Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
#88 - Shifting Paradigms in Financial Advice for a Deeper Impact with Amy Mullen
Have you ever considered how your feelings affect your money? Amy Mullen, President of Money Quotient, talked with us about how understanding emotions helps with managing money. She told us about how Money Quotient started to teach people about money in a way that connects with their feelings. We learned that understanding how emotions and money are connected is really important for helping people make better financial choices.
We also heard some stories about how Money Quotient has helped people with different levels of financial knowledge. From helping people who spend a lot learn to save money to giving detailed advice, Money Quotient's tools really work.
If you want to understand how money works with feelings, this episode is for you!
https://www.moneyquotient.com/
Amy's Social:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amynmullen/
How's everybody doing? Welcome back. This is the only feeling podcast and in this episode we talked to Amy Mullen, who is the president of money quotient, where they make IQ me EQ and talking to people as smooth as ever. I really enjoyed this conversation. Amy had a lot of awesome points and a lot of awesome perspective when it came to the way that money quotient can help advisors really nail down on that emotional aspect of financial planning. So enjoy this episode of the Only Fee Only podcast with Amy Mullen.
Speaker 2:Only podcast with Amy Mullen. How's it going everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast. I'm Peter Travelo. I'm here with my co-host today, brock Buckles. How's it going today, brock?
Speaker 1:It's great, pete. It's a beautiful day outside. Happy to be here with you, as always, buddy.
Speaker 2:Lovely and it's May 1st, start of a new month. So today we have Amy Mullen on from Money Quotient. Very excited to have her on and share her story. She's got a very different side and very enlightening side to the industry and definitely for those advisors who are looking to better their client experience and further their career. So, amy, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2:Likewise. So for those who don't know who Amy is, do you want to give a quick overview of who you are and who you're currently serving?
Speaker 3:Sure, yeah, I'm Amy Mullen. I'm president of an organization called Money Quotient and we've been around since 2001, providing training to financial professionals, mostly financial planners, but we also have financial coaches and counselors and educators that use our materials and our model as well. So we focus on how can we create a client experience that helps to tap into the emotional brain and build motivation to take positive action in their clients' lives. So we focus on you know we take a multidisciplinary perspective understanding psychology, understanding neurology, how the brain works and how people make decisions, build that motivation to take action, and we try to build it all into a practical process that financial professionals can guide their clients through in the hopes that they get really great results on the other end engaged clients, motivated clients who are adopting healthy financial behaviors.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's really cool. I've always've always been, you know, whether it's finance or just other parts of the the world. Right, I've always been fascinated with you know people's emotions and psychology and the way the brain works and all of that. Um. So let's go back to the beginning of money quotient, I mean when this organization first started. Obviously you guys are taking a different approach. It's not let's go out there and be financial planners, it's like we're going to look at the emotional and psychological side of money. Um, so how did that kind of begin? And then where did you guys start to see some of the first breakthroughs?
Speaker 3:Yeah, um, I'm so glad you asked this question because it really gets into the why of money quotient. Start with why. You know, simon Sinek, it really goes all the way back to when my mother was. Let's see how old was she?
Speaker 3:She was probably in her late thirties and this whole kind of life's work started when she was unexpectedly left to raise two small children myself and my brother on her own and she realized that one big gap in her education was around personal finance. She didn't know how to take care of our own personal finances, to take care of her young family. But then she also quickly realized that she wasn't alone either. A lot of people didn't have this education, and it wasn't just the preschool teachers like herself, but it was also people that she thought were very highly educated. So even the doctors and lawyers didn't seem to know what was going on in their financial lives, and that was a big surprise to her. So she got really interested in financial literacy and an advocate for financial literacy. But then she fell across some research that showed shockingly that no financial literacy programs or how do I maybe I'll rephrase this all financial literacy programs have little to no statistical correlation to people actually implementing the education they were learning or the strategies. It did not relate to behavior change, even when people sought out the financial education for themselves. So this was really something that shocked her and also sparked her curiosity about. You know, what is the missing piece If people are going and seeking financial education for themselves? They were concerned, they have an anxiety about their financial lives. They were there, listening and engaged and learned, but it didn't translate to them actually doing anything in their financial lives, and that was true for all financial literacy programs. So she ended up having the opportunity to go back to school and start working on her master's degree and her whole focus was trying to figure out what is that missing piece. And so she was involved in a lot of research projects and even after getting her master's degree she realized how much she enjoyed research and how interesting, she thought, you know, this whole topic area was.
