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Facilitating Financial Health: Tools for Financial Planners, Coaches, and Therapists John E. Grable Authors: Brad Klontz, Rick Kahler, and Ted Klontz Publisher: National Underwriter (2008) ISBN 978-0-87218-962-1
Every professional activity goes through progressive change. Financial counseling, as a help-providing profession, is facing one of the most dynamic and important transformations since its inception. While financial counselors have long seen their role as facilitators of their clients' financial health, there has been hesitancy among many counselors to blend relationship therapy with money advice. The view that financial counseling is first, and foremost, a quantitative activity, designed to address specific client deficiencies, is undergoing a radical change. This transformative process has been skillfully documented by Klontz, Kahler, and Klontz in their new book, Facilitating Financial Health: Tools for Financial Planners, Coaches, and Therapists.
According to the authors, Facilitating Financial Health "presents a new model for helping clients achieve balanced and healthy financial lives" (p. xv). Their primary aim in writing the book was to introduce the concept of integrated financial planning. That is, planning and counseling that combines emotional aspects of personal finance with more traditional tools and techniques associated with financial counseling.
Klontz, Kahler, and Klontz introduce new terminology to help describe what is meant by the phrase integrated financial planning. They define financial health from two perspectives. The first is a person's "exterior." This refers to the quantitative aspects of a person's financial life. The exterior components of a client's life include past actions, such as previously filed tax returns; present actions, including a client's cash flow and net worth statements; and future goals, such as retirement and estate planning. The second descriptor is a person's "interior." By this, the authors mean the attitudes someone holds about money and the way they relate to personal financial issues. Interior components include past beliefs and emotions; present issues, which consist of factors such as awareness and authenticity; and future issues, which include a client's dreams, possibilities, and undefined goals. Traditionally, financial counselors have attached greater importance to the exterior position of clients. Klontz and his associates argue that true financial health cannot be established until both the exterior and interior aspects of a person's life become integrated.
It is at this point that Klontz and his associates...