Finance
‘Money pervades everything’: the psychotherapist delving into our deep anxiety about finances
I am a generous tipper. I’ve always thought, to the extent that I have thought about it at all, that this is a positive trait. Recently, however, I’ve begun to wonder. Is it normal to feel a deep sense of anxiety after ordering a takeaway pizza, then realising there is no change in the house? Does everyone spend their spare time searching Google to find out if one should tip the Waitrose delivery driver – or whether to do so might cause offence? Are hotel stays meant to be such a stressful experience, requiring constant calculations to determine the appropriate amount of cash to reward every personal interaction?
These are the kinds of questions that arise while I’m reading Money on Your Mind: The Psychology Behind Your Financial Habits. Written by Vicky Reynal, Britain’s first self-styled “financial psychotherapist”, the book outlines a wide range of unhelpful financial behaviours, offering something that will resonate with almost every reader, and makes a convincing case that these are rooted in our emotions – driven by fears and desires – and influenced by past experiences. Perhaps we struggle to spend money on ourselves or others. What do we fear might happen if we do? Some of us are incapable of budgeting. What do we gain from our overspending? We may see our colleagues rewarded with salary increases while we languish on the same pay grade. Why do we struggle to ask for a raise? Are we battling with doubts about our self-worth?
I’m fascinated by what my own financial choices might reveal about my psyche. So, when I go to meet Reynal at her consulting space in Vauxhall, London, I take the opportunity to ask her. Reynal greets me in the manner one would expect from someone who deals with money matters: with a firm handshake and a businesslike demeanour. Smartly dressed in black trousers and shirt under a monochrome patterned blazer, she would not look out of place in any boardroom in the City. After we take our seats, she encourages me to think more deeply about my behaviour. What is behind my compulsion to express gratitude for small acts of service? What do I fear might happen if I don’t? “Is it about wanting to be liked by the other, or wanting the other to think positively of you, even if it is just for a few minutes?” she asks. “I guess the question that pops into my mind would be: is there a part of you that expects people to be critical, so you choose to appease them upfront to avoid that feeling?” I have to admit, this sounds like a definite possibility.
Ten years ago, Reynal started practising psychotherapy and began to notice how often clients’ problems were linked to finances. We tend to think of money in terms of cold hard numbers: the size of our bank balance, the interest rate on our savings account or credit card debt, the number of years it will take to save a house deposit. We believe our financial decisions to be rooted in rationality. Having worked with enough clients for whom money was the source of emotional distress, Reynal sees things differently. Five years ago, she began describing herself as a financial psychotherapist, helping people explore their money troubles as a formal part of her practice.
In the book, Reynal cites a series of statistics to illustrate how money is causing us all kinds of problems. One UK poll found that 32% of us find it stressful talking about our finances with family and friends. Another found a third of couples had argued about money. People with substantial debt are reportedly more likely to suffer from ulcers and migraines, and six times more likely to experience anxiety and depression. Clearly, an absence of money can have a serious impact on the quality of our relationships and our health. But Reynal sees money troubles among the wealthy, too. “If anything, they feel guiltier about their unhappiness, because there is this conception that money should buy happiness,” she says. “And so, if you’re unhappy despite having a lot of wealth, it brings up a lot of shame and guilt.”
Reynal remembers a conversation in her consulting room that drove this point home. A client came to her with what he described as a “£2m problem”. Reynal assumed the man had somehow run up a huge debt. In fact, it emerged he had been granted an unexpected windfall. “They were completely distraught over it,” she recalls, “and who could they tell that to, hoping to find empathy and understanding and to really help them unpick what’s behind that? There was this real fear of people’s envy, how it would spoil the children, how it would ruin his marriage trying to decide what to spend all this money on. It was a person in distress, even if some people might find it difficult to empathise with that.”
