#30 - The Power of Knowing Your Numbers

In this episode, Gillian interviews Kristine Beese, founder and CEO of Untangle Money, explores how emotional clarity around money can unlock time, energy, and attention, leading to a more flourishing life. She discusses gendered financial equity, the emotional triggers of money, and practical tools for women to improve their financial confidence.

What’s fascinating that came out of this conversation is the extent to which financial planning tools, investment solutions and traditional savings trajectories completely miss the oscillating nature of the typical woman’s earning pattern. As a result of time away from earning to bear and raise children, and or care for parents and family members, there is an additional “tax” on women’s ability to create financial freedom in addition to the existing pay equity gap. 

This is an excellent episode to gather valuable intel to help women assess and create systems to start working around this reality instead of wondering why the journey to wealth independence seems stacked against. 


Key Topics
😌Emotional triggers of money and their impact
💰Gendered financial experiences and systemic biases
😌Practical tools for financial confidence and planning
💰The role of side hustles in wealth building
😌The potential of AI to personalize financial advice


Quotes 
• “There’s so much going on before you’ve even looked at the numbers that money becomes triggering.”
• “Women have a different financial lived experience, and the tools weren’t designed for that.”
• “If the algorithm assumes money you’ll never earn, the plan is going to fail you slowly.”
• “The biggest competitor we have is doing nothing—avoiding looking at the money.”
• “Avoidance eats up time, creates anxiety, and turns money into something bigger than it is.”
• “Once people actually look at their numbers and understand them, everything starts to change.”
• “We don’t tell people what to do—we show them the trade-offs so they can decide.”
• “Most people are doing really great—they just haven’t been given the tools to see it.”
• “When you feel calm and clear about money, you improve all the other areas of your life.”


Chapters
00:00 Money and Emotional Well-being
00:58 Introducing Christine Beze and Untangle Money
02:08 Why Money Triggers Emotions and Stories
03:19 Gendered Financial Experiences and Biases
05:37 Designing Financial Tools for Women
06:09 Life Stages and Financial Data Points
07:37 Women’s Career and Earnings Patterns
09:08 Pay Gaps in Male-Dominated Fields
10:46 Societal Value and Early Money Lessons
11:42 How Untangle Money Works
16:12 Iterative Process and Confidence Building
20:14 The Power of Writing Down Numbers
21:08 Outsourcing Trust and the Google Effect
22:06 Side Hustles as Wealth Building Tools
27:14 Self-Sabotage and Avoidance in Finances
30:00 Changing Perspectives on Housing and Lifestyle
35:43 The Role of Self-awareness and Embodiment
38:12 Values, Trade-offs, and Joy in Spending
40:18 The Future of AI in Financial Planning


Check out Kristine’s work!
Untangle Money - https://untangle.money 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kristinebeese/ 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kristine.beese/ 



#flourish #wealth #wealthmanagement #investing #advisor #KnowThyWealthKnowThyself 

Connect with Gillian: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillian-stovel-rivers-ma-cfp%C2%AE-cea-997094124/?originalSubdomain=ca   
https://x.com/GillianStovelR 
https://www.instagram.com/gillianstov... 
https://flourishfamilywealth.com/

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

The Flourish Feed Podcast, a series of curiosity-driven deep dives into the nature of flourishing through wealth. I'm your host, Gillian Stoville Rivers, M A C F P C E A, Senior Wealth Advisor at CIA Sante Wealth Management.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Long story short, we see women's salaries plateau around 42 on aggregate. And also on aggregate, we see women earn about$500,000 to a million dollars less over a career. Now, if I'm a financial plan algorithm and I'm anticipating you're going to get$500,000 more or a million dollars more in, that's a lot of money that I can use towards your retirement allocation. I can use it towards goal allocation. But if you don't have that money, then, or if you don't see that money in real life, that plan's gonna fail you slowly. It's gonna be like, oh, you're short this year, oh, you're short next year, or you're wow, every year after 42, you're gonna be short. And that's that's sort of what I mean by women have a different life, a financial lived experience. We just don't have the same earning. It's not that we don't have the same earning potential. I think that's flawed. It's we just aren't seeing industries paying women as much over the course of their career and lifetimes.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

