Guest:
Julie Heaton is Director of the Penn State Sokolov-Miller Family Financial and Life Skills Center. She is a Certified Personal Finance Counselor®, Certified Academic Life Coach, and holds a Master's of Public Administration and Graduate Certificate in Public Health Administration from the University of Montana as well as a Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from the College of William & Mary, VA. In her role at the Center, Julie oversees programming, instructional design, and general operations. She represents financial wellness initiatives in Penn State's Undergraduate Education Council, serves on the Penn State Commission for Adult Learners, and is Chair of the Penn State Financial Literacy Advisory Board, bringing together Penn State faculty, staff, and administrators that work in the financial literacy space. She is an active volunteer with the Higher Education Financial Wellness Alliance (HEFWA) and currently serves on their Programming Committee as the Master Class Coordinator. Before coming to Penn State, she taught personal finance at the University of Montana and served as Director of the University of Montana’s Financial Education Program. Julie lives in State College, Pennsylvania with her husband and two daughters. When she's not busy talking about financial wellness, you can find her with her family hiking on a trail, paddling a river, or curled up with a good book!
Episode Transcript:
LINDSEY WHISSEL FENTON: From the price of eggs to the price of housing, there can be a lot of things about our financial circumstances that simply feel beyond our control. But there is one area of our financial wellness where we pretty much have total agency. I'm Lindsey Whissel Fenton with 12 Degrees on WPSU. Financial clutter can quietly pile on stress and negatively impact our ability to make good money decisions. Is there a way to Marie Kondo our money? To find out, I'm talking with Julie Heaton, director of the Penn State Sokolov-Miller Family Financial and Life Skills Center. Julie, what is financial clutter?
JULIE HEATON: Financial clutter is really any unnecessary or outdated information that are creating noise in your money life. So, it could be physical clutter like mail that you haven't opened. But it also can be digital and alert. You keep getting about a subscription or mental clutter like an address the bill and that is bothering you.
LINDSEY WHISSEL FENTON: And how can all of this clutter inhibit our journey towards financial wellness?
JULIE HEATON: Missed deadlines. Panic when tax season comes around. Even identity theft. Overdraft fees. And then there's mental barriers. So, if you feel like you don't understand your money landscape then you're going to delay important financial bills. Because those are things where you kind of have to have an idea of what your money looks like in order to know what the move is.
LINDSEY WHISSEL FENTON: So, let's move into if someone is just looking at the proverbial or actual pile. What's a good place to start?
JULIE HEATON: I would just start with something really small, like I just need to open the letter…throw out some stuff. I do think physical financial clutter is an easy place because it's quite literally taking up space in their homes. And then you can move into your digital space. The other thing is mapping your financial universe, because you need to have an idea of what this map of your financial universe looks like. Whether it's written or, I actually think drawing it out is really useful. It is an exercise that helps people map out the basics. I usually start with like, where's your money at? Bank accounts? List the bank accounts. What financial apps do you have or pay for or engage with? What brokers are you using? Where is your retirement held? What credit cards do you have open? This will lead to kind of those other questions and picture kind of a map going out from there where it's like, “Oh, I have this student loan. But I actually think that's a collections agent. And I do know the name of that. It's somewhere in my email.” And then we start building out these systems that we're connected to. This can be really emotional, but if you keep it first just on like a pragmatic like, “Who's in my financial universe?” Like, “Yeah, I have a credit card, but I keep forgetting to cancel and it charges me an annual fee. And I only remember it once a year when I see that since the annual fee comes out.” And these are actually great motivational builders to be like, let's go look at the credit card, see if there's anything like a subscription you want to keep this attached to it, but if there isn't, let's close it right now. And, you'd be shocked how much it feels good to somebody who's overwhelmed by financial clutter to be like, “I got rid of that credit card that I once a year makes me feel bad about myself.”
LINDSEY WHISSEL FENTON: That was Julie Heaton, director of the Penn State Sokolov-Miller Family Financial and Life Skills Center. This interview is part of 12 Degrees, a program and podcast produced by WPSU in collaboration with the Penn State Nese College of Nursing. To learn more, visit wellness-dot-psu-dot-edu. I'm Lindsey Whissel Fenton, WPSU.
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This is a clip from a longer conversation. To listen to the full episode, visit:
