Latest / Marci talks money (and life) / Financial Therapy, Money Mindset & Why Self-Worth Matters More Than Net Worth with Dr. George Blount
Transcript
- Marci (00:00.991) Hello, I am MoneyMarci. Welcome. I am thrilled to welcome today's guest, George Blount. George is a financial therapist, finance professor, and founder of NBalance Financial, where he helps individuals move past the anxiety and shame often tied to money and rebuild a healthier relationship between self-worth and net worth. His work sits at the intersection of behavioral finance and psychology, treating financial stress not as a spreadsheet problem, but as a human one. And his research on how Generation X and Generation Z think about and behave around money has made him a sought after voice on the generational shift in financial attitudes. George currently serves as a professor of accounting and finance at Holt International Business School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and as an adjunct lecturer at Tufts University, where he brings two decades of Wall Street adjacent experience into the classroom. He also teaches personal finance and chairs dissertation committees as an adjunct professor at Westcliff University in Irvine, California, and previously spent five years on the faculty at Endicott College's Gerrish School of Business, teaching managerial accounting and behavioral finance. Welcome George. Dr. George M. Blount (01:28.024) Thank you so much, Marci. I appreciate all the background, but I think it would probably just lead to the fact that I can help your audience talk about finance or understand some of the concepts around money. And I'm very happy to be here and talk to you today. Marci (01:43.647) Well, I am thrilled to have you and I probably end up with a financial therapist of some kind every season, give or take, and the different approaches and where they come from and their background is important because people need to find the experts that speak to them and the experts that that align with them. So tell me, how did you get here? What were your degrees in and what was your evolution? Dr. George M. Blount (02:13.118) Yeah, it's a good question. I think I did not seek out financial therapy, it kind of found me, so I have degrees in finance management. Those are my undergraduate degrees, associates and bachelors. And then my master's is in business administration with the focus in enterprise risk management. And I had worked with those degrees in financial services since 1997, all throughout the 20s, 2000s into 2010. I think What I would say is I grew up poor from Jamaica, Queens New York and so my entrance into financial services is one of understanding what finance is, but then also understanding kind of being around lack of financial information, lack of financial resources. And so I've always enjoyed being in financial services, but understanding more so what it's like to have a broke mindset or a poverty mindset and know that you have access to these resources and not be able to tap into them. And so after the 2008 financial crisis, after seeing a lot of people struggling with financial education, I started to seek out a more academic route to how we solve financial education as to more product sales and kind of corporate oriented ways of helping out people. And you just start to see how many solutions there are in academia, in higher education that are not being used in the private space. And so I decided to use that as my ammunition to start to help people. And that's where financial therapy was part of that academic research. The practice seemed to resonate well with just understanding your own emotional relationship with money as my background have has allowed me to do. But then also I understood that it was more of an emotional relationship with money because even though I knew about finance, was helping people with their financial matters, Dr. George M. Blount (04:19.914) and was licensed, I still struggled with just believing that I could do the same things that I was recommending to people. And so from 2018 on, I've been working as a financial therapist, helping people with their emotional relationship with money, specifically Generation X black men, because of just the need to really feel a sense of self-worth and stop working at some point so you don't just work until you die. But then also transferring this information to Gen Z and I do that through teaching and that's been good to share the experience but then also to make sure that I help them develop a good emotional relationship with money before they enter into the workforce. And so that's my journey from you know degrees to financial services to the realization that I could do more with financial therapy and then choosing to do so for the rest of my time in this industry. Marci (05:21.245) Okay. So you mentioned you grew up in poverty, but did you talk about and learn about money or there just was none so it wasn't discussed? Dr. George M. Blount (05:30.265) Well I think it's a very common thing whether you grow up in poverty or you grow up in affluence, you don't talk about money and learn about money, you just experience it. You do. You act and you behave. And so sometimes the conversations aren't there. I think that's more of a historical and evolutionary fact. We don't have financial education in schools, and so therefore the majority of our financial education was experiential when you stood in the line with your parents at the bank to cash your check, when you sat at the table and you saw your family writing checks for the bills, you were curious. You asked questions and that's how we did a lot of our financial education. But what's happened is we haven't really had those conversations as of late because everything is digital. And so as we've seen technology interact with financial services, we've seen less of an ability for people to see with their eyes how you do these things with finance and they're more so just learning on their own. So my background's very similar to that. We didn't talk about finances. You don't