[00:00.5]
Welcome to Inside Personal Growth Podcast. Deep Dive with us as we unlock the secrets to personal development, empowering you to thrive. Here, growth isn't just a goal, it's a journey. Tune in, transform, and take your life to the next level by listening to just one of our podcasts.

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Well, for all my listeners, you're in for a special treat today as, joining us from Pennsylvania, on the other side of that screen is Mary Clemen Evans. Good morning to you, Mary. How are you? I'm great, Greg. How are you today? Good, good, good.

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And people, they know me, but they don't know you. And I'm going to show the book, and there'll be something flashing across the screen for my listeners if you're actually watching on YouTube. Obviously, if you're listening, the book is called Emotionally Invested and Outsmart your Anxiety for Fearless Retirement Planning.

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And this is a Forbes book. And Mary, had a lot of fun writing it. She told me so. A lot of work, but a lot of fun. And you're going to learn a lot today, listeners, and I think from somebody who's not only a good financial planner, but is good at as a life planner.

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And so you have to be that if you're going to work with people's finances, because more than finances comes into the picture. Right, Mary? That's for sure. Yeah. So let me tell them a little bit about you. I, like I said, I'm thrilled to have you on the show at, Financial Advisors, who's revolutionizing how we think about money by bringing emotions into the equation?

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Mary is the founder and president of Evans Wealth Strategies. And what city in Pennsylvania is that again? Emmaus, Pennsylvania. Emmaus, Pennsylvania. You can look her up on the web as well, and we'll put a link in these show notes below for everybody that'll go directly to the website.

[02:04.1]
She is a cfp, a cdfa, and an abfs. And I'm going to let her talk about all those designations because I truly don't know what those last two are. But what makes her really, truly is her background approach to what she calls financial therapy.

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She opened her practice in 2008. She began experimenting with a, completely different way of, interacting with clients. Her intent was to create an environment where people would never feel judged or guilty about their money decisions. And she said, here's a shocker.

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We're emotional about our money. I don't think the industry likes to admit that money is so very emotional. And it is. She's been Featured all over the place. You can look for her out there. But, Mary, I'm going to let the.

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You tell the rest of the story. And I think that's where listeners like to. To know, because, look, you opened this firm in 2008, and while, you know, it may seem like whatever, it's.

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It's not that long, long ago. So where did you come from? How did you get there? And how did your personal history really play into you being so passionate about this? I think I'm gonna answer that in a little bit of reverse order.

[03:29.7]
Okay. People are a little surprised to find out I grew up poor. Very poor. As a matter of fact, the house I grew up in had once been a chicken coop. And the seven of us, my dad converted it into a house and the seven of us lived there. And at one point in my childhood, my parents were great people.

[03:47.1]
They were smart, they were loving, they were hard working. But some tough circumstances and we actually ended up on welfare. And back then it was. There wasn't any food stamps. You got, you know, government food. There is such a thing as government cheese. I remember it well.

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Yeah. And I remember when we went on there, you know, and my mom, who was really a strong individual, you know, had tears in her eyes, and I figured it was because of shame and guilt and she felt bad. And it really had an impact with me. I thought, I never want that to be me.

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And luckily it wasn't. I have been extremely fortunate in my career. And I went into corporate finance. I worked for Fortune 500 and I did very well. It was all very nice. And then I worked for a company that closed.

[04:36.5]
I was deciding what to do with my life at that point. My mother had cancer. I was her caretaker. So I was. You were the. You were the financial advisor I'm calling, actually the, the cfo, for Road Publishing, right? Yeah. Rodale Publishing, Men's Health, you know, Prevention.

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You work there for years and years and years, right? Yeah, about 10 years. Yeah. Long time. Yeah. You know, it's interesting, you. We talk to people who've been in impoverished, situations who rise up from the ashes like you have.

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And, you know, was really kind of strange about this is that you started this practice just two weeks before Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008. And you must be thinking to yourself as somebody, wow, my timing couldn't have been any worse.

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Most people would call this a terrible timing. Right, But. But you turned it into excess. So what does that say about how we should view setbacks in our Lives and in particular financial ones, because, look, your parents didn't have a lot of money.

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You rose up. How many kids were there? Five kids. Five. Now, have they all become super successful? They have, yeah, they have. Everybody was smart and hard working. Yeah. Great parents. Right. So it just shows you that you're, that, you know, where you come from doesn't determine your destiny.

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Right. And here you are in 2008 going, okay, how am I going to get, get through this? So what, what would you tell people out there today that are, maybe feeling the pressure of this turmoil, financial environment that we're in?

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And, you know, they're saying, hey, my 401K is a 201 and a half. Right.

