Facilitating Better Financial Conversations
Episode 32 with Certified Financial Behavior Specialist and CEO of Money Habitudes Cara Macksound
We know that our beliefs and behaviors around money are deeply personal. However, many financial professionals still try to keep the personal stuff out of the conversation.
What if there was a way for us to have better financial conversations? Today’s guest, Cara Macksound, CEO of Money Habitudes, has built a career out of helping people understand the psychology of money to empower them to manage their financial well-being.
She’s doing it through The Money Habitutes, a game-like assessment used by financial professionals to help people understand and talk about their finances in a fun, constructive way.
Join us for a fascinating conversation that explores the context and lenses through which we view money and how it impacts our relationship to risk, money, and the people in our lives.
About Our Guest:
Cara Macksoud, FBS® is the CEO of Money Habitudes. She completed the Financial Therapy Graduate Certificate at Kansas State University and holds a BS in Finance from NYU Stern School of Business. She is a Certified Financial Behavior Specialist® and a member of the Financial Therapy Association where she serves on their business development committee. She is also a member of the Association of Financial Counseling and Planning Education (AFCPE) and is an AFC candidate.
Prior to joining Money Habitudes, Cara was the CFO/COO for The Animation Project, an incentivized workforce development program for at-risk youth. Before her time in the nonprofit sector, Cara was an ETF trader for 12 years and, at the time, the youngest female to earn a trading seat on the floor of the NYSE.
Cara, the founder of Bank Roll’d, spearheads a nonprofit dedicated to financial literacy, extending education and mentorship to the unbanked, often marginalized by the traditional banking system.
Raised in a modest environment in Brooklyn, Cara faced the challenge of reconciling her humble upbringing with the extravagant lifestyle prevalent on Wall Street. This stark difference in money attitudes led her to initiate Relationship with Money workshops. These workshops facilitated participants in exploring their financial behaviors and attitudes toward risk. This venture laid the foundation for Cara’s growing career, now centered on the psychology of money to empower individuals in managing their financial well-being.
Recommended Reading from this episode:
Elon Musk - Walter Isaacson
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Cara Macksound 00:00
There's not a right or wrong. If you have these habitudes, everything's gonna work out for you. It's based on your life, so your family system, your cultural system, your community system, how you play into that and how your money works for you in that system, are these habitudes supporting your financial goals and health, or are they sabotaging you or causing you a challenge. Having awareness gives us the ability to then make, hopefully better decisions, because we're aware of what our real motivation is.
Wes Brown 00:36
Hello and welcome to analog advisor, where we explore how money shapes our lives, futures, families and communities. I'm Wes Brown and I'm Sonia Luter, whether you're managing your own family's wealth or just curious about the world of wealth management, this conversation will enlighten and inform. Thanks for being here and for tuning in. Our beliefs about money are deeply personal, shaped by our upbringing, family systems, culture, community, personality and more. But many of us try to keep all of those things out of our conversations about money, and we fail to acknowledge their impact on our behaviors. As a result, this topic deeply fascinates Sonia and me, so we were thrilled to welcome today's guest, CEO of moneyhabitudes, Kara mixed Kara has built a career centered on using the psychology of money to empower individuals to manage their financial well being. Throughout this conversation, she helps us explore the habits and attitudes we form around money, and introduces us to the money habitudes, a game like assessment used to help people understand and talk about their finances in a fun and constructive way. It was fun to learn more about Kara's background, having started on Wall Street at 17 and having moved her family of 723 times over the last 25 years, and to hear how her relationship with risk has been impacted and shifted by better understanding the context with which she views herself and her financial well being without question, one of our favorite conversations. So we hope you enjoy it. Let's get analogy. Music. Well, Kara, it's good to be with you. Thanks for joining us today.
Cara Macksound 02:07
Absolutely. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, if
Wes Brown 02:10
you wouldn't mind, just love to get to know you like tell us a little bit about kind of who you are, what you do, and how you got to where you Sure.
Cara Macksound 02:17
So I spent my early career, as I mentioned earlier on Wall Street, I was a derivatives trader, and I went to Wall Street really, really young. And had I just to jump a little bit ahead? Had I known then that I was actually doing like on site research for what would then become this career in behavioral finance? Right? There's no place like Wall Street to see people cross over into greed that, I mean, people make more money than they can ever spend. And I call it the genie in the lamp, right that moment where Jafar wants to be so powerful that he gets himself locked in the lamp. And that was my experience on Wall Street, right, where these guys made more money than I mean, I don't. My dad was a school bus driver. I don't come from a whole lot, and I watched people make more money than I could even ever count, and they would literally commit greed or fraud to, you know, make more to then imprison themselves. Well, I mean, legitimately, how many hedge fund guys went to prison, right? And so when you think about that from a behavioral standpoint, I didn't know then I was a kid that that's the work that I was doing. So fast forward, I have five kids. Wall Street gives you a swift kick to the butt. They're like, we don't want anybody here with kids. So I, you know, I'm not I've learned through this career that I'm not really great at doing nothing. So I went and I ran a nonprofit for New York City, and what I was tasked with. There was banking a group of unbanked kids. And what, I mean, the city of New York bit of a mess. They were like, Hey, you got to get these kids financially educated. They don't know anything. And I was like, Crick of the neck, like, they don't know anything. How is that even possible? They're showing up in my classroom. They've got Nikes, Gucci's coach, they've got, they seem like they got money to spend. How do they know nothing, right? If you've got money in your pocket, you've got to know something. At minimum. You get the idea of like, I want that, and somebody else has it, right? And so I said to myself, instead of building these curriculums, I'm just gonna wait in there and ask these kids what they know. And so that was my second lesson of like, I went in and I was like, Hey guys, how do you get what you need? Do you rob it? Do you borrow it? Do you right? And again, I'm in low income areas in New York City. Let's call a spade a spade, right? A lot of those kids were like, I'm dealing drugs. And I was like, Well, okay, how does your business model then work? Because, look, I'm not here to tell you what you should make your money on or what you should spend your money on. I'm here to make sure that