KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A study at the University of Georgia aimed at merging the realms of therapy and financial planning.
The blended approach is being tested at Kansas State University as well. A Nashville therapist and his son also have started writing about the subject.
Researchers say the timing for the broader approach couldn’t be better as families feel deeper financial woes in the poor economy.
The recession “certainly gets everyone’s attention,” said Ted Klontz, the Nashville financial behavioral consultant. “They are open to a lot of ideas they weren’t open to before.”
In the past, couples struggling with financial issues that put a strain on their marriage, have left both therapists and financial planners with questions unanswered.
Experts say therapists are taught to look for mental health causes for problems, not monetary ones, and haven’t traditionally learned how to help their clients budget or reduce debt. So questions would arise when counselors met with widows consumed with grief who were also nervous about learning to manage their finances.
“When something financial does come up in a session that provokes a lot of anxiety, it becomes glossed over or just rolled up with another problem,” said Kristy Archuleta, a financial planning professor at Kansas State who is also a licensed therapist. “So you might work on another problem that has some impact on the finances, but you never address the finance issues that are going on.”
About 30 practitioners nationwide have begun combining the specialties. But there had been little research about how best to do it until recently as the universities in Georgia and Kansas began experiments and the Klontzes started writing about it.
The University of Georgia says results from its initial tests of the effectiveness of the approach, published in Family Therapy magazine, are promising. The article outlined the program and included raves from participants, including men who had gone to the sessions only for the financial counseling but were surprised how effective the therapy was.
Joe Goetz, a financial planning professor at Georgia, hopes the research will “start a movement” among practitioners. Kansas State, meanwhile, hopes to publish its initial results in the next six months.
Klontz, president of Klontz Consulting Group, helped write a study that reported success in treating more affluent people with destructive money habits such as overspending and hoarding — part of emerging research into money disorders that previously had been confined largely to problem gambling.
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