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Well, one of my favorite expressions is, it's not what happens to you, it's how you respond to it. And one of the things we're doing for our clients, and we've always done is we know these times are bad. And we certainly know two weeks before Lehman's brothers, they were really bad, too.

[06:52.1]
And people are frightened. This is not their world. You know, they have a 401k, but they're not working in the finance industry. And it changes all the time. You know, we go through bad times every four to five years. You know, it, it happens. We turn around and we keep moving forward.

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And what people tend to lose perspective of, is this. And one thing I tell people all the time, when you're in the stock market, what do you own? You own parts of really good companies. You know, these, these companies know what they're doing. If you're high quality and well diversified.

[07:25.8]
And no matter what happens, like I work for Kellogg's. The next morning, the board of directors of Kellogg's is getting up and saying, how do we make more money today? They don't care. Tariffs are no tariffs. You know, who's in office, what the policies are. They want to make more money.

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None of them said, let's not frost those flakes because we don't like what's going on. Like, let's put frosting on them. I bet we'll sell a billion of them. And they did. Yeah, so that will happen, but sometimes that takes time. So you, you have to be patient there.

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Also, Those same, CEOs and board of directors go into times where there's cost cutting. And I think, you know, we see that. Look, you were the CFO for a very big publisher, and I'm sure you went times where budgets were a really big deal.

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And living with those budgets and the toughest thing that most people in your position have in HR is like, letting people go, right? It's like, okay, we, We. We don't need everybody right now. And I think there's as much fear of that today as there is anything, because we've seen these massive layoffs and things happening.

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What. What is your. I mean, if. If Mary had a crystal ball, which, you know, we don't all have a crystal ball, but if you were to look forward another three or four years right now, where. What would you tell people, to make them feel more at ease emotionally about their money and their life?

[08:59.6]
That's a big question. It is a big question. I don't expect you to have an answer, but at least you can d. Here we go. Let's do the two step. Greg. I mean, people. People are definitely worried about getting let go.

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Yeah. Let's remember, even in 1983, unemployment was almost 11%. And we came very close to that. 2008, 2009, big unemployment numbers. And it could happen again. So prepare for it. You know, have cash set aside, have your, you know, money airbag, what I call it, ready.

[09:34.0]
But here's something else. Why it is so frightening when you get let go. And I really learned this lesson in 2008. What are you really afraid of? You're afraid of the unknown. And I tell people, what if I told you, okay, you just got let go from your job. Nine months from now, you're going to find another job.

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It's not going to be for quite as much money as you had been making, but you get the job, and it's a decent company. You're working there for maybe six months. And here, lo and behold, another position comes open much more closer to what you were earning before. And you take that job. Could you handle that?

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And everybody's like, yeah, I said, of course you can. And that's what's going to happen. You just don't know it. We don't know the timing. We don't know what it's going to lay out. But, you know, most people find another job, they figure it out, they change their lifestyle. But try not to let the fear of the unknown overwhelm you and also don't let it paralyze you.

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Keep moving forward. Yeah. I have a friend who's a physician who wrote a book about worry, and he's. He's a great guy. And I was just at his house yesterday in his living room talking with him, and I said, I've used your statement many times. Steve, if I gave you a quarter for everyone, he said that worry is the misuse of our imagination.

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Yeah. And, you know, we, we can project forward, but, you know, as my little mother used to say, yesterday's a cancel check, tomorrow's a promissory note. The only time you have is really right now. And I loved her little statement because I still remember it today.

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With that being said, you argue that the biggest problem isn't that people don't know how, what to do with money. It's that they don't understand why they make the financial decisions. So can you explain what you mean for someone's money?

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Why? Right. It's like, okay, let's just say somebody comes to you and says, hey, Mary, I'm a socially responsible investor and this is my why, and I am not going to invest in defense or I'm not investing any of that.

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Is that the why you're talking about? It's not. Okay. I mean, those are some tools that people use. This is actually based on behavioral finance and one of those four initials, Greg so stands for I'm an accredited behavioral finance professional.

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So their terms are a little difficult to use. They say that there are two types of people, exponential discounters and hyperbolic discounters. I use the term FOMO and fo, Fear of missing out and fear of running out.

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And here is the high level difference between that. So the fear of missing out, people, they are hyper focused on today. They get dopamine from buying things today, the, the clothing, the golf clubs, getting the, bathroom done, taking a vacation.

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And we all need dopamine. You know, that's what lights up our brain and it's necessary. So that's who they are. And the photos, the fear of running out, they are hyper focused on the future. They are security seekers. They get their dopamine from saving, from feeling responsible.