you understand how the system works, so you know the rules of engagement when you play the game, right? So once I started understanding what they did. Know it's not that they. Financially educated. They were just doing it outside the FDIC system, but they absolutely understood credit and leverage and trust and borrowing and, you know, arbitrage and fair value, like they understood things. So I was like, Oh, this is really fascinating, even further, because we have this narrative in our country that everybody's financially uneducated. It's that they can't check the boxes. It's like standardized testing. Just because somebody scores low on standardized testing doesn't mean they're ignorant, right? And so that became my like driver, and so moving forward with these two groups of people who happen to be on the same block in New York City. So now I go from the highest of income to the lowest of income, both on Broadway, downtown Manhattan, and I'm like, but humans actually want the same thing. What both groups are trying to accomplish is connection, being part of their community, being seen, feeling heard, right? Like I was like, Oh, this is even goes one step further, because now I've seen a lot of zeros in a bank account, and I've seen no zeros in a bank account, but I see the desires for the same thing, and so that was really what set me down this road. I During covid, as many people we could work remote. I My nonprofit didn't know what their funding was going to be. We decided to move from New York to Florida. I was actually just gonna make five kids were home, as you can imagine, what that was all and that's a lot. I was like, cleaver for a minute there where I was like, making dinner every other Tuesday. I was like, This is insane. And so I took a beat and I went, you know, again, just having this desire to learn more. I went back to K State, did the financial therapy degree, got introduced to money habitudes during that program. The intention was never to, like, go out and start a company or run a company, but it was the first tool that I had ever worked with, where I in this classroom of people that I was with, from the wealth manager down to the nonprofit individual, like people were using this tool. And I thought, Okay, so I've spent 20 plus years in financial services, and I've never met a product that is attributable to like, it's this inclusive, right? Like most financial products are, for certain people, when you get a SNAP benefit, if you don't qualify at this income level, you can't get a SNAP benefit if you want to balloon type interest only mortgage, you know, that's not for everybody. That's only for certain income level people. And so I thought, How fascinating that there's people using this product on both ends of the spectrum. And that's really what got me, you know, interested in the product. And then I wound up meeting the founder. She was at a, you know, a different stage of her life. The product really needed some extra digital, you know, enhancements, and some training, some support. And that was really where I kind of took the ball and have been running
Dr. Sonya Lutter 07:53
with it. You packed so much into that Kara, and you snuck a little piece in there that I am fixated on. So I have to ask you about it. Did you not say that you were a bus driver before working in my dad? No, I was like, wow, that is quite a leap. I need to hear that story.
Cara Macksound 08:10
My dad is a school bus and it really adds to my story, because, you know the story of the guy who runs a little boat down, and I think it's like Mexico. It's a real story. And then a vacationer comes down, and he's like, this is a great business. If you bought, if I invested in you, and we got 50 boats, and you got this big business, you'd be able, the guy's like, I'd be able to do what? And the guy's like, well, you'd run this big business, and then one day you could retire and be on your boat. And he's like, but I'm on my boat now, right? And so, interestingly enough, my dad, who had the ability probably to be pretty successful on Wall Street, he's very well read. He really understands balance sheets and companies and projections. When people would say to him, like, why are you just a bus driver? And he'd be like, well, I want to be able to play 270 days of tennis a year, and as a bus driver, I can do that. And so his friends would say, Yeah, but I have this great big job, and I go out to Pebble Beach, or I go out to these and he'd go, Yeah, you get three weeks of vacation a year, and if it rains, one week, now you're down to two weeks. He's like, I don't have that problem. 270 days a year. I'm on the court, and if it rains, I don't care, because I have 269 other days. And took me to my older age, but he really understood enough. He's, I mean, he's still alive. He understands enough at a different, almost chill, like a pain in the butt kind of way, but, but it was very fascinating, because that's who I was raised by, and then went into Wall Street, and it was inundation of, like, just the amount of stuff that was available. Like, I didn't even know money could buy these things, because that's not, I didn't come from a environment where you had extra like, we weren't allowed to run the temperature gage. You know, past 62 I was like, with three sweatshirts on, like, shaking in the house in the winter.
Wes Brown 09:59
That's so funny. How. I'm curious, because I know I want to jump into what money habitudes are, and I know Sonia will want to go there as well. How old were you when you started on Wall Street?
Cara Macksound 10:07
17. I was a baby. I was I graduated high school a friend of our family. My God, my parents had made him my godfather, worked down there, and he was, I was looking for a summer job, and he was like, Yeah, you can come be a coffee runner. And so I was like, great, what does that do? And he was like, you know, you come down and because, remember, this is the 90s, 1995 so there was no technology. It was still open auction trading pits and certain stocks traded, you know, stocks like Coca Cola, Texas Instruments, you know, they traded in certain areas on the trading floor physically. So the guys that stood in that pit couldn't leave all day, so they needed lunch, brought to them, coffee, phone messages, anything. So that was legitimately your job. You ran physically, ran back and forth, delivering them stuff. And look, I think, right, you know, there's a there's a point of what you know and how smart you are, but there's also a better be lucky than good. And I just happen to have the right personality, right time, right place. And is I stand at 411 but in my head, I identify as like a six, five linebacker, so I never knew that I wasn't as big as the guys, right? And I say guys, because in the 90s there was, I mean, there's still few women, but there was even less back then.
Dr. Sonya Lutter 11:23
I never knew this about you. This is so fascinating. Yeah,
Cara Macksound 11:28
it was a, I have to say, if I go to bed at night, like, with any like, I wish I could relive a moment I don't have any real regrets, but, like, I would kill for it to be like, 95 through 2000 like on, like, what is that movie where you just keep going through it Groundhog Day, right? Like, I would just want to be in that loop for ever, because it was just that much fun. Like it really was. I mean, it was stressful and it was insane, and, of course, the money was ridiculous, but more than the money I went to work every day like just elated with I'm a risk taker. I'm a, you know, I love feeling like I'm in a burning building while I make it out. And so the job was perfect for me.