As we've talked about in previous shows, money rarely feels tangled because of numbers alone. It feels tangled because it's tied to late-night worry, to avoiding bank apps, to arguments that start over groceries and end somewhere deeper. It's tangled up in the pressure to do it right, the guilt of spending or the fear of not saving enough, and the quiet shame of feeling behind when everyone else seems to be ahead in a hyper-produced social media universe. Looking great. But on this episode of the Flourish Feed Podcast, I'm joined by Christine Beasy, founder and CEO of Untangle Money, and we're gonna explore how emotional clarity around money can unlock time, energy, attention, and ultimately a more flourishing life. But first, let's get to know Christine a little bit. Christine Beasy is the international award-winning founder of Untangle Money. She talks about the unintended consequences of a financial system built for the typical male. We're gonna get into some of those actual dates and numbers today, which is gonna be great. She shares captivating stories about what women need to know about money and what women can do differently to align their day-to-day spending with their long-term goals so that women can make the best financial decisions for themselves. Equipped with research, insights, and experience, Christine is a credible and compelling resource that regularly educates audiences on why gendered financial equity is critically important. And as the CEO of Untangle Money, her goal is to get an affordable, unbiased financial plan into the hands of every woman to equip them with the financial confidence they need to know the next steps that they need to take. Christine Beasy, thank you for coming today. Welcome to the Flourish Feed Podcast. Thank you for having me, Jillian. This is amazing. Well, as I talked about in the introduction, money rarely starts with numbers. It starts with stories. It starts with scripts that we've had since we were young, maybe even identity and relationship points. But when we unpack those, we can unlock other forms of capital. And, you know, you really do help people transform lives. But to start off with, why does the word money trigger so many different emotions and stories for people, especially before we even look at their numbers?

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Yeah, it's a great question because it's hard to understand what is so triggering about money. But when you think of how pervasive money is in everything we do, right? You can't eat without money, you can't have a home without money, it's everywhere, you can't retire without money. It is just there's so much pressure on getting it right. And yet we have no tools and no learning on how to do it. And then we have you layer on these money stories that we've heard, be it scarcity or you know, don't use debt or all debt is bad, or you know, abundance sometimes, and people just don't know where to start. And an interesting thing that's sort of sad and is still true, uh, at least for our generation, is that people and it uh and society and the norm is that money is the purview of men. So when you layer on the gender on top of this pervasiveness, on top of these money stories, and then you layer on gender, there's so much going on before you've even looked at the numbers that it just is triggering for from I would argue most people. Most people have some negative gremlins that come up for them when they think of money.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

And for you, you're a very, very educated woman. You know a lot about the money space, you know a lot about the tech and engineering space as well. But let's start with how did you manage to enter this differently? How did you manage to not have that gender layering so that you could see through it? Or did you, and how did you see through it?

SPEAKER_00 4:46

It's interesting because at first I don't think I did. And what I mean by that is the layer that I saw was was superficial. So it was the packaging. You know, I did really feel intimidated going into male-dominated banking spaces, even though I came from a male-dominated engineering space. For some reason, again, this banking space felt unwelcoming. And I thought, well, if I struggled to get to that space, then, you know, there are ways to make spaces feel more welcoming to people. And so I'll give a little thought exercise. You know, if you think of Gold's gym, it's this black muscle-building space that was the first franchise and exercise gyms, and it was hyper masculine in its design. And then if you contrast that with a yoga studio and the calm and the serene and the, you know, the light colors, you know, they both help you exercise, but they're going to resonate with different people. So I thought we were building the yoga studio for personal finance, right? Just a different offering, designed differently with different sort of, you know, I've done a lot of therapy. So, you know, incorporating some of that cognitive behavioral therapy learnings into it. I thought that's what we were doing. And then when you when we dug a layer deeper, that's when we saw that the data was actually not aligning. And so what we mean by that is women have really different financial lives. And the tools that are out there were designed on a male financial lived experience. And so when you apply, use try to use that tool with a woman, it's not going to be within the range of use cases, right? So it's it's going to fail women. So we, you know, at first we thought it was going to be just this marketing and packaging exercise and language and design. And then it turned out actually, it's also about the design of the algorithm and data and the model that we use to drive it. So it became far more pervasive than we originally set out to think or set out believing that it would be.

SPEAKER_01 6:38

That's really, really interesting. Does that have to do with life stages? Does that have to do with women having a markedly different life stage? Because I want to come back to the, let's call it the chemistry of the bro gym versus the chemistry of the yoga studio, because there's definitely something in there that we all have subconsciously been exposed to our whole life for generations that is true. But before I go there, let me ask you a little bit about this life stage question because I myself have used financial planning tools as a professional and on myself for 30 years and never even considered once that maybe the data points don't fit me. Tell me more.