Listening to this story, I do find it a little hard to empathise. I don’t doubt that to this particular client this was a very real problem. On the other hand, to many people struggling through a cost of living crisis, a £2m problem will not sound like much of a problem at all. Reynal’s case is that, while money can cause us real problems, for some, the way we feel about money can be just as challenging. And aren’t all money problems relative? No doubt my own money anxieties would cause some eyes to roll. But by focusing so intently on our individual relationship with money, I wonder if we risk ignoring the factors that create inequality and leave so many people facing financial hardship. “Well, they definitely relate, because what is going on at a macro scale often affects the individual,” says Reynal. “But ultimately, all we can do is manage our own experience of what is going on out there in the world.”
Reynal believes financial literacy can only take us so far. “I do make the point in the book that we have to teach children about money, because it’s not an innate skill. A lot of books out there tell people how they should behave with money and what they should do with money. But, for many, something gets in the way of being the way they want to be with money. So they end up overspending, or being overly greedy, or keeping financial secrets from their partners. And what I tried to do in this book is go to the roots of what experiences, what feelings, what longings, sit behind our money behaviours. It’s only by understanding these that we stand the chance of changing them.”
It won’t surprise you to learn that the process often involves looking back to childhood. Here, Reynal’s own story is illuminating. She is cagey about revealing certain personal details, in case that affects the way clients relate to her in her practice. (When I ask about her accent, she declines to say where it’s from, explaining that clients’ assumptions about her background can often be revealing.) She is happy, however, to reveal certain biographical information. After completing a psychotherapy degree, she studied for an MBA at the London Business School. Why the MBA? “Family pressures?” she laughs. “I think that in itself says a lot about the meaning of money in my family.”
Reynal learned early in life how money can cause heartbreak. “My father had two very difficult experiences with money that involved loss, betrayal and deceit,” she says. “The consequences of that – both financial and emotional – affected the whole family negatively.” Through therapy, she explored the meaning of those experiences, which she now describes as “financial trauma”, and their broader ramifications. “Unpacking all the different aspects of that was important to move on from it and to make different choices.” She felt drawn to the idea that she could help others do the same.
Still, for some time, Reynal felt torn between her passion for psychology and the expectation that she go into business – to forge a career in the world of money. Gradually, she began to wonder if the two paths needed to be distinct. She was fascinated by the aspects of her MBA studies that touched on psychology, such as behavioural finance. Fittingly, it was a piece of advice from one of the world’s richest men that encouraged Reynal to combine her two interests. As part of her MBA studies, she was invited to Nebraska to meet the legendary investor Warren Buffett. She asked him how to make such a pivotal decision as how to spend one’s professional life. His message? “Follow your passion, because only by doing something you love, can you ever be good at it.”
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Buffett’s advice stuck. After spending some time in the corporate world, Reynal returned to study psychotherapy at postgraduate level. Just as she had been struck by the psychological aspects of finance, she observed how discussions about money were largely absent in therapeutic circles. “If you look at the psychoanalytic literature, there’s thousands of papers written about the relationship with sex, with food, with other objects,” she says. “And so little written about money.” Reynal saw a way to bridge a gap between her two passions – and also, perhaps, to meet both her family’s expectations and her own.
Sometimes, we need to hear advice in terms we’re primed to understand. In the face of family pressure, it took some words of encouragement from Warren Buffett for Reynal to act in her own interests. Intriguingly, she saw something similar happening when she started calling herself a financial psychotherapist, attracting clients who finally had permission to seek help. “More men started coming,” she says. “I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. But I think, especially for some of the older men I saw, who might have grown up in a generation that wasn’t open-minded to psychotherapy, calling it financial psychotherapy might have enabled them to access it with less shame than if they were just going to a psychotherapist.”
The behaviour Reynal hears about in the consulting room and which she describes in Money on Your Mind, ranges from the mundane to the extreme. Some people engage in unsustainable shopping habits, others steal from their employers or blow their life savings engaging in “findom” (financial domination), a sexual kink in which the participant derives pleasure from giving money for nothing tangible in return. On the spectrum of money troubles, I feel reassured that my anxiety around tipping must fall at the less troubling end of the scale. Nevertheless, Reynal’s questions point to the way even my seemingly mundane behaviour may still be emotionally revealing. What does tipping represent for me? What does my anxiety say about the way I see myself and what I expect of others?