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You know, they, they're always worried like you don't know what's going to happen. You have to save and you have to be, you know, prepared for this. So when you start to realize that this is your money, why, you can now start to realize, okay, this is what I need to do.

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This is what my partner is thinking. You know why there's a difference there? Mixed marriages can be a little difficult. Yeah, a FOMO and a fomo. Yeah. And that's usually the case though, right? It is more than not. You know, one person, probably saver, one person is the spender and they're trying to compromise.

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Yeah, sometimes that's not so easy. Well, so what they do is they don't talk, they don't talk about money. That's the biggest problem we have. Right. We don't talk to our friends, we don't talk to our families, we don't talk to our spouse. And why we don't do that is people feel shamed.

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Why they feel shamed? Guess cuz what our industry has done. We've shamed you. You know, that hasn't worked out. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting, the psychological analysis that you just discussed, you know, the fear of missing out or the fear of running out.

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And frequently that perspective is shaped by our past. So you came from a family that didn't have a lot of. Were you more on the side of fear of running out? And, you know, because I came from a, family with a little Jewish mother who grew up during the Depression.

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And it was always the fear of running out. Right. So, when she passed away in the house, she literally had thousands of dollars in little places all around in. She had it in filing cabinets and underneath in Oregon and in drawers and whatever.

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And you know, you read about people like this when they die and they never tell people that it's there. Right. I have a really funny story about that and I'm going to tell it real quick because this is truly the fear of running out. So we have a garage sale with her stuff.

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We sell this handbag that she had to some lady for two or three dollars. Now, this was very cool. The lady leaves, she comes back five minutes later, she hands us $500. And she said, I only paid you $3 for this, but there was $500 in that purse.

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So the, the Great Depression was such an enormous impact on that generation that almost all of them had the fear of running out. And your mom and my mom sound like they could have been twins. Yeah, they probably were. Yeah.

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After my mom passed away, I told my siblings, go through the pockets of everything, look in the bottom of the drawers, turn things over. And we found tons of money. Because people think of the Great Depression as a stock market crash, which it did, but the stock market was back in a couple of years.

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The real problem, by the way, was banks closed, there was no FDIC insurance, there was no securities and Exchange Commission. So I don't know, maybe your parents were a lot more affluent than mine, but I'm sure my grandparents, like they were not in the stock market. You know, if they had an extra dollar, you know, or 50 cents, they took it down to the bank, they put it in there.

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And when the banks collapsed, you know, people lost all that money. So people were terrified. Yeah, yeah, I know. She came from an era where people. Actually, she lived in St. Louis, and, she was telling us stories about people jumping out of windows because they had run out of money and they actually killing themselves.

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Right. Yeah. That must have been really a tough time. She said, you know, we would, you know, would happen frequently. Been reported in the newspaper. Right. So you mentioned that most financial advice treats people like they're one chart away from financial, happy.

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And I understand there's all kinds of charts that we can get. Why doesn't showing people more graphs and spreadsheets actually help them, change their behavior? Because it doesn't matter, if it's Schwab or it's the company that you work for or it's.

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It's Raymond James or whoever. You know, there are a lot of charts and graphs in this business. Let's face it. Well, you know, and. And I have to tell you, when I first started, I was showing people charts and graphs, and then I'm looking at their faces and realize, oh, I think they want to kill themselves.

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You know, I. I have to do this a different way. But this is the only industry that I know of that. And this goes back to my big sin, big, big lie thing that, you know, we want. We make people feel like they need to understand everything about the financial markets, the most complex system in the world.

[17:56.6]
Why? I don't know. My husband gives anesthesia. He never goes into a patient and say, well, you know, what anesthesia do you want? Here's five that I was looking at. You know, here are all the pluses and minuses of it. What do you think that, you know, anesthesia should I give you?

[18:11.9]
I mean, it's crazy. And we're not. We are emotional creatures. Like, I openly admit I have a brownie problem. So no one needs to show me another chart or graph of how many calories are in brownies or what happens if I eat too many brownies.

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You know, like, I don't need to know that. The problem is not that I don't have the facts. Like, I know eating brownies every day is not good for you, but when I'm having a bad day, guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to have a damn brownie, right? And if somebody yells at me for eating a brownie, guess what I'm going to do?

[18:45.6]
And I know what mine is. Mine is licorice. I'll go to Trader Joe's and buy two packages of licorice and they're gone in two days. Is it black licorice? Because that's not. Yes, I do like black liquor. Yeah. But if someone yells at me, creating a brownie, I'm just going to go eat another brownie because it's, it's my feel good.

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So when people are not making good financial decisions and then we're yelling at them for not making good financial decisions, they continue to make bad financial decisions. It's crazy. Yeah. And showing them, one more charter graph isn't gonna make them feel any better.

