Women's Money Wisdom

Episode 228: Money Talks: Navigating Financial and Mental Health Wellness with Lindsay Bryan-Podvin

• Melissa Joy, CFP® • Season 4 • Episode 228

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Have you ever wondered how financial stress impacts mental health and what can be done to address it? In this episode, Melissa Joy and Lindsay Bryan-Podvin discuss the Financial Empowerment Initiative at the University of Michigan, focusing on the intersection of money and mental health. Lindsay shares insights from her work and the impact of the workshops on participants. They also explore the challenges and misconceptions around seeking financial advice and therapy.


Listen and Learn:


  • How the Financial Empowerment Initiative at the University of Michigan connects money and mental health
  • How to navigate challenges and misconceptions around seeking financial advice and therapy
  • The significance of educating yourself about reputable financial professionals and finding the right fit for your financial and mental health needs


Resources: 




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Melissa Joy:

Welcome to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. I'm Melissa Joy, a certified financial planner and the founder of Pearl Planning. My goal is to help you streamline and organize your finances, navigate big money decisions with confidence and be strategic in order to grow your wealth. As a woman, you work hard for your money and I'm here to help you make the most of it. Now let's get into the show. Today, we're going to get some insight on what it's like for a financial therapist someone who is a mental health professional who focuses on money going into the world. We're going to talk about their experiences and what they're bringing back to the table, what they're learning from people in real life right now. I think it's going to talk about their experiences and what they're bringing back to the table, what they're learning from people in real life right now. I think it's going to be a fascinating discussion, and am so glad to have Lindsay Brian Podvin rejoining us in this episode because she is a past guest to the pod. She is a financial therapist, author and speaker specializing in helping people understand how money and mental health intersect. Her business is Mind Money Balance and she's also the curriculum creator and workshop facilitator for the Financial Empowerment Initiative, which is a five-part series on financial wellness at the Center for the Education of Women Plus at the University of Michigan.

Melissa Joy:

Lindsay, welcome to the podcast, thanks for having me back, melissa. Well, you are always doing amazing things. You are an author of a book on financial anxiety, you do one-on-one therapy with people working on their relationship with money, and you also train therapists in how to run great practices. So you are always up to things on the cutting edge, things that we really need in this world. But today we're going to be focusing on your work at University of Michigan or the Center for the Education of Women, plus the Financial Empowerment Initiative, and this is brand new to me as well. So give me the overview of what you've been up to.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Oh my gosh, yeah, so I'm trying to remember the last time we had a conversation on this podcast. But, as you mentioned, I am a person who gets very excited about new things. I love testing the waters and experimenting and ideating, and that's why, for me, being a financial therapist in private practice has been so beneficial and supportive, because as I get new ideas and have opportunities for new collaborations and new iterations of things, that's where I feel like I come to life. And so the partnership with the University of Michigan, cew Plus that's a shorthand for the Center for the Education of Women Plus came out of a need that they had identified around helping different people who are coming through their doors. Cew Plus was initially founded to help non-traditional students, more often than not women who were parents or women who were returning to higher education after having children. So that's how they were started, and they were often providing folks help with funding, counseling, emergency financial needs, things like that, and what they found was that they had all of these great opportunities for things like scholarships, emergency hardship money, but they had a lot of repeat clients and they were struggling with how to create empowerment around money and not just focusing on the education or the resource. And so they came up with a plan to create some curriculum around the emotional and psychological side of money so that they could enhance and enrich their existing services, to make, hopefully, better use of them, so that people could understand why they were doing with what they were doing with their money and make more discerning and aligned financial choices. So we partnered together for a three-year pilot program. We just wrapped, as I told you before we hit record year one. Year one was really ironing out and nailing down the content for this five-part workshop series. Year two, which we're heading into, is going to be train the trainer, so I'll be recording educational modules and then we will train facilitators that will be staff and students to help facilitate these breakouts. And then year three, we will be evaluating the train the trainer module and hopefully disseminating it more broadly.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

But what has been so powerful about these workshops is that we have had the buy-in of over 20 different on-campus groups.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

So this is groups ranging from the multicultural center, from first-gen students on campus, from MHealthy and university health services, and at first we started to recreate some of these silos.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Oh, we should just have a program for first-gen students or just a program for people of color or just a program for non-traditional students, and we started to realize that we were starting to split up and silo everyone and instead we said you know what, let's just do it all together and see what happens. And that has been one of the most powerful things. To help people feel heard and validated and understood is to have somebody who is a 19-year-old first gen student sitting next to a soon-to-be retiree who's been a professor for 30 years at the university and they are sitting at a table together and having shared financial experiences and that is helping to break the mold. It is not that we can only talk to this group of people in a certain way. It is that normalizing and validating these shared experiences or having compassion for people who have different lived experiences, helps us to just understand that money stuff is incredibly emotional and that has been so powerful in this work.