SPEAKER_00 7:16

Yeah, so what we found, so again, this is these are things we know, but when we layer them up, they become critically important. So women tend to go into industries that pay them less overall, right? If an industry has a dominance of women, it's going to pay less overall than an industry that's dominated by men. Women are going to earn less in equal jobs, they get less pay for equal work in the same jobs. We're going to pay more for things like uh pink tax along the way, but also our salaries peak because we we tend to enter and leave paid work for because we're generally the person on tap for child care responsibilities, but also elder care responsibilities. And so, you know, if you think about an a heterosexual couple, usually the man is older and so they'll have, they might be further in their career and they earn more money because they're in an industry that makes more and they're making more money in that role. And so when there's when it's time to have someone step back to do care work, economically as a couple, it makes more sense for the woman to do it. And so, long story short, we see women's salaries plateau around 42 on aggregate. And also on aggregate, we see women earn about$500,000 to a million dollars less over a career. Now, if I'm a financial plan algorithm and I'm anticipating you're gonna get$500,000 more or a million dollars more in, that's a lot of money that I can use towards your retirement allocation. I can use it towards goal allocation. But if you don't have that money, then, and or if you don't see that money in real life, that plan's gonna fail you slowly. It's gonna be like, oh, you're short this year, oh, you're short next year, or you're wow, every year after 42, you're gonna be short. And that's that's sort of what I mean by women have a different life, a financial lived experience. We just don't have the same earning. It's not that we don't have the same earning potential. I think that's flawed. It's we just aren't seeing industries paying women as much over the course of their career and lifetimes.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

And you said that that is because, or that is typically true when women are in industries that are either equal or dominated by women, or we have to go into the lion's den and we have to go into the male-dominated industry, and then maybe we have the potential to earn as much, or what do you see there?

SPEAKER_00 9:27

No, so what we see, so a PEGA came out with so a PEGA is the engineering society of Alberta and geology, and they found after five years, and it it takes four years to apprentice to be a full professional engineer before that you're an engineer in training. And so there's not a lot of differentiation there. But so after five years, they saw a significant pay gap between women and men. And this is like the first rung of the ladder, right? So it was really disappointing. So when women go into male-dominated fields, sometimes the pay gap can be exacerbated. We see this in medicine, we see this in law. Sometimes that's based on their area of focus. You know, they tend to have inside these higher paying professions, there tends to be areas of focus that are different between the genders, but some of that is also just blatant bias that's baked into the system. So a similar surgery on male anatomy pays more than a surgery on a female anatomy. And I don't know enough to know whether one is much more invasive than the other, but I feel like a lot of female anatomy is much deeper in our body than some male anatomy. So to me, it would seem like the woman's one would be harder. You'd think so. You'd think so. But there's, you know, it's these things are anecdotal and statistical. And it just, I think fundamentally we just under-recognize the value that women bring to the table. And so I, as a society member, sometimes feel like I can pay women less. And we see it in the teenage years. So when we pay men or young men to do our law, we pay them more than we pay the young women that we have watching our children. And so it starts super early on what we think the value of the relative work between men and women do. And so we just, and that's pervasive, that's men and women and so that is society doing it. And so we have a lot, a lot of change and work that we need to do on ourselves to see these changes externally. And so while we wait for those changes to occur, we think you should use a tool that understands the lived experience you'll probably have and will set you up for success.

SPEAKER_01 11:27

Well, no wonder, because we talked about this before we started this uh recording today, no wonder women don't want to talk about money. I mean, it looks like from the very beginning, it's a reminder that they are second class compared to what they're from even lawn care and babysitting, which it blows my mind. I hadn't even ever thought of that before. But you could be right. I don't remember the last time I paid a male versus a female for either of those myself, but I'm going to be mindful about that. So when it comes to your program, I'm curious if first I want to know, I want to know a little bit more about how it works. What are some of the things you talk about? What are the, let's call it key principles of or exercises you go through. But do you coach people to ask for more compensation? Is that part of the structure, or is that more the empowerment that they might get out of your program than leads them into the world saying those things?

SPEAKER_00 12:18

Yeah, we don't necessarily coach them. We don't coach them in that. But what we do say is, you know, if they, if when we go through their looking at their NAM money, there's certain ratios that we look at and say, you know, your your fixed costs or the money you've committed to spending before you've even gotten out of bed should be below 50%, ideally. And that's really hard to achieve. So we do acknowledge that most people aren't able to do that with today's cost of living, but that that's what we're aiming for mathematically. And then we so one way to improve that statistic is either by reducing subscriptions. We love hygiene on subscriptions. I really dislike when people like basically burn money because they're paying for a subscription that they don't use. I'm guilty of it myself, but I've gotten better at checking them more often. So that's what I mean by hygiene. So you can reduce your committed costs, or you can increase the size of the money that you're working with, which would be getting an increase in money. So some for a lot of women, that actually looks like a side hustle, we've noticed, but it would also look like negotiating for more money. The challenging thing with negotiation is, and Fotini Iconomopolis is an excellent resource for this. And so is um Gillian Clemmy. They're both excellent at gendered negotiations because there are some things that we learn in negotiation, like tactics that are taught that actually disadvantage women. So if a woman tries to do them, it will actually backfire on them. So yes, yes. So you want to be very careful on how you negotiate as a woman. But yes, it's like if you can get more money, that that's always makes your finances better. So we do look at that.

