HerMoney Podcast Episode 183: On The Couch With Financial Therapist Amanda Clayman

If hermoney podcast episode 183 is on your radar, this short guide cuts through the noise. Here is what is worth knowing, and how to put it to work today.

Key Takeaways

• "You can't change your financial circumstances overnight.
• It takes sustained effort and application."  That’s just a bit of the wisdom shared by this week’s HerMoney podcast guest, financial th...
• In her role, Amanda guides her clients on how they can positively change their overall approach to their finances, and adjust their thinking...

"You can't change your financial circumstances overnight. It takes sustained effort and application." 

That’s just a bit of the wisdom shared by this week’s HerMoney podcast guest, financial therapist and Prudential financial wellness advocate Amanda Clayman. In her role, Amanda guides her clients on how they can positively change their overall approach to their finances, and adjust their thinking in areas that may be holding them back. 

Over the last decade, the concept of financial therapy has become more mainstream, as more people have sought to discover why and how our thoughts and feelings may shape our financial choices. 

Amanda says she was led to her profession after seeing “how money was so misunderstood, and how much suffering we really take on in our lives because of this misunderstanding.” Facing her own financial struggles has better enabled her to guide her clients: “I was in a pattern where I would just shut my eyes and spend,” she says, describing some of the money habits she had to re-learn. 

“I had been engaging with money only as a form of self punishment,” she says, discussing a time when she erroneously believed she had to strip away all the small joys and comforts from her life in order to pay off debt. After some self-discovery, she was able to make the mindset shift from thinking of budgeting as a constraint that forced her to say “no,” to a tool that has allowed her to say “yes” to the things she wants most in life. 

At the end of the day, Amanda says she tries to impart to all her clients that money is a tool that should be used consciously , a tool that allows us to take care of ourselves and the things and people we care most about, both today and in the future. She describes why her approach to money is based on holistic health and wellness, and tells us what numerous of her clients have in common. (Hint: No one shows up to financial therapy because they want to check in and brag about how well they’re doing with their money!) In numerous cases, people seek her guidance because of a conflict in their family, or a desire to finally put a stop to a recurring problem. Amanda starts each session by helping her clients to establish a framework for where money is or isn’t working in their lives, and then digs into where and why money may be causing them anxiety. 

Amanda also offers up her thoughts on the automation of our finances , sometimes “set it and forget it” can separate us too much from our money. “I fully embrace and appreciate automation, but it takes us away from being conscious,” she says. In other words, automation is a place that we want to get to, but there needs to be a period where we are highly engaged with our money before we can allow ourselves to disengage. 

In her role as a financial therapist, Amanda has guided hundreds of couples on their path to understanding one another’s differing money styles, and has helped them “excavate under the surface” so they can start solving the real problems. (As opposed to just arguing about who is “right”… No one is, but frequently we so desperately want our partner to validate our point of view that it results in conflict!) 

Lastly, Amanda shares her thoughts on why money is such a sensitive and powerful thing, and offers her tips for the best things we can all do to feel positive and confident about our finances on a daily basis. She leaves us with some powerful philosophy to mull over as we look to make more empowered money decisions: “Don’t live so in service of the future that you miss out on the joys of today. And similarly, don’t be so focused on today that you aren’t taking the necessary steps to have safety in the future.” 

Then, in Mailbag, Jean and Kathryn talk about the pros and cons of closing credit cards you no longer use, what to do if you worry you’ll have too much money saved for college, and the myriad options for how child-free individuals can leave a legacy behind. And in Thrive, Jean gets serious about elder abuse , who’s at risk, how to prevent it, and what to do if you suspect it. 

Transcript

Jean Chatzky: (00:06) HerMoney is supported by Fidelity Investments. We want you to demand more from your money, so start by knowing what you own and what you owe. We’ll help you take the next step that fidelity.com/demandmore. Now HerMoney comes to you through PRX. Hey everybody, it’s Jean Chatzky. Welcome to HerMoney. I don’t frequently recommend books on this show except for the ones that are written by the authors that we feature because I have very particular taste in books. I tend to read mysteries almost exclusively and I really like mysteries that have strong female protagonists, so it narrows my worldview by a excellent deal. However, right now I am reading, or rather listening to ’cause some of my reading takes place in my car when I commute, I’m listening to this book written by Lori Gottlieb and it’s called, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone and it’s all about Gottlieb, who is a therapist, who is going through therapy herself, and the world of therapy. And having gone to my own therapist while I was in the process of reading this book, I just have to tell you like, mind meld. It was a bit of an explosion and I felt really funny walking into the room, but maybe our next guest can help me with that because financial therapy has become a thing in the last, I don’t know, 5 or 10 years, we’ve started to hear a lot more about people going to therapists specifically to help with their financial matters and when I talk to financial therapists for research that I’m doing for a book or an article, my first call is typically to Amanda Clayman. She is a financial wellness advocate. She’s a leader in the field of financial therapy and she lets you her clients decode how their thoughts and their feelings may be shaping their financial choices. My guess is, she has saved a lot of marriages as well. Amanda, welcome.