Wes Brown 12:12
And imagine if you knew then what you know now, right? So you could see it with the clarity that you see it today, although Wes,
Cara Macksound 12:18
you know, I would argue that I wonder if ignorance was actually what was a benefit to me. Sure, right? I can imagine, as a trader, you make very snap, quick decisions, and you sometimes your best trade is the one you just got to get out of and make it into the next trade, right? Like, I wasn't a, I wasn't a financial advisor where I had time and effort I'm in. You're in minute to minute trading situations, yeah, now, because I have a much more data to to, you know, go through my brain, I find that I make slower decisions, right? And I find that sometimes that's my hindrance. These days interesting, because I don't right. I went before. I just had to go with the gut, because I didn't have anything else, whereas now I'm like, Oh, I can think I can, I can afford. Let's bring you want to bring money behaviors back in, you know, back to those low income, high income people. When we make decisions and we have more money in our pocket, we can actually make more mistakes, because we can correct them. Right? Think about a bow and arrow. If you have three bows, you know, if you have three hours in your bow and you've got to make a shot, you've got three shots. If you get it right, 33% right, if you've got 100 arrows, and you got to get one still, how good of a shooter Are you? Not that great, right? And so when you, when I, when you do have deeper pockets and you do have a bit more, I don't think we celebrate the people who get it right with less enough, because they actually their their batting average is higher.
Wes Brown 13:42
That's interesting. Sonia's got input on the gut feeling. I do. I just knew the target.
Dr. Sonya Lutter 13:51
No, I don't even have data to support this, just anecdotal. And I love having another female on their show, because you have hit the nail on the head there with men make snap decisions, yeah, because there's not as much going on. I mean, last night, I couldn't sleep at all because I was thinking about everything I had to do today. Yeah. And how ridiculous is that? And hardly any of it was for me. It was, yes, exactly. And that just makes me slower in thinking. I think somebody was
Cara Macksound 14:22
telling me about languages, when you speak a second language, one is emotional, and one is very like, you do it based on how it works. And I always say, I think one of the benefits of me, because, again, the years I was around like we didn't know about adds, we didn't know about all of this stuff. And so because nobody could help me, and I just had to figure it out in this environment that was very unforgiving, there was no like, think about it, you're only as good as your last trade, and it was all men, so I was already like, bottom of the barrel, and you're only as good as your last trade. So there's some way to measure you all the time that. Was forced to only work in system two, I guess it is right, the one that like forces you to just keep making a decision, with not taking in all of that extra that you know, or thinking about other things that you have to think about, which is probably, and again, I'm not saying they're right. I'm just stating facts, which is probably why they probably give you the swift kick when you start to have kids, because they recognize that you are going to have these other things to think about which will kill your mojo of trading,
Dr. Sonya Lutter 15:32
I would talk about this for an hour,
Cara Macksound 15:35
because it's fascinating, right? Like think about how many of people we don't like, how many people that are in our space that are doing the work we're doing? Not many of them, I could say, because I've met a bunch of them, right? Have set in a trading pit where the risk sits with you like you are directly coral. There's no job out there that directly correlates you to the money the way this does, right? Anything in sales, anything where you're making a product, there's a distance between you and the money trading, there's you're legitimately only as good as what that PNL says you are.
Dr. Sonya Lutter 16:13
This sort of segues into habitudes, yeah, because it is very emotion based as well. Yep, yeah. So tell us what habitudes are.
Cara Macksound 16:21
So money habitudes is a 54 statement assessment that similar to, like, a Myers Briggs Type assessment, but it's really what it's trying to tap is your what you do in your life every single day, with money as your motivators. So we're not looking at like, how's your cash flow, or what's your budget statement. The statements are things like duo money after the holidays, or when you give a gift, you need to give the highest brand name, or will you spend more on others than you'll spend on yourself? And it's really looking to tap that idea of when you have access to money or when you spend money, what are your underlying motivations? And when the habitudes were built. They were built in tandem. So there's security and planning, there's giving and status, and there's carefree and spontaneity. And interestingly enough, the two that come up the most that people are always shocked. I mean, shocked so much that when we do practitioner trainings, I get tears at times. Is when people go, Oh my gosh, I thought I was more of a giver, and that's not what shows up on their assessment and what we look at. And this is just an easy example to kind of understand. If your genuine joy of giving, then you really don't look for anything in return. So if I buy you dinner or I send something over to your house, and I'm just genuinely so happy to make you happy that's different than I've given you something to have you thank me. Or I want to be, you know, in a, let's call it in a donor situation, where I want my name, you know, front and center in lights. Or I want the front pew at the church, whatever that might be, right? There's lies the difference, and most people don't realize that they can be a giver, but it's really status driven, or vice versa. There are people that don't realize by giving, they're enabling someone else, right? And so giving and status are two that I find pique the most interest when they show up in the habitudes. But really what we're measuring is just where are you on the habitude? Unlike other financial assessments that are out there, we're not putting you in a quadrant. We're not saying you're a spender or you're an avoider or what we're saying is, here's these six habitudes. You're on a spectrum of each of the habitude. How far up or down Are you on these spectrums? And remember, just like food, where the three of us could each eat the exact same two hamburgers, but they're going to affect us differently. You're a runner. You're not going to gain any weight. I'm totally somebody who never goes out of the house tomorrow. I weigh five pounds extra. You have a gluten intolerance. The bun bothered your stomach. Those kind of ideas. That's the same idea with habitudes everybody. There's not a right or wrong. If you have these habitudes, everything's going to work out for you. It's based on your life. So your family system, your cultural system, your community system, how you play into that and how your money works for you in that system. Are these habitudes supporting your financial goals and health, or are they sabotaging you or causing you a challenge? Right? And that's where a practitioner comes in. So money, habitudes, we can offer the assessment, but we need the practitioner who stands between the client and the assessment to do that deeper dive now that they have this data in front of them. Can
Wes Brown 19:38
you repeat quickly the three pairs, so security and planning, security and
