Dennis Williams wants to democratize finance. To make money easy to understand and accessible for everyone, not just the wealthy. And as the CEO of My Financial Therapist, he’s on a mission to make it happen.
Why the traditional approach to money is broken
Dennis Williams, CEO of My Financial Therapist, invites us to break up with the American dream. And with startling facts like 50% of the population lives paycheck to paycheck, it’s not hard to understand why.
Dennis believes the American Dream serves as an anchor to keep us in place, to make us want things that get us in debt. And, as a nation, we’re more in debt than ever. Yet, if we democratize finance and make it more accessible for everyone to understand (not just the wealthy), that might just be the secret to living a life on our own terms. Dennis certainly hopes so.
Tune in to hear him chat to Amalia about all this and much more.
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Dennis Williams: [00:00:00] The traditional approach to money, I think, is broken. We're broken by design. It's meant to be this way. The more they keep us in the position of financial illiteracy, really, the more money they make off of us.
Amalia: Welcome to the whole damn pie. Today, I'm speaking with Dennis Williams, the CEO of My Financial Therapist. Dennis’s fresh take on personal finance and the role that money plays in our lives really got me thinking. Our money habits often do come from much deeper issues. Dennis has spent his entire career as a financial advisor at many of the big-name wealth management firms. But he realizes that they're not for everyone and they can exclude a large portion of the population. Instead, he wants to democratize financial literacy. We dig into what that really means, how his My Financial Therapist app is going to do that, and why we really need to examine the [00:01:00] elusive idea of the American Dream.
You describe being a financial therapist as your calling, yeah? How'd you get here? Tell me about your journey.
Dennis Williams: Oh, how'd I get here? I always knew I wanted to learn how to manipulate, in a good way, money. So I kind of started with my own journey and learning from family and friends, business owners, all that kind of stuff. But I got into the world of personal finance from a corporate level. So I started with Merrill Lynch.
Amalia: Okay.
Dennis Williams: Merrill Lynch is an environment which is very clear that they're catering toward a very small percentage of the population.
Amalia: Okay.
Dennis Williams: They want rich, wealthy people. So of course, here I am, 24, 25, representing, you know, Merrill Lynch, a young Black guy trying to convince people who are the opposite shade of me to give me their money and trust that I'm going to do better than either they could or all their other White friends or whoever, right? So I got into the kind of financial therapy because the people who are in my [00:02:00] circle, my friends, my family, my demographic, people that go to my church, they needed a different approach. And the approach from Merrill Lynch was clearly to leave them out and let them kind of figure it out on their own. This world is meant to kind of confuse people, give them too many options, call one thing four different names, force people to either have anxiety or confusion and stick their head in the sand and not do anything about it. Which, you know, for anyone who has money, whether you have a little or a lot, the more you neglect, um, a goal or something that you need to accomplish with regard to money, that thing snowballs really, really quickly. So if you can meet people where they are, not speak jargon, not confuse people, not try to scare people into making you think that you need me or you're going to fail financially, because that's also not the case. We overcomplicate things. So coming from a financial therapy point of view to me just means connecting the mindset, your mindset around money. We have to uncover the things that you do that are [00:03:00] productive in the sense of how you treat money as the tool it is. It shouldn't be, it shouldn't be the thing that you identify. That shouldn't be part of your identity is the money. That shouldn't be part of your identity. It should just be a means to which you're able to accomplish the things that matter to you most.
Amalia: Okay.
Dennis Williams: You have to connect values. So yeah, financial therapy to me, therapy and money, they need to be connected. Otherwise, I mean, how can you truly be successful?
Amalia: I like it. Have you always been interested in this industry? You said you worked at Merrill Lynch. Was little Dennis like, I am going to become a financial therapist?
Dennis Williams: No.
Amalia: Okay. Did you grow up having money?
Dennis Williams: No.
Amalia: Okay.
Dennis Williams: Heck no. I mean, we did not grow up poor. My parents worked their butts off to provide and give us all the opportunities they possibly could. Were we rich? No. But we had some really great people around us that were on the verge of becoming rich because of their hard work, really. Did I grow up with money? We grew up with enough [00:04:00] money.
Amalia: Okay.
Dennis Williams: Grew up going to great schools and being around good people.
Amalia: Yeah.
Dennis Williams: Did little Dennis grow up wanting to wear a bowtie? Little Dennis was always into fashion. Always into like, you know, I love this. Well, self-expression. Okay. And really not wanting to dress or look or be like anyone else. Like, I really wanted to be distinctly who I was. And that definitely has poured over into like going into the corporate world that is Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, and now I work for Wells Fargo, and now I'm trying to obviously work on my financial therapist as well. But yeah, no, I just, I just wanted to go against the grain.