have conversations and theoretical senses about all the resources that are available to you. But you're in an environment where you understand that you need money to survive and live. You have to do things to get that money, try to find jobs, try to better yourself, and you become more of a more of a member of this system of money than understanding it. And so once that momentum starts, whether you're fifteen or fifty-two, you gotta slow it down to make sure that we're reconciling, you know, what we don't know and what we should know so that way we can help each other out. That I see is more symbolic of where most financial conversations happen. We start to do. We never learn all the way. And we never slow down enough to figure out if we're making mistakes and how to correct them. Dr. George M. Blount (07:28.086) And that's really where I think a lot of the ways in which I grew up correlate to what we see in financial therapy. Lack of communication with the ability to use money and try to be in an environment that forces you to use money before you understand it can sometimes just lead to emotional responses, irrational responses, but absolutely not what you intend to do and what your purpose is and what you are trying to achieve. That that that's a That's a through line that I've been able to see. Marci (08:01.393) Now you talk about Gen X and Gen Z and the research you've done. So can I ask what generation you are? Young Gen X. Okay. Dr. George M. Blount (08:09.678) Yeah, I'm Gen X, right? So born in 1975 and kind of l went through one of those first transition times where we were expected to do, so that's my Gen. Marci (08:20.519) And What interested you to do that research? Was it kind of a self discovery thing or just seeing what was where there was a lack of information? Dr. George M. Blount (08:30.542) Yeah, I mean Gen X was one of the first generations that had a chance to enter into a diverse job market. They had a chance to set new standards. It it's also at this time when a lot of people were going to college for the first time in their families or where they were dealing with you know, single parent households and there's a lot of that within Gen X. Gen X also is a group that had to deal with a lot of resiliency when they were kids. I was a latchkey kid and so you know when I was growing up, I had a key to our house and when school was over, I was responsible for going, letting myself in, going in and feeding myself and taking care of myself. So there's some self-sufficiency that came into Gen X. We see that when we went into our adulthood, into our careers. There's a lot of we can do this on our own. Let's try to figure this out. But I think Gen X is one of those first generations where we see that new information, new degrees, more money, still didn't change financial behaviors. Right? You see the same exact people in an entirely different situation. However, you start to see a lot of the same financial behaviors happen. And it's a very interesting thing to see because your first question is why? I have more education, I have more money, I have more resources, but I'm doing the exact same thing. And that's a curiosity that stuck with me for a while. Marci (09:59.557) Is there a big difference between Gen X and Gen Z financial behaviors and and outlooks? Dr. George M. Blount (10:06.424) Yeah, very much so. I think if Gen X was kind of on this cusp, I think I like to think of it in terms of when Gen X entered into the workforce, pension plans were still a thing. 401Ks were just becoming and so a lot of folks entered into the workforce with this combination of pensions and 401Ks. Millennials were the next group that came in and started to come into a market that had 401Ks and so they were actively participating in the market. They were actively online trading and seeing all this and so their entrance into the marketplace was one that was very much about resources and technology. However, Gen Z's entrance into adulthood in the workforce has been debt ridden. th they're They're filled with a bunch of technology that gives them instant access, but they don't know what to do with it. So it increases the pace of their decision making in ways that it shouldn't because they're not really well positioned to do so. There also adds a lot of uncertainty. They're one of the first groups that don't have a defined retirement. Of all generations that came into the workforce, this is the one group where they're not quite sure that they will work consistently or be able to save enough to be able to retire. They don't really have a wealth blueprint. And so that's one of the shifts of going to a 401K. You get rid of the uncertainty of retirement and that's slowly starting to happen where Gen Z is the first population that has to deal with that. A retirement that they have to define on their own, start on their own whether they understand what it is or not. So it's a really interesting position to see them, especially when you see them as students, and then you also recognize that the degree of debt that they are saddled with, the lack of ability to try to find assets in terms of home ownership in any major city is going to be really difficult. The fact that most Gen Z are delaying getting married and having children Dr. George M. Blount (12:10.78) so they're dealing with a lot of these financial burdens on their own very early on without partnership or without the ability to feel any release of all of that stress and anxiety. It's a very interesting place f or them. And there's really a lot of stress and anxiety. And what we have to do with Gen Z, which is different from Gen X, is allow them to understand what their future could be. Gen X had a half a hybrid future from pensions 401k. You could see the future, so there wasn't that much uncertainty. Gen Z has a lot of uncertainty. And what's more important for them is where we don't have pension plans to guarantee them retirement and long term jobs and unions, we have to get Gen Z to understand their value, get them to plan, get them to have purpose, and