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They know, you know, particularly the shoppers, they know they're not putting enough in their 401k. They know they're probably going to run out of money. They know all that. Yeah, yeah. So what do you do when you find a couple or an individual and you know, the big thing in the industry is kind of like, well, risk tolerance.

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Okay, well, you need to make as much as you can so you could keep up with inflation. And if you're making well. But I don't feel comfortable putting money in that XYZ company because there's too much risk. What are, what are you doing in your practice?

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Because you are approaching different people differently about looking at their ability to find out what their risk tolerance is, depending on age and all kinds of variables. Do you have like a test that you give them or is it a, an intake questionnaire?

[20:14.4]
Well, I think no, we don't do the intake questionnaire. But what we do is we do a full financial plan so we know more about our client than most other people do. But those four question or six question risk tolerance questionnaires are crazy. Let me go back to anesthesia, because if my husband would actually tell people what the side effects of anesthesia are and then ask them if they want anesthesia, they would say no.

[20:40.3]
So we're doing the same thing in this industry. So besides doing a full financial plan, I really try to educate people and we use this word risk. Isn't risk a scary word? Like if you ask anybody, do you want a lot of risk? Who is going to say yes?

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Well, you might get a crazy person that does cliff jumping. They're okay with it. But not my clients. We need to explain words like volatility and growth. That's a really big difference.

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And when you can help people feel emotionally calm, like what is normal? You know, normal is we go through a bear market every four to five years. It usually lasts less than two years. You know my, I always use humor. I tell people, look, when you're investing in stocks, think of it like my weight.

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It goes up and down, but the trajectory is always up. And then people laugh, but they remember it. And then to make them feel safe, safer. This is behavioral finance as well, really. We tell people any money that you need within two years must be in cash or cash equivalent.

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So if you're retired in the withdrawal phase and withdrawing $5,000 a month, that's 120,000 every two years. You're still working, you may need a emergency fund. You might be planning on having a bathroom done or buying a car. It has to be kept in cash. We look at this from a psychological profile, not just math.

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So if you put everything in one account and we're in a bear market, you log into your account, you're going to see it, you're going to see that red, you're going to see it's down. We actually break out cash and then we, for two years. And then we have another, pretty conservative account for two years.

[22:28.6]
The more growth stocks are in their separate account when they log on, they're going to see accounts that are still up, they're going to see them in the green and they're not going to feel as bad. So like money market accounts and, and maybe bond accounts or things that they have like that. Yeah, well that's, that's also an extremely valuable way to approach it.

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You know, I like this behavioral finance way. Now no one sells out. Exactly. Exactly. So I just mentioned the 401k a minute ago and I. You call the shift from employer funded pensions to individual 401ks the big sin.

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Yeah. Why was telling people, don't worry, you can save for retirement yourself, Such a destructive lie that people were doing. And in essence, you know, look, the bottom of the book says outsmart your anxiety for fearless retirement planning.

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So let's talk about that fearless retirement planning. Well, first, you know, when four, when pensions essentially went away and 401ks came about, people didn't even know about that. Okay, so that's number one.

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They didn't even, they didn't even understand. Also required you unlike, you know, a pension, there was no reduction in your paycheck. So now we're asking you to reduce your paycheck to save for your retirement. And that requires delayed gratification.

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I don't know if you know, many Americans, we don't think that this is our area. Of specialty. And then to make it worse, we said, oh, this is so easy. You can do the investing yourself. How would somebody who's a teacher, a doctor, or plumber in their spare time, with working and raising a family understand the financial markets?

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That's just crazy stuff. And that's why, you need a plan and you need to be responsible for the things that you know about. You know, like what I want my clients to know is, what do you want retirement to look like? How long do you think you're going to work?

[24:41.1]
You know, do you think you'll get a raise? What do you need to spend money on? What do you want your lifestyle about? They're the experts on that. And then we teach them about the difference between conservative and growth. And we show them in the plan. If you go more growth oriented than conservative, you get to retire 10 years earlier.

[24:58.7]
Now, how do you feel about growth? That's amazing. People like, I like growth. Yeah. I had gone from people who wanted all the money in the mattress, and then when I move more money into, like, money markets or bonds, like, why are we doing that? Like, because you still need to do that.

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I know the growth has been great. And, you know, when the pandemic hit, everybody was slightly terrified. Terrified at the markets, terrified they were going to die. And people who had just retired were calling me and going, oh, my gosh, what am I going to do? I'm now in withdrawal and the markets are dropping.

[25:33.5]
Fastest drop into a bear market in six weeks. And I said, well, remember I have that two years in cash. Look at your account. Oh, and then, by the way, we have two more years and, like, sitting in some bonds and some conservative things, so we're good for quite a while. And then they're like, oh, okay, Mary, that's great.