Cara Macksound 19:42
planning, giving and status, and then spontaneity and carefree. And
Wes Brown 19:47
I'm curious, because this is brand new to me. One of the things that came to mind as you were talking was all and I started to make a list here, like all of the other assessments that we've talked about or engaged with or thrown around. And you know, they all are. Like, like, looking at the same thing from a slightly different, you know, perspective, and so you get some nuance of the same thing you learn. And I'm interested. I want to think more about where these things overlap, and how, where there's like, correlations. But I'm thinking of like, Myers, Briggs, as you mentioned, yep, Enneagram, habitudes, Clifton, disc I'm sure there's a whole bunch more,
Cara Macksound 20:22
yep, and I have a lot of practitioners that use this in tandem with one of the ones you just named. Yeah, yeah, right, because money does touch every part of your life, so when you think about it, and you may have different relationships with money in different places, right? You might be more status driven at work. You might be the one that brings in donuts every Friday because you want the team to, you know, think you're generous or whatnot, whereas home you are like, I don't need to do anything more for my family. I mean, that's a real story for me. When I ran the nonprofit program, my kids used to come visit me, and they would come into our snack cabinet, and they would say to the kids in the program, wow, you guys get the best snacks. They're all the name brands. And the kids would be like, your mom buys us the snacks. And my kids would be like, Mom, we never get these snacks at home because I was a generic snack buyer, and I for me right for those low income kids, I knew the brand, by giving them a brand snack meant status. And so for them, I realized that would give them an extra boost of like, I'm worthy, because that's not something that's available to them. For my kids, I'm like, You guys have everything. I'm buying the cheapest thing. There's five of you. I need to maximize my dollars, right? And so there are moments that you're willing to do different things in different settings because of the impact it's going to make, but think about how in tune you have to be, how much self awareness you have to have to be able to get there. I'd love
Wes Brown 21:50
to hear some examples of how it's used with clients. But what is the outcome of the assessment? You know, I think of like, we'll just use anagram. I'm pretty familiar with us. So it's like, that'll say you're a nine, and that means XYZ, right? You know, you look this way under stress. You look this way you under growth. And you know, and you will have these defaults, is it the same sort of output from this assessment?
Cara Macksound 22:14
So it depends if you do our digital version or our physical version. If you do the physical version, you're just sitting with your practitioner, you're reading through decks of cards. There is a way to kind of get the report out of it, but it's a little bit more cumbersome. When you do our digital version, you get a report and what it shows you in every single habitude. If you're using it, you are dominant in it, or you're super dominant in it. And so the best way I could explain it is think about the like, think about a movie, and we have a main character in a movie, and so if you have a super dominant habitude, that's usually your main character, you may even have two super dominant which just like, think of that movie with Angelina and Brad, where there was, like two Mr. And Mrs. Smith. Like, you could have two main characters in a movie, but without supporting characters, main characters have nothing to interact with, and the habitudes work the exact same way. We've got our main habitudes, the ones we lead with, what is our first kind of thought process, and then we have the subhatudes that are supporting us in all these different, you know, again, different interactions, relationships, how we function. Remember, the product is 23 years old, so there were people out there using this product for a really long time, and there was no formal training or support. There was a couple of written guidebooks and whatnot. The original deck was set up to be a conversation starter. It really wasn't set up to be like a diagnostic tool or anything over time, because the statements got better, practitioners came back and said, hey, when I see this and see this, I noticed this, right? That was kind of where we got all this information to build better training and support. But remember financial planners, and now that I could see the data, have some, I mean, terribly as it is, have confirmation bias, right? You put a bunch of us in the room where the financial content builders were, and so words like planning, we're like, oh, you're getting 100 on this test. And we're like, Wait, oh, wait, this is not a test. And I've seen a lot of people have a lot of bad plans, right? And so planning is the dominant habitude. But that doesn't mean you're good at financial planning. You're just a dominant planner, which would mean the more dominant you are in it, it could be harder to pivot away from a plan. So I would throw this back at the two of you, because you've worked with you know, hundreds of people. How many people have you seen stay in a job because they're fixated on like, the 25 year pension, or they're fixated on, you know, I love it the banks when they give you that emblem, you know, you get that plaque or something, and they get fixated because that's the plan. But all this is not serving them from now to when they get to the goal of the plan, right? And so I'm just trying to bring real life examples so you. And visualize what a habitude really means to someone interesting. You're
Dr. Sonya Lutter 25:04
doing a great job of really selling it in a positive light. I also wonder, however, the harm in over labeling people. Have you spent much time thinking about this absolutely
Cara Macksound 25:15
and what we try to say to people is that there's no, we hope that there's no label with habitudes, because it's, this is what's leading you, and it's really a self awareness of check on it. Is it doing you a service. So again, if I'm dominant in planning, and I think this is great, and I was a nine in planning when I first took so there's nine statements in each of the six habitudes to make the 54 statements. And I was a nine in planning, and I this was not shocking to me, like I know that I have a very hard time deviating from a plan, and I'll almost try to get that square peg in a round hole 100 times over, but being more aware of it, I'll still take the assessment today. I still get a nine in planning, but a card is shown up and carefree, which I never had for ages, until more recently, where I was able to look and say, Well, what do I need? So again, silly analogy. Think about this. When you have water, you have H 2o you add one more molecule of oxygen, you have a completely different substance, right? So h2 o2 is completely different than h, 2o and so that was, I have this one card in carefree now, and the card says, I don't worry about money. I think things will work out. And that's not really who I am. But I've come to the place in my life where I've worried all I could worry. I've built, you know, every backup plan. I've bought the insurance policies like at this point, if there's something I couldn't solve for, as Morgan Housel says, risk is what you can't see. I could spend the rest of my life worrying, or I could just decide what's meant to be. I've put everything in place I could put in place. And so my dominance hasn't changed, but my perspective with this one being able to absorb this, because I was able to recognize that I wasn't enjoying my life because everything I was going through, I was just worried about all that what could happen, instead of just enjoying what had happened. So
