Why You Know What to Do With Money… But Still Don’t Do It

In Part 2 of this series, we shift from awareness → action.

In the first episode, we talked about why earning more money doesn’t automatically fix your mindset. In this episode, we dig into the harder question: how do you actually change your behavior around money?

I’m joined again by therapist Ginger Houghton, and we break down:

•  Why change feels so hard—even when you know what to do 
•  The “stages of change” and how they show up in your financial life 
•  Why most people get stuck before taking real action 
•  How to make progress without overwhelming yourself 
•  The role of identity, self-worth, and the stories you tell yourself about money 
•  Why small, consistent changes beat big, dramatic ones every time 

We also talk about when it might make sense to bring in a therapist alongside a financial advisor—especially if money brings up stress, anxiety, or deeper emotional patterns.

If you’ve ever thought:
 👉 “I know what I should be doing… I just can’t seem to do it”

This episode will help you understand why—and what to do about it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today's episode, I am very excited to welcome back Ginger Houghton as our guest. She is a therapist and the founder of Bright Spot Counseling in Farmington Hills, Michigan. So in our last episode, Ginger helped us unpack a lot of the different ways our thoughts and feelings about money can impact us, even as high earners. We are certainly not immune to having money issues of various sorts. And so this week, Ginger is back with us to help us figure out how we can actually change for the better, dig into our money problems and have a better outcome so that we're living overall happier life. Welcome back, Ginger. Thanks, Carla.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

I love the work that you do because you really do get the money mindset piece and care about the psychology of it. One of the things that I wanted to talk about today is moving from kind of the reaction to how to engage with this differently. This is where most people get stuck. They try to jump straight from, I need to save for retirement now, I need to have $2 million in the bank and everything paid off and all of this money stashed away in different places. That's where they are at. And they say, This is where I need everything to change today. That's just not how the change process works. There are two behavioral researchers, Di Clemente and Procesca, who this is this research is old. It's not new, but I think it's helpful to every behavior that's involved with change. And I know that we've talked about this before, but these two researchers really did great work on how some people stop smoking and never start again, why most people start and stop smoking, kind of rapid fire. How a lot of other people are saying, I'm gonna quit, I'm gonna quit, I'm gonna quit. Right. And looking at how their research is connected to financial decision making and how humans going through any change process are all struggling with the same thing. These researchers found that there are specific stages of change that we pass through. Even if we don't pass through them all in the same way, we go through the stages. The first one is pre-contemplation. This is where you're not really thinking about change yet. For finances, this could look like avoiding your bank account or not tracking spending. There's not really a plan, there's not really a desire. If you look at de-clemente and prochesca's work, this was folks who go to the doctor and they say you have emphysema and they say, I'm not ready to stop smoking. There, there's not really a lot of desire there. Contemplation is the next step. This is where you start recognizing patterns and thinking, maybe I should do something differently. For in terms of de-clementine and Procesca, this is one people who are trying to stop smoking said, Yeah, I would like to stop, but it's hard, it's complicated. I don't like getting, I don't like knickerette. I gain weight when I so it's really where someone is weighing the pros and cons. In terms of financial situations, that's where someone's saying, I don't really like feeling the way that I'm feeling, or I don't like looking at my bank accounts and saying this. I know that I need to do something, but I'm not really sure what that is or what that looks like. So you're starting to see some desire for change, just not a clear direction. The next stage is preparation. This is when you start making small plans, opening a savings account, listing debts, looking at budgeting tools, listening to a financial podcast like Henry, right? Contacting a financial planner. This is when you start seeing some real change happen, that you're headed in a direction. Preparation when people stop smoking is when they pick up nicer or they pick up gum, like regular gum, or they sometimes people do vape pens now. It's very similar. All of this is you can look at any area of your life and say, okay, I see how I moved into preparation stage of change when I decided to start looking at job postings. If you want to get a new job, right? That you're actually starting, you're not just weighing the pros and cons anymore. After you pass through preparation, you move into action. This is where you start implementing those strategies consistently. So this is the paying the money and showing up for the appointment with a financial planner. This is doing the forms. This is following through on the suggestions that they made. So whether it's doing rollovers or whether it's budgeting differently, whatever those things are, you start, they start becoming a part of your everyday life. When you've been doing this for about a year consistently, you move into what we call maintenance. So maintenance is you have built these new habits and they really have become a part of your life. They're not such a struggle anymore. Things are kind of effortless that the plan is for them to stay in place long term. What we know about the stages of change too is that there's also relapse. So just like with anything else, to stay in maintenance, it's almost a little bit harder than moving through some of the stages because even though you have some muscle memory built up, so you might be budgeting, you might have direct deposit into an account that you don't see. You might have incorporated some of these things. You might get laid off, and that moves you out of maintenance because you got to figure some stuff out or you're you go back on a survival strategies and then kind of start again. I had one really smart client say to me to climb, he he looked at the stages of change in terms of mountain climbing because he was an avid mountain climber and he said it feels really hard when you begin and you're like, you know, half an hour in and maybe you're not conditioned. But then once you keep going, it gets harder and harder the higher you get. And once you get to the peak of the mountain, it's hard to stay there consistently. And I think there's a lot of truth in that for financial planning. I think for any human behavior, not smoking, finding a new job, leaving a relationship, any of these things to stay in maintenance requires a lot of support and diligence that can be hard because our our lives are not the same every day and we do have different challenges.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Yeah, really interesting stuff, ginger. And it's it's funny that you mentioned, you know, filling out the forms because it seems like I don't know, maybe once every 12 months I get I talk to a prospective client and they say, Yes, I want to work with you. I'm ready to sign on. Sometimes they even go ahead and sign the agreement, but I need to gather a lot of information from them and it just never happens. And and look, I get I work with a lot of people that are busy working professionals, often with kids too, and life gets busy. And so most of my clients sometimes just need a reminder or two, and they eventually find the time and they do it. But I have those people that I can just tell they are just not, they want to make a change, but they're just not ready. They just can't take that next step to send me the information that we need to move forward.

