going on in one’s personal finance journey?

Yeah.

I’m all about anything that we can do to normalize and validate our lived experience with money.

You’re so right that they tend to fall into these two categories.

I think that there’s such a craving, there’s such a desire, there are so many people that are wanting a more human approach to personal finances and a more compassionate and more kind approach to finances.

So, if I’m scrolling through TikTok and I have high consumer debt, and I see somebody talking about their debt journey and how they got into debt and the steps that they took to get out of it, it makes me feel less alone.

Having that validation and not feeling alone takes it away from it being a personal problem where I’m a failure and into, I’m a human.

I’m a person who’s made a mistake, or I was in a scenario where this was my only option, and what can I do to cope?

Other trends that are kind of in that vein of normalizing and validating, or spending a little bit less intentionally, are things like underconsumption core.

So that’s like spending less.

For the past few years, thrifting has obviously taken off as a way to spend less on new consumer goods.

There are always these different trends that are coming out.

At the beginning of 2024, loud budgeting was a big trend where people would say out loud, “I’m not spending my money on that. I’m saving up for this,” or, “I’m saving up for that.”

Anything that we can do, I’m all for it.

The nice thing too is that you can scroll on by if you’re like, “Oh, it doesn’t really feel great to me.”

Then no harm, no foul. You can just keep scrolling.

Yeah, no, I think it’s so cool.

Do you think a fintech brand or more traditional bank or credit union should be producing this kind of content on TikTok?

Great question.

So, I would say yes and yes because, or maybe yes and an asterisk.

Yes, if.

I think knowing the why, going back to the why.

What is the why behind creating that content?

I think something that is really important when it comes to social media is, the great thing about it is anyone can produce content, and the not-so-great thing about it is that anyone can produce content.

So, if we have a reputable credit union or fintech app or payment solution service that is offering insight that is actually truthful, that is incredibly important.

I think there are ways to do it that are engaging and, again, going back to empowering, to help consumers of that app learn how they could use your tool or use your service in a way that feels safe and that feels good, versus just kind of globbing onto all of the old ways that we used to talk about money.

Yeah, which often have been pretty hidden, I’d say.

Yeah.

I wanted to go, I mean, you’ve mentioned you’re this year’s financial therapist at Cash App, and that’s not the only example of this happening.

Laurel Road, for example, is giving people a few free months to the Calm app.

There are other fintech apps that approach a mental health thing in a different way.

One could block gambling purchases, for example, on certain apps.

These are the different threads I’m seeing as an outsider of how this is all kind of blurring and blending.

What kind of striking examples are you seeing, or what are you hearing?

So, in my partnership with Cash App, what I find to be really exciting is, as you mentioned, there is such a growing interest and a growing desire to better serve their consumers by providing them with the tools that are needed in order to make really wise financial decisions.

For example, with Cash App, you can look at your spending insights, as I mentioned earlier, and really get a sense of, is this really where I want to be spending money? Is this where I don’t want to be spending money?

Soon there will be features rolling out that will allow you to do something called merchant blocking.

Merchant blocking is exactly what it sounds like, where you could block a purchase from going through if you are paying with your Cash App card.

So, giving consumers the power to say, “No, I don’t want to spend money in that way,” or, “Yes, I do want to spend money in that way.”

If you are planning on spending money anyway on something like Uber, getting a discount by purchasing something through an app can be really helpful.

But I love some of the things that you’ve mentioned about these intersections and collaborations between different fintech platforms and mental wellness platforms.

The thing that I like about the example with Calm is that, much like I shared earlier, it’s about meeting consumers where they’re at and meeting clients where they’re at.

For some clients and for some consumers, doing a five-minute meditation is going to be all they need.

Whereas for other people, they might need to go to a one-on-one therapist to get some additional support for their mental well-being.

So, I think all of these things can be beneficial because we’re giving language and tools at the same time to consumers to give them the power to decide, how do I want to use this? How does this support me? How does this best fit with my overall wellness snapshot?