Amalia: For Dennis, going against the grain applies to many areas of life, including his desire to help everyone, not just the rich, achieve financial success.
Dennis Williams: I think that the traditional approach to money, I think, is broken. You know, you've seen different statistics, like 50 percent of the population lives paycheck to paycheck.
Amalia: Yes.
Dennis Williams: Like, what is it, 65, 70 percent couldn't afford a thousand-dollar emergency, 75 percent or more [00:05:00] have no financial plan whatsoever. I can literally throw out dozens of statistics that highlight that we're broken. And you know, it's almost like we're broken by design. It's not almost, it is. We're broken by design. It's meant to be this way. The more they keep us in the position of financial illiteracy, really, the more money they make off of us. It's not complicated.
Amalia: We talk about this a lot in the work that I do, is it, that a lot of the systems that we exist in and that we navigate just by living and breathing here are complicated by design, right? You could say that about healthcare. You could say it about education, higher education, right? Like the law. That fear and distrust that we're talking about in our flawed system, that's real. Our unnecessarily complicated financial system actually makes it harder for Dennis to do his job and creates more barriers to helping people.
Dennis Williams: One of the things that I noticed very quickly, if I introduce myself as a financial advisor, and I would do it, [00:06:00] I would almost like A/B test this. It's like, I would introduce myself as a financial advisor and it's almost as if a windy cold draft blew through the entire room. Something changed the mood like, like an instant. It's like, oh, he's a financial advisor. He's going to either try to sell me something. He's going to talk about what he does for a living. He doesn't really care what I do. He cares about telling me what the markets are doing or why he needs me. It's like the conversation turns on a dime. I started introducing myself as a financial therapist. And I'm telling you, I've done this thousands of times over the last 10 years. Not one time have I ever gotten that whole mood shift. I've always gotten, oh, I've never heard of that. Tell me what that means. I didn't know that existed. Like literally people wanted to know more about it versus trying to get away from it as quickly as they want to get away from the financial advisor. So you start to realize, why is that? Well, financial advisors are looked at as someone who is a salesperson, but it's like, if you're a financial advisor, why would you ever be seen as a salesperson? Like you should be seen as somebody giving sound, [00:07:00] thoughtful, holistic, financial advice. Not like, oh, I have this product or service in my mind because—
Amalia: Because I'm going to get some commission off the back end.
Dennis Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a whole another layer of things that contribute to the system being broken.
Amalia: Uh-huh.
Dennis Williams: Why would you ever incentivize someone to do one or two things when there are thousands of ways that you can accomplish a goal? If you're genuinely wanting to help the person on the other side of the desk, I had to take a step back because I wasn't being as successful as I wanted to be in the job.
Amalia: I'm not surprised that just selling people stuff to make money wasn't really working for Dennis. That's just not who he is.
Dennis Williams: It was frustrating because I'm like, wait a minute, I really actually do care about people. I really don't want to sell people like just stuff. I really like want to do this job the right way, like why is this so hard for me? And it's because I was doing it the way they wanted me to do it.
Amalia: Yeah.
Dennis Williams: So I had to like break that whole thing down. I talked to other people who I respected their opinions and kind of the way that they conducted themselves who were above me, and I kind of just put this kind of process together [00:08:00] and it's funny, it really, it was born out of a self-preservation almost.
Amalia: Yeah.
Dennis Williams: It's like I don't figure this out quick, I'm not gonna be like the 45 other guys who don't do this job anymore. So I started basically attaching time values, goals to money and creating very specific targets for targets for you. I would educate people on the things that fit best within those time periods of your life.
Amalia: Mm hmm.
Dennis Williams: Once we identified the targets, it was all—we already knew, okay, I have X amount of dollars within this time period of my life. And here are the things that I think, as the client, I'm going to dedicate those dollars to because Dennis has educated me on why this account makes sense over this one or, you know, what all these different implications are.
So at the end of that process, I no longer had to sell. It was now almost as if you were, "This goes here, this goes here. I want to put this here because, you know, you help me understand why. So all these things make sense for this reason." So I was leading the clients to water, not forcing them to drink.
They drink on their own, you know?
Amalia: Yeah, so instead of putting products in front of them that they could select from to purchase, you're educating and empowering them to come to a point where they feel like they can make the decision because they have the right information.
Dennis Williams: Yeah, that's it.