SPEAKER_01 7:34

Yeah, that's real life. You know, it's funny because I I often use the example of stages of change with I used to run like in my 20s, and then I had kids. I ended up getting a job where there was a gym right across the street for my new job. And I was like, that's what I'll do at lunch. I will have a gym membership, I'll go running, I will love that, and I it will be like old times. I I will do my few miles a day, I will feel great. And that was right, I was in contemplation and then I moved into preparation. I bought new running shoes, I bought a gym membership, I had everything in my bag on the front seat, on the passenger seat for months, Carla, which is not unlike the filling out the paperwork and really wanting it, and it just never clicks. It's funny because for me, there was a nice day in that scenario, and I was like, oh, I actually just like running outside. I don't enjoy treadmill running. So I just had that one thing, that one little insight. I was like, it's beautiful out, get your stuff, go was enough to click over. I'm sure it's similar for lots of folks who are like, that's the thing that I need. I just need that one more piece to click me into action to do it. You're you're finding people in preparation and they need that one extra reminder or that one other touch to say, okay, I can fill out those forms. I can get my stuff together because this is something that I want. And then it's hard to stay in maintenance without support.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yeah. Do you have any tips about breaking patterns, getting yourself to move forward with change, any anything that our listeners can can take with them to make the changes that they want to change?