Melissa Joy:

Wow, there's a lot to unpack there. I think that so often what I tell people in this podcast is that everybody has insecurity when it comes to money, and you and I hear that in our conversations one-on-one with clients. But we're not able to share that insecure voice in a relatable way, in so many cases because it's in a private setting, in a private room. So many cases because it's in a private setting in a private room. But we know that it's true whether you see someone with a seven-figure net worth or $1,000 to their name that there are so many commonalities when it comes to money and we don't have that shared knowledge that we're in it together and we also just have a culture that if money is discussed, it's discussed in a way that's very like external and materialistic or kind of signaling instead of that internal sense of lower self-esteem when it comes to money and things like that. So I love and I want to hear more about you know what you're expecting and then what you're seeing in these workshops.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Yeah, oh, my gosh, great question. So what I was expecting versus what I was seeing. So I have had the opportunity to do a lot of different in-person engagements and what I had seen historically before partnering with CEW Plus was a lot of trepidation, a lot of kind of slinking into the room quietly sitting in the back, trying to be present but kind of be invisible. So I was expecting more of that. I was expecting to have a handful of people kind of come in, kind of quietly whisper what they were there for and that I would have to work really hard to elicit conversation, and what I experienced was almost the opposite. I mean, melissa, when I tell you it was a series of five workshops, there was a little bit of that in workshop one, of like, am I in the right place? Is this the place? Am I allowed to be here?

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

By workshop two, three, four and five people would walk in hey, lindsay, hey, so-and-so. They knew the drill. They were welcoming other people. We also had these rooms set up where everybody was at a small table and we provided a meal for them. So we were literally breaking bread over money conversations and we noticed having the opportunity to have people share a meal while we were talking about this just already set the stage that this is a safe space. We are sharing a meal with one another. That is typically, in many, many cultures, a communal setting, a safe setting. So we were already setting the tone for things to be very comfortable.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

And the thing that blew me away was every time we had a breakout exercise where I invited participants to journal on something and then share with their table mates, I had to cut people off and say, hey, we are on a timeline here, we have to stop talking, we have to get back to it. And people would say no, no, no, lindsay, just three more minutes, just two more minutes. We want to keep talking. And these are people who were, in most instances, literal strangers when they walked in the door and they were asking me to continue talking about things like what their money stories were, what their financial fears were, what myths they'd been exposed to about money, what different benefits they had around money. I mean, it blew me away that so many people were hungry for a space to talk openly and transparently about money.

Melissa Joy:

Wow, that is such a breath of fresh air. I remember I just did a well-attended and well-received webinar at a workplace. It was on Zoom, everybody was all around the country and it was crickets when it came to questions, even though there was the opportunity for both anonymous questions to come pre-submitted Now those did come in, but also during the discussion it was really just like me talking to the world and I was like I think they hate it and I got you know, like loved it back, but it is so. I'm just, like you know, listening and my mind is like running with oh what if we broke bread like you're saying and or just even had that visual of? If we broke bread like you're saying and or just even had that visual of, like you know, imagine you're sitting around together, you know, just to like kind of preset the perspective that is helpful to be receiving and also sharing.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Yeah, exactly, I mean what I heard. There is the power of expectation setting, and that's what I'll say has been really helpful. So at the start of every single session, I'm providing some guidelines for looking at your bank statements or your 401k returns, or asking anyone to share their credit score. Right, there's a level of privacy here where you're only disclosing what you're comfortable with and simultaneously, whatever you disclose here stays here, and I ask that everybody in the room keeps everything that is shared confidential. And even if they want to tell a friend oh my gosh, I had the best experience at an FEI workshop I ask that they repeat it anonymized, and say, like a person I was sitting with had this great story, or you know, lindsay had this interesting example, but we're not naming names. So people feel safe enough to share a little bit more.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

And you know there are times where certain workshops were a little bit quieter and that's when I would do things. Like you know, in my last workshop, people were asking this question has anyone had that experience before? Or people had voiced these fears. Do those fears sound familiar? And sometimes just normalizing that people ask these questions is so powerful, and I had much more similar experiences to you, melissa. In the past where I'd go in I wasn't sure if a presentation was well received, but then I'd get feedback that it was, and so it took a little while to get kind of figure out the formula of how to set the stage for people to have that. It was great experience in the moment instead of just individually.