Speaker 3:So for a good decade after graduating with her master's degree, she continued to do research projects with nonprofit organizations and different I mean just different organizations, conducting the research and then building programs, workshops and things like that that were based on the results of that research, to have more effective education, essentially. And then over time she realized you know there are certain professionals that are uniquely positioned to be talking with their clients both about their lives which is very, you know, emotional it's connected to their emotions and talk about their finances at the same time. Financial planners, financial coaches, counselors these people were uniquely positioned to have these conversations and actually build more motivation to take action in their lives. So clearly you can begin to see some of those missing pieces that she discovered in her research was actually connecting to something that created an emotional feeling in somebody. So I'll share some examples.
Speaker 3:This is not new news because clearly we have a lot of sales tactics that we have been taught about finding the pain point right. You have to find the pain point because they're feeling anxious, they're feeling nervous and if you zero in on that and if you squeeze that part of them, then you're likely going to get them to buy whatever product or that urgency is pushing them to take action. So it's a common sales tactic. However, what's interesting is that when that fear subsides, which usually happens pretty quickly, they tend to go back to old behaviors. So it might be useful in terms of getting somebody to buy a product right away, but in terms of changing behavior.
Speaker 3:Finding pain points is actually not very effective, because once you have begin to provide them education or help them believe that things are going to be taken care of even without taking action, that anxiety comes down a little bit and they're less likely to act or change their behavior. So it's really actually when you can identify something that they're excited about or have positive emotions about, feel driven to work towards. Those are the types of emotions that lead to more sustainable behavior change. So when we are working with financial professionals, we're helping them to guide their clients through a process that identifies not only their concerns and the things that they're anxious about that's important, for sure but we're also helping them to identify aspirations and things that have intrinsic reward and meaning to them, because those end up being the things that continue to drive that person forward and then follow through on implementing the financial strategies that they have. That was a lot.
Speaker 2:Money is very emotional and we can definitely see your passion about it. You've had this passion and it started right around the 2000s. How did the business start? How did you start translating that passion into a service or a product that you could then provide and spread your passion around?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, so over that, 10 years after Carol Anderson I don't even remember if I said her name, carol Anderson, my mother, after she was doing the research and she was developing financial literacy materials for various organizations, over time she developed a library of resources, essentially, and she started to get this idea about providing it to financial professionals, providing the library of resources but also providing training to them on how do we facilitate these types of conversations. That brings about higher levels of self-awareness, that brings about higher levels of self-awareness. And so she came up with the concept of our organization money quotient, which is actually there's this philosophy behind it the EQ, or emotional quotient your awareness of your emotions and how they affect their decisions plus your IQ, your level of financial education. How comfortable do you feel with making decisions? So EQ plus IQ equals MQ, money quotient, which is a measurement of your overall financial well-being. So your overall financial well-being, you know, does include both your knowledge in personal finance as well as your awareness of how your emotions are affecting your decisions. So it all came from that philosophy. And and then so, over over time, well, so she wanted to start Money Quotient in 2001. She wanted to start Money Quotient in 2001.
Speaker 3:And at that time I originally went to school for photography and I was starting my own photography business. I was doing pretty well in Seattle, but just beginning to really build my business. And so she asked me would you like to also work with me and helping me build my business? So, you know, it would give you some flexibility in building your business at the same time I'm building mine. And I said sure, and frankly, I didn't even understand what it was that she was doing and I started to learn about it and I sat in on some of the first trainings with financial professionals and, frankly, I was blown away because these advisors were going through these materials for themselves as if they were clients. And that's how we helped them to understand how these materials work is. We take them through it as if they were clients, and they were. They left the training. I mean, first of all, there were tears that occurred in our training happy tears like these, awareness and they left our trainings feeling so inspired in their own lives that it just totally blew me away.
Speaker 3:So I became super interested myself and I ended up going back to school and designing my own degree program, bringing together all of the foundational pieces. So I put you know, the CFP coursework was part of my degree program that I designed, as well as psychology, effective communication and coaching skills, communication and coaching skills, as well as adult development, to you know how adults learn and then apply what they've learned to their lives. So I put those pieces together, so I had some of the foundational stuff too and got my CFP as well. And basically my mother and I have been working side by side ever since.