Amalia: I mean, when we say it like that, it seems like, "Duh, that's so easy," but the world doesn't work like that.
Dennis Williams: No.
Amalia: No, it does not.
Dennis Williams: The world has ulterior motives sometimes; not everyone can see that.
Amalia: It does. It really does. I know that one of your tenets is that you really want to democratize financial literacy. What does that mean?
Dennis Williams: Democratizing financial literacy means that we no longer intentionally try to overcomplicate people's lives by introducing things or concepts or words that don't help you become better from a financial perspective. It has to start at an earlier age. It has to start in schools. If I were to ask you, what are the top five things in your life? And you were to tell me, I would be surprised if money wasn't somewhere on that list. And I've, again, you know, I've asked that question a thousand times, thousands. So it's like, how the heck are we, are we expected to go through this thing called life, which really moves fast if we let it get away from us?
And then we're losing track of all those goals, which are all attached to money. It's like, that is, to me, that's almost—what is the word? Neglect? That's—what is a word worse than neglect? That's like, that is just, I don't know. That is...
Amalia: Terrorism? What is it?
Dennis Williams: Financial.
Amalia: Financial terrorism. It's the other app.
Dennis Williams: Yeah.
Amalia: No, I'm just kidding.
Dennis Williams: Blasphemous.
Amalia: Yeah.
Dennis Williams: Yeah. We got to democratize this thing. People need to know how to improve their lives with this thing that touches every part of their lives in a way that is unique to them. If we don't do that, it's almost like, to me, it's neglect from the top down. Like, what are we talking about?
Amalia: Tell me about My Financial Therapist, which is your baby. It's an app, which I think is brilliant.
Dennis Williams: The best way to imagine the app is if you were sitting at my desk, in my office, and we were going through an initial conversation about your financial life, the things you cared about, and how you wanted to support them with this funny tool called money.
We want to be that person on the other side of the screen, their financial therapist, that's in their hand anytime they need. I kind of describe it as like a safe place. It's kind of like just being very thoughtful with how we approach money, how we kind of, like I said, the democratizing of financial literacy is anyone at any moment should be able to pick up a tool to make their lives better. And then within this context, it's specifically about money. So understanding yourself within the context of money. Really breaking it down, I kind of describe people as—if you were investing your money and you had a couple of companies to choose from, would you invest your money in Microsoft if they had no financial plan that guided their future decisions with how they're going to invest your money?
Amalia: Right.
Dennis Williams: I'm pretty sure people would be like, "No."
Amalia: No, I'm going to go ahead and pass on that.
Dennis Williams: So why would anyone invest in you or yet you have a positive financial outlook if you don't have a plan that guides your decisions with money in the future?
Amalia: My Financial Therapist app, is it available to me now, or is it in development?
Dennis Williams: It's in development. It's in development. Yeah, we've created the first prototype of it.
Amalia: Okay.
Dennis Williams: We're going through a little, a few challenges with tech, of course. And getting it actually created the way that the vision is designed to be interacted with. So we're getting close. We actually are bringing on a new technical partner, developer, teammate to help us move forward faster. So things are, you know, moving along.
Amalia: So what kind of help are you looking for to get this thing over the line? How are we going to see Financial Therapists in our lives? You're doing a program with a local credit union?
Dennis Williams: Yeah, yeah, Boeing Employee Credit Union. Okay. We're in an incubator with them. So we're trying to utilize their expertise to help us progress, to help us build it the right way, to help us test it with their employees, and then larger groups of employees, and maybe with members. I mean, they are the fourth largest credit union in the nation. They are massive.
Amalia: Oh, I didn't know that.
Dennis Williams: Yeah. Yeah. They're massive.
Amalia: Okay. I mean, I'm a member, but I didn't know that. Okay. So maybe I'll see it on my account or something.
Dennis Williams: That, in a perfect world, yeah. That would be ideal. I mean, they've introduced us—as you can imagine, being as big as they are, they've kind of sprouted seeds of former BCU employees all around the Northwest, as far as, you know, former employees that have gone on to lead other credit unions.
So it's been a really nice opportunity to kind of get to know other people. Like, for instance, right after this meeting, I'm headed down to Olympia to meet with a group called Circle, which essentially pulls money together to test and get behind new fintech, new technology ideas. So we're going to go meet with them and just see what we can learn and how we can be accessible and make sure that we can actually get things off the ground quickly.
Amalia: How can we help you?
Dennis Williams: I just want people ready to download this thing and test it and give me feedback. People can go check out myfinancialtherapist.com. You can sign up for our waiting list. It's going to help in terms of when we go and raise money from venture capitalists and angel investors. If we have a list of 10,000 people saying that they want this thing to be real, it'll be so much easier to grow.