Addressing the way money affects our relationships, Reynal writes: “Arguments about money are rarely about money.” I think about the times my partner and I have argued about money. Were these disagreements really about money or were they about other things, such as fearing the loss of independence – or coming to terms with new responsibilities? Thinking about these questions, I realise how many of our relationships have a financial aspect to them. Money pervades everything. Examining our emotions may give us a way to understand how we feel about it. But should we all be thinking about money in order to understand our emotions? “It’s a window into something, you know?” says Reynal. “By being curious about why you behave a certain way with money, you can find out something about yourself.”
There are rarely easy answers when it comes to self-discovery, says Reynal. Regular readers of financial self-help literature may be disappointed to find Money on Your Mind lacking in investment tips or simple saving strategies. That’s an attitude Reynal has encountered among money-minded people who seek therapy. “It takes a bit of time to break through that so that we can get into a more reflective space,” she says. “We can get into: ‘What is this really about?’” Then there are those who seek to avoid money discussions altogether. For Reynal, the remedy is the same: “Understanding it more, understanding our relationship with it more, will ease our anxiety,” she says. “But to do that, we need to start talking and thinking about it.”
Money on Your Mind: The Psychology Behind Your Financial Habits by Vicky Reynal is published by Lagom at £16.99
Within the global manufacturing industry, maintaining a competitive edge requires a delicate balance between driving internal efficiency and fostering strong external relationships. For Applied Materials, a leader in materials engineering solutions for the semiconductor industry, this challenge became the foundation for a strategic finance transformation program, with an SAP Taulia solution emerging as a key enabler.
The journey began in early 2019 with the launch of Agile Finance, an end-to-end transformation initiative designed to support the company’s aggressive growth trajectory, which included a goal to double in size. The initiative was built around three strategic pillars: enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the finance organization, promoting career fulfillment, and establishing a robust digital operating model. The impact was significant, with the finance function achieving approximately 35% productivity gains in its labor force.
The third pillar—the move to a digital operating model—is where the partnership with SAP Taulia began.
“The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution was introduced not merely as a cost-cutting measure, but as a strategic tool to transform and digitize the interaction with Applied’s extensive, global supplier base,” Junaid Ahmed, corporate VP, Finance at Applied Materials, says. “We understood that to reap the benefits of digitization, we had to ensure the suppliers were on board. It needed to be a win-win outcome.”
Unprecedented flexibility for suppliers
The program empowers suppliers—thousands of them worldwide—to self-select which approved invoices they wish to discount for early payment. This is not a continuous, all-or-nothing commitment but rather a decision made on an invoice-by-invoice basis. This flexibility allows suppliers to manage their working capital needs with greater precision, taking advantage of early payment during their own critical periods, such as quarter-end or year-end, to help meet their own financial targets.
The system also drastically improves transactional efficiency. Suppliers no longer have to call Applied to track invoice status, approval, or payment date. All this information is available 24/7 in the SAP Taulia solution, reducing resource allocation on both sides and ensuring both reap the benefits of moving to an integrated, digital system.
Strategic benefits for Applied Materials
For Applied, the program is a testament to its focus on balancing efficiency with strong supplier relationships. The philosophy is a “win-win” built on a crucial spread: Applied Materials, as a Fortune 500 company with strong cash flow, has a significantly lower cost of capital than many of its suppliers. By funding the discounts, Applied captures a return—the discount income—while offering its suppliers funding at a rate close to their cost of capital, but with greater convenience.
This relationship-focused approach is critical. Applied’s supplier account managers actively support the program because they recognize its mutual benefit, not viewing it as a finance mandate to push costs onto the supply base.
Furthermore, the “dynamic” nature of the discount rates is a powerful risk mitigation tool. Unlike fixed contractual discounts, the rates can be adjusted in response to global economic changes, such as shifts in interest rates. When interest rates rose after the pandemic, Applied was able to adjust the discount rates accordingly with minimal pushback, as the core proposition remains the valuable spread between the parties’ cost of capital.
The SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution has been rolled out globally, giving all suppliers the opportunity to use it. This has been critical over the last 12 months as many businesses around the globe have been subject to new and often unexpected tariff costs impacting their margin and their liquidity.
“The flexibility of the solution means suppliers can access funds when they need them, which helps them navigate some of the economic uncertainty that many businesses are facing,” Dirk Holoubek, managing director, Finance Shared Services, explains. “2025 saw a 23% increase in usage of the discounts, reflecting the pressures that suppliers are feeling right now on their cash flow.”
The solution’s capability to drive sophisticated analytics is also a major strategic asset. It helps provide insights into the different costs of capital between Applied and its supplier base. This data allows for targeted outreach and communication, ensuring that the offer of capital support is proactively extended to the suppliers that need it most.
The strategic value of the solution is further cemented by its ownership. The acquisition of Taulia by SAP brings several advantages.
“Trust is really important to both us and our suppliers,” Ahmed says. “For our suppliers to adopt a new solution, they need to know its technology they can rely on in the long term. Being part of SAP creates that assurance in the long-term future of the program.”
Looking forward, Applied Materials is already focused on the next stage of the transformation project: Agile Finance 3.0, which is focused on enabling the organization to become AI-first. The company is deploying a global, organization-wide AI assistant to drive personal productivity, but the strategic application of AI in the supplier management space is even more profound.
AI is expected to transform decision-making enablement by analyzing critical information and communicating effective options. In the future, AI will be able to proactively assess the specific needs and attributes of the supplier base, enabling Applied to address issues more quickly and resolve them earlier. The benefits are already tangible in e-invoicing: AI has made the solution more flexible and “human-like,” capable of reading minor changes in invoice format that would have previously caused electronic errors. This reduced rigidity and increased flexibility are directly contributing to the overall efficiency of the digital operating model.
By leveraging the SAP Taulia Dynamic Discounting solution, Applied Materials has not only digitized a process but also strategically transformed its financial operations, creating a system that is agile, resilient, and focused on maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with its global supplier ecosystem.
Cedric Bru is CEO of SAP Taulia.
Finance
Houston budget amendment would give financial assistance to help those impacted by a trash fee
HOUSTON, Texas (KTRK) — Houston City Council could soon consider whether to offer financial assistance to help those who may struggle to afford a proposed trash fee.
This month, council will approve a budget. In it, Mayor John Whitmire doesn’t increase taxes.
However, he does want to charge a $5 monthly fee to cover trash services. A plan to help close the city’s nearly $200 million deficit that doesn’t add up to some.
Speaking in front of council on Wednesday, Super Neighborhood 64 president Lindsay Williams brought more than concerns, she had numbers surrounding the mayor’s proposed $5 monthly trash fee.
A plan his team says could climb to $25 a month by 2032. If it does, Williams told council that $300 annual cost would be just .15% of a $200,000 income.
For someone making $15,000, it’s two percent. “More than 13 times the burden for the same trash, same truck and same fee, but not the same pay,” Williams explained.
However, Controller Chris Hollins said the mayor’s not being truthful about the real cost.
“Houstonians are not stupid,” Hollins said. “We should not treat Houstonians like they’re stupid.”
Hollins said the cost may need to be $40 a month. Whitmire didn’t respond to Hollins during the meeting when he asked if he plans to increase the fee.
No matter the cost, some council members want to offer financial relief. Right now, there are no exceptions.
However, an amendment council will consider from Council Member Alejandra Salinas next week would change that.
“If they for whatever reason met the threshold and need an additional need because of the administrative fee, our amendment would allow them to apply for funds through the water fund,” Salinas said.
The trash fee wasn’t the only item from the mayor’s seven and a half billion dollar budget proposal that sparked debate. Hollins said a plan to divert money away from water utilities could drain a billion over the next five years from infrastructure money.