SPEAKER_01 13:51

So tell me a little bit about how your program actually works. What do people come expecting to learn? What do they come away with? Is it different than what they came to expecting to learn? Tell us about it.

SPEAKER_00 14:02

Yeah, you know, I don't think we've done a great job explaining what how how we work with clients and what they walk away with. So we can talk about that later. But what it largely comes down to is we take as few data points as we can possibly take about you in, and then we set your expectations. So traditional financial planning would start with your goals. And we don't do that. What we do instead is we set your expectations. We make a bunch of assumptions and we say, okay, here's what you're working with. Now what do you want to do? And then the other thing we learned is that if you just show that to people, they don't actually think, oh, this is a starting point. I can change from here. They think, oh, okay, thank you very much. I'm gonna go. And so we say so. We now we say, okay, we're gonna set your expectations and we're gonna show you the major drivers that you can adjust based on some of the assumptions we made that you can adjust that can have really massive impacts on your on your now money and future money. And then the last thing we do is you walk away with, you walk away with your two most important numbers, what you can spend for every hour that you work, and how much you need to put away for the retirement, the future money that you chose. And then we want you to iterate. So we want you to execute, practice, and iterate because there are so many assumptions and you know, life is about trade-offs. Our values change over time. The trade-offs we want to make changes over time, our change over time. And so we want you to come back and instead of just having one data point, we want you to see the trend line, right? So, and so we set your expectations, we help you understand what you're working with, then we help you understand how you can change those things, then you get some numbers that you can execute with, and then we want you to iterate. So it's really a force that process.

SPEAKER_01 15:41

Do you think that the iteration process and even the initial, but the iteration helps them to gather more confidence about other forms of capital in their life? Like they become a little bit more meticulous with their time, more aware of their energy. I mean, there's got to be some good overlap there.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

I think money is so foundationally impacting every other area of life that when you feel better and you can exhale around money and you have a clear idea of what you're doing and importantly why you're doing it, then everything else does tend to fall in place. I think there's a misunderstanding about the iteration process. So we do, when people do iterate, you know, we've we've really made our assumptions conservative. So you should see an improvement over time. And we did that purposely because as we said, we don't know if you're gonna have children, we don't know what your life is gonna look like. There's more unknowns, but so we we wanted it to be conservative and the upside comes with time. But also it's to your point, it's that practice. It's that, you know, I waited two years. I thought it was every three to five years that you'd need to check in. And I think I had read that somewhere, but I waited two years between doing the mini for myself and my husband. And I noticed that I was untethered from the numbers. I'd forgotten the why behind what why we had made some of these decisions or why we had prioritized certain things. And also we had different outlays. We had children that were in daycare and leaving daycare at this time. So the money situation was pretty changing every year. But I really felt untethered from the numbers. And so that clarity and that, you know, just that calm that comes from looking at the at the what you you're working with and seeing the plan just enables that person to improve the habits that they're working with and just improve, to your point, all the other areas of life because they're not sitting there stressed out about money. Definitely.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

It reminds me, it's funny that you say that about checking in with it regularly or becoming untethered. It reminds me of my mother's father. So my grandmother, my grandfather on my mother's side. And I remember clear as a bell, him sitting at the kitchen table and he would pull out a full scat piece of paper and he would just start to write his numbers. It was like his way of reminding himself, this is how much is coming in and this is how much is going out. And he would do that every week. I mean, that's how it used to be done. And what's interesting, I think you and I were talking about AI earlier, is that we've kind of outsourced our trust of how much we know our numbers because we know we can look it up if we need to. I think they call that the Google effect. I don't have to know it if I know where to get it. Do you know what I mean? Yes. Yes. But when you do take that human moment and use a pencil and write out your numbers, how much different that relationship is with the calm that you're talking about? I think that's really smart.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Well, and I remember my parents once a month sitting at the dining room table with all the papers laid out and going through it, right? And they had to balance their checkbook and things like that. And I actually, you know, in Canada, we don't have APIs for open banking, meaning that, you know, if I use um a data aggregator, uh, plaid and flinks are the ones that are most common. I'm not attaching to APIs, I'm not getting that data uh without your intervention. I actually need your username and password, and then I'm gonna screen scrape it. And there's some risks with that, with your fraud protection. But and because of that, we chose not to use a data aggregator. We make you enter your numbers. And I think that is a friction that some users don't like, but I think it's super valuable as an exercise because you don't, otherwise you don't really notice. You know, we thought, well, if these things change, we can give them a notification saying, hey, you know, your water usage or your water costs have gone up. And that is valuable in and of itself. But I think just the exercise of going through and pulling these numbers, the number of people that say, you know, when we used to work with them in person, oh my gosh, I forgot I was paying for that, or I haven't used that in in ages. Like I'm just gonna cancel that, or I didn't, I didn't even know that money was coming out of the bank. Like it's just, and it's just hygiene, right? It's just making sure. I love that you say your grandpa knew where, like the money that's coming in and the money that's going out, and just reminding himself.

