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In this episode, we dive into the emerging trend of money dysmorphia—a distorted perception of one’s financial situation that’s affecting people across all income levels, especially younger generations. Our guest, Shane Tenny, a certified financial planner, helps unpack the causes and symptoms of money dysmorphia, exploring how social media, societal pressures, and the comparison trap are fueling financial anxiety. We’ll discuss how to recognize the signs, the impact on mental health, and practical steps to develop a healthier relationship with money.

Shane Tenny is managing partner, Spaugh Dameron Tenny, LLC, and host of The Prosperous Doc podcast.

He discusses the KevinMD article, “Money dysmorphia: the new financial disorder affecting millions.”

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Transcript

Kevin Pho: Hi, and welcome to the show. Subscribe at KevinMD.com/podcast. Today we welcome back Shane Tenny. He is a certified financial planner and the host of The Prosperous Doc podcast. Today’s KevinMD article is “Money dysmorphia: the new financial disorder affecting millions.” Shane, welcome back to the show.

Shane Tenny: Thanks, glad to be here, Kevin.

Kevin Pho: So you’ve been on multiple times, generously sharing advice from a certified financial planner perspective. Today’s KevinMD article is “Money dysmorphia: the new financial disorder affecting millions.” Tell us the events that led you to write this article, and then, for those who didn’t get a chance to read it, about the article itself.

Shane Tenny: For sure. So money dysmorphia is a little bit of a new buzzword that I discovered is floating around. I can’t take credit for having invented it, but we did put the article out a couple months ago, and it really came to me following a conversation with my daughter. She’s 16, and one evening we were just having a conversation about conversations at school at the lunch table with her colleagues. Fortunately, she is able to listen through a little bit of a more objective lens, and she was just saying, “Dad, it’s so sad how some of my friends struggle to believe in their own beauty.” I think a lot of us have kind of heard this narrative or heard this trend.

I was driving into work the next day, and of course I don’t have any specialty or background in, I guess, teenage girl psychology, but as a financial planner I was thinking of this trend that we hear from clients, and our own kind of inaccurate perception of money, and how we perceive things to be different than they really are. Well, lo and behold, I think it was that very day I saw an article in the research on this topic, which is now called money dysmorphia, and it totally connects to this same trend, just as it deals with us and our money.

Kevin Pho: So what kind of things are you hearing from your clients that further define or clarify money dysmorphia?

Shane Tenny: There’s been now several research pieces done by this. The one that I came across was by Credit Karma, and they surveyed about a thousand Americans and found that about one in three people would identify as really having a distorted view of their own financial picture. And of course, when you slice that up, we see that it’s higher among our Gen Z population, kind of our high school, college, and 20-year-olds, but even still there’s one in four Gen Xers, which is my population, 40s and 50s, where you have kind of this distorted view of reality.

Kevin Pho: And so what does that manifest like?

Shane Tenny: What we hear, as a financial planning firm that works with folks in the medical profession, is a couple things. Number one, folks coming out of residency and fellowship, they are aware that their friends from undergrad have finished school, have finished training, have finished graduate school, they’ve been making money for a long time, and so there is a perception that I’m never going to catch up. My friends are making money and they’re way ahead, and I’m just saddled with debt. I’m never going to catch up. And so that’s kind of how it manifests sort of early in the career of a physician.

Midcareer, it in some ways is no different than the general population, that is the feeling that I’m comparing what I earn to what I think other people earn, and so I’m looking at their decisions, I’m looking at their Facebook, their Instagram, their social media post, comparing it to my life and feeling discouraged, or having some sort of emotional response that’s not grounded in reality.

Kevin Pho: So when they manifest those things in your office and you’re talking to them, what kind of sense do you feel it’s affecting their psyche and some of their financial decisions? What do they specifically ask you to do when they express some of these money dysmorphic feelings?

Shane Tenny: What does it sound like? It sounds like discouragement, stress, anxiety, jealousy, embarrassment. I say probably a lot of the emotions, and I imagine that a lot of the folks listening to us right now might identify with that, either in themselves or have seen that in colleagues or family members.

