The Psychology of Financial Decisions | Dan Pascone with Nate Astle | Podcast #15

Posted on June 19, 2025 by Dan Pascone

Answer Box: TL;DR

Your money decisions are never purely logical – they’re driven by emotions, experiences, and often old stories from your past. In this episode, Dan and financial therapist Nate unpack why fear and shame sit at the core of many money struggles, how childhood experiences around money shape your adult behavior, and what “financial therapy” actually is. Nate explains how couples, individuals with financial trauma, and people stuck in unhelpful patterns (like impulse spending or avoidance) can benefit from blending traditional therapy tools with financial planning. The big idea: if you want better financial outcomes, you have to work on your emotional relationship with money – not just your spreadsheets.

Key Takeaways

Financial therapy focuses on the emotional and relational side of money. Nate is trained as a couples and family therapist and works specifically on how feelings, beliefs, and relationships intersect with financial decisions – not on choosing investments or building portfolios.
Fear and shame are the two dominant money emotions. Fear shows up as scarcity thinking, catastrophizing, and tunnel vision (“this one outcome is my only path to safety”). Shame shows up as “I am a failure” or “my net worth = my self-worth.” Both can quietly drive destructive financial behavior.
You’ve never had an unemotional money experience. From big moments (promotions, business launches, home purchases) to tiny ones (grabbing a candy bar at checkout), every money decision pulls on your emotional state – even if you tell yourself you’re being purely rational.
Many people use financial solutions to try to fix emotional problems. Overspending, chronic under-earning, avoidant behavior, and constant hustling can all be attempts to soothe anxiety, fear, or old wounds rather than strategic financial choices.
Childhood money experiences leave deep imprints. Watching parents fight about money, seeing secretive spending, or growing up in scarcity can create internalized stories like “money is dangerous,” “I’m responsible for everyone’s comfort,” or “I’m not good with money.” Those stories often replay in adulthood until they’re brought into the open.
De-identifying from your money is critical. Money is something you have and work with – it’s not who you are. Untangling identity from income, savings, or debt is a key part of reducing shame and making healthier decisions.
Financial therapy is a young but rapidly growing field. It emerged after the 2008 crisis, formalized through the Financial Therapy Association, certifications, trainings, and books. It’s increasingly bridging the gap between financial planning and mental health.
The future of financial advice is more emotional, not less. As robo-advisors, fintech, and AI handle more math and projections, Dan and Nate agree that the real value-add will be helping people navigate the human side of money – behavior change, relationships, trade-offs, and life meaning.
Self-compassion is a powerful money tool. Most people never got real financial education, yet judge themselves harshly. Nate emphasizes approaching your own mistakes the way you’d treat a friend: with understanding, curiosity, and grace instead of blame.