SPEAKER_01 19:43

Every single week is super important. Yeah. We seem to, I think, imagine that we have a boundless capacity for the stress that we can carry because of that. And we've told ourselves the story that we don't have the time to write it down. But I'll also tell you about another generation of my family, which was my father, who was a wealth advisor before me, into whose business I came and then uh became his successor. He said that he had never been successful at telling people how to spend their money. It's one of the things that when it comes to the financial planning process, it's the hardest part to get clear, right? It's the hardest part for people to check in on. And that's why there was an app several years back, you will remember for sure, called Mint.com, which I was a massive fan of, absolutely loved it, because it connected into my credit cards and my bank account, and it made me beautiful reports about where my money was going. And that seems to be what people actually need, or at least what they think, but what I think that the sort of the mental exercise that you're asking people to go through at least once in a while is super valuable because you become so in touch with what you don't need, right? With with what is enough. I want to come back to, I now remember the thing earlier that I couldn't remember, which had to do with you said side hustle. And I'm I think that's a fascinating part of being a woman. And the more younger women I know in their 20s and 30s, they have the main job, but they also have the side hustle, which A gives them optionality because they can control their income with something that they can dial up or down on the consulting side, but it also introduces them to this world of being an entrepreneur. And that's what you are and also what I am. And I I wondered in your experience of working with women, if you have any insights or case examples or a haws where you're like, you know what, this side hustle gene or this side hustle muscle that we could actually help young women train could be a really valuable part of wealth building.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Well, I think two things, right? I think there's a positive and a negative side of the coin. So I'll really quickly address the negative because I do want to focus on the positive. I do think, and this is nothing new for women. Women have been doing multiple jobs for years, but that sometimes, you know, that can it limits the amount of time we have to spend with loved ones. You know, we can get burned out faster. There's there's something about always being on. Always working that is really challenging. So I do want to say there are some negatives we see with it, but I really love the idea of focusing on the positive. I think women are really great with risk management. We are incredible. It's something that we are innately, we seem to be innately great with or excellent at. And I think that to your point, it's far less risky to try something out in a part-time capacity on the side of your full-time job earning money to determine whether this entrepreneurial venture is worth setting aside the full-time job and making maybe taking on on a full-time basis. So I know a lot of women, you know, try a side hustle and then maybe sof and try another side hustle. And then maybe that turns into their full-time thing. And I just want to reframe the side hustles that maybe don't turn into the full-time thing is experimental and data gathering and doing the research to just determine if this thing has legs, because going full-time into adventure before you've tested out the waters is not clever from a risk management perspective. So I do love that women are trying these things out. And yes, I do think it is an opportunity to an introduction to entrepreneurship. And I think a lot of times this turns into their full-time job because it's probably something that they like a little bit more than what they're doing full-time. Curiously, sometimes they find out they don't like doing it full-time or they don't like doing it to be paid because whatever creative outlet they got or whatever, you know, whatever they were tapping into doesn't feel as joyful or as free of, I don't know, market whims as when they were just doing it as a creative. Yes. Yeah. That's interesting too.

SPEAKER_01 23:41

Traditional wealth management focuses on a few key moments: your first house, sending your kids to university, when you retire, and when you die. Will you have enough? Will you die with too much or too little? These are questions of a very finite nature. Our approach goes above and beyond with the belief that wealth is not just money, but comes in at least four forms: time, money, energy, and attention. And that wealth is a wave that you can learn to ride to a life well lived, a life where you flourished, where you surpassed the finite game of having enough, to experiencing the infinite game of playing forever. Instead of just focusing on a few of life's moments, we focus on all of the moments between the 1440 minutes of each day, the energy to be harnessed from each and every sunrise, every meal, and every great night's sleep. The power of connection and meaning that all four forms of wealth, time, energy, money, and attention can access. This is what it means to flourish. So the question is: which wealth advisor is right for you? An advisor who helps you open the door to a few of life's moments or to all of them? Consider this. In the next 24 hours, you have 1,440 minutes, and it takes just a few of them to contact me at grivers at asante.com. Doing so could be one of the best investment decisions you ever make. So when we are, and not just women, but men, but when we are footloose, fancy-free and just at a school, right? That seems to be the perfect time to be as engaged as you can in the building of however many pathways you want to try, including the side hustle. And then there might be a chapter later when your kids are a little older when you maybe re-reignite that side hustle and maybe it becomes the full-time thing. But have you noticed in the coaching that you do with women that they're more, maybe it's generational, nomadic or mobile between industries or jobs? Or is that a personality thing? Is that an is that a generation thing?