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Amanda Clayman: (02:24) Thank you Jean. And I have to say, I feel incredibly flattered to be mentioned in the same breath as Lori’s book. I also adore that book and I also listened to it as an audio book and it was such a excellent experience.

Jean Chatzky: (02:39) It’s such a excellent read. I mean I sometimes go through the process, I have an audible subscription, so I, you know, I download a book once a month and sometimes I just get on a real roll with a reader, and I find myself looking for other books read by that person. I’m definitely gonna do that with this book because there’s something about this reader that is so, her name is Brittany, I don’t remember her last name, but she’s wonderful. So I’m glad to hear that you enjoyed it too. Tell us a little bit about financial therapy. I had coffee with a friend of mine, Robbie Myers, who runs Shondaland, a couple of weeks ago and we were talking about financial therapy because we were hashing out story ideas, and she was like, that’s a thing? I think a lot of people are surprised that that’s a thing.

Amanda Clayman: (03:31) It’s funny to me because that was actually my first kind of light bulb moment on my journey to become a financial therapist is I saw not a field that existed, but a need that existed. And I really thought to myself, why isn’t this a thing? And then of course the next thought was, well, maybe I should try to move into that need and see what develops. For me going into the mental health field, which was a career change, going into the mental health field specifically to work with people around the role of money in their lives seem like such an intuitive thing. Because I really saw once I was coming to terms with some events in my own financial life, I really just saw all around me how money was so misunderstood and how much suffering we really take on in our lives because of this misunderstanding.

Jean Chatzky: (04:29) I’m so glad to hear you say coming to terms with something in my own life because I have looked at, sometimes in therapy, I have looked at why I do what I do. And I really think I do what I do because I was trying to solve financial problems that existed in my own life and my own emotional attachment to money. What were you looking to fix?

Amanda Clayman: (04:54) Well, I would add, too, to that list, we’re frequently trying to solve problems in our own emotional and financial past where we’re sort of reliving patterns or trying to work through traumas and money can be a very central figure in some of our traumatic and emotional experiences. For me, what was overlooked in terms of what I was taught about money, because I was really, I was raised by two very frugal parents, but two parents who had undergone some of their own sort of personal traumas around growing up in poverty, such that when I was growing up, I really thought that the wolf was at the door all the time. And sometimes that was true, but but numerous times it really wasn’t. And so I was sort of taught this frugality that was based in almost like a clenching, if you will, around money. And when I became financially independent as a young adult, I didn’t know how to take risks in my life. I moved to New York, I had no money. And whether that advisable or not, I had certain problems that I needed to solve as a result of that. And so I did have to sort of like throw myself at the world a little bit. And that began, for me, a cycle of starting to incur debt and then just really not being able to use money in a conscious way to take care of myself and still be able to make good financial choices. So I was kind of in a pattern where I just would shut my eyes and spend. And I didn’t knowm and it was a whole sort of the problem, as you can imagine, really just fed on itself and sort of compounded. And that was the thing that I needed to be ultimately reparented around money and my parents did kind of step in and teach me how to budget in a much more productive and healing kind of a way.

Jean Chatzky: (06:58) I frequently use the phrase money is a tool and you should use it consciously, but that you should use it consciously to take care of yourself is not something that I’ve heard before, but I’m going to borrow it because I think it’s totally right. Right? Well that is what money’s about. It’s about taking care of ourselves and the people that we love and the things that we care about today, tomorrow and down the road. Right?

Amanda Clayman: (07:24) Yeah. I think it’s actually the only way that we should think about money because it is based on holistic health and wellness. And when we, and that was in fact one of the real shifts for me was, I had been only engaging with money as a form of self-punishment. I thought, I have made these mistakes, oh, that is so bad about me. What I need to do is sort of do penance through money. Like, strip away all joy and comfort from my life in order to pay off this debt. But that wasn’t sustainable in the way that I was doing it. And it was only after I had this kind of epiphany or this really profound shift from budgeting and allocating my money and that being sort of a process or a tool of no, and turning that into a tool of yes, what is it that I want to say yes to in my life? And that definitely included debt repayment as a priority, but that was finally balanced with a realistic understanding and acceptance of how I needed to use money in all of these other ways that would keep my life stable, such that I would stay in this process for the longterm, because as you know, most financial changes don’t happen, you can’t change your circumstances overnight. These really take sustained eff

Final Thoughts

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Originally published at savingswitch.com.