Key Moments

00:02 – Intro & sponsor. Tailored Wealth is introduced as helping business leaders live their version of a rich life.
00:30 – Dan sets the context. Episode 15 focuses on simplifying complex financial topics for high-level professionals.
00:49 – Meet Nate, the financial therapist. Dan introduces Nate as founder of the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute and notes he’s rarely met a financial therapist despite a career in financial services.
01:26 – What is financial therapy? Nate explains he works with the psychological, emotional, and relational aspects of money, with a background in couples and family therapy.
02:17 – “You’ve never had an unemotional money experience.” Nate explains why every money choice – big or small – involves emotions, even if we pretend it’s purely rational.
03:27 – Who Nate works with. Couples with financial conflict, individuals with financial trauma, and people struggling with behavior change around money (impulse spending, inability to save, etc.).
04:27 – How clients find him. Nate describes starting as a typical couples therapist and gradually becoming known specifically for financial therapy as his career evolved.
05:20 – Money is deeply personal. Nate shares how his own therapy made him realize how central money was to his distress and why emotional work is necessary to be “your best financial self.”
06:16 – The two biggest money emotions. Fear (tunnel vision, scarcity, catastrophic thinking) and shame (feeling like a failure, over-identifying with money) dominate many clients’ inner worlds.
07:30 – De-identifying from money. Nate emphasizes money is something you have, not something you are – and how shifting that frame changes behavior.
08:39 – The birth of financial therapy as a field. After the 2008 crash, financial planners and therapists began collaborating; the Financial Therapy Association formed around 2009 and the field has slowly grown since.
10:29 – Where the profession is headed. Nate believes financial therapy will increasingly be woven into both financial planning and traditional mental health work, given how pervasive money stress is.
11:21 – Why this matters for advisors and therapists. Money has ranked among the top three stressors for Americans for many years, and professionals need better tools to address it emotionally, not just technically.
12:42 – Dan’s framing: money as a means to an end. Dan talks about connecting financial decisions to the broader life someone wants – not treating money as the end goal itself.
13:27 – Nate’s childhood money story. He describes watching his parents fight over a big purchase (a four-wheeler) and internalizing responsibility for their conflict as a child.
14:57 – Money as a window into your life. Nate explains that daily financial behavior reveals core beliefs, fears, and values – which is why it’s powerful but also vulnerable to talk about.
15:35 – The vulnerability of sharing finances. Asking someone to show their budget or money situation is, as Nate says, “asking you to be naked” – it requires respect and care.
16:07 – Lightning round begins. Quick questions help the audience get to know Nate personally.
16:07 – Coffee or tea? Nate chooses tea (while Dan notes he’s drinking tea too).
16:22 – Cats or dogs? Nate picks dogs.
16:28 – Favorite tech tool? Video games – specifically story-rich RPGs like Final Fantasy.
16:52 – Favorite money/success quote. “Shame is the enemy of change.”
16:52 – Favorite book. The Financial Anxiety Workbook by Lindsey Bryan-Podvin, which closely mirrors how Nate thinks about treatment.
17:10 – Personal finance hack. At the grocery store, look at price per ounce, not just total price, to get true value.
17:45 – Bucket list item achieved. Launching the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute and creating a collaborative space where planners and therapists work together.
18:05 – Current milestone. Recovering financially from buying a first home and getting back to “normal” after a big one-time outlay.
18:45 – A mistake turned lesson. Nate’s own impulsive spending on video games, leaving him short on personal money for a few months.
19:06 – Advice to his younger self. Be compassionate with yourself; you didn’t get the education or exposure you needed around money, and most people didn’t either.
19:23 – How to find Nate. Through the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute website or by searching for him as a financial therapist online.
19:40 – Dan closes the episode. Reminder to keep your strategy sharp, your goals clear, and your money working as hard as you do.

Episode Summary

In this episode of Making Sense of Your Money, host Dan dives into the often-ignored emotional side of money with financial therapist Nate, founder of the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute. Unlike traditional planners or advisors, Nate’s work sits at the intersection of mental health, relationships, and financial behavior. He’s trained as a couples and family therapist and focuses on how our beliefs, traumas, and relational patterns show up in everything from our budgets to our big life decisions.

Nate starts by explaining what financial therapy actually is: working with the psychological, emotional, and relational aspects of money. He emphasizes that while we like to treat money as a purely quantitative subject, our actual decisions are “inherently emotional.” He goes so far as to say, “You’ve never had an unemotional money experience,” whether you’re accepting a promotion, launching a business, or just deciding whether to buy a candy bar in the checkout line.

From there, the conversation turns to the types of clients Nate sees: couples who can’t get on the same financial page, individuals with financial trauma whose past experiences are still driving their anxiety, and people who simply can’t seem to change their money habits (impulse spending, difficulty saving, constant avoidance). Nate notes that in many cases, people are trying to use financial solutions to fix emotional problems – and until the underlying emotions are addressed, the behavior rarely sticks.

Two emotions come up repeatedly in Nate’s work: fear and shame. Fear narrows our perception, creating tunnel vision and the belief that only one outcome will keep us safe. Shame ties our worth to our financial situation – the belief that “I am my bank balance,” or that we’re fundamentally a failure because of our debt, spending, or income. Nate’s therapeutic work centers on expanding people’s sense of options (to loosen fear) and helping them de-identify from their money (“money is something you have, not who you are”) to loosen shame.