SPEAKER_00 25:53

Definitely women, because they're in and out of the workforce, they we don't see as many women in jobs for their entire lives. And I'm not sure because we don't work as often with men. I'm not sure how that compares and contrasts to men, but we definitely don't see women staying in their jobs for a very long period of time. We see them going to part-time work and often that's at a different place. And then we see them come back and often that's at a different place. And one of the issues that that comes up with that type of work is pensions. You know, part-time work. Are you building up your pension? Are you is that is that work that is helping you with your CVP? And so that that part can become really tricky. And that's something, you know, I don't know if there's a solve for it in this conversation, but it's just something I notice that I'm aware of when women are changing jobs frequently is are you building and are and again, it could be men too, but you know, there's not a lot of defined benefit pensions in the work that we do. There aren't that many.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

No, I would think not. There's not a lot of those left, period. But certainly unless you're full-time in in one of maybe 10 different organizations in the country, it seems like they're pretty rare. But that point about the automatic savings that takes place even into CPP is great, but it needs some critical mass, right? If we're just going from part-time to part-time, it's pretty hard to build up that critical mass. I want to talk about maybe the darker side of what some of these people might be going through, which would be self-sabotaging behavior. Are there patterns that you see when people either sabotage their own financial progress or they maybe they decide it's not for them even without trying? And what does that represent to you? Tell me a little bit about some of the mind games that maybe women are playing with themselves.

SPEAKER_00 27:31

Yes. The biggest competitor that we have is doing nothing, it's avoiding looking at the money. So one of the things that we thought would be beneficial was with our online solution, we never talk to you. You don't have to interact with a human. And what we thought that might be helpful for is you don't have to reveal your financial underwear to somebody else and receive that judgment. Because we had a lot of people who said, you know, I'd really like to do your program, but my husband doesn't want you knowing our numbers. And so interestingly, as a company, you normally grow through friends and family first. And we didn't. We grew through beyond friends and family, which is usually a harder place to tap into. But friends and family, a few did, but a lot of them, you know, didn't want to feel exposed in that way. And I don't know if that happens in the high net wealth space as much because I feel like there it's more of a trusted person that you'd want. Whereas in the middle income, I we just didn't see that many. And so doing nothing, and it's common in all areas of life, right? You know, we we when we have mental health issues and we finally get the care and talk to someone that works for us, we feel better. When we finally start on that exercise path with a trainer that we trust, you know, all of a sudden we feel better and we have more energy. And it and avoidance is if so easy to do and so harmful. It eats up our time because we sit there worrying, it gives us anxiety. We become afraid of this boogeyman. And it's one of the most fascinating things that I learned is I thought going in, I assume that if you know we're trying to make your numbers work now and we are trying to get you to be able to retire in some capacity and die at 95, right? That's sort of our base case. And you can change the death age yourself, but that's you know the average. And I thought when we managed to do that, those customers would be satisfied. And we when we weren't able to do that for a variety of reasons, those customers would be unsatisfied. And I was totally wrong. All customers were satisfied because once they looked at it and they had a plan and they understood what they were working with, all of a sudden we saw all these positive changes and all these things that they said, well, surely I can't stop doing that, or I need this, or I have to live here. You know, all of a sudden, when they looked bigger picture and what what they decided they wanted to deserve, yes, then all of a sudden they're like, Well, you know, I actually don't need to live here. Or where you live has is just a lot of costs associated with it. So that's one of the major changes that you can make to lower your costs. But they, or they discovered, you know, I don't need that in my life right now anymore. And so it's fascinating to see people, and we don't tell them what they should do or shouldn't do. We just self-select them. They self-select because one of the things we we looked at is we said, you know, when you have, when you want to buy three$1 items, but you only have$2 to work with, it's gonna be about trade-offs. And if I can't apply my values and judgments to your situation, so that's why we wanted to show you the different trade-offs so that you can decide for yourself. And if if none of them work, then there's other things that you can self-select into. So, yes, the main thing that people do that is not helpful is avoidance. There's nothing. Is nothing.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

It's so helpful to have a way of looking at it because I was talking with somebody else last week about he coaches gentlemen in the South Asian community, and that he was amazed how many of them don't use calendars. And I don't think he's speaking specifically about South Asians. He was just saying people in general aren't using calendars and he couldn't imagine it. And I said, I know I see I see time in the form of an outlook calendar. Do you know what I mean? And the same thing I think is true of money, unless you find a way to see it. And that's what you are doing, is you're giving people a way to visualize it. And until we have a way to visualize it, unless you're my grandfather with the back of the napkin, you know, writing the numbers out, there's no way to see it. And the other thing I find too is, you know, to your point about when they finally can control their own choices about what to dial up or dial down, when you can also see the impact of those trade-offs. And if you do make that small change, now we're moving towards a goal with some very, very clear language. So this comes back around to one of the things I said at the beginning, which was like bro culture interface versus pink yoga interface. Tell me more about how you made it look and feel and how you thought it was going to be appealing, but what you ended up with.