Melissa Joy:

Well, I'm hearing too some of the questions that you're asking. People are very personal but they're tying money to emotion, to identity, to a narrative that may be internalized or may be externally, you know, kind of setting the stage when people come in the room and talk about money. That is not formal training that we necessarily receive in the certified financial planning coursework. It certainly is emerging in other aspects of financial planning, but tell me where your mental health professional skills are coming in and tell me where your financial planning or not your financial planning, but your financial therapist and like kind of technical side of understanding money are coming into these workshops. Is it like 80-20, 50-50? How is it all kind of coming into the room?

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Great question. I would say for sure it's an 80-20, meaning I'm using about 80% of my skill set as a social worker who has facilitated workshops and group therapy spaces in the past, and I'm using about 20% financial literacy. Using the basics. Of the five workshops, only one is really focused on financial terms financial literacy. The other four are all around common money experiences that intersect with how we feel. So the first one is really around understanding our money story, not just what we learned from our parents or caregivers, but also the messages that we got from our communities, our schools, our healthcare, our policies, laws, cultural norms.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

The second workshop really focuses on understanding financial anxiety and money shame.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

The third one focuses on those big T and little t traumas understanding financial trauma and how it shows up, whether that is a one-time thing, like experiencing a car accident, and how that might have impacted our finances, all the way up to some sort of chronic systemic stressors such as experiencing systemic racism. And then the last workshop focuses on how to set money boundaries and have money conversations with others. So only that fourth workshop are we talking about the building blocks of personal finance? And the reason that it is structured in that way, melissa, is that there are so many amazing financial literacy resources, and the hope with the FEI series is to help people feel comfortable enough and safe enough to attend those financial literacy workshops and um speaking engagements or online courses and feel like they have the skills to regulate their emotions so that when they're learning about something whether it is a budget or retirement or asset allocation they feel safe enough in their body and they understand what's going on so they can stay really present and take something away from that engagement.

Melissa Joy:

Well, that's so interesting because sometimes when people do feel levels of discomfort, just like in any other aspect of life whether it's your visit to the dentist or going into, you know, filling out paperwork for something that you feel anxiety about I see those situations where people just opt out, tune out or kind of want to fast forward to the end and just like, hey, you handle it, because I do not feel comfortable here. You know that goes into even scheduling meetings and things like that. So you know, or just delays in getting things done because it feels it does not feel good or comfortable because of your personal experiences, and so I just think that's so powerful and thank you for tying together that the purpose of this work is to make people feel more comfortable with the resources and opportunities that exist in our world, and we'll make sure to include some links to some resources, both locally and nationally, that are available for people who are interested.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Perfect for people who are interested, Perfect.

Melissa Joy:

I'm also curious, though, what kind of outcomes. I mean? You've alluded to them, but what kind of outcomes are you seeking? What does research say that work like this can help? What possibilities are there or what change could be affected by workshops like this Great question.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

So, as we're in the early stages in year one, we were gathering pre and post workshop data, and what we were really looking for in year one is consistency and applicability, meaning, did you get what you thought you were going to get out of this workshop and how will you be able to use it? How do you think it will help you? So right now, these are all first person perspectives that say, yes, this workshop was helpful, yes, I enjoyed it, yes, I learned something and here's what I think I may do. So right now, the type of feedback that we're getting is between 80 and 95% satisfaction on the workshops in terms of feeling like they got something out of it and they will be able to apply something out of it. And then, anecdotally, we're hearing things like I've never been in a place where I felt this safe to talk about money, or it was so helpful to hear that I wasn't alone, or learning more about my money story and financial psychology will help me to make wise financial decisions in the future. So we don't have the outcomes yet on how these workshops are impacting things like a person's savings rate or contributing to their 401k, for example. Right now, we're trying to make sure that what we say we're going to deliver is what we're going to deliver and hopefully in the future we'll be able to tease out that these workshops are impacting financial outcomes as far as what the research says.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Right now, unfortunately, with a lot of the financial literacy only content, what we're finding is that people are really good at regurgitating things on a quiz right after, but when it comes to three months later or a year later, that application isn't necessarily sticking.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

