I am surprised that Vicky Reynal, a financial psychotherapist, is soft and reaffirming when I meet her. Perhaps I shouldn’t be – she is a therapist, after all. But something about her line of work, helping people untangle their issues with money, had primed me to expect someone more brisk, more clinical.

I think of how many business executives she meets with, how prohibitively expensive her time must be, and how strong her boundaries probably are. I even panic at the thought of logging into our Zoom meeting one minute late, because time, after all, is money.

Reynal, I’m sure, would find this compelling. She believes that we often have thoughts and feelings about money that actually have nothing to do with cold, hard cash, and everything to do with our earliest emotional experiences, deepest yearnings or misgivings.

It can be frustrating, then, that Reynal won’t talk much about herself. I’m genuinely curious – especially when I ask about her fascination with Warren Buffett, whom she has read extensively about and once met in person. She admits she was drawn to him growing up, but offers only vague hints as to why: references to formative financial experiences and the symbolic weight he held within her family, though she declines to elaborate.

As a psychotherapist, she tries to obscure her own life from her clients, to prevent it obstructing their process. Anonymity, it turns out, is a very good therapeutic tool.

“People try to guess where I’m from, and their guesses tell me so much about their internal world. Some people who have very strict and ungiving parents guess that maybe I’m eastern European, because of how cold they perceive me to be. Others guess I am Mediterranean or South American – from a warm country – because of how loving and giving [they think] I am.”

When Reynal was younger and went through therapy herself, she had a transformative experience working through some of the feelings about money. This, she thought, must be an area ripe for psychotherapeutic practice. But after nearly a decade studying psychology and psychotherapy, she was surprised to find that only a handful of research papers and textbooks directly focus on it.

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, we are talking about our relationship with food, with sex, with people, why aren’t we talking about people’s relationship with money?’ It comes in the therapy room anyway, because it’s part of leading a life and people get into all sorts of messes because of it – and as therapists we have the lens to understand that.”

When Reynal began to explicitly market herself as a financial psychotherapist, she was suddenly overwhelmed by patients queueing up to talk to her. Her inbox was full of emails from would-be clients, telling her how relieved they were to find her. “They were saying: ‘I didn’t know a money psychotherapist existed, and I need your help,’” she says.

She sees some clients on a concession fee or a reduced rate, as they may be unemployed or struggling with debt. But others don’t need it. These are patients who know what they need to do when it comes to money on a rational level, but they just can’t bring themselves to do it: the client who obsessively buys shoes, or the one that can’t bring himself to buy basic things like a coat in the winter, because he feels a deep and bewildering desire to deny himself nice things – despite having more than ample means to buy them. Others have more than enough cash, but can’t find contentment. They come to her thinking: “Maybe you won’t judge me, for being wealthy and yet unhappy.”

Finances are central to how we relate to the world. The way we deal with our income affects our families, shapes our conversations with partners, and can cast long shadows over our relationship to our parents.

But as with so much in therapy, when people think they are coming to talk about money, it is actually not about the money at all. And beneath all that, it often reflects the lessons we absorbed growing up.

“It’s just a language that we use, because I think it’s easier to say: ‘You are being stingy,’ than to say: ‘I wish you were more affectionate with me,’ or ‘I don’t feel you love me enough,’ or ‘I love you more than you love me,’” says Reynal.

She also meets clients who are struggling to make ends meet, who have the sense that they are being childish and impulsive with money – they feel belittled by the way that they spend. When Reynal raises this, I can’t help but wonder whether her clients attach those negative descriptions to themselves because in the US and the UK, poverty is often described as being about bad choices rather than broader economic conditions.

Most of us can point to relationships in our lives – certainly with ourselves – where the way in which we spend serves as a proxy for something deeper. The colleague who is a constant under-tipper, who feels hard done by despite always contributing least to the bill; the sibling who works like a dog but can never, ever ask for a raise; the friend who constantly feels on the edge of financial ruin, despite having more than enough.

So what are the subconscious motivators beneath these interactions? Reynal will often see clients who come in to talk to her about one thing: for example, a recurring frustration that they are always too generous and give far beyond their means, even to the point that it leaves them feeling resentful and angry; which in turn leads to a conversation about people pleasing and where the urge to put others’ needs first came from in their life.

Those behaviours, it turns out – just like infidelity or drug use, or any of the more obvious topics that we associate with therapy – may originate from a time in our lives when we felt unsatisfied. An incredibly generous person might have struggled to fit in during their teenage years, while another’s hunger for wealth might be due to an unmet need to be loved by their caregiver as a baby or feeling constantly rejected or dismissed as a child.

“They are non-obvious links on the surface … but they help us get to the real longing underneath, the real unmet desire.”

Her practice has helped her understand broader shifts, too. She remains shocked at how social media use has led to an unprecedented level of lifestyle inflation. People are no longer comparing their lives with their neighbours, but to totally unattainable lifestyles displayed by people paid to look rich.

“There’s this manic level of social comparison,” she says. “People begin to believe that everyone has more money than they do. A lot of clients of mine are men who come under an enormous amount of pressure because they have taken on mortgages bigger than they could afford or cars that they couldn’t afford. They have to accept that they have failed against their own standards, or the shame of not being able to provide what their family wanted or was hoping for.”

In some ways, it’s no surprise that many of her clients feel a sense of relief after finding her. These kinds of struggles aren’t often met with much sympathy – especially in an economy where so many are simply trying to make ends meet.

“There’s this idea that is quite common that money will fix everything. And of course, if you are struggling to pay your bills, money would make that better. But to make the leap that if people have money they must be happy, or they have no right to be unhappy – that’s a big leap,” she says.