[25:50.4]
How are you doing? And so you ease their ears, their fears and concerns. And I think those fluctuations. You know, I was speaking with a professor from Michigan State the other day that's going to come on, written many books, but he was talking about us as a society being able to embrace.

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And I know this is a hard one for people. Ambiguity, meaning, you know, we're living in. The. People are so used to this. More certainty, but less certainty and more ambiguity. And. And he's saying it has to become kind of a way of life.

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Right. It's got to become a way of, like, who we are, because we are not used to that. Would you have a comment about his comment around ambiguity during these times or until we. I mean, it Seems like there's such a shakeup going on that so many things are going to get reinvented.

[26:53.9]
You know, I mean, people are looking at Bitcoin now, and you would have never thought Bitcoin would have entered the picture the way it is now with the endorsements it's got and all the kind of stuff that's going on, and, you know, more. And then the. Then the securities Exchange Commission potentially rewriting laws, you know, and the whole money system seems to be moving.

[27:21.5]
Yeah, there's a lot of moving parts. But you know what? There's always been a lot of moving parts. If you go back and you study financial history, which I've done, you know, for the last 100, 150 years, all these things we're talking about, we know about, we see, that's not what takes us off the rails.

[27:37.1]
It's the things we don't. It's the bus you don't see. It's not the bus that you do say, you know, because a lot of the things that are happening now that are causing disruption, we know what caused the disruption, and we kind of know what the solution to that is. Now, that doesn't mean that solution is going to come back tomorrow or next week or, you know, maybe even later on this year.

[27:56.8]
But in the other thing that we think about, you know, if we worry about something like that's going to help prevent. Just, you know, worrying does not prevent Imagination. Yeah. Yeah. It doesn't prevent the bad things from happening.

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And I think the only thing certain in this world is uncertainty. And, you know, like, I talk a lot about the rug puller. I've had so many times in my life where I thought, this is it. I'm on track, Things are going great. And then book, you know, something happens.

[28:29.8]
It's life. It's just life. Well, look, we have a financial icon, Warren Buffett, who's finally stepping down, from his huge company that he created. And, you know, if you've watched the moves he's made recently, just like you said, he's moved a lot of money into cash.

[28:49.4]
Yeah, he has a lot of money into cash. And I think there are people out there that, you know, you talked about this in the book. They put critical emphasis on these media personalities who you call, you know, yell at the callers.

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Now, I wouldn't call Warren Buffett one of them. Oh, no, I love Warren. Yeah. By any means. He's about the calmest, coolest guy I've ever, ever seen on media. What's the psychological impact of shame based financial advice.

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And why doesn't it work? Because, I mean I don't. The YouTube, everywhere the airways are filled with quote unquote experts. And I'm going to tell most of my listeners, not many of them are experts.

[29:36.3]
I was listening to one of the guys and he says, well, I've made million millions of dollars. What they forget to tell you is it cost them, a million and a half to get to where they were. And really their net profit was, you know, maybe $100,000.

[29:51.4]
You know what I mean? It's kind of like you're, you're listening to so many people tell you this and there is a lot of it out there and then it makes people feel less than. Oh, for sure. Yeah. No, I, I adore Brene Brown, who I think is the leading I do expert researcher on, on shame.

[30:09.7]
But I think it never became more clear to me than after I started the business and people would come in and see me. Yeah, great couples. And within the first five minutes they're apologizing to me, they're apologizing to me for not knowing more, for not doing more, for not saving more.

[30:26.7]
And we haven't even looked at anything yet. And as I say, there should have all over themselves. And you know, again, you know, I use humor to try to bring down the temperature. And I'm like, oh, you want me to judge you? Well, if that's the case, I'm going to have to charge you more because I don't like it and it's a lot of work.

[30:43.6]
And then they laugh and they relax. But I realized like, and people tell me, well, I was afraid to come in and see you. I was afraid to go see a financial advisor. My last financial advisor was always yelling at me. And yet this is.

[30:58.9]
The financial systems are so complex. You need a really high quality financial advisor. And because they listen to the people on the air who said, what did you do that for? And you know, you should be afraid, you should be embarrassed. They thought I was going to do that and I would never.

[31:16.6]
And I don't even go over what you should have done. Like, unless you have a time machine, that's not real helpful. This is where we are, this is where we want to go. You know, let's spend our time, you know, figuring out that path. And people need to be able to talk about money, they need to be able to get help on money.