Speaker 3:She's very much on the research side. She loves digging into research projects. I often take the findings from that research and I build it into training programs and materials that advisors can use with their client. So we've really built out a pretty specific turnkey practical process and I think what's so great about that is that, regardless of the experience of the financial professional like they could be a brand new advisor or they could be a very seasoned advisor and they have a framework that they can lean on to facilitate these conversations with clients, raising their awareness and building that motivation to take action. So we've really kind of laid out a pretty specific practical process that makes it easy for advisors to implement, process that makes it easy for advisors to implement.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm kind of thinking of the phrase teaching old dogs new tricks. I feel like a lot of people would think that a product or a service like what you guys offer would be for people that are getting into the industry and trying to figure that out, and certainly that could be the case. Right, it's never too early to start learning these things. As a matter of fact, the earlier that you learn them, the better off you're going to be. However, if you've been in the industry for 15, 20, or 30 years, I feel like it's very easy to kind of fall into those habits that you've had and kind of rush things and kind of feeling like you know what people need and then maybe not listening as intentionally as you should Do. You guys run into that a lot.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah, it can be hard to break old habits, but, but you know, one of the things that we recognize pretty early on is, you know, advisors are a lot more successful with implementing these materials and navigating these conversations when they have good support and continued learning. So that is something that we offer, you know, from the very beginning is we often demonstrate how to use particular facilitation skills to get the most out of these conversations and allow those advisors to practice that and provide feedback so they feel confident. It's the confidence that is so important. When they understand what they're trying to accomplish, when they're going into the meeting, they've had some practice with navigating these conversations, then that makes the world of difference. So we have a kind of a, an online course that we guide them through. That has some live communication, workshops and things like that, where they're they are learning these skills.
Speaker 3:But I think what's so cool is that oftentimes we have the senior advisors.
Speaker 3:They recognize that this is the direction that the industry is going and they're thinking about the next generations at their firm. They're thinking about how can I set this up in a way for my successor that's going to continue the evolution of this practice into the future. So maybe that senior advisor doesn't go all the way deep into learning all the skills themselves because they're like thinking about their retirement, but they're recognizing the importance of it and they're also thinking about how can we create a consistent client experience where we are like nailing it every time and getting you know if you're growing your firm and you're bringing on more and more advisors, how can you create a consistent client experience across advisors as well? That's going to be, you know, effective and efficient, both effective and efficient. So we may not get every senior advisor to change their ways, but they certainly are recognizing the importance of learning these skills and see that, you know, the profession is really kind of heading towards more behavioral coaching as part of what a financial professional offers yeah, definitely.
Speaker 1:So how did you guys just I mean, like, obviously with anything you turn it into a service and you guys have been able to do that, um, but how did you decide what you're going to offer and what are some of the different? I guess I don't know if you want to call them packages. Obviously we were talking about how you were at the shift conference and, you know, spoke live, did a three-hour pre-conference talk. But what are some of the different service offerings that you guys actually do? And then, who are they really applicable to? Who should be taking advantage of those?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so well. We just have a fairly large library of resources and that includes tools that you use directly with clients, client-facing tools. You facilitate a discovery process and walk them through it, and you know we're drilling down into specific transitions life transitions they may experience. We have a short sequence of tools to take people through when they're doing retirement planning or legacy planning. You know we also have a sequence of tools to use with business owners. So we have, you know, a lot of different types of resources. But how we provide it to advisors is through different kind of packages in terms of like.
Speaker 3:We have a silver, gold and platinum level which, as you move up, your library of resources that you have access to is bigger and bigger and bigger. And our lowest level is all the kind of surface level tools where you're gonna have great conversations but the depth of the conversation doesn't go terribly deep and as you move up you're going to get deeper conversations and more specific conversations. So people can choose a level that fits their own comfort level with how far do they want to go with their own clients, or they can pick a level that makes sense for the type of clientele that they're working for or working with or the type of business model that they are using. We have a. Fundamentals training is the beginning, where you get to be exposed to the whole process, all the materials. You learn about everything and then usually people pick what package silver, gold or platinum makes sense for them. After that, fundamentals training is over.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, you're. You're making me think of like the scene in the matrix where it's like the red pill or the blue pill, like you can do kind of the baseline entry level stuff. But you can also go as deep as you want to go with this right. Um, yeah, that makes complete sense. So I guess, what does the platinum offer that the gold or the silver wouldn't?
