The Financial Therapy Podcast - It's Not Just About The Money

Bari Tessler has spent over 20 years guiding thousands of people into happier, more empowered and refreshingly honest relationships with money. She was one of the early pioneers of financial therapy, and actually coined the term, by combining her Master’s degree in Somatic Psychology and her financial expertise in bookkeeping to create an integrated approach to deep money work.  Join Bari and Rick for an insightful conversation on how Bari became a leader in the field of financial therapy.A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

What makes life worth living? This question is at the heart of financial life planning and financial therapy. Where do we rate financial, emotional, and physical wellbeing? A recent study by Pew Research Center, November 18, 2021, on "What Makes Life Meaningful?’ finally resolved my curiosity. The survey asked respondents from 17 developed nations to rank 17 topics for their importance in bringing meaning to their lives. What do people around the world value in life as compared to the US?  The results may surprise you.A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

For our ancestors, even as recently as the 19th Century in many places, survival skills were hands-on. If you didn’t know how to build a house, farm, hunt, butcher animals, sew, and cook, you couldn’t provide well for your family. Money skills were largely worthless. It’s completely different today. Providing for yourself and your family requires knowing how to earn enough money, spend wisely, save for future needs, protect your assets, maintain good credit, and build an emergency fund. More importantly, you need to be able to apply these skills.  Read more here.  A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

New couples tend to be great talkers.  Young love can be a wonderful time of discovery and sharing. New couples, regardless of their ages, need to get to know one another and explore the possibilities of building a life together. They discuss their histories, their philosophies of life, their goals, and their dreams. Unfortunately, one thing young couples often don’t talk about is money, their money. We talk about the cost of government programs, the cost of living, our personal taxes, and public policy on taxing the profits of businesses. What we don’t talk about is our personal money.   A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

How do you feel about the rich?  While most Americans feel the rich are hardworking, only 10 percent think they are honest and one-third believe they are “greedy” and “self-centered.”  It makes sense that if most people have a Money Script (a belief) the payoff for hard work is dishonesty, greed, and self-centeredness, that they might not want to work very hard.  Money Scripts like these can keep you poor, according to Dr. Brad Klontz. Klontz.  The problem with negative Money Scripts associated with the poor is that they are only partial truths.  The article noted that many beliefs about the rich based on misconceptions.A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

It’s shocking how many engaged couples don’t have substantive discussions around disclosing their finances to each other, much less their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs around money. It's common to get married and later discover that your partner has a huge amount of credit card debt that was not disclosed. This secret often comes to light unintentionally when bill collectors start calling, money seems to be unaccounted for, or a couple can’t qualify for a mortgage. According to a study by Dave Ramsey, “the larger a couple’s debt, the more likely they were to say money is one of the top issues they fight about.”  A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

A reporter recently asked me how a left-brain, number-crunching financial planner ironically ended up being one of the founders of financial therapy.  The answer is simple, a divorce. Few would argue that divorce is life-changing and it was no different for me.  When my wife told me she wanted a divorce, my first thought was, “I am going to grow.”  Granted, that’s a strange first thought when informed your spouse wants to leave you, but it turned out to be 100% right.A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

If you had a magic wand and could change anything about yourself that would improve your financial and emotional wellbeing, what would it be?  This is a hard question.  I am not talking about changing your financial circumstances, winning the lottery or getting a big inheritance.  I am talking about changing yourself, your behaviors, thoughts or emotions that could ultimately change your financial situation. Ebenezer Scrooge did just that with the help of some of some skillful guides.A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

I spend a lot of focus helping my clients protect their hard-earned assets from the reach of a frivolous lawsuit. The chance of such a lawsuit in the US is always a risk when a person with a nest egg is perceived as “rich” and someone who “could afford” to shell out big bucks to make an unfounded lawsuit go away. As devastating financially as a frivolous lawsuit may be to one’s wealth, it’s nowhere near what I consider the number-one potential destroyer of financial wealth—divorce. Learn more here.A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values.. 

What do you do when your find yourself in a state of being financially “stuck?”  Stuck is not a very professional word, but it’s an accurate description of a very familiar financial condition.  According to Vocabulary.com, stuck describes something that’s frozen or fixed in one place and can’t be moved.  We can become stuck in almost any financial task; earning more money, drawing a will, drawing up a health power of attorney, investing a sum of money, being financially dependent on someone, reducing living expenses, setting up a retirement plan, the list is endless.  Tune in and learn how to get unstuck.A podcast that blends the nuts and bolts of financial advice with the emotions that drive our money decisions. Join Rick Kahler, CFP®, CFT™, as he blends practical financial wisdom with the emotional insights that shape our choices. Discover how financial therapy can help you make money decisions that truly align with your values..