Financial Therapy: What Is It, and Do You Need It?

Dealing with your finances can be very stressful. Financial therapists work to lessen that stress, and help their clients develop a more sustainable and healthy relationship to money. Financial therapy is a brand new field, but more people are turning to financial therapists to get help. They do this for more than their savings and finances. Many people want to develop a more sophisticated awareness of how money impacts their mental state of being.

A financial advisor can help you get your short- and long-term financial plans in order. Speak with an advisor today.

What Is Financial Therapy?

Financial therapy is a growing field that seeks to combine aspects of traditional financial planning with aspects of therapy. Financial issues can be one of the biggest stressors that exacerbate mental health issues such as anxiety or depression. Consequently, financial therapists work to address both the financial issues themselves and the impact they have on your mental health.

Financial therapists use a combination of therapeutic exercises and financial expertise. They want to help their clients think, feel, and behave differently with money. The goal is to improve the overall well-being of clients while using evidence-based practices.

The thing about financial roadblocks is that the obstacles aren’t often exclusively financial. A lot of the time, psychological, relational and behavioral issues are also at play. Financial therapy seeks to provide holistic assistance. That way, you can tackle every facet of these issues and get to a healthier place.

Should You Work With a Financial Therapist?

If you’re considering whether a financial therapist could help you, think about your general relationship to financial planning. Do you think you have anxiety about money? Or unhealthy behaviors and feelings when it comes to spending, budgeting, saving or investing? If so, you might benefit from exploring financial therapy. That might be true even if, by traditional metrics, you’re on pace for hitting your financial goals. It’s possible to have an unhealthy relationship with money even if your finances are good on paper.

Of course, if you have chronic financial issues – like racking up debt, going over budget and failing to save for retirement – then that’s a further indicator that your relationship with money might be out of whack.

Whether you work with a financial therapist or not will depend on a number of factors specific to you. Namely, your relationship with money, your ability to afford financial therapy, and your opinions regarding therapy in general.

How to Become a Financial Therapist

The Financial Therapy Association (FTA) oversees the Certified Financial Therapist (CFT) designation. Applicants for the CFT designation will need to have a bachelor’s degree. It should be in either a financial field (finance, economics, etc.) or a mental health field (psychology, social work, etc.). However, if the applicant already has a Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP®) or accredited financial counselor (AFC) certification, then the bachelor’s degree can be in any field.

Additionally, applicants must  complete a series of educational training videos provided by the FTA. Candidates must also demonstrate that they’ve completed 500 hours of necessary experience. Half of these hours must be direct client service. The other half can be a combination of more direct client service, teaching, building financial plans, giving professional presentations, or conducting peer-reviewed research.

Finally, candidates must pass a comprehensive exam to officially become a certified financial therapist. The total cost for the training and exams comes to $1,200, with a $25 renewal fee for FTA members ($100 for non-members). ¹ Continuing education requirements will go into place after one earns the certification.

What Happens in a Financial Therapy Session

Financial therapy is not a spreadsheet review and it is not a traditional therapy session. It sits between the two. Once you understand what you need you’ll be able to decide how it fits into your long-term goals.

Early sessions typically focus on your history with money rather than your current asset allocation. The therapist will want to get some background info. They will want to know how money was handled around you as a child and what messages you absorbed about spending, saving, and debt. You’ll analyze the emotions that come up when you think about your finances now. These questions are not small talk. The patterns you developed around money drive the financial behaviors you struggle with today.

From there, sessions move into identifying the specific triggers that lead to problematic financial decisions. A financial therapist might help you recognize that work stress makes you overspend. They may notice you avoid looking at your accounts because the numbers make you anxious. They may explain how sometimes arguments about money are really about control, security, or trust. The therapist uses techniques drawn from cognitive behavioral therapy, motivational interviewing, and other evidence-based approaches. These help you understand the connection between what you feel and what you do with money.

Financial Therapy in Practice

The treatment also has a practical side. A financial therapist may ask you to review your budget, set a specific savings goal, or track your spending between sessions. They often frame these tasks as tools for understanding behavior rather than assignments to optimize your finances. The goal is not to produce a financial plan. It is to change the way you relate to money so that the plans you already have or the advice you are already receiving actually sticks.

Most financial therapy engagements involve sessions every one to two weeks, similar to traditional therapy. The length of the engagement varies depending on the complexity of your situation. Some clients see meaningful shifts in savings and discretionary expenses in a few months. Others with deeply ingrained patterns or significant financial trauma may work with a financial therapist for a year or more. Progress shows up not as a number on a statement but as a noticeable change in behavior. Have the destructive patterns that brought you in started to break?

How Financial Therapy Differs From Financial Planning and Traditional Therapy

Financial therapy, financial planning, and traditional therapy all deal with aspects of your relationship to money, but they approach it from different directions and solve different problems. Understanding where each one starts and stops helps you figure out which one you need or whether you need more than one.

A financial planner works with numbers, goals and timelines. They build a retirement plan, recommend an investment allocation, structure your tax strategy and tell you how much you need to save each month to reach a specific target. What a financial planner cannot do is help you understand why you have not followed the last three plans you were given. If you know what to do with your money but consistently do not do it, the problem is not the plan. A financial planner is not trained to address the behavioral or emotional patterns that get in the way of execution.

A traditional therapist can help with anxiety, depression, relationship conflict and other mental health concerns that may be connected to money. But most therapists are not trained in personal finance. They can help you process the stress you feel about debt, but they may not recognize that a specific financial behavior like compulsive spending, financial avoidance, or secret accounts is a pattern with its own clinical framework. They may also lack the financial literacy to help you connect your emotional state to a concrete financial action that could reduce the stress they are treating.

Best of Both Worlds

A financial therapist is trained in both domains. They can identify that your anxiety about retirement is not just generalized worry but is connected to a specific gap in your savings that can be quantified and addressed. They can also recognize that your inability to save despite a high income is not a budgeting problem but a behavioral pattern rooted in how you learned to cope with uncertainty as a child. The financial therapist works on both sides at the same time, connecting the emotional pattern to the financial behavior and helping you change both.

Financial therapy does not replace a financial planner or a traditional therapist. If you need a retirement plan built, you need a financial planner. If you are dealing with clinical depression, you need a licensed therapist. But if your financial problems keep coming back despite having access to good advice, if money is a consistent source of conflict in your relationships, or if you recognize that your feelings about money are driving decisions that hurt you, financial therapy addresses the gap that neither of the other two professionals is designed to fill. Some clients work with all three simultaneously, with the financial therapist serving as the bridge between the emotional work and the financial work so that progress in one area supports progress in the other.

Bottom Line

Achieving financial wellness is no easy task, and it can often come with some sacrifice and plenty of delayed gratification. If you feel like you need a little help to make it all work, you’re in good company. A financial therapist can help you not only get the numbers in order, but also help you improve how money influences your outlook and your mental health.

Tips for Managing Your Finances

• Having an emergency fund in place can make a big difference when it comes to nipping financial stress in the bud. Do your best to stash away three or more months of expenses in a high-yield savings account. Then, try to avoid touching it unless there’s an emergency.
• If you’ve had issues managing your finances, consider working with a financial advisor. Finding a financial advisor doesn’t have to be hard. SmartAsset’s free tool matches you with vetted financial advisors who serve your area, and you can interview your advisor matches at no cost to decide which one is right for you. If you’re ready to find an advisor who can help you achieve your financial goals, get started now.

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