Again, just maybe to use the scenario of the 30s something new physician who’s watching their undergrad friends getting promoted and working up, and they know they don’t have $300,000 of student loans, there’s a feeling of just discouragement, like am I ever going to get ahead? That is a very, very common question in our offices. But this feeling of how am I ever going to get there, how am I going to overcome, I don’t even understand money, which is often a little bit of a side issue, but other people are having great vacations and great lives and new cars. We see that pressure a lot in doctor’s lounges, and again I know many of our listeners can relate to that. Pressure is maybe the most succinct word that we see.

So what happens, what we know happens kind of from the research and what I know happens anecdotally, is it kind of falls on a continuum. On the one hand, it can lead to a little bit of a carpe diem approach of overspending, misuse of debt, impulsive behavior, because I too want to be driving that kind of car, or living that kind of house, or having my kids in that school, or taking those vacations, and strategy be damned, I’m going to find a way to make this happen whether I understand it or not. And so because of that unhealthy and unrealistic perception of my finances, then I’m just going to move in. So on one end of the continuum it can kind of lead to this indulgent type of response, to feel better.

On the other end of the continuum is really kind of a hyper-saving, more of a hoarding, like I said, maybe a hyper-saving or a lifestyle compression. I’m not going to, I can’t afford, I don’t want to do these things, because then I feel like I’m never going to get ahead. And so either one of those extremes is maybe at the least not healthy, and at the worst destructive, either financially or relationally.

Kevin Pho: So what separates money dysmorphia from just, say, run-of-the-mill financial stress? Everyone has financial stress, but what are some of the symptoms and tip-offs that this may be a little bit more pathologic, and delve more into the money dysmorphia that you’re talking about?

Shane Tenny: I think we could clearly take this conversation outside of my lane, because it overlaps heavily with just psychology in general and behavioral finance, but I think that is a really insightful and important question, and perhaps is best answered by bringing back the analogy I started with, of just body image and those sorts of things.

There are many of us who start the new year or go on vacation and say, “You know what, I wish I was more fit, I wish I could lose weight, I wish I could be healthier,” and then that manifests in what we would arguably call constructive behavior, maybe modest modifications to our exercise, to our diet, things like that, to improve. What differentiates that from more destructive behavior at the extremes, where we see eating disorders or things like that? And so I think the line of demarcation here is kind of the extremity or the extremeness of the response.

And so for an individual, for a physician, for a family to say, “Hey, we want to save more,” or “We really want to go to Disney too and it’s going to be 15 grand, let’s save up,” here we kind of see a fairly healthy response, some strategic decision-making and behavior and things like that. But when it becomes, when we see those responses being paralyzing, emotionally discouraging, frustrating, and leading to impulsive behavior, either impulsive saving or impulsive spending, that’s when you kind of see, I’d say, concerning flags of decision-making.

Kevin Pho: So let’s talk about one of those extremes. Let’s say the impulsive spending. Perhaps a physician wants to buy a house more than they could afford, they want to buy a car perhaps more than they could afford, and now they’re in your office and you’re their certified financial planner. So how do you intervene? What kind of advice or what kind of approach do you take to veer them off that path?

Shane Tenny: Sure. Well, like so many things that are kind of impulsive or compulsive behavior, the ideal time is to intervene before it begins to manifest too hard. And so ideally we can have conversations early in their financial journey or their financial awareness, and specifically in our office we welcome the opportunity to engage with physicians early in their career while they’re kind of forming their financial decision-making.

And so if we hear conversation like I’m describing here, “Well, I feel like all my friends are living in this neighborhood, I’d really like to get there too,” one of the most helpful things we can do is begin to just name what we’re hearing. Hey, let’s talk about this, because if there is one thing we all know and we all fall victim to, it is the comparison trap. Comparison is the thief of joy.

What we might want to try to do, if we’re early in that cycle, is to help open up a genuine conversation where we might talk about the client’s own money lessons. What did they learn growing up, what was their experience, did they have a household of abundance or a household of scarcity, what is the neurological wiring that they are bringing into their new career as a physician, into the household with six-figure income, that sort of thing. Let’s just pause and think about that. That awareness, which many of us don’t have the ability to do or the time to do, is really helpful, number one.