Wes Brown 27:10
it's almost like it is an awareness of a shift that's taken place. So like that new car that you added, and I'm not exactly sure how you say you added it. I'm sure what that means exactly. Well,
Cara Macksound 27:19
as I did the assessment, it moves. So you have three piles. When you do the statements, you That's me, that's not me, or sometimes me. And the goal of the three piles versus, like, a longer scale where you have like, agree, sometimes agree, disagree, strongly disagree. The idea is there's three active piles, right? So that's me. I do this. That's not me, I don't do this, or sometimes, and as Sonia and I were discussing before the call, like sometimes, which was originally thought of in numbers, like if you do something sometimes, if I say I go to the gym, sometimes in the week, most likely you're thinking somewhere between three and four times, right? But if with financial behaviors. What we came to learn was, if I've done something once, and it had a huge impact on my life and how I read a statement. So let's say the example I give is I owe money after the holidays. And let's say there was one Christmas I bought all these ridiculous gifts I owed all this money, and me and my husband got into a ridiculous fight, and it lasted for months, and we were at blows. And even though I've never done it again, you put this statement in front of me, if I'm really, like truthful with myself, I'm gonna put that in the sometimes pile. And so that probably means I'm carrying around that shame and guilt for something that I've never done again, but I can't put in and that's not me, because that's not me, feels untruthful, and so that we give this is how we train the practitioners to be able to look at some of these statements and have a better conversation. Again, we don't, I don't know that a lot of our practitioners at this point are even looking at the whole assessment like again, to Sonia's point, to label you, I think it's more to say. We've got a couple of statements here. Tell me a story. How are they showing up in your life, so we can figure out, who are you at work? Who are you with your family? How is that working for you? Is it a hindrance? Is it an advantage? Is it a challenge? Right? Because if I'm carrying around this one card of I owed money after the holidays, and like Christmas comes, and I cringe every year, because, genuinely, I'm a giver and I want to do things, but I, you know, this big, huge fight of disappointing my I mean, remember when we're in a couple ship, we almost absorb somebody else's habitudes, even if they're not our own. We're aware of them because we're sharing this money situation with them. When
Dr. Sonya Lutter 29:39
you get to these piles of cards, what is it exactly that the practitioner is doing with them? Walk us through a practical example with the client,
Cara Macksound 29:48
sure. So again, depending if they're using the physical cards or the digital version, if they've given out the digital version, the client's going to have most likely gone through the statements. It takes about 12 to 14 minutes for them to go through the statements. And both you, the practitioner and the client, will get the results. Now the practitioner also gets every single individual statement that the client has said YAY or Nate to. So when we look at a report, and I don't know if it'd be helpful, I'm happy to bring up a mock report, but what we're able to look at is how many statements? Again, we're looking for those dominances. We're looking for those you know, maybe you have, like, a habitude. You've got zero statements that you've selected, right? And so we want to look at where are the statements, or if they're all that that's not me pile again, remember that the client doesn't know what statement the habitude is correlated to. So if this, the client has gone through all nine of, let's say spontaneous statements, and put them all in the that's not me pile. And we do again, this type of work with our practitioners. What is that saying? If I've if basically spontaneous says, I indulge, I want to have a good time, right? And so if I've got all nine statements in that's not me, am I just an automatic no to everything that everybody says to me, right? Because if you went through all the spontaneous cards, I'll just give you a for instance, you've got things that say things like, when I go into the store, I have to buy something. I have a lot of things I bought, but I never use right? And so if they've said no to every single one of these cards in the spontaneous pile, they're probably somebody who's pretty rigid, right, like they're they've never, you know, everybody's done at least something like this at least once or twice. So if all nine are in that's not me. That's very different than maybe I've got three or four of them in the sometimes pile, right? And so then we'd want to say things like, hey, you've got this thing that you say, I have a lot of things I bought I never use. It's in the sometimes file. Tell me a story. And they're like, I don't really do that, but I have this group of girlfriends that we go out on Thursday nights after work, and we go to Marshalls. And no matter what I buy with them, I never use it, because I just feel like I don't want to show up at the register with nothing, because they're all buying something, so I indulge the activity, but they're all sitting in a bag in my closet, and I never, you know, I buy the same oven mitt every time. And that's a true story. Actually, I had a practitioner tell me that story, and these are what we try to do is bring it to the person's real life. What is happening to them every single day that they subconsciously don't even realize that when they go out with this group of girlfriends, they want to fit in. Humans want connection, right? We're back to where we started. And so how do we connect? Money is a tool that we use that makes the playing field feel a little bit I mean, it's not always level, but we try to use it to level it off. So
Wes Brown 32:47
what's the outcome? So it's really geared towards developing some self awareness around our behaviors relate as it relates to money specifically, although I think it sounds like it could be broader than that,
Cara Macksound 33:00
money touches every part of our life. Touches everything, right, right? There's every job ends in money. That's the common denominator, and then no job pays in coffee or chocolate or gym memberships. You have to take your money and you have to convert it would be right, but you have to convert your money to those things. And that's where people get jumbled, because we all get paid the same $500 and then we all utilize the $500 differently. But now I look at you, and I go, Wes, must be nice. And you're like, wait, I had the same 500 bucks as you I just chose to use it this way over that way. But I like, maybe some way you're doing it. You bought yourself time, and now you're sitting on the beach, right, and I bought myself stuff, and now I'm cleaning the stuff I bought right? And so that's where we go wrong. And people don't realize why they're doing what they're doing. So this is a hopeful way to, like, break that down. I go out with these girls on Thursday nights. I want to spend time with them. I start spending money that I for stuff I don't even want, but it's more so I could stand in the group and feel like I'm participating. Well, can we give you better tools so you can still feel like you're participating, but not spend the money on oven mitts? Okay?