SPEAKER_00 32:01

Well, so we ended up, so we have these mini wellness moments and they're purposely put in there. So one of the ones that I really like is because women earn less money, and in North American society, we are very tied, our self-worth is tied to our income. Before we ask you about your income, we ask you about two things you like about yourself. And one of the, so again, back when we were doing this, we still have a full service offering and a self-service offering, but when we only had the full service offering and we were learning, one of the women who came through said, I don't think I've ever been asked what I like about myself. And I actually found the question really hard to answer because we're constantly asked what we don't like about ourselves. That's a fantastic way to market to women. And so we see that in everything. Heart breaking. But how often are we actually? So we like they we liked it so much we actually ask you twice. And then we ask you about your income and you go in sort of, you know, supported into that question. And then, you know, before we do debt, we have a breathing exercise because we saw people would stop when they came to the debt and we're like, we know this is hard. And we warn you, we say, okay, we're gonna look at debt. We know this is hard. Let's do a breathing exercise to give us that support. And, you know, we can do hard things as people and especially as women, you know, we can do some of the hardest things ever as women, and you know, because of childbirth, right? And and so giving them the sort of space to, you know, process those feelings and then and then do it anyways, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:30

What a remarkable insight to package self-awareness at an emotional level and embodiment with money. Oh my gosh. I mean, that's genius. How did you come up with that? Is that just you?

SPEAKER_00 33:43

Yeah, the it was experimentation, right? We we sort of thought, you know, a lot of it was both women, original founders, myself and Rhea, had done a lot of therapy, right? We did a lot of cognitive behavioral therapy. And so we brought a lot of those instincts and and practices to this, this, this space. And so we, when we ask people what really, you know, originally they're just survey questions or informal interviews and, you know, what really scares you about money, you know, it's like, I can't believe I'm in so much debt, or I, you know, I just can't look at my debt numbers, or I just I feel so much shame around. We heard the word shame endlessly, you know, the amount of shame people are holding about their money. And most of the time, people are doing the best they can. And it's heartbreaking when no one's ever given you any tools or frameworks or guidance, or it's disparate, you know, it's all over the place and you don't know who you can trust. It's heartbreaking that this is the result, that you feel shame when actually most people are doing really great, right? And they just need a few tweaks here or there, or they just need to feel like they just need to explain to them and understand the ramifications of some of the choices so that they can make better choices. So we wanted to make sure that while we're collecting the data, which we found people found hard, right? Like, because you have to look at your numbers to put the numbers in, that having those wellness breaks in there made it more likely that you'd get through the process. So that's why we did it. And then yeah, yeah, it's one of my favorite things.

SPEAKER_01 35:06

No wonder you call it untangle money instead of fix my money because you're you're not fixing anybody.

SPEAKER_00 35:11

We're not fixing anyone.

SPEAKER_01 35:12

No. You're just showing them a couple of, as you say, a couple of tweaks. So when they untangle these money patterns and you help them acknowledge they're actually doing the best that they can with what they've got, what do they end up discovering about themselves that seems to surprise you or surprise them?