that's where their financial decisions are gonna be anchored. And if we don't do that early on, it really creates a a detrimental future for them. Marci (13:11.067) Okay. And what is financial therapy? Dr. George M. Blount (13:14.936) Yep. Financial therapy is the ways in which you communicate, behave, act and think around money. It is the aspect of financial psychology and financial planning to say that if you don't understand the financial planning aspects, what will happen is your psychology starts to take over. You will use emotions, you will start to make irrational decisions, you'll use biases, and all of those things will start to take over. And so financial therapy seeks to really reconcile this relationship between the emotions that you may experience from your past around money, around how you learned around money, how that makes you feel today. So that how does your money past influence your money present? And if we have a stable money present, what does that mean for our future? Can we actually build wealth? Are we gonna have instability so it makes that wealth very difficult? Financial therapy is recognizing your money past to create stability in your money present so that way it allows you to build your money future. And we do so through qualitative ways. The emotional relationship that you have with money, understanding any financial trauma and anxiety in trying to transform the relationship that you have with money so that it's naturally positive as opposed to naturally negative. Marci (14:43.965) Right, and people don't always consider how emotional financial things can get and how much you make decisions based on emotional feelings. Dr. George M. Blount (14:57.432) Well we have a society that's very much based on experiences and we call that a hedonic economy where a lot of our economy isn't based on needs, like people can meet their needs by you know, food but what we really force people to do is to think about the experience that they have. They can buy food, but do you want cheap food or the best food? They can buy a phone, but do you want the cheapest phone plan or the most expensive one? And so we turn every need based decision into a decision on experience, right? What type of experience do you want? And that really allows us to have differences in how we think about money and value. In other forms of economy and in very value oriented economies, you'd never be able to overprice a cup of coffee because coffee is coffee. I If everybody's working at a factory and everybody's making the same, you don't have the luxury of having a variance on coffee because people understand value and they would simply not pay. So when you have very value oriented economies like you do in India, like you do in hybrid China, like you do in in a lot of Asian company countries, as you do in a lot of African nations, as you do in a lot of agricultural based economies that you see in Mexico and South America, they're very much value oriented. And so the ability to spend money is based on the context that you place on value. And literally when you come into the US, all that shifts. Where it goes from value to experience. And so one of the biggest things for Gen X is honestly if you're a first generation immigrant, your parents are probably telling you, you need to save, you need to do, you need to do all this. And their US experiences are telling them, spend. Spend based off of experience. You deserve to have the best experience. You don't deserve, you should never have the no-frills version. You should always have the Dr. George M. Blount (16:57.53) premium version. And those conflicts are really hard to reconcile. Marci (17:04.593) Right. And your goal in the financial therapy is to get people into a a state of financial wellness? Dr. George M. Blount (17:11.5) Not only say to financial wellness, but to understand what their boundaries are. If you can understand what your needs and wants are, you can move pretty fluidly throughout both of those. If you satisfy your wants as often as you satisfy your needs, you don't deprive yourself. So you don't have this desire to, you know, when you finally get money that you're gonna splurge it all on yourself because you never take care of yourself. We know that we have needs and wants. It's not always gonna be a fifty-fifty split, but you have to satisfy your wants. That that That's an emotional need. And so you have to satisfy your needs, you have to eat, you have to sleep, you have to provide shelter, you have to provide support. Those are all needs, but you also need to have fun. You also deserve to have happiness. You also deserve to share experiences. And if you don't allow yourself enough time for that, or if your financial situation doesn't allow you that those types of moments where you're able to have fun, experience happiness, experience community, it's not the same, right? Money should not be something that excludes you from happiness, fun, your family and your community. Or just having money shouldn't mean that you have more fun, more happiness, more community. And so it's really about understanding it. And so it's about understanding that. That's the psychology. Like sometimes you're stuck right in the middle of understanding those two realities that are facing you today. Marci (18:30.944) I think there have been study sorry, go ahead. Marci (18:42.954) There There have been studies that say at this amount of income you get, you know, at a certain point you reach maximum happiness and and money over that doesn't make you happier. And of course that's a moving target and it would depend on where you live and and all of those other things. But it's interesting to think that it's not the unlimited money that that gets you unlimited happiness. Dr. George M. Blount (18:53.078) Yeah. Dr. George M. Blount (19:06.542) Yeah, I think the money's never really the issue. I think people when I ask people how much money do you need, they don't know. And that's always an interesting answer because that just means you wanna have more than zero. When you want