KOTA Territory NewsFinancial planners taking new approach

Financial planners taking new approach

Matt Hunter

For financial planner Rick Kahler, managing money was always about numbers and logic.

“I'm probably as left –brained as you can get,” Kahler says.  “Emotions has nothing to do with it.”

But after attending a conference two years ago, his thought process began to change.

“I was absolutely skeptical. The first time a therapist spoke to one of our professional groups, I said what are they doing here?”

What the therapists were doing, was taking part in a new world approach to finance that considers the emotional aspect just as important as the scientific.

“The reality is, every financial decision has an emotional component related to it,” local therapist Dave Jetson said.  “If we can help the client embrace the emotional component, we can help the client work through that so they can make a more sound decision.”

For a few years now, Kahler and Jetson have helped clients make those decisions together, but for financial planner Dick Vodra, it's been his approach for two decades.

“If you understand how this works, you really get involved in making better decisions for you,” Vodra says.  “I think it help my clients make better decisions and my clients seem to appreciate it.”

With the economic downturn taking an emotional toll on countless Americans over the past two years, the marriage between finance and feelings is impossible to ignore.  As planners like Kahler and Vodra share their approach with more of their peers, it will likely only grow from here.

“I do think it's the financial planning of the future,” Kahler says.

“I think it's the present of finance,” Vodra said.  “I mean, it’s been the present of finance for me for 20 years.  At one point they were talking to call this financial, planning, financial life planning, and some people just said it's just financial planning done really well.

Last week, a group of financial planners and therapists met in keystone for the Nazrudin project's annual conference. It was the first time the national event was held in South Dakota.