Nate also shares a powerful personal story from his childhood: watching his parents fight intensely over a big purchase and internalizing the idea that his enjoyment of the item was somehow making their conflict worse. That moment became a key insight in his own therapy and helped him see how deeply money, conflict, responsibility, and self-worth can get tangled up in a child’s mind – and later reappear in adult financial behavior.

The episode then zooms out to the financial therapy field itself. Nate explains that it’s relatively new, emerging after the 2008 financial crisis when financial planners and therapists realized they were dealing with the same client issues from different angles. The Financial Therapy Association formed around 2009, and since then the field has grown through certifications, trainings, and books – including the Financial Anxiety Workbook, which Nate recommends.

Looking forward, Nate believes financial therapy will become increasingly central to both financial planning and mental health. As Dan points out, tools like planning software, robo-advisors, and AI can handle projections and optimization – but they can’t replace the human work of unpacking values, fears, goals, and trade-offs. Money has consistently ranked among the top stressors in American life, and professionals on both sides of the aisle will need more sophisticated emotional tools to truly help clients.

The episode closes with a lighter lightning round, where Nate talks about his love of story-driven RPGs, offers a practical grocery-store hack (always check price per ounce), and shares his current financial milestone: recovering from buying his first home. His final piece of advice to his younger self – and to listeners – is to practice self-compassion around money, recognizing that most of us were never truly taught how to handle it and are doing the best we can with the tools we have.

Full Transcript

Announcer: Brought to you by Tailored Wealth, helping business leaders live their version of a rich life.

Dan: Welcome to another edition of the Making Sense of Your Money podcast, where we cut through the financial noise and help business leaders to make smart, confident money decisions. Welcome to episode number 15 of the Making Sense of Your Money podcast.

Dan: I am your host Dan. I am the founder and CEO of Tailored Wealth. And each of our episodes features a trusted voice in the financial world, someone who works directly with high-level professionals to simplify the complex and turn strategy into action.

Dan: And I am super excited about today’s guest. We’ve got a real unique conversation for you today. Really excited to welcome in Nate. Nate is the founder of the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute. So Nate is actually a financial therapist, which I was telling him earlier, I don’t know that I’ve ever even met a financial therapist, being in financial services my entire career.

Dan: So, thanks so much for joining me on the Making Sense of Your Money podcast. We’re excited to have you today, Nate.

Nate: Hey, thanks so much. I’m excited to be here.

Dan: All right. Very cool. Very cool. So, we got a lot to cover and I know our audience wants to hear your expert take. I know I want to hear your expert take on some key topics.

Dan: So let’s jump right in and, if you don’t mind, just provide us like a 90-second overview of who you are, how you got into what you do, and then what you do as a business.

Nate: Yeah. So, I’m Nate, financial therapist. I’ve been doing financial therapy for about eight years now. Financial therapy—what that means is I work with the psychological, emotional, and relational aspects of money.

Nate: So my background is in couples and family therapy. I’m a mental health therapist by training, but I’ve always focused on money stuff. I was very lucky to find financial therapy early in my career.

Nate: I think something that we often forget about money is it’s not—as much as we wish it was—a quantitative kind of thing. Our actual decision-making around money is incredibly emotional. It’s inherently emotional.

Nate: One of my things that I say to people is: you’ve never had an unemotional money experience.

Nate: Whether it’s a big money experience like getting that promotion at work or, you know, starting your business or whatever, or even just “Do I spend money on the candy bar in the checkout aisle?”—all of them pull on your emotional state, and we need to work with our emotional state to make better money decisions.

Dan: Yeah, that’s very cool. I couldn’t agree more. I mean, you know, we all inherently know there’s emotions involved in money, but you’re right—it can be really taxing to think about all of those decisions, from the big ones to the small ones. So I can see why your industry and your position is super, super valuable.

Dan: So tell us maybe a little bit about what types of clients you deal with on this side and ultimately what you help them to accomplish.

Nate: Yeah. Well, honestly, I have a pretty broad range. I work with anyone up until their 70s, you know.