Whitmire disagrees saying there’s more than enough funds to handle the change, and continue with projects.
“We’ve all admitted the budget’s not perfect, but certainly it’s a first start that Houstonians understand and it’s a shame it’s being so politicized because it’s literally people’s lives and death,” Whitmire said.
Council will vote on amendments next week. It has to have a new budget in place by the end of the month.
Copyright © 2026 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.
Reader question: My spouse has little interest in our financial position. As we age, this concerns me. I try to share some basic information (income, spending, account balances, debt, and so on) each month but rarely get a response. I think graphs or charts might be of more interest to her than a bunch of numbers. What recommendations would you have for illustrating our financial position so that I am not the only person aware of how we are situated? Thanks!
Answer: Your situation is pretty common. Most couples I know develop a division of labor over time, where one person is in charge of financial matters and the other person is less involved. That’s definitely the case for my husband and me. He’s in charge of paying all the monthly bills and preparing our tax returns, but the financial planning and investment decisions are up to me. This type of arrangement might work well for a long time, but can become less sustainable with age, particularly if the “finance person” in the relationship dies or develops a major health issue.
Online tools and mind maps
Illustrating your financial situation with charts and graphs is a great idea that might help your spouse become a little more involved. Morningstar’s Portfolio X-Ray tool includes a variety of images that help illustrate your financial situation. Websites for most major brokerage firms also include some visual tools. Schwab, for example, offers a Portfolio Checkup and a bar graph illustrating your account’s monthly income from dividends and interest income. Vanguard has a Portfolio Watch tool and a variety of performance illustrations, tools, and calculators.
A mind map, which we used with clients when I worked for a financial advisory firm, can be another way to picture your entire financial situation on one page. There are various softwaretemplates for drawing a mind map, or you can simply sketch it out with a large sheet of paper and a pencil. Start with your names at the center of the page. Then draw spokes connecting to various categories, such as names of other family members; investment accounts; real estate and other assets, insurance policies, estate plans, key goals and values, and contact information for accountants, estate planners, and other professionals. It can be helpful to go through the mind map together and make any updates needed at least once a year.
Other ways to communicate about money
A few other ideas—though not related to charts and graphs—might also be useful.
I like the idea of putting together a net worth statement that itemizes cash, taxable accounts, real estate, retirement accounts, and debt for each member of the couple as well as items owned jointly. It’s a good idea to update this document at least once a year and discuss it as a couple. If you set up the document as a spreadsheet, you can include columns with additional information such as account numbers, what each account is used for, which accounts are subject to required minimum distributions, or tax issues like potential capital gains.
Many couples also put together a binder (sometimes humorously called a “Doomsday Book”) that contains information about where to find important paperwork, insurance policies, how bills are paid, what each account is for, steps the surviving spouse will need to take, final wishes, and any other critical information.
A well-qualified financial adviser can bridge the information gap
Finally, you could consider working with a good financial adviser, who can help involve your spouse in financial matters while you’re still living and step in to fully manage investments and personal finance decisions if you pass away before your spouse. Make sure the adviser holds the Certified Financial Planner designation and charges fees that are reasonable. Although a 1% fee is still the industry standard for accounts of $1 million or less, it’s possible to find advisers who charge significantly less, including a few who price their services based on hours worked instead of a percentage of assets under management.
_____
This article was provided to The Associated Press by Morningstar. For more personal finance content, go to https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance.
Amy C. Arnott, CFA, is a portfolio strategist for Morningstar and co-host of The Long View podcast.
Related links:
What If This Turns Out to Be a Terrible Time to Retire?
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/what-if-this-turns-out-be-terrible-time-retire
Bill Bengen: ‘Inflation Is the Greatest Enemy of Retirees’
https://www.morningstar.com/retirement/bill-bengen-inflation-is-greatest-enemy-retirees
3 Big Questions to Ask Your Aging Parents
https://www.morningstar.com/personal-finance/3-big-questions-ask-your-aging-parents
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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