Yeah.

So, I think that’s a really important point too.

There’s no one solution here.

There needs to be many.

Yeah.

It’s hard, right?

Especially when we think about tech.

Tech loves to do problem, solution, and have it be, if A, then B.

But that’s unfortunately not the way that most of our emotions work or the human brain works.

We have so much data and so much insight about the way we behave, about the way we think, and about the way we feel.

But there is something really powerful about giving consumers the opportunity to choose what fits for them and allowing them to decide what feels best.

So, it isn’t a one-size-fits-all, and I know that tech loves to be, “This is the one solution.”

But there are many, many options here to help your consumers feel supported around their emotional and financial wellness.

Yeah.

I’m laughing right now because I think of my friends sometimes.

I present like, “Oh, and here’s this app that will do this,” but they’re like, “Oh, that’s not, that wouldn’t help me.”

You know what I mean?

But the entrepreneur thinks that will solve the issue.

It’s just often more nuanced.

Yeah, exactly.

Lindsay, there’s one segment on the show that we do that’s called “That’s What You Said.”

Luckily, among your many skills, you’re an author.

So, “That’s What You Said” was in your book, The Financial Anxiety Solution.

You wrote that a person with financial anxiety can feel guilty, embarrassed, or fearful of their money.

Their heart races when the bill comes at dinner.

Their stomach drops when they have to talk about their performance review.

They feel demoralized when they don’t understand what’s going on in their retirement account.

That’s so striking because it’s really showcasing the feelings, of course, of what’s going on here.

I was hoping we could unpack that a bit more.

Walk me through an example or two of things you’ve encountered with real-life humans.

Yeah.

So, my book, as you mentioned, The Financial Anxiety Solution, focuses on anxiety and money.

To be clear, this isn’t necessarily talking about the clinical diagnosis of anxiety.

This is the anxiety that we all experience as humans.

One of the things, when we experience anxiety, anxiety is a natural response to a stressor.

So, what happens is we get those physiological responses.

Our breath gets a little bit shallower.

We get a little bit sweaty.

It’s a little bit harder to focus.

You might have some stomach queasiness.

When we feel that way physically, our emotions kind of get on board.

We start to question ourselves.

We get really uncomfortable.

We don’t like being uncomfortable, so we kind of want to leave the scenario.

When we experience that financial anxiety, we try to make some sort of financial decision when we are in that state of being really overwhelmed from a nervous system standpoint.

We aren’t going to make the wisest decisions.

So, really thinking about first noticing that that anxiety is happening.

Then when we catch, “Oh, I’m feeling anxious because a bill got dropped off at dinner, and I didn’t discuss with my friends beforehand how we were going to split.”

But you don’t go through all that first, right?

What you first feel is tension in your shoulders, and your eyes start darting around the dinner table, and you’re wondering what’s going to happen.

So, in that moment, pausing and noticing, “Oh my gosh, my heart rate is spiking. All of a sudden, my stomach is really clenched. My muscles are tight.”

This is anxiety.

This is a response to stress.

Then kind of talking yourself through, it’s okay that I feel anxiety.

It’s okay that I feel stress.

Why am I feeling this?

Well, I’m feeling this because I was planning on just paying for the portion of the dinner that I bought.

I don’t want to split it every single way, and I’m really nervous or frightened that my friends might judge me if I make that ask.

Then really thinking about, how true is it?

How true is it that this group of people who you’ve just broken bread with is going to say, “Lindsay, you’re so cheap. You’re so stingy. I can’t believe you did that.”

I mean, they might, but then maybe it’s time to get a new group of friends.

But in reality, more likely is you can say, “Hey, this feels a little bit weird, or I’m feeling a little bit anxious, but I was really just planning on spending money tonight on my portion of the meal. Can I just Cash App whomever takes the tab my portion of the meal and my part of the tip?”

When we do something like that, versus respond to that nervous system dysregulation, we are able to make wiser financial decisions.