Nate: I tend to work with people who are struggling in a few areas. One is I do a lot of work with couples. I mean, I’m a couples therapist—that’s what I’ve specialized in for a long time—but couples with financial conflict or who feel like they can’t get on the same page.

Nate: I also work quite a bit with folks with financial trauma. So, these are people who have gone through difficult money experiences or just gone through difficult experiences in life, but it’s showing up in their money. It’s showing up in their anxiety around money or showing up in the way that they make financial decisions—so that kind of deep work.

Nate: And then I do quite a bit of work, too, around just people trying to change financial behavior. Maybe you’re an impulse shopper. Maybe you struggle to save. Or “I just can’t figure out where my money is going” kind of thing.

Nate: Usually, in my experience, people have financial solutions to emotional problems. And so we have to kind of figure out: what are the emotional problems that you’re trying to fix with X money behavior?

Dan: Yeah, that’s fascinating to me. I want to peel back the onion on that a little bit more.

Dan: Are you typically engaging with someone, Nate, because they have other issues and then the financial side comes out of it? Or do they specifically come to you to help them solve some of those financial challenges that you referenced?

Nate: Anymore, people are coming to me specifically for the financial stuff.

Nate: As my career has grown and I’m more well-known in the financial therapy community, people come to me for financial therapy. But it’s not where I got started. I was just your run-of-the-mill couples and family therapist.

Nate: But like I said, finances were always interesting to me, but it wasn’t until I was doing my own therapy—going to see my own therapist, working on my own stuff—that I realized, I guess on a deeper level, just how personal this is. And not just for me, but for everybody.

Nate: Money isn’t—it impacts every aspect of our lives. The way we grew up around money, the way our parents taught about or talked about money, the way we feel—like these are deep things. I think sometimes we miss that when we talk about financial literacy or talk about, like, how do we become our best financial selves.

Nate: It’s like, well, part of becoming your best financial self is becoming your best emotional self, if that makes sense.

Dan: Yeah, that’s really well said.

Dan: So I want to dig into that a little bit deeper. Can you maybe share with us some of the biggest challenges that your clients face? And I don’t necessarily mean “overspender” or “they’re in debt” or whatever the case may be—but at a deeper level, what are the challenges? And then anything you can do to share how you help your clients to overcome those challenges.

Nate: The two biggest emotions I see around money are fear and shame.

Nate: Fear can look like a lot of things: “I’m afraid of my money running out,” “I’m afraid of…”—a whole lot of things. And when it comes to managing money fear, a lot of it is reminding yourself you have more than one option.

Nate: A really common experience with fear is we get tunnel vision. And so it’s like, “Okay, the only way I can be safe or the only way that I can get my needs met is if these dominoes all line up.”

Nate: The thing is, that’s not true. Most of the time, we have more options than we sometimes can perceive. And if we can expand our tunnel vision a little bit and help us see, “Oh, I could go that way, or I could go this way, or I could go this way,” it reduces the psychological stress.

Nate: The other thing is, like I said, fear and shame. Shame is a huge one. We put a lot of meaning-making into money—what it means about us. And when we’re experiencing shame around money, it feels like we’re a failure or we over-identify with our money.

Nate: Like having a lot of money makes us a good person or a good provider or a good X, Y, Z. And one of the things that I do a lot of work on is helping people learn to de-identify with their money.

Nate: Okay, money is something you have and maybe need to work through or maybe need to change something about, but it’s not who you are. You’re a whole bunch of things besides your money.

Nate: And let’s kind of tease apart: all right, where’s the shame coming from? Is that shame useful or true? (And I promise you it isn’t.) How can we have a healthier self-concept that helps us make financial decisions, but from a place of our own values rather than a place of our own insecurities or fears?

Dan: That’s really, really powerful. I love your quote around “Money is something that you have, not something that you are.” I’m going to use that if you’re okay with that.

Nate: Yeah.

Dan: I’ll give you proper credit, I promise.

Dan: Nate, let’s talk a little bit—I’m fascinated by your industry because, frankly, it’s one that I didn’t know a whole lot about. Tell us a little bit about the financial therapy industry and maybe how it’s evolved since you got into the space. Just educate us on what that’s all about.

