What happens when the financial plan is solid, but the client still can’t move? That’s the question at the heart of this week’s conversation with Ashley Quamme, a financial behavior specialist and former Marriage and Family therapist who now works inside advisory firms helping clients get unstuck.
Ashley didn’t set out to work in financial services. She built a thriving private practice doing clinical work with couples and families, but kept running into the same wall: money kept showing up in her clients’ Relationships, and the therapeutic tools she’d been trained to use weren’t quite reaching it. She Googled her way into the emerging field of financial Therapy, went back for a graduate certificate, and gradually found herself fielding calls from financial advisors asking her to help them understand why their clients were making the decisions they were.
In this conversation, Ashley shares a story that captures the real work of financial behavior change. A high-achieving husband — senior executive, frequent traveler, financially successful by every external measure — was stuck in a life that didn’t feel like his own. He was missing his kids. He felt the pull to slow down. But he couldn’t make the leap. When Ashley and his advisor started exploring why, the answer wasn’t in his balance sheet. It was in a family story he’d been carrying since childhood: that achievement was how you earned Love, and that stepping back from success meant something was wrong with you. Getting him unstuck meant surfacing that story first.
Ashley describes her framework simply as think, feel, do. Understanding why we think, feel, and act the way we do around money before we try to change any of it. As she puts it, all behavior makes sense in context. The advisor’s job, and the financial therapist’s job, is to understand just enough of that context to help clients move.
She also reflects on her own money story. Growing up in Durham, receiving hand-me-downs from a cousin she admired, and the visceral resistance to secondhand clothing she carried into adulthood without quite knowing why. Recognizing that story, she says, was its own kind of freedom.
This is a conversation about what it really means to help someone change their relationship with money — and why the plan is only ever the beginning.
Guest bio: Ashley is the Owner of Beyond the Plan®, a consulting practice that partners with firms to integrate financial psychology into their practice. In addition to her work with advisory firms, she is a speaker and host of Planning & Beyond™, a podcast where she explores the intersection of financial planning and human understanding, bringing practical strategies and insights to advisors and financial professionals.
Resources: LinkedIn
