How Financial Therapy with Financial Planning Increases Financial Intimacy For Couples with Michael Reynolds

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.

Key Topics:

• How Michael’s upbringing inspired him to dedicate his career to personal finance (05:21)
• Ed and Michael’s thoughts on Dave Ramsey (08:25)
• Pros and cons of professionally loving your clients (13:58)
• Michael’s biggest takeaways from financial therapy (17:44)
• Making it okay to talk about money (21:34)
• The importance of storytelling in sales (25:55)
• Financial planning as a form of financial therapy (29:18)
• Intuitive eating in comparison with finances (34:20)
• How to achieve financial awareness without falling into financial obsession (35:23)

Resources:

• Elevation Financial
• Wealth Redefined Podcast

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