01: My Path to Financial Therapy
In the first episode of the Mind Money Balance podcast, host Lindsay Bryan-Podvin walks listeners through her journey to becoming a financial therapist. Listeners will learn how this former waitress became one of the United States’ first financial therapists, and how she came to specialize in financial therapy with high-earning couples. Learn more about Lindsay at her website www.mindmoneybalance.com or follow her on Instagram @mindmoneybalance
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[00:00:00] Welcome to Mind Money Balance. I'm your host, Lindsay Brian Podvin. I'm a woman of color, popcorn connoisseur, and one of the first financial therapists in the United States. This is the weekly podcast all about making money feel good in your relationship, the no-guilt, no-shame podcast, so you can stand in your power as a couple. Let's go.
[00:00:32] Welcome to the inaugural episode of Mind Money Balance. I wanted to rewind just a little bit so you could get a better sense of kind of how I ended up in this line of work, being a financial therapist for high earning couples. So let's rewind a little over a decade to May of 2008. So in May of 2008, I had graduated with a bachelor's degree in sociology, and at this point in time, our economy hadn't yet tanked here in the United States. We were kind of riding this really high roller coaster in our economy where almost anyone could get a job and you didn't necessarily have to have a ton of relevant experience. Case in point, I had a degree in sociology, graduated on a Friday and on Sunday I was flying to Chicago to start my new job in marketing on Monday.
[00:01:34] Something I knew absolutely nothing about and turns out didn't end up being my thing, which is totally fine, but I thought, "you know what? I didn't like that. I'm going to try something else and let me back up a little bit." So the marketing job kind of went like this: it was pretty much the best gig you could get straight out of college because all my expenses were paid, my phone was paid for. My cost of living was pretty much subsidized. I got a per diem every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I didn't have to pay for housing. I lived out of a hotel and I didn't have to pay for transportation because I had a company vehicle. So my first job into the "real world" was like Disneyland.
[00:02:25] For a 22 year old, I had no real concept of what life was in terms of being a financially responsible adult. And this was a contracted job, which meant that when it ended in December of 2008, I didn't wanna keep doing it as much as it seemed like a very fun position for a person in their early twenties. I really realized that the job just was not for me. So I did what I thought was the fun thing to do, and I thought, you know what I'm gonna do with all of my money that I earned because I hardly had to spend anything in those first months out of school. I'm gonna go travel and I'm gonna go to Europe and Asia by myself and spend all of this hard-earned cash because it was so easy to get a job.
[00:03:22] I'm sure I can do it again. So that's what I did for about two and a half, three months. I went to Europe and Asia and met up with friends and family and was also alone for a lot of it, which was so fun. And let's just remember that in 2008 things were very different in terms of travel. I--there was no such thing really as a smartphone. I had to go to internet cafes at every city I went to, to email my mom and let her know if I was safe. If I wanted to call my boyfriend, now, my husband, I had to find a payphone and use like an international calling card. It was a very different world, but it was a great experience nonetheless. So when I got home in late March of 2009, I thought I'm just gonna snag myself a new job.
[00:04:10] Funny thing that had happened in summer of 2008, the great recession happened, but I had no clue how it would impact me because my job was so insulated from the real world. Honestly, like I had said, everything, every expense that I had was covered. So I went home and realized there were no jobs, and it's weird.
[00:04:35] I look back and I didn't really even panic. I remember being annoyed that I couldn't find a job. So what I did was I went back to serving and bartending just like I had in my undergrad years and just like I had in high school. And I did that for another year and a half, two years. And as I was doing that to bring in an income, I started thinking about what I wanted to do next.
[00:04:59] I knew for sure I didn't wanna do anything in marketing, but I also knew I didn't wanna go back to school and go the PhD route like a lot of sociology folks who I knew. So I tried to figure out what I wanted to do and I'd always had an interest in people. I'd always had an interest in mental health and I was trying to kind of put the connect to the dots and what I decided to do was apply to a school of social work and if I got in, then I would go, and if not, then I would figure it out. So I applied to one school, happened to be a pretty good one, like ranked number two in the country. Got in, went to school, studied mental health, and trained as a therapist, and became a social worker that was trained in mental healthcare and in interpersonal mental health.