Nate: Yeah. Financial therapy is relatively new compared to something like traditional financial planning or mental health.

Nate: I would say it really started after the 2008 crash, where they had essentially a conference—a bunch of mental health practitioners and financial planners—like, “Hey, we’re seeing the same issues. What do we want to do about it?”

Nate: So the Financial Therapy Association, which is the, I guess, governing body, got started around 2009 and it’s been growing slowly ever since.

Nate: I really got started around 2017, 2018 when I was in school, and I was very lucky to work with very smart people—professors and some of the people who essentially created the field.

Nate: But since then, there’s a certification—the Certified Financial Therapist designation. It’s a bunch of trainings. I put trainings out. There are books. It’s a field that is growing a lot.

Nate: And it’s, I think, cool because like you said, all of us kind of know that there’s this emotional component around money, but I feel like a lot of people: one, don’t know where to go to get help with that; and two, there’s a lot of professionals that want to be supportive in that area but don’t know how. And that’s kind of what financial therapy is here to solve.

Dan: Very cool. Very cool. It makes a lot of sense that it sort of blossomed and really started to gain traction after the financial and credit crisis. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Dan: Where do you see the industry going? Is it predominantly one-to-one work? Is it done through financial education and literacy and content? Where do you see your industry today, and then maybe where do you see it going—and how do you plan to be a part of that?

Nate: Yeah. I’m biased here, but obviously I think it’s the future.

Nate: I think, in my experience, financial planners—the benefit or what they bring to the table—is changing. The more robo-advisors, the more fintech options there are, and the big AI thing… I think being good at math and being good at projections won’t be enough to justify the work in the future.

Nate: I think what financial therapy, to me, represents is: how can we take financial care and financial healing and make that more a part of the experience of going to a financial planner?

Nate: I also think, for people more on my side of the aisle—mental health and therapists—I think this is something that therapists will continue to need to get specialized training in. Just the same way, you know, you can be a couples therapist but you can get specialized training in sex therapy, and it’s different and there’s additional stuff.

Nate: I think it’s important that we have additional training in financial therapy because it’s a huge predictor of divorce—financial stress. There’s this semi-famous survey that gets put out by the American Psychological Association every year about stressors in America, and there’s things like political unrest, there’s a whole lot of different factors.

Nate: Ever since it came out, money has been in the top three stressors for Americans for the last however many years—15 years or whatever it is. Money and money stress is baked into our lives.

Nate: We need professionals that can help us with that in emotionally intelligent ways, and not just people telling us “Do this, do that, and then all your problems will be solved.” Like, that’s not how it works in our day-to-day.

Nate: I’m gonna get off my soapbox. I can go on for a long time about this.

Dan: No, I love—I mean, you’re speaking, frankly, my love language because it is so much more than a spreadsheet or, you know, we talk a lot about financial planning software and that stuff is really important to help you make good decisions, but understanding the why behind those decisions and then connecting it to what you’re ultimately looking to accomplish in life.

Dan: And I say this to clients all the time: money is, to some degree, a means to an end—but it’s really about what you want that end to be like and how you use it effectively to ultimately live the life you desire. And yes, the financial components are a big piece of helping you get there if you understand it the right way.

Dan: So that’s really, really well said.

Dan: All right, so last one and then we’re going to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about you. You mentioned your background, but what about finances made you want that to be sort of the specialty focus of your practice?

Nate: Yeah. As I mentioned, it really became personal for me when I was doing my own therapy. I was talking to my therapist, working through some of my own traumas and childhood experiences, and I realized just how much of my own distress came from how my parents thought about money.

Nate: My parents—I love them—there’s things that they didn’t do well. And I think I remember, as a kid, my dad made a pretty major financial decision without talking to my mom. He bought a four-wheeler. It was a big deal.

Nate: I was excited because I’m an 11-year-old kid. Like, “Hey, really cool new toy.” But then I remember, as I was just taking it around our little cul-de-sac for the first time, I remember seeing them fighting about it, very understandably. My mom was upset and my dad was defensive and all that.