Wes Brown 34:13
So once you know this, what do you do with it? Well, and
Cara Macksound 34:18
that's where the Remember, the goal is, whatever the practitioner and the client have established. So we have everybody that uses our tool, from debt consolidators to mortgage loan officers to financial advisors to estate planners, right banking institutions. I mean, the tool is being used in a plethora of different environments. So whatever the goal is, if we're debt consolidating, then we're really gonna have to get back to that budget and figure out how we can spend less, or how we can start to shift money around. If we're talking about a mortgage loan officer, right, we might be thinking about, well, we've got these people in front of us. They're coming for this loan, and they're looking to buy a house that they really. Can't afford. And after we do their assessment, we see that they're really dominant in status. And it's all about keeping up with the Joneses, and it's all and so what does that really look like in their financial life? So are we able to walk them through and say, you know, think about this, if you really get into this house, which is a hard nut to crack, now you've now you're in the neighborhood, now the car, now the school your kids go to, now the clothes you're getting, right? Like it's a snowball effect, right? It's a moving goal post. So is, you know, maybe there's some self awareness around the status. Is it really delivering you the value, you know, for you? And some people may say yes, again, the name brand snacks that I talked about, I knew what that would do for those kids, right? But I also knew we weren't going to indulge it forever, and it didn't mean just because I bought it for those kids, I was going to come home and spend my own money on my kids with name brands, right? And so again, having awareness gives us the ability to then make hopefully better decisions, because we're aware of what our real motivation is.
Dr. Sonya Lutter 36:03
We keep talking about the practitioner. Is that a critical element of this? Or can a person go and do this on their own? You know,
Cara Macksound 36:10
it the way it was originally designed was that people could go and do it on their own. I don't recommend that, and here's why, because it's, I think it's overwhelming. Just in general, when you sit down and you think about how you deal, it feels personal, it feels emotional. You I think no matter how we break it down, there always seems to feel like deprivation, even when there's enough, when you talk about money for whatever reasons, right? And so I always recommend that people do it with a practitioner, so you don't start jumping to conclusions. Or I've had again, as I mentioned, when I've trained practitioners and I've gotten their results, and they have two cards in giving, and they're not dominant in giving, and they believe that they're a giver. I've had tears in my training sessions where people are like, I swear I'm a giver. I And I'm like, Whoa, there's no judgment here. And then I'll go through the assessment with them. Let's look at the statements that you put. Let's look at where you put the other statements, right? And so somebody will have two cards in giving and maybe five cards in the sometimes pile. And I'm like, well, it's not that you're not a giver. You have conditions around giving. You ask questions you might want to know about ROI. You're not just open, you know, the checkbook, and you're just giving time, energy, resources, money, whatever it might be. And so that then starts to make sense to them. But I don't know if everybody's trained the way we are, that if they did this on their own, you know, could you create some good conversation? Probably. But if you really are doing it from the assessment full level, I always recommend a practitioner.
Wes Brown 37:43
We bring all these other things into that assessment process, right? So we have all of these sort of predetermined opinions or views about ourself. So as we're reading a card and we're trying to, like, accurately assess how we respond to that's me. It's not me. Sometimes it's going to be colored by, you know, if I already think I'm wasteful with my money, and then I, you know, whatever the card says, like, that's going to bias me in the way that I absolutely answer that, as opposed to, like, if Sonia and I were going through this, or you and I were going through this,
Cara Macksound 38:15
yeah, and I will say, like, that was one of the very, very first things I developed when I took over, which was a financial bias training for financial professionals, right? Because the idea like our lived experiences are our rights, like it's what we think is right, even if we have brought in our perspective, or, you know, we understand other things, we still have what we think is right? And when, even when we're working with someone else, and I do this whole thing in our financial bias training for our practitioners, where we do word associations around habitudes being on one end of the spectrum or on the other end of the spectrum. We do this so practitioners can recognize that they can't just put that lens on when the client reveals to them, right? Because certain cultures, certain communities, certain family systems are set up that certain habitudes are going to be attributable. So you got to let them tell their story so you can understand how it fits in in the bigger financial plan, or it's not a you're this or that. It's more of a How are you a short term planner or a long term planner? Right? So you might be dominant in planning, but you're also a short term planner. So you always have the next vacation planned, or you may have the next big purchase planned, but you might have nothing safe for retirement. Just because you have a nine and planning doesn't mean you have a retirement account, so your financial advisor, right who's working with you on a retirement plan sees this line in planning right now, recognizes that you're someone who's capable of planning, but you're planning for what's important to you. How do I now create a retirement plan that's. Important to you, right? So that's whereas, if you came in and you were dominant in spontaneity, your habitude is so very different, the planner might be able to say, Wow, I'm dealing with someone who so I don't feel frustrated, and they don't feel frustrated. I've got to come up with more tangible, smaller tasks, or tasks that we do together in person, because this person's not a forward, they're not a planner, right there. That's not how they're coming at this, right? And so that's, that's the nuance of what we're trying to get at. So you look our clients don't look like us. If they did, they might not need us.