Speaker 3:yeah, well, you know, I think gold is probably our most popular package. It really has a very robust set of tools and materials that advisors can use with a real in-depth goal setting process, and all of that. What Platinum offers is a whole bunch of additional modules modules and by that I mean like a client facing article library that you could use on your blog and in different publications. It also has a number of workbooks that advisors have used to put on client appreciation events or educational workshops and things like that. So the workbooks go into. A couple of them are specific around retirement planning.
Speaker 3:We have one that's called Journey into Elderhood. That's meant to be used with the adult children and their aging parents to help them communicate what their wishes are, what their ideal aging situation would look like, but it does it in a way that really gives honor and meaning to that period of life, you know, helping people to feel good about that part of their life, which I think is unusual in our society. And and and then there's a another workbook that really focuses on helping people to become aware of both the EQ and IQ pieces of their money quotient and look at ways at increasing both of those. So the platinum has a bunch of additional resources. Oftentimes people will go straight for the gold level and then two or three years into their partnership with Money Quotient, then they'll decide to go to a platinum level and start looking at those extra goodies. But that's typically how it works.
Speaker 1:Well, I like the specificity behind it and how you can basically get what you want out of it. You want to go really deep. I mean, what you just said is a very specific situation, right, but it is important and I think a lot of times, especially in America, it is hard for elderly people to maintain their dignity in a bunch of different ways. So it's huge. Would you mind giving us like an example of a success story of an advisor that you guys started working with and then how it really evolved and changed their outlook on everything?
Speaker 3:Yeah, absolutely. Oh man, I have a million stories Let me think about, oh, you know. So one of the topic areas that we explore. Actually, maybe this will be helpful too.
Speaker 3:We have four specific kind of topic areas that we suggest advisors facilitate conversations to facilitate with their clients. One is around satisfaction and values and the link between you know spending your resources not just money, but your time and your energy when they are aligned with your values. That's when you feel a sense of life satisfaction. And if people are feeling unhappy with their lives or dissatisfied in any way, that would be a place to really examine. Do we have clarity around what our core values are, what's most important to us and how are we actually spending our limited resources? Are they aligned or are they not aligned? And a lot of times, if they need to make adjustments, right, they're not feeling totally satisfied in this area. If they need to make adjustments, then there are financial implications that go with making adjustments. It might mean spending less time over here and more time over here, and sometimes there are, you know, things that need to be considered in the financial plan because of that adjustment. Another topic area is biography, so exploring you know, their life and their and understanding how their perspectives were formed, how some of their preferences were formed. If somebody is an overspender or something likely, those behaviors were developed when they were younger. So this is where around the biography is where I want to tell a little bit of a story.
Speaker 3:I had one of our advisors in our money quotient community share about a client that he was working with that made tons of money, tons of money. It was definitely a situation where you would think this person should never run out of money because of how much they make. But this guy kept spending it when as much as he earned it. He spend it so clearly he was not building that nest egg for retirement and no matter what this advisor did, he couldn't seem to help this client change their behavior. The guy logically understood what was going on. He knew, if he didn't change his behavior, that this was risking his retirement.
Speaker 3:But the behavior continued to happen and after taking the money quotient training, this advisor started to explore the money memories, started to explore, you know, growing up, what were your some of your first money memories and your first job and all of this. And they got to the question about the first job and he just started telling the story about. He had a paper route. That was his first job and he remembered he was pretty young, because you could have a paper route when you were really young back in those days. So he remember feeling very proud about it and then going to pick up his first paycheck and he was so excited to come home and show his family the first paycheck that he got.
Speaker 3:And when he came home his mom was so excited for him and said show you know, let me see, show it to me. And he pulled it out and then she plucked it out of his hand and said you know, now that you are making money, now that you have a job, you can contribute to the household bills. And so I'm sure that probably what she thought was she was helping to teach him some financial lessons like this is how an adult works, kind of thing. But to him it was just as soon as he made that money it was taken away from him and what he didn't realize. So after that point, whenever he got paid he would try to spend it before he would get home to his family so that it wouldn't be taken away from him.