Nate: And I remember this feeling of, “I’m enjoying this thing out here and they’re fighting about it. Does me enjoying this make their fighting worse?” I was internalizing their conflict as a reflection of something I had to take responsibility for.

Nate: That was a really big breakthrough for me in therapy, realizing, like, “Whoa, I’ve got feelings about this,” you know. And then, as I’ve heard other people’s stories over the years about how they grew up around money—what emotions they associate with money, how when they look at their money, does it reflect on their feelings of self-worth—money is deep, man.

Nate: Some of our most core experiences in life have financial implications. And money is also something we touch every day. Even if you don’t spend money in a day, you probably go to work. You probably think about money. You probably think about different things.

Nate: I think this is some of our most core human experiences. Money has a window into life on the other side. How we live our financial life is a window to that. And that’s something we need to explore and honor.

Nate: If I’m a financial planner and I ask you, “Tell me about your budget,” or “Show me what’s going on with your finances,” I’m essentially asking you to be naked—vulnerable. And I respect that. I respect that work, for what we’re asking clients to do, and hopefully that they can get to the place that they want to get to.

Dan: That was powerful, man. Well said. Well said.

Dan: All right, we’re gonna shift gears a little bit. We’re gonna focus a little bit on Nate now. So this is what we call the lightning round.

Dan: Our guests know that we never prep anyone with this because we want it to be super organic and natural. And all we want you to do is just give us the first thoughts that come to your mind. It could be a one-word answer; it could be an expanded thought.

Dan: All right. Coffee or tea?

Nate: Tea.

Dan: Okay. I got some tea right now myself.

Dan: Cats or dogs?

Nate: Dogs.

Dan: Okay. Me too.

Dan: What is one tool or piece of technology, other than your phone or your computer, that you can’t live without? Could be hardware or software, by the way.

Nate: Video games. I’m a big video game nerd. I love that.

Dan: All right. What kind of games do you play?

Nate: I play RPGs. So, like, Final Fantasy. I love games that are like stories. I love feeling like I’m in a book.

Dan: Got it. Got it.

Dan: Do you have a favorite quote about money or success?

Nate: Shame is the enemy of change.

Dan: Love that. Love that.

Dan: Do you have a favorite book on business, finance, money—any of them?

Nate: Yes. The Financial Anxiety Workbook by Lindsey Bryan-Podvin. It’s a workbook, but it is the book that comes closest to how I think about money and how I would go through a treatment plan with someone who is having anxiety around money.

Dan: Very cool. I’m going to check that one out. I haven’t heard of that, so I’m going to check that one out. Very good.

Dan: Do you have a personal finance hack that you can share with our audience?

Nate: It’s a simple one, but it’s at the grocery store: look at your price per ounce. Don’t just look at the total price, because the price per ounce is going to be the thing that tells you what’s the bang for the buck that I’m getting.

Dan: I love that. I love that. Good one.

Dan: What’s one bucket list item that you’ve already accomplished? Something you’ve already checked off the bucket list.

Nate: Starting the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute. That’s something I wanted to do as soon as I got in the field—like, I want something that’s collaborative, where I work with financial counselors and planners and we’re all working together. And it’s been really cool to open that.

Dan: Good for you. That’s awesome.

Dan: What’s one financial milestone that you’re working towards?

Nate: Recovering from buying a home. We just bought our first home, which is super exciting. And homes are expensive, man.

Nate: And so, you know, we saved up for the down payment and all that. But now it’s like, okay, I want to feel normal again. I don’t want to put that much money into one single thing for a while.

Dan: There you go. Good for you.

Dan: What’s one financial mistake that you’ve seen turn into a valuable lesson?

Nate: My own impulsivity with games and buying games and then being like, “I don’t have my personal money for a few months now because I’ve bought too much.”

Dan: There you go.

Dan: And if you could give one piece of advice—whether it be financial or otherwise—to your younger self, what would it be?

Nate: Just be compassionate. Give yourself the grace and kindness that you would give anybody else around this thing, because you didn’t get any education or exposure around it. Most of us didn’t. Just find a little bit more compassion.

Dan: I love that. I love that.

Dan: And then finally, Nate, if our listeners want to connect with you, collaborate, see what you do, potentially work with you, what’s the best way for them to reach you?