Dr. Sonya Lutter 40:40
So true. I wonder about your children. Kara, you have five of them. Yes. Are they the same or similar in their money habitudes? And if not, how in the world did it come to be that
Cara Macksound 40:53
way? So this is so funny that you asked this question because I was appalled to think they weren't all exactly the same for all my training and all my all I know, and that was really a huge eye opener for me. So they're my kids are 13 through 18, so they're not very old. And really, when we talk about the assessment, we always say we don't recommend it for anybody, really, under 15 or 16, because you're still trying to figure out who you're following. You know, by 16, you start to have those more solid thoughts. So that being said, the little I had everybody do it. So the little ones were probably maybe 11. Was two years ago when I took over. So they're probably 11 through 15 or 16 when I had them do it. And I just expected that most of them would be the same. But I had my oldest daughter showed up, not super dominant, but dominant and carefree. And I think I almost lost like my head might never pop any again. I'm a nine in planning, and we do see a bit of higher levels of care free. Do seem to correlate with people that are, you know, financially, you know, winding in financial scams or fraud, because they trust they they relinquish their control more, and because, again, that's just part of that habitude. And so I was freaking out, and I'm like, What, uh, and so I said to her, Okay, we're gonna go through the statement. You're gonna talk to me about this. And so everything that she kind of said to me was, you know, I just trust ace. That's her brother. She my son is like, the nine and planning just like me. And he's like, Wall Street, you know, that's his thing. He's like, constantly reading the markets and investing. She's like, I kind of just let ace tell me what to do, and I'm always happy with what he gives me. And I was like, Okay, so in this positioning in her family system. She's got a trusting individual so she can use her capacity for other things, and she's completely relinquished control, but he's in this situation right now at their age. Remember, we know what happens to siblings as they get older, and there's, you know, money between family, but at this age, she's been able to trust him 100% but I was like, If I don't help her be aware of this, what does that look like when she gets into a relationship with someone who, if she has, you know, she becomes a breadwinner, or she has access to money through inheritance, through her own doing, and she's, you know, has just been in this position where she relinquishes control to someone who's her trusted person. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just be aware of it, because you've been in this situation, every situation after it doesn't mean it's exactly the same. And also as people get people right, your brothers and sisters as they go on and get spouses, and now you have in laws, and let's say, God forbid, mommy and daddy drop dead, and there's money. And of course, we're decent people in that we've written it all how it plays out. But if you don't have that kind of clean plan, we I mean, tell me a story that you know where the money brought the family together doesn't happen, right? Right? And so I needed her to be aware that you can't just openly trust. You can't just openly relinquish your decision making to someone else because you think they're going to just always do the right thing. Sonia, this is
Wes Brown 44:13
reminding me of the discussion with on spendthrifts and tightwatch. Oh yeah, when he was talking Yeah, so with Scott, and he was talking about how opposites attract. And I'm thinking about this as a tool for, maybe for parenting. And so I'm thinking about my 19 year old, so just went up to college, and, you know, the next, I mean, I was married by 23 so it's possible kids by 25 so it's possible that, you know, six years from now, he could be in the same boat. And so a lot of big decisions to make along along the way, and a lot of self awareness to develop as well. And so thinking of this as a tool for developing self awareness, and maybe thinking about who he might, you know, marry or partner with for the rest of his life, seems like it could. Be an incredibly valuable tool.
Cara Macksound 45:02
And how many couples get, I mean, think about the two reasons couples get divorced, infidelity and money. And it's not actually money itself. It's not its fault. It's how the two people think feel and do money, right? And so how many couples walk down the aisle and haven't had like, a real, raw conversation about what money means to each of them, or, I mean, I remember the first time I bought generic snacks, and it was right after I stopped working, and my husband came home, and he panicked. He was like, wait, wait, am I not doing well enough that we can't afford and I thought, No, I think I'm doing great for us. I saved us all this money. And because he grew up in a household with a single mom, and he got made fun of for having generic snacks, right? His version of like, what he wanted his kids to have was something better, right? And so think about like that snowballs into like, if you don't have those really raw conversations
Wes Brown 46:02
well, and I'm thinking about the use, the usefulness of this in developing self awareness. And then I'm wondering, you know, if opposites attract? You know, might be a weird first or second date for somebody to be like, Hey, can we do this, this assessment? But you know, I am curious. Maybe, you know is, is there, you know, somebody who's high in spontaneity? Are they, you know, attracted to, or do they rely upon or look for people like maybe your son, who's high in, you know,
Cara Macksound 46:35
security. And I, because I don't get to work with clients, you know, we're only B to B, so I don't, I only get the stories that the practitioners tell, so I don't have statistics on the you know what couples or look like this or this, but what I will tell you, and what practitioners have told me over and over again, is when couples don't look the same, one is dominant spontaneity. One's dominant planning. As long as they're not coming like it's they're not in, like, marriage counseling for like on the brink of divorce, if it's a financial planning meeting or it's a mortgage meeting or that couple's actually usually easy to work with, because the couple ship now has access to all the habitudes with the two people together, right? The issue is usually when people have the exact same habitudes but are defining them differently. So when I say that I'm dominant planning, you're dominant planning, but you're telling me you've got the 30 year, you know, policeman job. We're not going to take a vacation, we're not going to spend any money. You're going to do your 30 and then we're going to retire in Florida, and then we're going to enjoy our lives. And my dad died at 52 and I'm like, we're not gonna What if we don't make it to 30 years? Could we at least go on a vacation twice a year to enjoy our life now? Right? So you're a planner and I'm a planner, but you're long term and I'm short term, and now we can't get right on the right way. You know, you're part of this mentality of like, we can't spend a nickel until we get to the finish line. And I'm part of the mentality of like, we if we do our planning correctly, we could spend a couple of nickels on our way and still get to the goal, right? And so that becomes the harder of the two, because you're like, how can you not see it my way? But again, that's where family system, cultural system, Community System has played a part in the way you see the world. Interesting.
