Expert confidential: Kelley Keehn

Occupation: Financial literacy advocate, speaker and author of nine personal finance books. Consumer advocate for the Financial Planning Standards Council (FPSC) and member of the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada’s Consumer Protection Advisory Committee. My mission is to make Canadians feel good about money.

City: Edmonton, Alta.

Age: 43

I’ve been in the industry since: 1994, when I apprenticed with a wonderful mentor, Wayne Taylor of Taylor Financial Group Ltd. in Edmonton, who died in 2016. I was an investment manager for one of Canada’s big banks from 1996 to 1999, when I opened my own wealth management firm. In 2005, things came full circle when I sold my book of business to Wayne in order to focus on writing, speaking and financial literacy.

Behavioural economics

I’m fascinated by behavioural economics, especially given that I’m not a natural-born saver. I need those nudges and hacks to make good financial decisions. Money isn’t rational. We all play what I call “inner games” around our finances—like a former client of mine worth $10 million who let his pipes freeze and burst in the winter because he grew up during the Depression and couldn’t let himself turn up the heat. Or the young professional earning $1 million but in the hole for three or four times that amount, driving a Mercedes he couldn’t afford because he was spending the way other people expected him to.

Or a client worth more than $2 million who confessed to me that she really wanted to take herself for a coffee but wouldn’t, because she had free coffee at home. It was a small thing, but I found it sort of heartbreaking: with all the money [she] had, she couldn’t indulge in a small moment for herself. I thought, “What am I doing as an advisor if I can’t help my clients have a better relationship with money—not just earning and saving and growing it, but enjoying spending it as well?”

These kinds of problems kept cropping up before I left private wealth management for writing and speaking. I wanted to help a wider circle of people than just my client base understand how emotional baggage can reinforce money problems.

Taking KYC to the next level

My message for the industry: take more time to humanize your practice. Instead of focusing on products and solutions, focus on your clients’ hearts and minds. Dig deeper than the standard KYC form. Maybe each meeting, add two or three questions that give you more insight into your clients’ needs, like, “What was your experience of money growing up? What does wealth mean to you? What does it mean to your spouse?” Especially in the age of artificial intelligence and robo-advisors, it’s important to keep that human touch. There’s always going to be a need for personal accountability.

Up close and personal

I’m the youngest of three siblings raised by a single mom; she kicked my dad out when I was eight. We grew up really poor. My mom had no education and zero skills. She worked very hard as a waitress. There were times when we depended on government assistance, when Santas Anonymous came to the house. At the same time, I had a couple of uncles who had become wealthy in real estate. So I had the experience of growing up very poor but with a keen understanding of what it was like to be very rich.

Susan Goldberg

Susan is an award-winning freelance writer and editor based in Thunder Bay, Ont. She has been writing about personal finance for more than 20 years.