Nate: They can go to the Financial Therapy Clinical Institute website or just search for “Nathan financial therapist.” There’s another Nathan out there that’s a famous cricket player in New Zealand, but no…

Dan: Yeah, that’s not you. That’s not you.

Nate: That’s not me. I wish it was, but yeah.

Dan: All right. Very good, Nate. This has been great. Thanks so much for sharing your time and your insights today.

Dan: That’s it for episode number 15. Thanks for all of our listeners for joining. And as always, keep your strategy sharp, your goals clear, and your money working as hard as you do. Cheers.

Resources & Citations

Financial Therapy Association. Professional organization dedicated to integrating cognitive, emotional, behavioral, relational, and financial aspects of well-being.
Certified Financial Therapist designation. Information on education and training standards for practitioners who blend mental health and financial planning.
Financial stress research. Surveys from major psychological organizations that consistently rank money among top life stressors.
The Financial Anxiety Workbook by Lindsey Bryan-Podvin. A therapeutic workbook focused on anxiety, emotions, and behavior change around money.
Guides on money scripts & childhood financial experiences. Educational material on how early money messages influence adult beliefs and behavior.

FAQs

What exactly is financial therapy?

Financial therapy is a specialized field that blends principles from mental health counseling and financial planning. A financial therapist helps clients explore how emotions, beliefs, family history, and relationships influence their money decisions. They don’t typically manage investments or provide product recommendations; instead, they focus on the emotional, psychological, and behavioral side of money.

How is this different from working with a financial planner?

A financial planner usually helps with strategy and tactics: budgeting, retirement planning, investing, tax strategies, and so on. A financial therapist focuses on why you behave the way you do with money, how your past experiences shape your current patterns, and how to change your relationship with money so those strategies are actually sustainable. In many cases, they work best together.

Who might benefit most from financial therapy?

People who:

Have recurring money conflicts with a partner or spouse,
Feel constant anxiety or shame around finances despite decent income,
Have experienced financial trauma (job loss, bankruptcy, family poverty, or chaotic money dynamics growing up), or
Know what they “should” do with money but can’t seem to change their behavior.

What is “financial trauma”?

Financial trauma refers to deeply distressing experiences related to money—chronic scarcity, sudden financial loss, childhood instability, betrayal or secrecy around finances—that leave lasting emotional imprints. These experiences can lead to anxiety, avoidance, compulsive behavior, or rigid control around money long after the event itself.

How do fear and shame affect money decisions?

Fear often narrows your thinking, making you see only one “safe” path and leading to rigid or panicked decisions. Shame creates a sense that you are your financial mistakes or circumstances, which can cause hiding, denial, or self-sabotage. Both emotions can block constructive planning, honest conversations, and healthy risk-taking.

Can I work on this on my own, or do I need a financial therapist?

You can absolutely start on your own—through journaling about money memories, reading books on money psychology, talking with trusted people, and practicing self-compassion. If you find that your patterns are persistent, overwhelming, or deeply tied to past trauma or relationship conflict, working with a qualified financial therapist or therapist with money training can provide structure, tools, and support.

Disclaimer

This episode and page are for educational and informational purposes only and do not constitute financial, investment, tax, legal, or mental health advice. Financial therapy is a developing field and may be practiced under different licenses or credentials depending on jurisdiction. Always verify that any professional you work with holds appropriate qualifications for the services they provide. Before making significant financial decisions or changes to your treatment or mental health plan, consult with a licensed financial advisor, tax professional, and/or mental health professional who understands your specific situation.

Next Steps

If money regularly triggers anxiety, conflict, or shame—or if you feel stuck repeating the same patterns despite knowing what to do—it may be time to look beyond spreadsheets and into the emotional side of your finances. Start by reflecting on your earliest money memories, the messages you absorbed at home, and the beliefs you still carry about what money “means” about you.

When you’re ready to connect your financial strategies with a healthier relationship to money, explore more episodes and resources at Making Sense of Your Money, or learn how Tailored Wealth partners with professionals and families at yourtailoredwealth.com.