In the 16 years since entering the profession, Casserly has grown her practice exponentially, written a book and established her own independent financial advisory practice. She didn’t start out with a lot of advantages – in fact, as a young person who put herself through college, she didn’t have the connections to the affluent that provide some young financial advisors with a leg up on the competition.

Her success was far from guaranteed, but she persevered by sheer hard work and determination. “My boss told me to either get into work by 7:30 every day or I’d be fired,” she said. “So I was there on time every day. He told me to get out and find 100 referrals one day and I did. I learned that this is a referral-based business and worked hard for years to get the referrals I’d need to succeed.”

Casserly stayed with John Hancock until 2004, at which point she had become one of the company’s top advisors. She founded her own company, JMC Wealth Management, located in Chicago, Ill, and hasn’t looked back since.

Wealth management philosophy

During her 16 years in the industry, Casserly has worked with a wide variety of clients. She has become more selective about the group of individuals she serves and now focuses on helping the wealthy create more alignment between their money and their life goals and dreams.

She’s come to believe that the decisions people have made in the past about their money can limit their ability to make healthy money decisions in the present and the future. “We have to clean up our past to be able to live in the present moment and plan for the future,” she says. “If you’ve got a lot of debt, for example, that inhibits your ability to have enough money to live on today and save for the future, for retirement and other needs.”

That being said, punishing yourself for past unhealthy money behaviors won’t work and isn’t healthy. “You have to understand the relationship between money and emotion,” she continues. “I like to relate it to health, which people can understand. If you try to give up Oreos when you love them, you likely will end up feeling deprived and buying a whole bag of them and eating them. It’s the same thing with money. If you are trying to change your money behaviors and save more, it’s still important to reward yourself from time to time. The guilt and shame has to be removed from money and from spending.”

Consumers in this country have become far too addicted to debt and also mistakenly believe that the market will climb by an unrealistically high percentage year-over-year. She believes that consumers have to buckle down and mend their own financial balance sheets because the market isn’t likely to do much for anyone over the next few years. Consumers will have to cut back on spending and save more.

If they can discipline themselves, they will be rewarded, she continues, because after a number of years of stagnation, the market will start climbing again and those with savings will be rewarded. But for now it’s important to pare down debt and increase savings to ride through a low-return and low-yield environment.

She advises retirees who need to stretch their income to make up for a lack of yield to “cut off your kids and grandkids. You shouldn’t suffer because they don’t want to cut back their lifestyles. It’s not practical to keep helping your kids when you don’t have the resources and aren’t sure how long you’re going to live.”

Industry misses opportunities

Casserly’s viewpoint is that the financial advisory industry lacks the ability to make financial issues understandable to the average person, or even the average wealthy person. “In the financial advisory world we have compliance and lots of technical knowledge but no understanding of how to take finance to a practical level that people can understand and relate to,” she adds.

Too many advisors keep their conversations with clients on a superficial level, she contends, and consequently don’t understand what truly motivates their clients, what their hopes and dreams are and the emotions that have led them to manage – or mismanage – their money in the way they have in the past and present.

“You have to have the willingness not only to have the warm, fuzzy and sometimes difficult conversations with your clients, but also to share information about your personal financial struggles to create some empathy and some connection,” she adds. “There’s a huge gap between most advisors and most consumers – most financial advisors don’t understand what motivates their clients around money and don’t create the space to have the important conversations to create the connections they need to really understand what’s going on.”

Her ideas surrounding emotion and money are fleshed out in her book, The Emotion Behind The Money, which she self-published in 2008. She’s getting a lot of interest from financial advisors who are interested in following the model for working with clients that she lays out in the book and she’s considering setting up some kind of licensing or training for advisors who want to incorporate these practices in their financial advisory businesses.