She lists many of the ways that people struggle with wealth. Some clients have more than their families did, and self-sabotage as a result, perhaps believing they don’t deserve it. They don’t invoice clients properly for work, or feel guilty when there’s a lot of money in their account. Others spend money extravagantly, almost to rid themselves of it. And in the therapy room she often learns about how the stories clients have heard growing up affect them: if their families thought of wealth as immoral or greedy, for example, what does that say about them if they become wealthy?

But Reynal also stresses the many stabilizing and positive relationships people have with money – like feeling empowered after years of struggle, or wanting to be financially independent because it is freeing.

“It’s not about stripping emotions out of financial decisions,” she says. “It’s about becoming aware of them.”

In that sense, she invites readers to be inquisitive about their own attitudes towards money, how they spend it, and where their own beliefs about financial security come from.

“We can’t all afford therapy. But opening up that curiosity can be enough: why am I buying this thing? Or why am I feeling guilty about spending money on that thing, if I have enough for it? What’s the longing behind that?” she says.

Some may think there are just a number of different ways to split the bill. But for those who look deeper, they may just find out something new about themselves.

00:00 Speaker A

We are cranking it up a few extra gears with Stock of the Week. I’m locked in on Netflix ahead of its July 17th earnings report. What’s caught my attention is that the stock has been underperforming the broader market rally this month. Shares are down five and a half percent in July while the S&P 500 is up 1.7%. Judging by the Wall Street commentary out there, analysts aren’t making too much of this trend divergence though. Needham analyst, Laura Martin, is out today raising her target price on Netflix to $1500 from $1126. She says she remains impressed with Netflix’s global scale and stable content spending. Jumping into the Yahoo Finance platform, you can see Martin isn’t alone in her bullishness. The street has hiked its 2025 EPS estimate on Netflix by 79 cents compared to just 90 days ago. They have also lifted their 2026 EPS estimate by 60 cents during that same time span. Still with me, my round table Larry Tenterelli, Steve Sosnick, and Inez Ferre. Uh, Inez, I want to go to you here on Netflix out of the jump. Netflix, I can understand why these estimates have climbed. Really for the better part of two years, Netflix has come out here and they have completely destroyed, crushed, hammered, however you want to put it, earnings estimates, and they have come out and raised guidance. I’m trying to think, why won’t that happen again, given how popular the platform is?

02:24 Inez Ferre

Well, certainly you have a lot of Wall Street that believes that they can continue to outperform as a company. I mean, they’ve had their password share crackdown. They’ve had their ad tiers that has done very well. They are pushing into live sports. So there’s a lot of reasons why the street is bullish on the stock that and you mentioned the sort of underperformance this week, but look, if you take a look at a year to date chart and you take a look at where it’s come from the April lows, you have Seaport Global that has been that noted this when they actually lowered their rating to neutral because they said, “It’s a lot that’s baked into the stock right now. And on evaluation standpoint, they’re saying, let’s just wait to for for management to execute on everything that is now priced into the share into these shares because they’ve gone up since those April lows, almost 50%.”

04:01 Speaker A

Larry, let me get over to you here. The stock has underperformed in July. Any concern or red flag on your part there ahead of earnings?

04:24 Larry Tenterelli

No, that’s part of the rotation that I discussed that started on July 1st. The chart that you just put up showed a sharp pullback in Netflix on July 1st. And we saw that with quite a few of the high momentum stocks and money moved into small caps, healthcare, home builders. And I I think it’s a normal sector rotation. Fund managers have made a lot of money this year in tech and some of these growth stocks. And I think it’s a normal rotation to book some gains and then reallocate into underperformers. Netflix is a very strong long-term uptrend. It could always consolidate after nearly a 50% move off the lows, but the long-term trend is very strong.

05:20 Speaker A

Hey Larry, that’s what I’m trying to get at. Is it, is the stock become so priced for perfection? Even if Netflix comes out again, beats on earnings, maybe the street’s just continue to inclined to sell this name.

05:37 Larry Tenterelli

That’s possible. There there’s a lot of gains in a stock like Netflix that could be booked. So as a trend follower, I’m going to stay with the weekly trend, which is strong, but a lot of these stocks have had big run-ups. So if there was some profit taking into earnings or after earnings, as long as they stay over the 50-day moving average, it really wouldn’t concern me.

06:04 Speaker A

Steve, last word to you. Is Netflix perhaps one of the most perfect stocks in the market? Uh, they had Squid Games, the finale drop at the end of the quarter. This is going to be the first full quarter where they raise prices on folks. So their profit should look pretty good. And oh yeah, there’s no tariff exposure.

06:39 Steve Sosnick

Oh, it’s certainly been a beneficiary for all the reasons you’ve suggested and both and Inez and Larry both made great points about like the the year-to-date performance and also sort of the um, end of the second quarter markup fading uh, at the as of the 1st of July. Um, but I do think, you know, it’s proven to be a very price inelastic stock. I know that I’ve tried to cancel it and my wife and kids have revolted every time I try. Can’t cancel Netflix, Steve. What are you doing, man?

07:39 Steve Sosnick

I don’t watch it. My family does. I watch other stuff. I watch more sports than Netflix, but what ends up happening is they they they rebelled and said, “Absolutely not.” And so I think they’re, you know, this company, every time they’ve tried to do something that people thought might scare off customers, it hasn’t. The question now is, is it priced, is it priced to perfection, or is it priced beyond perfection? Uh, the trends are certainly very strong. Um, it’s been a great company and the, you know, but but as with many things market-related, have we gotten we’ll find out when the earnings come out if we’ve gotten a bit ahead of our skis, um, in terms of expecting another round of perfection. But boy, the market since the last earnings, uh, the market’s really repriced this stock in a very positive way.

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