Amalia: That's awesome. And once it's available, when I download the app, what is it going to do for me? Does it help me make a budget? Does it help me plan my future? All of the above? Does it help me heal my financial trauma of scarcity? Like, what does it do?
Dennis Williams: Yes. All of the above.
Amalia: Oh my God.
Dennis Williams: All of the above. So if you think about the context of a therapist, you know, you come into an environment where someone is helping you actively work through something that's not working the way you want, maybe.
Okay. So, you know, there's a journal feature within the app that tracks everything you do, tracks progress to goals, introduces insights within the journal that help, based on what we know about you, kind of dig into like, "Okay, we noticed this is kind of a sticking point or something that we need to help you overcome." So, or support. Like, maybe you're doing something great. It's not—we don't have to always focus on negative things, but maybe we need to focus on either good things that you're doing or uncover some of the negative things we need to break through. But if I were to say, what are you going to leave with? We help people create dynamic financial plans in a therapeutic environment.
And if you were to break down the word dynamic—because some people are like, "What does dynamic mean?"—it's timely and relevant. If I make a plan for you today, I know it's going to be wrong tomorrow because you're not the same person you were yesterday. If your plan is dynamic, if it's linked to accounts that we can see and that are feeding into who you are and all the targets and all the things you're trying to accomplish, that plan should change as you change.
You know, you get a new house, you have another kid, you go back to school, your kid goes to school. You either need to have something like this application that can be dynamic application that can be dynamic in the moment, but or you need to be meeting with me every week. And who's going to do that?
Amalia: Right. I love the part about having a dynamic plan because we know that life is always changing. When you align your money with your goals, you're kind of forced to take a hard look at what you say versus what you do. And that's not going to look the same for everyone. We have to ask these questions of ourselves. What messages have we internalized that we don't even realize? Dennis invites us to break up with the American dream.
Dennis Williams: I want everybody to be successful, but I'm a skeptic, especially with all the stuff that we've been force-fed over the years. And the American dream, it's funny, I had an epiphany, like, I don't know, like two years ago, part of this process of doing this company, starting up my financial therapy. You kind of look at the things that are meant to keep us in a system that benefits off of us, not necessarily us benefiting as a result of being a part of it.
Amalia: Yeah, it doesn't serve us.
Dennis Williams: It doesn't serve us. And then you start to look back on, okay, when did this all start? Like this whole American dream. I remember literally like, when American dream, like what was the history of the American dream? And it was like, it was like a term coined from some author like in the 1930s, like in the kind of, you know, post-Great Depression, World War II, that whole era. I get it, you want to give people something to aspire to, something to dream toward, something to anchor yourself to. But what it became more than anything was a marketing tool. It became this just like an anchor keeps you in place. That's literally what it became. It's almost like, okay, the American dream is to have this, you know, the house with the picket fence, 2.5, whatever point, whatever kids, the dog, the wife that stays at home and does not work.
Amalia: A car, because this is the booming car industry, time.
Dennis Williams: Car, yeah, we gotta have cars. Like, if you're American, you gotta have a car. Right. American-made car. A fossil fuel-burning car. Yes. So all these things that were part of the, uh, what is that? The, uh, what is the word I'm looking for? The mystique or whatever you want to call that is the American dream that everyone really bought into. All it did was serve as a way to get you in debt, make you a cog in the wheel, make it so that you could not stop working. You worked your 30, 40, whatever decades of work for a particular company so that you could maybe one day, I don't know, chill on a porch and kick back and whatever. But that's not really how it worked. All it did was it limited your flexibility. It made you stuck in a cycle that you maybe didn't want to even be a part of or participate in, but it's too late now. You're anchored to that little plot of land that is your American dream and it became more of a, I don't want to, what's the opposite of a dream? I don't want to say what I'm going to say.
Amalia: Nightmare?
Dennis Williams: And maybe it did though, because when you think about like dream and nightmare, because like, if we were to go back to our grandparents, maybe doing that nowadays would be great. Because we make enough money. We could afford like your salary, your house might be two and a half times your salary. You can afford to buy a home, not have to pay for 30, 40, whatever years. And we can't do that anymore. Things are way more expensive. The cost of living has not kept up. The pay hasn't kept up. We're in more debt than ever.