The example there is, if I didn’t pause, if I didn’t take myself through the way I was thinking, the way I was feeling, I might just throw my credit card in and split it four ways and then feel that regret the next day that I didn’t advocate for what I wanted financially.

Or I throw my credit card in, but then the next time my friends ask me out, instead of saying, “No, I can’t afford it,” or, “That’s not in my budget right now,” I just ghost.

Those are the types of decisions that we might make when we’re really anxious.

So, encouraging us to just notice the connection between financial behaviors and anxiety and give ourselves permission to slow down, to check in on what’s happening so that we can make decisions that we feel better about, or at least are decisions that were better in that moment for us.

Yeah.

It’s always that moment of giving yourself permission to create a pause.

But that’s very hard to do.

There’s one thing that’s happened, it’s for an app that was created for older adults, but it’s like when they’re sending money to a new contact, it won’t move for like six hours.

But that’s to give them that pause in case it’s fraud.

I would love that idea used in other ways as well to handle some of the emotional challenges tied up with money.

Yeah, such a great point.

You’re just exploring this, and I know Cash App has that study about manners.

It was really zoomed in on Gen Z because I’m also curious about, are there patterns in different ages here?

Mostly, for sure.

Yeah.

So, I want to know about those patterns versus ages.

I’m curious what you found most striking in some of that data, or funny or surprising.

Yeah.

So many different things that come up.

But one thing, just as a therapist, as I zoom out and I look at these generational differences, what strikes me is how quickly our thoughts and our beliefs and our etiquette around money have changed with the rise of the way that we do things online versus the way we used to do things in brick and mortar in previous generations.

This study in particular was really looking at Gen Z and Millennial folks.

But what we noticed was how comfortable these generations of folks are, because they’re digital natives, using money in a way that we might not use and doing things that previous generations might consider to be a little bit gauche or a little bit tacky.

For example, Gen Z doesn’t believe, generally speaking, in splitting the bill 50/50, or in that dinner example I gave, splitting it evenly four ways.

They think that’s kind of tacky.

They actually think that everybody should pay for what they got because, again, they grew up in this era where they were able to quickly divvy up who had what and send money back and forth.

Whereas for previous generations, it would be mortifying to have to get out all of your dollars and make sure that it’s exactly right and ask for anything different.

So, we saw that big difference.

The other thing is just the literal comfort that people have or don’t have when it comes to digital or credit cards versus cash.

So, 25% of Gen Zers said that actual physical cash gave them the ick.

I don’t know if I can say that as a Millennial.

But they were like, oh, it was associated with feeling cringey and icky and sad.

They’re just not used to it.

So, to me, I think it really highlights how quickly life has changed over the last 20, 30 years.

How normal what other folks in older generations, how normal sending money to your friend has become.

How normal it has been to advocate to just pay for your way.

Or to advocate to set a boundary and say, “Hey, I’m not going to go to that wedding. It’s outside of my budget.”

Whereas a couple generations ago, those were the things that were pretty taboo.

These younger generations are far more comfortable naming what’s going on, advocating for their needs, setting boundaries, and talking about some of those taboo things because, again, it’s just built in in ways that it wasn’t in previous generations.

Yeah.

It influences, like there’s an openness to sharing how much money you make, for example, too, which I find can go both ways, right?

Yes, that’s important, but also, oh, you might have some awkwardness as a result with a few people.

Do you think this will have to influence product design in some way?

I don’t know exactly how I’m thinking about that, but...

I’m nodding my head.

Yeah.

I mean, if we know that people are getting a physical negative reaction to cash, then yeah, we want to be mindful of the symbols and the designs that we are using when it comes to money.

The other thing is that younger folks are so much more comfortable communicating in pictures.

I mean literally with a meme, but I also mean with emoji, right?

So, what are the emojis that we associate with good and positive and fun and togetherness?

What are the emojis that we associate with stress and awkwardness and tension?