Wes Brown 48:25
This is reminding me of Sonia's book, which is fantastic, by the way, I've given it away to, I don't know, dozens of people. Yeah, you
Dr. Sonya Lutter 48:33
keep asking about data, and we were talking about this before you got on. Wes that the money habitudes are just getting into the research right now, and it's so super exciting that you are supportive of the research Kara, and wanting to know, is this reliable, is it valid? How can we make it better? How can we maybe alter it for certain populations, if necessary? And there's a lot of places that are not willing to do that. And it also means that at this exact moment in time, we don't have a lot of data to answer some of the questions that you're talking about. They're really great questions. And I think that idea of couple of alignment and then what are you doing? Are you expecting them to alter their money latitudes, or is it simply an awareness of each other's strengths? And
Cara Macksound 49:22
again, I always say to people like, if the research came back and said, This doesn't really seem super valid, but the impactfulness of the conversation it started allowed somebody right, and that's hard to measure, but that's as valuable as anything else, because what do we know about communication? Most things can be solved if we communicate clearly and calmly, right, like the minute you lose it, the minute you fly through the handle. But if you can, if both parties can communicate clearly and calmly, that's why mediation is beautiful, yet people choose to spend money. So talk about right the. Way people think about things, how many divorces go to mediation versus how many divorces go to legal lawyers? So I've already chosen, I don't want to be with you yet. I'm going to spend all my shekels telling you over and over and over again instead of just saying, Hey, I don't want to be with you, I'm going to take my shekels and go play over there and maximize my utilization for these dollars. It's bizarre, but that's human behavior. Kara,
Wes Brown 50:23
you obviously live in this world every day, and I don't know how you don't view the world through this, through this lens. I'm sure you do, but I'm curious. You know, as we come to the top of the hour here, we always kind of ask a couple of questions at the end, and one of them is, what books you're reading right now.
Cara Macksound 50:41
So I it's funny, I read a while ago, and I just reread. There's a chapter in the Elon Musk book, the new one, about him going on, like, Christmas Eve. It was like, I guess when he was taking over Twitter with the servers. Am I resonating with either of you? Okay, and so, you know, again, Elon Musk gets a, you know, this crazy reputation and all kinds of stuff. But what really caught me in the book was, and this is why I have to keep rereading it, and I've probably read it three dozen times at this point, because I'm like, is it the money? Like, is it that somebody told him it was gonna cost this? And he was like, that doesn't compute. That doesn't sound right, I'm gonna go double check your numbers. Or was it just his looted, you know, his total craziness of like, I'm gonna go. And I think it's probably a combination of all. But I thought about how many times people have said to me, you know, and I would think it would be similar in, like, Elon Musk's case, right? Like him spending his time going in, like, this little Toyota down to where the server was. Like, when you think about it, collectively, you're like, This guy's got so many other things to do. But when I thought about the, you know, again, coming up with the dollar amount, remember, the dollar amount that he figured out he could do it for was an iota of, you know, what they had quoted him and time, which was money. So by him going, he figured out it could be done in three days time, versus the guy who told him it was going to be 13 months, or whatever it was. And so, you know, I often think like when people are like, Oh, you shouldn't spend your time that way. Or, you know, you can maximize this. And I'm like, but is there enjoyment sometimes to going to those levels? And let's be honest, there's no amount of money that's going to change Elon Musk's life at this point. So having experienced like, I go back to my Wall Street guys who crossed over into those levels of greed where they imprison themselves. I keep reading this chapter, and I'm like, You know what is crazy as he is. He was having fun like that was he maximized his you like, his enjoyment of what he could do. And he does care about the numbers, and he does care about this like level of like, don't like, Kelly's gonna put square pegs in round holes and make it fit. And like, I think that's what excites me about all of it, because I do think we know we chase Jones's and we conform to society, and we think there's only one way to do something, and it all seems to cost something. And I'm like, I don't, I don't buy into that anymore, right? Like, I've realized there's so many ways to get things done, and it doesn't all have to cost XYZ. And so I really, I think that's what's attracting me to this chapter, you know, just so so so much because I keep rereading it, because I keep trying to, like, pull out different like, did I miss this? Did is they they have detail here? Because that it just keeps resonating with me.
Dr. Sonya Lutter 53:45
That's such a different perspective than I think most people would take from the book. It's fascinating to hear it. Yeah, it's great. And you sort of hinted at our very last question. A bit of we like to promote authentic living. And we're curious how you build moments of authenticity into your daily life.
Cara Macksound 54:05
So I super, I think I'm just super fortunate to, like, always just be very confident in being just who I am. I've always been kind of ridiculed. Too much of a Brooklyn accent, too. I'm too tacky. I'm this and that like, I think, fortunately so I have just been in a place of like, I'm gonna go, everybody's gonna disapprove of this, so let me just do what I want to do. So funny enough, like, I'm in my 23rd home of a 25 year marriage, and people think this is absolutely insane. It's very Goldilocks. Is like, I want to make sure I try too soft, too hard, to up to down. I want to try everything so I don't go around knocking anything right, like I just want to walk alongside all the different people. And I think that keeps me very authentic, because I don't have to walk in step with them. I just gotta walk next to them. And so that's. Been one of the I mean, it's just a very different way to walk through life and to take seven people along with you, but everybody's, you know, everybody's been good with it so far.
Dr. Sonya Lutter 55:14
I don't know how you stay married after that many moves.
Cara Macksound 55:16
My husband always says he knows it's gonna be over when he doesn't get the next forwarding address, he's always like, I remember, I'm a trainer, so part of us moving oftentimes, has to do more with I see market manipulation, where I'm I buy something that's undervalued or right. So so people don't realize that. Like, there's a part of I like to just go places and do new things. But there's also a level of like, I'm, like, if I can capitalize on this, you can, like, nothing's worth so much to me that it becomes, what is it? The endowment bias, like, I don't think, because it's mine, it's worth so much more if you want it, and I paid X and you're probably X times two. I know how to do the math. I'm like, yours sold to you. I'll move on to the next
Dr. Sonya Lutter 56:04
thing. It's a fun lifestyle, for sure.
Wes Brown 56:07
Yeah, the stamina it must require, though I I'm impressed, but I also I just as a, you know, an observation is like, Man, how refreshing would it be if everybody did that in an effort to not be judgmental of other people, just walk alongside of my son, try it all. What an impactful way to live. I've
Cara Macksound 56:25
learned so much that way, because you don't know what it's like until you experience what it's like, and think about what you bring back then to the other people.
Dr. Sonya Lutter 56:38
This has taken so many twists and turns. It's been really delightful. Kara, thank you for joining
Cara Macksound 56:44
us. Yes, thank you. Thank you. You