[31:35.2]
And none of this is happening. I actually think it's doing terrible things, for people Getting really good quality help. I think it's making them more anxious, to be honest. Oh, for sure. You know, I, I'm not gonna. I think our social media craze there's got its goods and it's bads.

[31:52.3]
Right. And it certainly has done a lot to propel society forward. It's got a lot of negatives in it as well. So look, when, let's talk about a practical application. You got a, fear of missing out married to a fear of running out.

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Let's just say that the man is the fear of missing out and the fear of running out. As a woman, actually, how do you work with a couple like that and how do you help them from destroying that relationship? Because they come in your office and I'm sure you see plenty of them that way.

[32:27.0]
Oh, yeah. And you. And you have to be able to, when it be the mediator. Yep. Well, and, and what you find out is they don't have the language to talk to each other. That, that is the problem.

[32:43.2]
And you know, the, the FOMO will say to the fo row, all you care about is money. I care about people. You know, the FOMO will say to the fomo, you're so irresponsible. All you do is spend money. You don't care about our future. So I don't let any of those conversations go on.

[32:59.2]
You know, I do explain the difference. So FOMO and fo ros to to come together and just slightly change their behaviors. There's a few key things that need to happen. If you have a severe fo row who doesn't want to spend a dime on anything the FOMO doesn't want to talk to, because what the FOMOs, again, hyper focused on today, on the vacation and enjoying life.

[33:24.0]
One of the key provisions to financial happiness, having enough money for the pleasures of today. You have to give them permission to spend the money. And that's where FOMOs don't understand. I don't want any of the money spent. Like, we don't need this. Why would we spend the money? So, you know, you can't have everything, but you can have something.

[33:40.9]
So I find out from the FOMO what's really important to you is having the bathroom done. More important than taking vacations, is going out to dinner, you know, more important than clothing? So let's prioritize it and let's put a budget together. So whatever that budget would be, you know, maybe it's $20,000 a year, maybe it's $2,000 a year.

[33:59.3]
Everybody's different. Then you have to show the photo. The photo loves plants. They love the plan. They love, you know, seeing whether they're on track and when. I can show them, like, look, he gets to spend this $20,000 a year, you know, take you and the family on vacation, and you are still going to meet all your retirement goals.

[34:21.9]
This is the amount of money you have now. This is what you're going to have at retirement. This is how much you're going to be able to withdraw every year. And then the sorrow will say, well, what if, what if? So we have a whole series of what if, what if Social Security goes away? You know, what if pensions decrease?

[34:38.0]
What if inflation goes up? Faux rows are really good at coming up with a list of, of what ifs. I love them for that. And we walk them through all that. And I said, in all those scenarios, you're still okay. Yeah. So why don't the two of you sit down and plan that family vacation that you're going to enjoy.

[34:57.6]
It's interesting, Mary, they probably still leave with a question, even though you've answered them all, because that's just a faux row for you. I mean, it's, you know, I can say I'm, I'll just raise my hand and I'll say, I'm the pharaoh in the marriage. And I, again, it was, it was programming.

[35:17.6]
And my wife has always said, hey, look, you're just like your mother. You know, here's the image of your mother. Thank you. And I said, well, you know, I, I actually take that as a blessing. Many of the things that I received from her were a blessing.

[35:33.6]
And this leads me to this question. You know, after your son Dan passed away, his death, you, said you evolved from a faux row to more of a FOMO. I get it.

[35:48.7]
I know right now I'll be 71 in less than a month. And I know what happens when you look at your finitude, no matter how it happened. So just a quick story. My daughter in law, 44 years old, two grandchildren with her and my oldest son, she rushed in, she had a artery, leakage.

[36:12.0]
She ended up with bypass surgery at 44 years old just last week. She's changed already her attitude about being with the family and being more close and more loving and so on.

[36:28.9]
So how do major life events like the one in your life change a relationship with money? And is it possible to consciously shift our money? Why? Right. In other words, for you, you had a very, very devastating thing happen, and it's always hard to lose a child.

[36:52.4]
But the reality is you're now taking a position of, hey, things will work out. I can see that in you through the whole conversation, that you're not a big worry ward anymore. It's like, hey, you know, we're all gonna. We're all gonna leave this planet at some time.

[37:09.4]
You know, the finitude is here. And that gets into the estate tax planning, which I'm sure you help these people with as well. So can you comment how you changed what it was like and why people maybe would want to take a middle of the road stance versus be so much of a faux row, which is what you were before?

[37:30.4]
Well, my definition of financial happiness, which I did do a Venn diagram because I'm, a nerd at heart, but, you know, it's having the money that you need today to spend on things that give you today's pleasure while still knowing that your financial future is safe.