Amalia: Yeah. It's disillusioned us. I think, you know, we're still tied to this concept that maybe isn't achievable. I also think like, if you look through history, like it's a term that can also mean like you're entitled to this American dream because you are an American, right? And if you're not experiencing it the way that it's packaged and sold to you, then it's probably someone's fault because you are entitled to that. I can see it in the financial aspect, but I think there's also many social ties to it that create division instead of harmony. And I think harmony should be part of the American dream.
Dennis Williams: Yeah, it's funny. Like, like you saying that reminds me of things like, like sayings, like keeping up with the Joneses. Right. Or the fact that I feel a need to buy x, y, and z thing because so and so, you know, I want to keep up appearances. I'm a financial advisor. I should be driving like a Bentley or I don't, what do, I don't know. What do financial advisors? I guess Bentley's.
Amalia: Bentley's the official brand of financial advisors everywhere.
Dennis Williams: Call us Bentley. Yeah.
Amalia: Yeah.
Dennis Williams: Do you guys need sponsors?
Amalia: Bentley. Bentley, we'll take you. Yeah, we'll take it.
Dennis Williams: That'd be awesome. I drive a, what do I drive? A 2008? I drive a paid-off 2008 old-school Mercedes. And I want an older school BMW to replace my old-school. I just like old-school stuff. Anyway, I like not paying for, I like not being stuck in that, in that rat race, not stuck in that. Like for instance, like the last thing I'll say about the American Dream. The opposite of that is using your money to buy back the most precious thing we all have, which is time.
Amalia: Yeah.
Dennis Williams: So if we can pay ourselves first, if we can not overextend ourselves, if we can use the tool of money to actually buy back the ability to do whatever the heck we want when we want, I think people will be a lot happier.
Amalia: I agree. I totally agree. I totally agree. This is very interesting. So I grew up not having a lot of money at all. I grew up with a mom who was really hardworking, you know, single mom, but your labor can only take you so far, especially a woman in a certain point in time. And so I grew up just, if you don't want things, then you're fine. If you can live a life where you don't want anything, really, or you don't need much, then you're fine.
Dennis Williams: Yeah.
Amalia: Right? That is a really hard mindset to get out of because there's a lot of judgment wrapped in it. So I think money is even more complicated because it's not just a product. It's not just a thing. It is tied to our identity. It's tied to our values and how we see ourselves and each other and especially compare ourselves to each other. So as I have gotten older, and older and, you know...
Dennis Williams: Now and wiser and more awesome.
Amalia: Yeah, thank you. And wiser and wiser. You know, owning a company, you look at money so differently. Like trying to financial plan for a business is way different than you would do it for your own business yourself as a human being, you know, in your personal life. And also, fun fact, what I've learned is that this country's tax code is built around business. So if you want to learn anything about, you know, building wealth or saving money, it's start a business.
Dennis Williams: Yeah.
Amalia: Yes. That's the next episode. That's the next episode of Money Therapy with Dennis.
Dennis Williams: Yeah.
Amalia: I'm learning. I mean, I have literally, I know, I think if my financial therapist app was around when I was younger, it could have really helped me kind of deal with these things. Honestly, when I started being more successful in business, I had to hire an expert, an actual psychology therapist who specialized in money to help me break through barriers because I had a lot of judgments on myself of feeling a certain way with success, feeling a certain way with obligations to others. And, you know, for the record, I'm not swimming in it, but, you know, when you come from nothing, swimming in it feels a little bit different right now. I'm not Oprah. Okay. Not yet.
Dennis Williams: Yeah.
Amalia: We're not Oprah over here, but...
Dennis Williams: I call her by the way.
Amalia: Right. But like, the minute where I'm starting to think about, Oh, like, I should probably donate to some charities, right? Like, and what are those charities gonna be? But, you know, 10 years ago, there was no money to donate to charities, right? But now there's this question and so it's been a really interesting journey for me. I think this tool is going to be really helpful. I really mean it. My financial therapist would have been so valuable to me. We need that safe space to look at our relationship with money, unpack our habits, and all the emotions behind them.
I do have one more question for you before we go, which is a question I ask everybody. Because this whole show is about designing life the way you want it. So what is your whole damn pie?
Dennis Williams: Let me think. What is my whole dang pie? My mom might listen to this so I can't cuss. Okay. What is my whole dang pie?
Amalia: Yes.
Dennis Williams: My whole dang pie, or my world I want to live in, is a world where we are empowered to live life on our own terms.
Amalia: Dennis is, without a doubt, living life on his own terms. And his professional work is all about helping others do that very same thing. I really admire Dennis’s drive to improve financial literacy and help everyone examine their relationship with money. This conversation reminded me that we can all make change from within a broken system.