SPEAKER_00 35:28

You know, often the the most surprising thing is when they're like, oh, I have more money here, or oh, I forgot about this money here, because they're sort of taking stock. And it's, you know, it's kind of like when you open a drawer and you find a winter sweater that you remember wearing last year, but you totally forgot about this year, right? It's like this new, it's that comes this new sort of breath of fresh air. And then the other thing that we find half the people we work with it really resonates with them is this concept of flex money per hour that you can spend. And so instead of telling people what they can afford in the like prescriptive way or like don't eat the avocado toast or don't buy the latte, we really want people to understand how much time they have to trade to purchase something. That's it. And I don't care where you choose to spend your time. And so I still vividly remember my mom, who's a very fashionable woman and still helps me with my wardrobe at 50 years old. Um, she said she went three months without eating lunch at work because she wanted to buy this dress. And I she saw showed me the picture of the dress. She obviously loved the dress, she had the dress forever. And I would never make that decision. Like I would never make that trade-off. Just on your values, yeah. Based on my values. But I love that she did, right? And so she knew that was that was she did, she's to this day does not care as much about food. And you know, it's just isn't a foodie. But she is this fashionable woman. And and I I just I wanted a way for people to be able because one of women's biggest questions about their money is what can I afford? But that is loaded with judgment, right? Don't buy, don't get your nails done. I heard I've had so many people tell me, don't get your nails done so you can retire. I'm like, are you kidding me? I don't have them done right now. But like, or don't get your eyelashes, or you know, this and I do think that the beauty industry capitalizes on women more than I wish as a society was possible. However, I think if you want to get your nails done and that makes you feel good and that's what brings you joy, it's not gonna break the bank. There's other things we would spend$100 on or$200 on, right? Like flex money. Yeah. Yes. And so I wanted them to know, okay, if I want to get my nails done, it's gonna cost me 20 hours of my week. Is that worth it to me? Sure. And then now you can decide. Now you can decide what you want to be able to afford, right? And so that's where it comes back to this like questioning what they deserve versus what they're in control of doing or what's actually want. Right.

SPEAKER_01 37:47

I think that's the other thing you're helping them see too. It's not, it's not someone else's goal. You're not getting your nails done because everyone else is getting their nails done. You're saying, this is the price of it. How badly do you want it? Let's use the part of our brain that makes good decisions. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:00

Yes. And even with subscriptions, you know, sometimes it's a pain to go through the process. But if you think it'll take me 15 minutes to cancel, but it'll take me four hours to keep, right? Then it kind of makes that trade-off better.

SPEAKER_01 38:11

I love these trade-off discussions. That's so hardcore and very clear. I want to ask you a couple of like a contrast question. So the first one, biggest barrier for helping women right now is, and it might be on the lines of the beauty industry or might be something else. What do you see is the biggest barrier besides not doing anything?

SPEAKER_00 38:31

Yeah, and we touched on this before we started recording, but I really think we've trained women to see wit products made for them as inferior because people have pinked it and shrinked it. And I don't think that's their fault that they sometimes say a product or service made for women and they think that's probably not as good. So Rogaine, I use Rogaine for men because it's 30% cheaper than the Rogain for women. Same chemical. Amazing. So we're used to this. The other thing is I think sometimes women don't know where to get started. And so, you know, you ask one question and then you get seven other questions. You're not really answering anything. And I just think sometimes we don't feel confident or trusting enough of the offerings that are out there. So it's easier again just to do nothing. So I think those are the two biggest barriers. Perfect.

SPEAKER_01 39:20

And this last question, which leads me into the last question I ask everyone in season three of the Flare Speed Podcast. I want to know what you see the biggest opportunity is to elevate what untangle is and what it could become. Slash, in closing, uh, looking ahead, what's the most meaningful way you are using or imagine using AI? And they could be connected ideas or maybe they are separate.

SPEAKER_00 39:43

So this is actually we just applied to a program to tease out how AI could help us deliver the product better. Because I do think we've done so much of the groundwork that if we were to layer AI onto it, it would just be that much more personalized and customized. I think that would be amazing. So we could help people in a more personal way than we do now. We see it is personalized, but I think we could make it more personalized. There's some there, you have to go through every module. There's some modules that may not apply. And the AI could skip that for you. I think that money is so I don't think. When women understand their money and understand the choices they're making, statistically, they have better financial outcomes and statistically, they have enough money to live for their entire lives. They are making better, better, better decisions about their money for them. And then along with that, and very similar to your four parts of wealth, they see their stress go down. So if we can, you know, we say every woman, we've made a target of a million women in Canada because that is that will be a step change in the number of women who are financially secure and confident and much less financially stressed because it's women's number one source of stress. And so it could transform the way women experience life. So that's what we're trying to do.

SPEAKER_01 41:00

I look forward to seeing how you leverage everything that I can help you leverage, but everything you've already built. You're brilliant. Thank you so much for showing us that money isn't just something we manage, it's actually something we relate to. We check in with it, it checks in with us. And when we do that, we can make a really big impact, not just in our lives, but probably for our families as well. Christine Beasy, thank you so much for joining me today. And I look forward to seeing you again soon. Thanks, Jillian. Join me next week on the Flourished Feed Podcast to keep exploring the infinite game. In the meantime, remember to stay curious, turn your passions into purpose, and play hard. I'm rooting for you. This program was prepared by Gillian Stovell Rivers, who was a senior wealth advisor with CI Asante Wealth Management. This is not an official program of CI Asante Wealth Management, and the statements and opinions expressed during this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of CI Asante Wealth Management. This show is intended for general information only and may not apply to all listeners or investors. Please obtain professional financial advice or contact Gillian to discuss your particular circumstances prior to acting on the information presented.