Speaker 3:And what this now adult who made a lot of money wasn't aware of was how that created anxiety within himself. So every time he got paid and had money in his bank account, this anxiety within him would grow until he spent it and then that reduced his anxiety right. So he didn't know where it came from. And then all of a sudden, as he's telling that story, it was very clear because that light bulb went off and he was like, oh my gosh, I've been trying to spend my money before my mother takes it from me this whole time my whole life and um and so that really was the ticket to help him. That awareness was the ticket to help him change that behavior. And what I want to make sure that people understand is that doesn't take away that anxiety. That anxiety still rises, but now the awareness helps him to make a different decision and if he continues to make a different decision every time he feels that anxiety, eventually that anxiety begins to go away. So I think this is important for advisors to understand Just because they have awareness doesn't mean that it's easy to change that behavior, but as soon, as long as they continue with that new behavior. It gets easier and easier and easier. So you know, that's kind of an example of how exploring um is spending some time to explore this person's life really made a difference in the success of his financial plan, really turned things around for him. So satisfaction and values.
Speaker 3:Biography transitions is another topic area. We're constantly experiencing life transitions, so proactively planning for them is really important. And then we also dig deep into goal setting, because I think what we don't take a moment to think about is that most people don't enjoy goal setting for one reason or another. Either they've attempted to work towards goals and they've had so many failures in their life that they just don't like goal setting anymore. They just don't like goal setting anymore. Or what's common in our industry is we've had sales goals pressed upon people that make them feel negative about the term goal setting. So, for whatever reason, a lot of people have negative feelings about goal setting. So we talk about how do we reframe it, because goal setting is really important in the work that financial planners do with their clients. But how can we reframe it to remove some of those mental obstacles and have the client really engage in the goal setting process and actually get excited and motivated about their goals. So those are the kind of four topic areas that we delve into in our fundamentals training.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. So one question that I have is you brought up different business models that advisors are working in. Can you dive a little bit more into that and like where your services align with the different business models? I mean, brock and I we've always kind of looked at it from what Michael Kitsis considers. You know, like one a solo boutique firm or solo, you're working by yourself. You know, the second level being a boutique, you know it might be two to 20 advisors and then the third level being the largest being enterprise size. So kind of what are those three different business models or how do you break them up and where do your services align with that?
Speaker 3:Well, mostly we work with the smaller firms. That's kind of been our main focus. But, that being said, frankly, I feel like we have a really good model that would work well for larger institutions. Like I said, you know, the hope is that you're creating a consistent client experience, and how important would it be for larger institutions to do that If they're putting marketing out there and saying what is it that we do at our large firm? It's important that the advisors are walking the talk and have some consistency. That being said, I think it can be challenging to implement at a deep level in these larger institutions because you do need to get buy-in from everybody involved. So I would imagine that at the larger institutions, for the most part, you're going to see more of a silver level type implementation. So if you're looking at our silver, gold and platinum, you could likely get easy buy-in from across the board with our silver level, because those are, you know, the level of depth of conversations would be easy for everyone to manage. But we work a lot with individual advisors and then small boutique firms RIAs typically, but they don't have to be.
Speaker 3:And, you know, if you are implementing like our most effective model, which I believe is our gold level, then it's basically a four meeting process with a getting acquainted meeting.
Speaker 3:The client and the advisor agree, commit to a working relationship. After the getting acquainted meeting, then most of the data gathering, both financial, and we call it our engage stage. They're defining point A in that first discovery meeting. Engage stage they're defining point A in that first discovery meeting. So they're collecting all the financial information as well as working to understand values, preferences, perspective, everything that makes up that person sitting in front of you. And when you have clarity around that, then the next meeting is about designing a future, so defining point B. And then the fourth meeting is when you are presenting a draft of the financial plan and you're connecting all of their values and vision and goals to the specific strategies that they have. So, yeah, and then what happens after that is totally dependent on the client situation, like they may have additional meetings to meet with an estate planning lawyer or insurance broker or whatever it might be to you know, follow through on that implementation.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, man. I think you guys are doing something really special and it's been fun to take a minute to really learn about what you guys are doing. And again, it's just one of my favorite parts of finances is the psychological aspect of it and the way that that kind of affects us all. For people that want to follow along with what you're doing, Amy, or Money Quotient, how can they do that?
Speaker 3:They can go to moneyquotientcom. That's our website. We also have a sister organization called MQ Research and Education, and that's where we're focused on conducting innovative research, kind of collecting that research that backs our trainings. And also we're working towards creating a platform that can be used for pro bono activities on our nonprofit website as well, and that's MQREorg is our nonprofit website. I'm on LinkedIn. I do a lot of posts and blog articles. You can find me Amy N Mullen is my handle on LinkedIn and there's also a Money Quotient page on LinkedIn as well.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, appreciate the time today and have a great rest of your day, Amy.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me. This was fun. Great to get to know you guys.