SPEAKER_01 9:20

Yeah, I think the first thing that I would look at if someone is interested is looking at how you as an individual move through the stages of change in all areas of your life. Because typically the way that we do move through change in one area applies to everything. So some folks will kind of skip over pre-contemplation and contemplation and move right into almost the end of preparation that once there's an idea in their head, they're like ready to rock. They're like, Denzo, but then they might burn out really fast because they moved way too quickly through the other stages that the foundation wasn't steady enough. Other folks have a tendency to stay a really long time in contemplation, for example, really weighing the pros and cons longer than is maybe helpful to them. It's the same thing. Sometimes I myself stay in preparation for a long, a longer time than is helpful, where I'm like, I know what I want to do, I know what I need to do, I need to make a phone call or I need to do these other two things. That's where I tend to kind of languish. The antidote to that is having an accountability buddy sometimes to say, hey, I know you wanted that thing. You told me you wanted that thing. What's your status? That's really helpful. Or giving yourself a lot of visual cues, right? Putting it on your calendar, a recurring reminder until you've done that thing. That kind of pesters you enough to say, hey, this is something that's important to you. Make the time, make the space. It's it's probably half an hour of your time. Do do the thing. Those are typically the ways people move through the stages that don't help them. Part of this is if people consistently move through any of the stages too quickly, they just struggle with burnout and then going back to the beginning and then they feel like, uh, I just tried to do this. This feels like so disempowering because I tried to make change and it kind of collapsed. The goal for moving through these stages is to kind of be mindful of what your pattern is and be intentional about what you would like it to be moving forward. And that change is a process, it's not a single action. That's why a lot of the Dave Ramsey advice, well, I don't really have feelings about him one way or the other. I think people really struggle with like the envelopes and the things because it's it's too much at once that there aren't enough kind of micro steps built in for people to really get something down and then layer onto it. Get something down and then layer onto it so that changes a process. It it feels kind of rough or like the snowball method, I'm sure everybody is familiar with. That feels really hard for people because it's really pushing someone right into action and then assuming that they're gonna stay between action and maintenance, which isn't how humans function most of the time.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. You know, sometimes if I start working with a client and I do the whole analysis and I see that they have got to make multiple big changes to get on track. You know, instead of saying, hey, you're in terrible shape unless you do these huge traumatic things, it's about starting with the baby steps. And I do, of course, really focus on, you know, on the positive that again, a lot of my clients that are high earners that haven't built their wealth yet, they have time on their side, right? And so starting at 50 is better than starting at 60 and starting at 30 or 40 is better than waiting until age 50. And so if I can help them make small changes, hey, increase what you're putting in your 401k by 1% this year. And then when you get your next raise, increase it again by 1%. Because, you know, it's it's funny actually when I think about my earlier myself earlier in my career where I would get so excited and do this analysis and say, hey, if this client can make all of these really big changes, we can make a lot of progress. And that's just way too overwhelming for, I mean, pretty much everyone, I think, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah. And I think that's true in every area of our life. So to really, I think that's such a good example and to normalize the changes really hard. And that most humans don't thrive with a hundred changes thrown at them, even though, like, I think it's so admirable of like young Carla to say, like, let's do all the things. It's really not the way we go through life. I had a pretty bad injury over the winter that like put me out of commission and I ended up in PT. And the PT actually said to me, I'm giving you these three things. That's all you need to do. It's three things, it's five minutes per day. Because she was a really experienced PT, she said, earlier in my career, I would have given you a hundred things to do and shown you all the things and done all, and you would have gone home sore. And and what I'll say is like, I think there's something that we can do for ourselves that's saying, like, how do I work with someone and approach this slowly in a way that like works with how humans move through change? And knowing that money stuff is inherently more emotional and loaded than almost anything in our world other than relationship stuff.

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Yeah. So speaking of which, I'd like to dig deeper into identity and self-worth with money. And it's interesting because when I work with people that came from frugal backgrounds, I see, you know, two different main outcomes and of course everything in between. But sometimes people that grew up, you know, not well off, they learn to become really frugal. And no matter how much money they make, they remain to be frugal. And sometimes, though, when people grow up, you know, poor and then they start making a lot of money, they want to buy all of the things for themselves and or their kids that they never had growing up. And I think it has to do a lot with probably how money was handled when they were, when they were younger. There's different ways that people not as well off manage with that. And I think that there's a lot of people, I guess, even if they are raised wealthy, maybe they were raised in a way that the type of car you drive, the clothes that you wear has to do with your self-worth, or even this, again, someone that grew up not so wealthy, now be able being able to afford the nice things. And that's kind of like for them, even if whether they realize it or not, it's sort of this proof of see, I belong in this world.