In other words, they might take something away that day, but unless they are taking action right away, the odds of them taking that financial literacy education and making meaning of it are quite low and unfortunately, it actually can kind of serve as a disservice. When it comes to employers doing things like here's how to budget day or here's how to retire day, is they kind of give themselves a pat on the back. Employers doing things like here's how to budget day or here's how to retire day is they kind of give themselves a pat on the back and they're like cool, check, we did that thing in our to-do list, but it isn't. We aren't actually seeing the behavioral outcomes. We're able to measure that, yes, they can answer a quiz, but we're not necessarily seeing behavior change. So that's a long way of saying we're hoping to see some behavior change, but we don't have the data just yet. But based on what we're seeing, I'm really, really hopeful that we'll get you know.

Melissa Joy:

We're working to feature in the podcast, including you, lindsay, thank you. I know that there are barriers to receiving advice or therapy one-on-one. Some of them are financial themselves, but what are you hearing from people in your program about how they approach working with a professional like myself or yourself, and what are some of those fears? Or, you know, how does anxiety present itself in that engagement?

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Such a good question.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

So when we are doing workshop four, which is kind of the building blocks of personal finance, there's always time for questions and almost always a question or a version of questions comes up. That sounds like when do I know it's time for a financial planner and how do I know that they are reputable? A lot of anxiety around. Can I trust that the financial advisor that is associated with my 401k or 403b has my best interest in mind? What is a reasonable percentage to pay? What is too much? How do I know if they are hearing me? Do I have enough money for it to be worthwhile?

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

A lot of those questions, and I also think there's so much confusion over who is reputable and who isn't. As you and I both know, when you are a member of a professional licensing board for me as a member of the NASW, the National Association of Social Workers, and for you as a certified financial planner we have certain rules and guidelines that we have to adhere to, which may make it harder for us to do things like go viral on TikTok or have a video picked up on YouTube.

Melissa Joy:

Definitely difficult on the financial side if you are following ethical and legal obligations.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Ding, ding ding. That's the thing If you are following ethical and legal obligations. So one thing that I do in these workshops is I teach people what are some red flags to look for when they are consuming personal finance content and what are some questions that they can ask when they are considering hiring someone. And I think there's so much noise out there about how you can DIY it. And, to be clear, I'm not opposed to DIYing your personal finances or your mental health, and I think one of the strongest things you can do, one of the kindest things you can do for yourself if you're feeling anxious in relationship to your money, is to seek help, and that help might be a financial therapist, it might be a financial planner, it might be both, but there's nothing wrong with getting feedback and seeking help.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

We've made so much tremendous strides in decreasing mental health stigma, but I still think there are so many misconceptions around when you might seek out a financial planner and who they are for. I think a big misconception is that financial planners are only for people who have generational wealth, or financial planners are only going to sell you products that you don't need. So I think there's a lot of education that needs to happen and helping people understand that it is an act of self-care. If you're feeling a little bit anxious or a little bit worried and you want a little bit of help, it's an act of self-care to get the appropriate financial and mental health support that you need. Wow.

Melissa Joy:

Yes, we can devote episodes to all of these topics because, first of all, I think it is so difficult to parse out. I'll just speak for my world and the world of financial planners. There's so many different acronyms, there's different standards of care that were depending on how we do business. There's also a lot of well-intended or marketing-intended advice that's out there. That really is, you know, is quite judgy of. Like you know, here's the way that things should happen, and I agree with you, lindsay.

Melissa Joy:

I think that there are people out there where it's very appropriate to kind of self-implement your investment or money strategy, and that may be the case for part of your life, and at other parts of your life it may not be the case, but so many people are unable to put themselves in somebody else's shoes where they've really made it a hobby and a passion to focus on money. And then they are the ones that are on TikTok or Twitter saying here's how it should be done. And it's shameful. If you pay someone for advice this way or that way, they also may have a preference for a way that you should pay that might be more costly than another way that they perceive to be less than. And there's so much to unpack there.