From there, then we might help them begin to define as objectively as they can their own goals for themselves, as opposed to just accepting the goals that social media puts on us. Instead of believing that, oh, because I’m a doctor I should be driving a 5 Series BMW, look, forget that, forget what you’ve seen, forget your colleagues. What kind of car do you want to be driving based on where you are? And let’s set that as the goal and lay out some steps to get there.

Now, I’m creating a scenario where we’re able to intervene early. You brought up, well, what if somebody’s already bought a house that’s a little bit too big, or things like that? And again, in that case, there’s more work, because we now need to address the root issue, the decision-making, the behavior, and then sometimes we have to unwind decisions that have been made, and that’s uncomfortable.

Kevin Pho: Give us a hypothetical story, because when it comes to financial literacy, it’s often not high on a list of physicians, as I’m sure you all know. So in those cases where a physician may have already fallen into that comparison trap, give us a success story about how you as a certified financial planner can perhaps influence that to a better outcome.

Shane Tenny: Sure. There’s two that come to mind, and again, I guess we’re kind of stumbling into two personas here. So that early persona, that early physician persona, I’ll say the kind of hypothetical physician in their 30s, those success stories are abundant within our practice, because often what we’re needing to do is just reframe or re-anchor the perspective, so that the client, the physician, is coming out and their only frame of reference is what they see on TV, what they see on their social media feed, what they hear from their friends.

As professional advisers in this space, we can re-anchor that. We can say, these things that you have seen as defining you, let me reframe that, and let’s rebuild this. And that is so empowering, because they then know they’re making decisions based on, from an educated and experienced perspective. And so that’s very, very helpful.

And maybe to go one step deeper on that, this notion of, I’ve just come out, I got my new contract, I’ve got my new salary, and the bank has approved me for a $1.7 million loan, my friends and this and this and this. And we can say, you’re right, they approved you for that, but let me tell you how we can help you make decisions that are really going to accomplish all the things that are important. And so that’s empowering.

The other scenario, again I think we’ve kind of stumbled into here, is what about the physician who’s perhaps found themselves in a situation where they’ve already made challenging, destructive decisions? The thing that’s coming to mind right now is, about two years ago a client came in and they had been heavily influenced by their peers in the doctor’s lounge, quite literally, and as a result of that they were told the only way to grow wealth is to own investment real estate and rental properties and things like that. And so we have this, I’ll say relatively primary care type of provider, that has just stretched themselves very thin taking on investment real estate, and it’s not only created financial stress, but it’s emotional stress, because now they have to manage and keep up and juggle all of the decision-making.

With us, and so in that case, we were able to help reframe. OK, tell me why, what are you trying to accomplish? And there was certainly the desire to provide and care for their family, there was some internal shame over not understanding financial concepts when their peers appeared to, and then there was the embarrassment, I want to do the things that my colleagues are doing and that hopefully will lead me. And so once we began to unpack those, get to the root of it, it became easier to say, OK, I understand that I’m in over my head here, and then we just begin the process, how do we get back on track as constructively as possible?

And they did. It took a little time, but we’re able to let go, sell some properties, move some things, breathe on cash flow, and then reset, as I kind of alluded before, reset goals that are important to them, not goals that are forced on them from others.

Kevin Pho: We’re talking to Shane Tenny. He’s a certified financial planner, host of The Prosperous Doc podcast. Today’s KevinMD article is “Money dysmorphia: the new financial disorder affecting millions.” Shane, as always, we’ll end with some of your take-home messages that you want to leave with the KevinMD audience.

Shane Tenny: Absolutely. I think a couple take-home messages. Number one, let’s all just recite the mantra together, comparison is the thief of joy, and so beware of the comparison trap. Number two, recognize the signs in yourself of jealousy, stress, anxiety, and the propensity to what you know are foolish decisions. And if in doubt, ask for help. There is no shame in asking for help, and we in the financial planning profession love doing what we do and love the chance to come alongside and help you make smart financial decisions for you and your family.

Kevin Pho: Shane, as always, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your perspective and insight.

Shane Tenny: Thank you.