[37:46.2]
And I realized I wasn't spending enough time on the things that would give me pleasure today. And one of the things, my husband was taking me down to the beach to, you know, try to make me feel better, calm me down. It was a tough situation. And I was looking at a beach condo, and I'm like, that's irresponsible.

[38:02.1]
We don't need that. You know, faux row was, was coming up, right? And, you know, which was ridiculous. You know, it's like, I'm emotional about my money. Yours, I'm not, but my money, I'm still very emotional. You should have had him give, give you some of that anesthesia that makes you talk so much and just laugh back out again, Yeah.

[38:23.6]
But one of the things that I did by the condo, by the way, and, I have friends down there all the time and family down there. I have my, my son's Widow and their four children are coming down there in about 10 days.

[38:40.4]
And, you know, they're going to love it. We're on the beach, we're playing together, you know, And I realize this is really what it's about, having this pleasure today. And I am certainly not anywhere near irresponsible. This is definitely not going to impact my retirement.

[38:55.8]
One, I'm probably never retiring, so I probably don't even need those funds. But what I had to tell myself to do it, it's like, well, you know, what if things went really wrong? I would sell the condo, I would have the money, you know, like, I would be fine. It's never going to happen.

[39:11.5]
But Phobos need to tell themselves these stories that when they go through the what if that we could always do this. It's the reassurance and it would be okay. Yeah, it's. It's the reassurance. So, you know, the money out of there, it's just in a different asset.

[39:27.9]
So if you did a balance sheet, or you did a personal financial statement, let's say it's like, hey, all I did was take money out of one pocket, put it into this thing, and it probably made more money than if I left it in the market because I threw ruined in a piece of real estate.

[39:43.3]
And I had fun there too. Oh my gosh. You can have fun as well. So. Yes, exactly. Is that, you know, I think that is kind of the thing is like shifting it and looking at as a shift versus a loss or an expense.

[39:59.5]
Right. It's, it's, it isn't an expense. It's an. And it's an. It's an investment. And truly a good investment. I'm glad that you made, you still have to. To spend money to go out to dinner and stay in nicer, you know, hotels. And I.

[40:15.2]
One of my things, my husband is better at like booking a nice hotel than I am and so I let him do it. It's like, don't ask me, I don't want to see it. I'll enjoy it when I'm there. Don't tell me what it costs per night, you know, versus the no tell motel that I might have picked out.

[40:34.9]
Yeah, you're like me. Oh, my God, we're peasing the pod. Because that would have been. How do I find that? Airbnb. Oh, my God. That thing was off the beaten path 10,000 miles and, and they had dogs barking and. Yeah, I get you.

[40:52.1]
So look, you, you call for major changes in the financial services industry from standardizing titles to requiring fiduciary, duty. If you could wave a magic wand and kind of fix three things tomorrow, what would they be?

[41:08.9]
What would you want to have Happen? The number one thing I want to see changed is that, FINRA, the regulatory arm, has 253 financial designations on there. Two of them that are not there are financial advisor and financial planner.

[41:25.2]
So anybody can call themselves the financial advisor and financial planner. The two most search for terms. You know the training a doctor has. You know, the training a plumber has. You do not know the training a financial advisor has. That is a big problem. And you know, they, they do all These different rules out there and, you know, thousands of pages of legislation, but they haven't standardized this yet.

[41:48.3]
And they need to, because people, you know, like I tell people, don't learn about stocks. Learn how to research who you're talking to. You know, what are their qualifications, what do they know? I mean, that's, that's even more important. And the fiduciary rule is that, you know, you have to put your client's interest ahead of yours, like, duh.

[42:07.7]
But nonetheless, you know, and every financial advisor and financial planner, standardize the titles. They should all be subject to fiduciary. I mean, that's just a no brainer. And, that's, to me, those are the two biggest.

[42:25.6]
But what is slowly happening? The cfp, the Certified Financial Planning Board, has now included behavioral finance into their training. So now you have to take like a master's level course on that, which I think is a great start. It is, but we need to do more of it.

[42:41.9]
We need to recognize it. You know, financial advisors just want to prove to you how smart they are. Let me show you this fancy charter graph. Let me explain. Alpha, beta, standard deviation, all the things that you would rather shoot yourself than learn about. I actually think that, you know, one of the best things that I did, I did it later in life, but I had, I had actually gotten out of the financial services business, as you knew.

[43:06.7]
I did the same thing you did pretty much, was I went back and got a degree in spiritual psychology. And I think that as someone who has a master's in psychology, you really need to have a master's in psychology to deal with clients.

[43:24.8]
No matter what you're doing. Now what I do is when I'm not doing this podcast show, I'm working with families, with family succession planning. And so the reality is, is that you really use more psychology than you do finance when it comes.