Melissa Joy:

And then there's also the kind of buzzwords which I, for example, am a fiduciary and I just told. We did a new website for plural planning and I was like make sure you include fiduciary, because I am getting good questions about are you a fiduciary? But then if the answer is yes, does that mean that I'm qualified? Maybe, maybe not, like a lot of us can say that we're fiduciaries and it may or may not be the right fit, so I don't know that that helps although I will devote more time in future episodes to kind of parsing through this and it is really important, in addition to the technical, that you feel seen and comfortable and that your voice can be heard in the room when you're engaged with a professional, because so many times I hear people talking about their traumatic experiences with past professionals where they were spoken to instead of spoken with and they did not feel like they were being seen in the room, especially if they were with a partner.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Yeah, I think you're bringing up something which is people's experience, just like if you have a bad experience with a therapist, it can kind of put you off to wanting to seek out another therapist. But, just like therapy having a financial professional in your life you are going to have to do some legwork. You may have to make a few calls, you may have to do a couple of consultations, but you want to make sure that it's a fit. I don't know what the outcomes are for financial planners, but I can tell you that for therapy, regardless of the type of training or letters that are behind that therapist's name, the number one indicator of beneficial therapy with positive outcomes is whether or not you click with your therapist. So I have to imagine there's something similar and I think there's something so important about finding a financial planner who has an understanding of the way in which you live your life, of what values are important to you, and is able to sit with you and talk to you in a way that feels good to you.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

That won't be everyone and there are those people out there. I think it's really important that if you have like a call with someone, you're like, oh, they weren't really the best fit, like call someone else. That that's. And. And to me, like as a therapist, if I get on a consultation call with a potential client and I'm listening to them and I'm like, ooh, this is not my specialty. For me, it's so, so important that I say to them you know, I hear what you're saying, I can understand the frustration or the pain or whatever stressors going on and that particular problem is outside of my scope. I'm not really the best fit for you. Let me give you some people who I trust who would be a better fit.

Melissa Joy:

That's also really important to say like hey, this is outside of my scope, I'm going to refer you out. Yeah, there are so many like and unfortunately you can't just like get out a detection device. But vibes matter, right and it you know with the right professional. They should not be intimidated to encourage you to interview more people. I often do that in terms of introductory calls and if we're not the perfect person in someone else's, that's great To me. I really want that relational.

Melissa Joy:

It's not about your accounts, it's about you and your accounts are a function for you and it's so important that and there's work to be done because we both, especially in you, know financial therapy and then in the financial planning profession they're newer professions. So you know, those longitudinal studies aren't out there yet, but we're really doing work that we know needs to be. You know creating pathways that are necessary. Know creating pathways that are necessary. Well, where can people? Lindsay, I'm assuming you need to be associated with the university to be a participant in your amazing programs. Have you found other programs like that out there, or do you have plans to kind of amplify or expand access? Great, question.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

So for year one, which we just wrapped up, it was actually open to anyone in the community, so I'm hopeful that we will have opportunities for community-focused cohorts of the Financial Empowerment Initiative in upcoming years, but I can't be certain. I know for sure that if you are associated with the university, there will absolutely be a unit that is doing the Financial Empowerment Initiative workshop series, so keep your eyes and ears peeled for more information because it's associated with the CEW. You can go to the CEW website to learn more about the Financial Empowerment Initiative and upcoming events. As far as staying in touch with me, my business is called Mind Money Balance. I am all of the places underneath that handle my website, linkedin, instagram, youtube, podcast. It's all there under Mind Money Balance, and I'm also a person who will say like hey, fyi, this free community event is coming up, so if you're on my newsletter or you're in my world, you'll get those updates.

Melissa Joy:

Well, we will make sure to have all of your resources in the show notes and I can't recommend enough. Your socials really do some great work about talking to all people. They amplify the access for those of you who aren't having one-on-one you know kind of coaching with you, lindsay, or therapy. You really are putting some great information out there. I always enjoy it and encourage others to listen in.

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin:

Thanks, melissa, I appreciate it.

Melissa Joy:

Well, I appreciate you. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. Thank you for listening to the Women's Money Wisdom Podcast. If you found value in this episode, the best way you can support the podcast is to forward an episode to a friend or leave a review. Go to pearlplancom and the podcast link to get all the resources and links mentioned.

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Melissa Joy, CFP

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