SPEAKER_01 16:02

Yeah, I think once someone has started to kind of move through the changes, it does poke at the stages of change. It does poke at their identity. Because what you're really starting to look at is breaking old patterns and challenging money stories and challenging our visions for ourselves, which our visions of ourselves are largely based on what we saw modeled for us. And that does come up in both ways, where someone says, I can't spend any of this money that I have worked really hard to earn, or I'm gonna spend all of it, or like a really deep discomfort with like engaging with this idea of they are solidly middle class or solidly upper class, right? That they have their social situation, financial situation has changed really dramatically in a way that feels hard to wrap their arms around and feels inconsistent with identity. The first thing that I would think about is really separating identity from finances. Oftentimes people will say things like, I'm bad with money, which is an indication to me that they are identifying with this idea that they are a person who is inherently bad with money, which is not a not a it's something that we believe, but it doesn't mean that that's true. I think picking out what those thoughts are and what those pieces of identity are that are connected. So when something bubbles up, saying, is that something that I want to keep with me? Is it valuable for me to say I'm someone who's bad with money? I'm someone who is cheap. I'm someone who is right. I think those things are really helpful for us to kind of examine and sit with and say, is that something that I want to continue on? The goal is intentionality, right? Those beliefs, it's really easy to shift over time into something closer to I'm someone who values stability and safety. So I make decisions based on that. I'm someone who values low risk. So I'll I'll say I'm like a super risk-averse person, just as a human overall, but I am with finances too. So saying I'm risk averse, that is part of my identity. It happens to be a part of identity, that in some ways is helpful for planning for financial freedom later, right? Because I have set up some things that are, I think, are really good. But in other ways, it was not helpful for me to say, I only care about paying off my mortgage because I'm so risk averse that I don't want to touch any kind of investment strategy. Identity is important, but it doesn't have to be interwoven in negative ways with finances. So I think just having that awareness of what are the beliefs that you hold to be true about yourself and finances. That's really step one. The the next step is saying, like, how does that intermingle with your values? If you're not clear on your values, then really doing a deep dive and a value sort with someone that you care about or our friends and family are actually really excellent mirrors for our values. When when you ask them, what do you think my top three values are? People will tell you with pretty amazing accuracy what those things are. I think in a way that sometimes we're surprised by because people see and hear us and watch our actions from a different lens, right? Then sometimes we have access to ourselves. So getting some feedback on like, we're not our beliefs about ourselves. Those things are moldable. What are our values? That should be a core part of our identity. Because sometimes the things that we think are our values are really disconnected from the ways that we live our lives. A good example of that, I was working with someone who we were down to like from 200 values to 10. And she said, the one that I cannot give up is environmental justice, that that's the most important thing to me. And I said, Okay, like I think that that's incredibly admirable and lovely. And how is your life kind of shaped shaped around that? What does that mean for your everyday life? And she said, Well, I recycle. Important someone in her world close to her called out the fact that like her life is really incredibly removed from like environmental justice, and that for that to be one of her top three values, there would need to be major change. If her identity, if our identity is connected to our values, it's important that we have a sense of what those look like and what it's like to live those values. One of the values that always comes up in a value sort is like financial freedom. So I think it's really important to do that work in a way that feels good and that feels like low stress, that feels exploratory as opposed to punitive. It's okay if you have negative beliefs about yourself and your identity as a caretaker of money. That's okay. It's just choosing whether you want to continue on with that moving forward.

SPEAKER_00 21:18

Yeah, I think, you know, one thing that I've really dug into myself is really questioning these beliefs that I have, which first requires like listening to the thoughts and challenging them. In fact, I almost didn't even start my own business because I had this long-held belief I can't do this because I'm not good at bringing in new clients. And I had to say, where on earth did that come from? Now I think it's some belief that I had early when I started in my career, which was totally valid then. You know, I'm 23, 24, had little to no experience. My Network was solely of other broke 20-somethings. Like, how am I going to get people with money to be my clients? And I had to realize like this was a belief that I carried in to a reality where it was no longer true, right? And so I even try to tell my kids now when they say, I'm not good at this, to say, I'm not good at this now, right? Because we're always or yet, because we can always grow and develop and change. And so, yes, one may say, I'm not good with money, but just say, I'm not good with money now. I'm not good with money yet. I think it's really powerful to question those beliefs that we somehow have.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Yeah, a hundred percent. And and it's funny, we've not discussed this, but I had a very similar belief system about myself starting my own business, is that I thought I was not a numbers person, that I could not do the the financial side of running a business. And it turns out that I'm actually like, I hate to say this, like remarkably okay at that. Um, after after some support and after some additional training and some things, that it's it's not that I'm bad at math. It's not that I also had a belief that was handed down to me from my parents who both were in unions and had retirements and had like very typical kind of boomer career trajectories, which no shame in that. Like it's great, really helpful. But they had an idea that they passed down to me that working for myself was unsafe. And I really felt that belief deeply. But I think generationally, that's not how things have played out for anyone in their 20s, 30s, 40s, is that most of us have experienced some lack of safety, financial safety through grant-funded positions or like all these other things, and that the things that were available for our parents' generation, for most of us are not there. They don't exist anymore, those safety nets. So we have to do a better job challenging those beliefs to say it was not unsafe was actually a really good financial decision for me to have my own business. But there were some beliefs there about what I could and could not do that I needed to shake loose. So I do think that awareness of beliefs is so profound and will change your life and change your money story, right?