Being mindful about how we communicate through basically a new alphabet, right?

It’s pretty cool to think about that and to also think about how we can incorporate those things.

Obviously, we want them to be UX-designed and make sure that they’re user-friendly.

But being mindful of the way that people communicate with each other and using similar language, even if it is a GIF or an emoji or something like that.

No, I love that.

Are you seeing patterns in emojis people use for expressing money things?

Dollar?

Yeah, for sure.

Exactly.

I mean exactly like what you just said.

If you type in money on your text messages, you’re going to see all of these different symbols come up.

It will be interesting to see which ones are the ones that we start to associate with good and the ones we start to associate with bad.

I’m sure over time we’ll be able to tease that data apart and say, “Oh, the mouse face emoji means this,” and, “The money-with-wings emoji means that.”

You’re bringing me back.

Years ago, I wrote a story of how emojis were sort of breaking down bank systems because it’s like a newer code and it was screwing them up.

But also, it got into, how do you interpret these things?

Maybe if a bank is experimenting, it will misunderstand the use of this emoji.

It’s just so funny to think something’s so innocuous, but then it could be like, wow, that was a big thing actually.

For sure. For sure.

Cool.

Well, Lindsay, I know we’re almost at time, but I have one last question.

Before I ask you that, how should people find you, or any last thoughts on financial well-being that you advocate for executives?

Yeah.

Final last thoughts on financial well-being for executives is to just do an assessment of how you are currently addressing financial well-being.

If you are addressing financial well-being mostly by different tools and different products, how can you enhance them with different messaging or different language to incorporate the emotional side of money?

What are the things that you can do without having to recreate the wheel to help your consumers and your product users have a healthier relationship with money?

Anecdotally, I just know when I’m working with my clients that when they feel like they are being treated with compassion and with empathy and with kindness, whether it’s with an interaction with an app or with a bank or with a credit union customer service member, they’re much more likely to continue engaging with that.

So, it sounds kind of basic, but taking what you have and thinking about it through the lens of overall holistic financial wellness.

Then in terms of how people can find me, my business is called Mind Money Balance, and you can find me basically all over the internet.

My website, my podcast, my YouTube, it all exists there.

As you mentioned earlier, my book is The Financial Anxiety Solution.

I highly encourage you to grab a copy, ideally purchasing a copy from your local bookstore to keep your dollars in your community.

May I just add, I love that part of your book included, like, maybe have one of these drinks while reading this.

Yeah.

I mean, it wasn’t all alcohol.

You had different options.

So, I don’t mean it is a boozy read, but you’ve got to create that space to get your brain to be like, okay, I need to be thoughtful.

Exactly.

We want to create, if not positive associations with money, at least neutral.

Because for so many of us, we’re scared, we’re anxious, we’re worried, we’re afraid about our money.

So, how can we start creating a new connection and setting the tone, whether it is with a fizzy lemonade or a grounding ginger tea?

What can we do to start creating more sensory integration around having a healthy relationship with money?

I love that. I love that.

My last question for you, what’s the image on your phone’s lock screen?

Oh, it’s my dog.

Oh, as is mine.

What kind of dog do you have?

I have a Portuguese Water Dog.

She’s sleeping.

You probably can’t see her on camera, but she is 45 pounds of softness, and I adore her.

Well, she’s lucky to have made that status on your phone.

Lindsay, thanks so much for being on the show.

I really appreciate your thoughts on this area that I know is going to become ever more present in the industry.

Yeah, thanks so much, Mary.

This was so much fun.

Okay, so one thing that really stood out is that what is considered poor manners today might be good manners for the next generation.

In two weeks’ time, I speak with the co-founder and CEO of Frich, Katrin.

We talk about why her startup is trying to make money less taboo for Gen Z.

Also, for any of the audience who caught the Cornerstone Frich Gen Z Hits Different webinar, we give you a bonus, our webinar after-party where we answer your questions we didn’t get to.

See you then.