[00:05:51] So I did that work for a little while. I worked in refugee resettlement, I worked in community mental health, I worked in research, and all along the way, money issues were coming up with my clients. And as a social worker, I was really just trained to help clients kind of put a bandaid on things, right? So I would help them negotiate their bill with the energy company or maybe budget out so they could make ends meet.
[00:06:18] But the money stuff was not just for my clients who were lower income. It was for clients across all socioeconomic statuses and in my own life during this time, I had gotten a huge interest in personal finance because I had that smack in the face, wake up Paul, about managing and mismanaging money because I had blown all of my money from my first job on Trapezing around the world.
[00:06:47] So in my own time, I've been checking out books at the library, reading up on personal finance and found it really fascinating and fun, which is hilarious because I think a lot of people think that money stuff is math stuff and it's not. I fricking hate math and I didn't do well in math and college. I think I took, I failed a, I failed my college algebra class and had to redo it. And then for my other math credit, I think I took astronomy. No, I know I took astronomy instead because it could count as a math credit. So trust me when I say I was as surprised as you are that I ended up loving personal finance stuff so much.
[00:07:27] So my philosophy in working with clients in financial therapy is that personal finance gurus can kind of be jerks. They often say things like, if you're not doing it my way, you're doing it wrong, or If you have credit cards, you're an idiot, or if you have debt, then you're stupid. And there's so much shame and.
[00:07:49] It's not helpful at all. Money already has enough baggage and stigma as is, and then when a person goes to find help and they're just being yelled at, they're not gonna get anywhere. So my approach and my philosophy is that money is really a 80 to 90% emotional and psychological, and only 10 to 20% about the numbers.
[00:08:10] And that's the approach I take, and I hope that now that you're here tuning into this podcast, you'll hear a lot of that reflected as well. So anyway, coming back to work and now these two things collide. So money stuff kept coming up with my clients. I didn't feel like I had adequate training and so I turned to Google University to help me out and I found that there were two different programs that could kind of bridge the gap for what I was looking for. One was financial social work and one was financial therapy. So I went ahead and got certified in financial social work in May of 2018 and, and I look at this and I just find it so fascinating that an exact decade after I graduated into this amazing economy, here I was 10 years later in a totally different place in my life and in my career.
[00:09:04] It is just, pretty wild to think about. So anyway, may of 2018, I graduate with my degree or my certificate and financial social work and started seeing clients and practicing as a financial therapist. And really quickly, I found that I wanted to work with couples because people were coming in as individuals and a lot of them were partnered or married.
[00:09:28] And I realized just like if somebody was going to therapy for poor communication and they were in a marriage, both people would need to be there because you can't really have a very successful marriage if just one person is going and getting help for communication. So really quickly, I made a rule, I guess we'll call it, that is if your partner are married and you want financial therapy, you both have to attend sessions, and that to me was game changer for a lot of reasons. One, it made me known as an authority of couples financial therapy. Two, it made it known to clients who were seeking out my help that I didn't play around, I wasn't going to kind of engage in something that I knew wouldn't be helpful. I'm not going to say, "yes, I'll help you with your financial therapy," but I'm gonna ignore how money shows up in your relationship. And then three, it made it such that the clients who sought me out really did want my help and wanted to do the work.
[00:10:34] So what all kind of just came together really beautifully for me, and that is the top sea turvy, windy road that got me where I am today, being a financial therapist for high-earning couples, and I hope that helps you kind of understand the road that I took to get here and how I ended up here.
[00:11:03] If you love this episode, take a screenshot and tag me on Instagram@MindMoneyBalance with your favorite takeaway. I love seeing what resonates with my listeners and sharing it in my stories. Thanks so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week right here.