to achieve something, you're gonna say, I wanna have five million dollars by the time I, you know, turn fifty so that way I could live off of that for the next twenty five years or start a business or whatever the case may be. Those are tangible, that's specific, and you're able to come to someone like me and I'm able to help you to achieve that. Most people never even have that answer. How much money do you need? I don't know. So that just means you wanna have more than zero. Right? You have no real thought about the amount of money you need, what you're gonna do with it. It's lost all utility. So know how much you need 'cause that at least help that allows someone like me to come and help you. Cause then I can just use math. I can use math to figure out well what type of rate of return do we need to get to two million, three million, four million over the next twenty years. That's easy to do. But a lot of people don't really have that information. How much money do I want to have? How much money do I need? What do I do once I have all of my needs taken care of? So once I've saved that two million or that three million, whatever that number is that I that I need, and I'm not working anymore, so what do I do with it? Right. So the conversations that we have around money are more nuanced. Why do I need it? What purpose is it serving? Once it served the purpose, what do I do then? Dr. George M. Blount (20:46.018) Those are really essential questions around financial literacy and how we understand our relationship with money. That takes the conversation beyond simply how much you have and it turns it into the utility of what you're doing with that money, why you're working, who you're spending it with, who you in turn who you want to spend it on. Those are more important questions and that's what we don't do. That's what's not That's what's not brought up in those happiness studies that says if you make seventy five thousand dollars you do happiness the problem is until you actually make seventy five thousand you don't understand that's that it you're not gonna be happy. And so there's a lot of people in the US and around the world that don't make seventy five thousand dollars a year. Which means they haven't reached that amount of money. where studies say you should be able to overcome the need for money to make you happy. So now they're just reaching for something that's virtually impossible to them. The other people that have achieved it, they got to that and now they're trying to figure out. So now they're completely lost. I thought I was going to be happy. Now I'm not. So now we created a study that tells you exactly what's going to happen when you reach this dollar amount. Hey, once you reach this dollar amount, you're not going to be as happy as you thought. And so what do you do now? So I think those studies are interesting because they really put us in a precarious situation. We let a bunch of people know that they'll never know what that happiness feels like because they're not making enough to get there to make that realization. And then we tell the other people that once they have the realization, good. But what do you want to do now? And we don't necessarily take them to the other part of it. So we need to exclude quantitative values when it comes to money. We need to start to look at the qualitative things. Why are you doing it? Who are you doing it for? When you're done, how are you going to experience happiness? Once you've experienced happiness, how do you continue to have fun? And money should be a supplement to that. It can't be the answer. So that's where we have to help people understand. Marci (22:50.655) Okay. this seems like a good place for me to insert my question for the season, which is what is wealth to you? Dr. George M. Blount (23:00.29) Wealth is intrinsic. Wealth is very much a intrinsic value because net worth is an equation based on assets and liabilities. And most people simply have more liabilities than assets. Homes are assets, cars are assets, and most people don't have enough assets to overcome their liabilities. So the reality is that if I wanted to define wealth based on some quantitative measure, most people, more than fifty percent of folks in the United States would have a negative net worth because you don't have any assets and you have more liabilities and that's driven by a debt society. However, your self-worth, your intrinsic value, allows you to understand your capabilities, how you use those capabilities and how long into the future you can be successful. Help out people. And so self-worth, that intrinsic value allows you to seek out assets, seek out new opportunities. It motivates you to try to find equity, to own things as opposed to leasing things. And so wealth is an intrinsic aspect more than an external output from like working and so forth. You have to define what you are worth, what you want to do with your worth and how your worth makes you happy, those are the most important elements in defining wealth. And once you do that, then you can get to the quantitative side, which is, well how much is that gonna take? How do we invest it? How do we use products and resources to get there? But until we understand the qualitative part, the products, the resources, the rates of return mean absolutely nothing. Marci (24:45.341) Makes sense. what can you tell me about the FINE method? Dr. George M. Blount (24:50.344) The FINE method is really a boundary of thinking about your overall wealth approach. I consider wealth also to be the accumulation of prudent financial decisions. Most people never achieve full wealth because they just make bad decisions over time. So if we continually make prudent financial decisions, we will get to a position where we are wealthy or we have the ability to have choice and flexibility. FINE is a ecosystem that allows you to understand where wealth can take you. So it's analogous to Financial Independence, so that's the F and the I. Nurtured means you've understood your past, so that way it well informs your presence, so