SPEAKER_00 24:26

Yeah. So, Ginger, for our final topic, I'd like to dig more into, you know, as we've kind of been mentioning over these two episodes, the clients that I have, the people that I talk to that are either overly frugal with their money and in my opinion, not enjoying it enough, or the flip side where people just cannot get themselves to save. And, you know, for me as a financial advisor, like we have these conversations where I can literally model it out and say, you can spend X more a year and be totally fine, or on the flip side, say you need to save at least X amount a year to get on the right track. But, you know, I'm of course not a therapist. And when people are really have deep issues and emotions and and it's very difficult for them to, you know, they they recognize that this is a problem, but they can't change. I'd love to hear sort of at what point do should people seek out seeing a therapist for their financial issues and and what types of therapy there is. I mean, I think we all know about talk therapy, but I would just love to dig deeper into this.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

Yeah, I love this because I think there oftentimes a financial planner is enough, right? That a financial planner is exactly what someone needs. I think sometimes a therapist is really a compliment when someone is experiencing a lot of like emotions connected to money, right? That there is real fear, shame, disappointment. When money feels super emotional, that's a good sign that a therapist is like a really nice compliment to what you're gonna do with a financial planner. I think the other thing is if your central nervous system, if you get a really if your stomach drops thinking about your bank account or planning for the future or not having a 401k, if your mouth goes dry, if you want to run to the bathroom, if you want to immediately flee, if you're getting any of the fight-flight uh signs, you really should also seek a therapist. Particularly in that case, I would say a therapist who has a polyvagal skill set, which is designed to help you and your brain and body recognize what you can do to biologically respond to normal stressors in a way that is acknowledging that they are not life or death. A polyvagal perspective and grounded therapist in that situation would be life-changing because it will allow your biology to support the work with the financial planner. If you have financial trauma, and a good example of that would be sometimes divorce plays out in a really scary way for kids. Or if you had to file for bankruptcy. So now there's a lot of fear, shame. If you have a trauma story that is deeply connected to money, I would strongly suggest EMDR, which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, or brain spotting, or deep brain reorientation. And deep brain reorientation is really better for shock. If you have a money situation that was connected to deep shock, say a partner left and you had no idea what the financial situation was and it was bad, DBR would be great, deep brain reorientation. Those are great. If you are finding your like identity is really wrapped up in not enough or too much, or you are really having trouble embracing where you're at as a high earner, I would say act would be really good. That's acceptance and commitment therapy. And that's that's really sussing through your values and saying what's the most important to me and who am I? And that's breaking down the identity issues. Those are all really helpful and important, and there are really skilled folks who can help you create a new story and help you manage the emotional side of this and the central nervous system side of this. Well, someone like Carla, right, can help you manage the practical financial realities and support you in this. And I think, Carla, you do just such an excellent job of recognizing that people are not robots. We're innately complicated and not shaming or judging, being just so incredibly supportive of the psychological side of change that needs to happen for financial planning to be successful.

SPEAKER_00 29:11

Yeah, for sure. And it's just, yeah, thank you for that. And it's again, it's something that has certainly been a journey for me from wanting to just immediately fix everything for clients and tell them what to do and expect that they can do it to just over the years of all this experience of understanding that it doesn't work that way. And so I love supporting the emotional aspect of my clients and understanding change as a financial advisor, of course, not a capable therapist. Well, thank you so much, Ginger. This has been wonderful. I really appreciate all of this knowledge and insight that you have brought to our show. Thank you. Thanks so much.