[43:42.4]
The math is easy. Yeah, the math becomes pretty easy is right, because it is what it is. So look for someone out there listening to this podcast right now who recognizes themselves, you know, and they say they feel overwhelmed about where to start, what to do next.

[43:59.9]
What's the next step? What should steps should they take on Monday morning? You would advise them. If they're like just feeling completely overwhelmed about their finances and where they're going and their investments and, they just need help.

[44:17.1]
What would you tell them? Well, I really think that people need a really high quality financial advisor. My office, we're all certified financial planners. Doesn't guarantee that that's the person that you want. But it's a, it's a pretty good start.

[44:33.7]
And there's some other good ones out there, but make an appointment, see the person, and if that person shames you, if that person isn't asking you a lot of questions, it's not the right person, go find another one. You know, interview three or four, who you're comfortable with, who thinks, who you think is really talking to you, who understand this, because I assure you, they're out there.

[44:55.4]
Maybe not super easy to find, but they're out there. And particularly the FOMO fo row couples. But a lot of times all my couples, the number of people that tell me they really don't talk about money until they're in our office, they want to be sitting down with us to talk to us. And if that's what you need, that's great.

[45:12.2]
And it's not your job to know alpha beta, standard deviation. It really isn't. You know, it's your job to do the savings, to earn the money, to, you know, listen to a really good financial planner.

[45:28.1]
That's, that's all you really need to do. Well, Mary, you're a broker dealer. And I want to tell our listeners, because we'll put the link, but, when you Google, Mary Clement Evans name or you look far up in the book, the website that it's called Evans well Strategies, I come up to one that says raymondjames.com forward/evanswealthstrategies.

[45:52.0]
That's one way they can get to you. Can they also get to you just by putting in your name? Or is there a separate website or is this the best way for them to kind of get through to you? Is raymondjames.com forward/evanswealth strategies?

[46:07.1]
I don't work for Raymond James. I trade through them. So they actually physically host the site, but we're an independent. It's. It's evanswealthstrategies.com we'll take you there. Okay. And, Mary clementsevans.com will tell you more about the book and behavioral finance, though.

[46:25.3]
And we'll also put a link to Mary's LinkedIn where you can find out more about her there and her posts that she makes, and all the things that she's doing there. So. And there's also a picture of the building that she works in the page there.

[46:43.3]
But it's also a great way to learn. You said do your research about somebody. I find that LinkedIn is a great way to actually find out more about the people that you're working with in their past history. So, I appreciate you being on the show today, speaking about your book, Emotionally invested.

[47:04.7]
And I think for the people out there today that feel any uncertainty about our times, any uncertainty about, you know, make like they're living with an opposite like we were just talking about. Go, go find somebody, even if they're not in your area.

[47:22.2]
I'm sure you can email Mary through here or going to her website, and one of her people in her office will make certain, Nicole, that she gets in touch with her and you guys have a talk. But I do know that wealth advisors, if they're licensed in all the states, can deal with people almost anywhere.

[47:41.6]
How many states are you actually licensed in to deal? Are you just in PA or are you in a bunch of other states, too? I think we're in about 30. I don't. I don't even know that I've track of it anymore, so. So you could actually work with a lot of people in very different areas that. Correct. I can.

[47:56.7]
But, you know, my mission here is really, you know, it's for people to understand themselves, find a great advisor. You know, I can't help millions and millions of people personally, not that many hours in the day, but I'm hoping my book does that and it shows you how to interview an advisor, you know?

[48:13.5]
Yeah. So people to feel better. This is a, again, this is a wonderful book for anybody who's kind of just starting out and wants to learn more, about how to invest, how to not be confused, how to not be overwhelmed, but to feel comfortable.

[48:32.7]
And I think that's the key, is you want to feel comfortable. You don't want to have to run down to your computer every morning and look to see what's happening. You want to leave that up to your advisor, who's proactive, which I'm sure Mary and her team is. So thank you.

[48:49.4]
Thank you so much. Namaste to you. Thanks for being on the show. Thanks for spending time with us this morning and, letting our listeners know about your new book. And we'll make sure that it gets out there on all the social media channels so everybody can listen to this podcast. Well, thank you, Greg.

[49:05.5]
It's really been a pleasure and an honor to be on your show and a lot of fun talking to you as well. I knew this was going to be a good interview. It was just fun. Yeah, we're, we're going to solve all the problems of the world. Two peas in a pod.

[49:21.4]
Okay. For sure. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Inside Personal Growth. We appreciate your support. And for more information about new podcasts, please go to inside personal growth.com or any of your favorite channels to listen to our podcast.

[49:37.9]
Thanks again and have a wonderful day.