that way you can create future outcomes. And that defines the E, which is Empowerment, that you are more capable than you thought that you were in defining your own wealth and creating your own equity. And so in wanting someone to be FINE, it's not simply that I want you to be okay. It's that I want you to have Financial Independence, I want you to be Nurtured, and I want you to be Empowered. And so when people are asking me as a financial therapist what the output or what the outcome should be for working with me or working with a financial therapist, I say you will be FINE at the end. You'll be Financially Independent, you'll be Nurtured, and you'll have a sense of Empowerment. And so that approach is how we can describe how do we reach financial independence. It's a way to describe the aspects of financial therapy so that way you can become nurtured. And then it's a way to describe the curiosity necessary to be empowered. What do you have to invest and save to get to the places where you have to be? So it's an entire understanding of wealth and financial concepts within a simple analogy around being okay. And in this case it's just being fine. Marci (26:47.913) So you know, There's all the teaching things that you do as well as your financial therapy work and do those worlds intersect? Dr. George M. Blount (26:58.624) All the time. All the time I would say the teaching is great because you get to see uncertainty in the students' eyes. They have so much potential they can go out into the world and create so much change, but there is that degree of uncertainty that you see present in them. And so you just really want to alleviate some of that uncertainty and give them enough confidence. Give them a baseline of knowledge, but ultimately give them the confidence to be able to just move forward and do what they need to do. what they know they're and in financial therapy, working with individuals, working with clients, it's the exact same thing. I just need to give you some baseline of knowledge so that way you feel confident. Confident enough to move forward. Everybody feels a little bit insufficient in their understanding of finances and as a result of that we don't move confidently in making financial decisions. We move tepidly and so one of the things that we can all take advantage of is having a baseline of what we need to know to be okay in financial matters and then to literally feel confident enough to make decisions with that understanding. And I think knowledge and confidence are the through lines between teaching Gen Z or what will be Generation Alpha soon, and what is financial therapy to individuals, to people that are in the workplace, to entrepreneurs that are trying to start their business, to couples that are trying to figure it out. You have to have some form, some baseline of knowledge that gives you enough confidence to simply do. And that's the magic in terms of making yourself wealthy or making yourself fine, is that you have to do. You have to believe in yourself first and then you have to do second. Dr. George M. Blount (28:50.796) You have to find the resources third, right? And I think what a lot of people do is they try to find the resources to motivate you to think of your planning to do. And that's completely reverse. Right? You do it all and then you go to the person that is going to get you the access to the resources and you say, This is what I want. This is what I'm trying to do. And this is what I can't do on my own. And I need you to do that. And if we can get people to have that conversation more often. Than simply walking into strangers' offices saying, Help me, I don't know anything about finances, you know, you know, teach me and I will be in your indebted gratitude forever. That's crazy. This is different. This is you have to know what makes you happy and then you need to find people to help you achieve your happiness. That is where we move forward. Marci (29:44.111) Okay. George, before we wrap up, do you have anything else you'd like to mention that maybe we haven't covered? Dr. George M. Blount (29:51.309) No, just say on the overarching belief or this undercurrent that self worth is more important than net worth, that if you have this ability to see within yourself of what you want to do and what you want to achieve, you can always find people to help you do it. But if you don't have that, you can talk to as many people as you want and they're not gonna be able to guide you. They're not gonna be able to find solutions because everybody's just guessing, because you've not given enough information. And so you have to believe in yourself first. You have to know what you want, what you want to achieve. And once you figure that out, we can help you. And it's okay because financial education isn't something that's available in K through twelve, barely available in a lot of colleges unless you are majoring in that. So the understanding that you have to seek out help, that should be standard in everybody's understanding. But the fact that they don't believe that they should seek out help, that they think I should do this on my own with limitations, that we have to change. And so self worth, your ability to know that you can and your ability to articulate what you want to do to those that can help you, that is always gonna be more powerful than how much money you have or how much money you think you need to have. Marci (31:12.477) Well, I hope that our conversation today helps people understand that there are resources to reach out to. George, thank you so much for being my guest today. We appreciate you taking the time to join us here. Dr. George M. Blount (31:25.428) No problem. Thank you so much, Marci, and I hope that it helped out. Marci (31:29.647) And to my listeners, I will be sharing a link to George's information in the show notes. Please check him out. He has a lot of good information. And don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and stay tuned. I'll see you next time. This has been MoneyMarci on Marci Talks Money (and Life). You got this.