Financial
Certified financial therapy focuses on emotional reactions to money and how those reactions can affect someone’s overall wellness. Certified financial therapists (CFTs) step beyond the number-crunching of certified financial planners and registered investment advisers, probing the causes and cures associated with financial worries.
“CFTs are uniquely trained to be able to educate employees on how their financial behaviors are linked to a variety of psychological factors,” says Nate Astle, a CFT and board member of the Financial Therapy Association. “Helping employees understand their money can greatly shape financial wellness, but also can encourage psychological insight into where these beliefs come from.”
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The roots of certified financial therapy date back nearly 14 years to the Great Recession, and today, the Financial Therapy Association has 323 members, only 27 of whom have a CFT designation with 20 more waiting to be tested. About half of CFTs are also certified financial planners, who number nearly 89,000 across the U.S. and will be required to take a psychology course as part of their continuing education credits starting in April 2022. While most CFT clients are landed as individual engagements, Astle describes the employer market as “an untapped space.”
Research shows that employees who feel better about their relationship with money take fewer sick days and have fewer conflicts with colleagues, and are more productive and likely to stay with their employer. Employees who are financially better off than their colleagues are more likely to report good health and lower presenteeism, as well as higher engagement, according to Willis Towers Watson’s 2020 Global Benefits Attitudes Survey.
But that balance is hard to come by, and financial stressors are only growing nationwide. Household debt in the U.S. rose $286 billion between the second and third quarter of 2021 — reaching a record $15.24 trillion, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently noted.
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In turn, conversations about these all-too-common financial challenges are spilling into employee assistance programs. Of all cases managed by ComPsych, the largest provider of EAPs, 25% involve non-clinical issues that include financial, legal and work-life. The top five issues include income tax, retirement planning, general education, credit card debt and hardship such as evictions, ComPsych reports.
An employer-provided CFT benefit could have a significant impact on the wellness of workers, as well as their families. Workshops often extend to a spouse or a partner who may be managing family finances, says Erika Wasserman, a CFT and consultant — and can increase the chance of meeting financial-wellness goals by 65%.
Access to CFTs is still relatively limited, though folks like Wasserman see a huge opportunity ahead. Throughout 2020 and 2021, her entire practice was conducted online, reaching folks from Singapore to South Florida. That means more advice dispensed to more clients — and more workers who feel like they’re in control of their finances, and stress levels.
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“In order for us to have a healthy relationship with money we have to be able to talk about it in the same way to have a healthy relationship with food,” she says. “The more we’re able to talk and bring it out into the open, the more that we’re going to be able to grow and learn from one another.”
