Podcast: Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith
Season 5 Episode 1 Title: Financial Literacy: Navigating Our Relationship with Money

Maxine Cuffe 00:03
You’re listening to Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith. A podcast by The Haverford Trust Company. On Speaking of Quality, Hank chats with authors, influencers and wealth management experts to bring a sense of clarity and calm to the complexity and stress of personal finance. And now – here’s your host, Hank Smith.

Hank Smith 00:23 

Hello, and welcome to another episode of “Speaking of Quality – Wealth Management Insights.” I’m your host, Hank Smith, Director and Head of Investment Strategy at The Haverford Trust Company. 

On this podcast, we explore topics ranging from quality investing, retirement resilience, stock market trends, estate planning, small business ownership, behavioral psychology and more. This season, my conversations with guests are focused on navigating change and the key decisions driving the future of the economy. Today, I’m excited to welcome Carly Meyer Bentley, CEO and founder of The Freckled Strawberry. Carly has decades of experience in wealth management and runs her own nonprofit dedicated to strengthening financial independence in women. Thanks for joining me, Carly. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 01:14 

Hi, Hank. Thanks so much for having me on. I’m excited to have this conversation with you and unpack all this great stuff that I’ve learned through the years. 

Hank Smith 01:23 

Before we jump into the Freckled Strawberry, and by the way, what a great name for a company. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 01:31 

Thank you. 

Hank Smith 01:32 

Can you tell our listeners a little bit of your background, where you grew up, how you grew up? 

Carly Meyer Bentley 01:40 

Yeah, sure. I think it’ll be a very enlightening disclosure and understanding of where The Freckled Strawberry originated and why. I’m the daughter of an entrepreneur. We have our roots steeped in agriculture in the middle of the country in Illinois. My father is a first-generation entrepreneur in enterprise and launched a high-end residential construction company and then parlayed it into a commercial company and snowplow removal and landscape company. So, everything that he built, he put a contract on to take that cyclicality out. So, I watched him. I was a front row seat of that opportunity, and where I come from, it didn’t matter if you were a girl or a guy. If you showed up and put your boots on, you had a job. So, it was very early on that I learned entrepreneurial work ethic and had my position in the family, so to speak. 

Hank Smith 02:45 

And so, you went to university in northern Illinois. What brought you into the financial services industry with a background of a grandfather who was farmer, a father who was in a variety of related businesses and being an entrepreneur, what brought you to finance? 

Carly Meyer Bentley 03:08 

Yeah, Hank. I am a curious person. First and foremost, I have a love affair with the Northeast. I told my dad that I was going to finish college and then go off and do big deals in the city in the Big Apple. And he said, ‘Chicago’s not a bad city.’ I think he was hoping that I would run out of money and come back home, but he knew he raised me differently. So, being from an entrepreneurial background, asking the questions of how to expand and scale the company was very familiar. It was like Dr. Seuss in our house. Stories about enterprise and how to get to the next level were common. So, I learned very early on that ‘he who holds the money, makes the rules,’ and understanding the instruments of money could help us do more. Where I really resonated and learned the most was in the lending space and learned that if I could understand how loans were made, is it possible that I could help entrepreneurs position their companies in ways that were attractive to banks to take the risk? So that is how I really learned where my position was in our family. And then took the big jump. My dad gave me $500, Hank, and said, “Good luck, and if you need to come home, you can always come home.” And there I went. 

Hank Smith 04:42 

And, you’ve been in the east ever since? 

Carly Meyer Bentley 04:45 

Ever since. I go back and visit every three months, but I am in love with it out here. 

Hank Smith 04:52 

That’s wonderful. So, you were in the financial services industry for 15-20 years before you started The Freckled Strawberry in 2021. Before we jump into that, please, I know our listeners are as curious as I am as to how you came up with The Freckled Strawberry as a name for your company. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 05:20 

So as a red-haired, freckled child growing up, I hated being called “freckled-face strawberry,” but then realized how unique it really was and thought, you know what? I’m going to trademark the name and make this messy thing my message. And then once I started learning more about strawberries, because I’m curious, I learned that the main strawberry plant is called a mother plant. And those little vines that grow from that mother plant are called daughter plants. And if you snip those daughter plants from the mother plant and plant them, they become mother plants. And so, I thought how appropriate, because The Freckled Strawberry is dedicated to empowering financial independence in women, how appropriate would it be for somebody that has learned so many different financial instruments to be the mother to all these daughters and then teach them how to do it on their own so that they don’t need me anymore and become their own person? So that’s where it came from and it stuck. 

Hank Smith 06:29 

So, I’ve got to share with you. My youngest son, Marshall, who’s 25, is a ginger, and at an early age, he embraced it and would go to school and anyone who teased him, his response was “ginger power.” 

Carly Meyer Bentley 06:46 

Yeah, I love that. I love that. We had to learn to be resilient because there was a lot of teasing. 

Hank Smith 06:54 

Absolutely. So, you started The Freckled Strawberry in 2021, really at the beginning of the pandemic. That must’ve been one very challenging time period. But what made you decide at that point in time, this is the moment, let’s seize it? 

Carly Meyer Bentley 07:23 

Yeah, Hank. When that moment strikes where you throw your pen down and say, that’s enough, it’s time to do something different. There were so many conversations, especially in COVID, between husbands and wives and families because of the uncertainty that raised a lot of questions. And being that curious person that I am, I started to explore a woman’s relationship with career selection and money. And what was this mystery between when she chose to do a career or had a career and her own experience with money? Well, that launched me into a deep research project that turned into a white paper that I wrote with The Economist. And what I learned is that there’s three primary influences that affect a woman’s relationship with her career selection and money. And the first one is based in values and steeped in family life that’s generational. And that is your proximal influences, and those influences, combined with a couple other influences, are responsible for outcomes. 

The second is socioeconomic background. So, we talk about my Midwest upbringing. In our family, it was no big deal, girl, guy, if you could do the job, do the job, and if my dad told me I could do something, I believed him and I did it. And then there’s the third one, which is a woman’s own innate ability or her DNA. Can she have the ability or does she have the ability to understand more abstract, difficult concepts? And usually that’s a yes. So, with those three in mind, which one is the loudest? Which one comes to the table first, that really is where a woman will connect with or disconnect from money. So, in that timeframe, it gave me plenty of time to write the theories, to write the practicum, to trademark it and then start practicing it in my day to day. 

Hank Smith 09:24 

So, how do you attract clients, and how many conversations have you had over the last four years? 

Carly Meyer Bentley 09:33 

Yeah, we help three types of women, which sometimes can be all three wrapped up in one woman. We help trailblazers or entrepreneurs, we help career divas or corporate professionals, and we help moms on a mission that are champions for their families. I happen to be all three of those. I was a career diva to begin with from an entrepreneurial background. I’m a mom. I was a single mom for a long time, talked about money early on with my son. It was like Dr. Seuss for him, very easy conversations. And then finally decided to launch this financial literacy company. Given all of these disciplines that I have, I thought that it was important for me to share and help those daughter plants along the way. So, that is who I help and why I help them. Attracting clients has not been difficult because what I’ve learned is that when I just start talking about it in my daily conversations, it’s very intriguing for most women and men. Men that have wives, men that have mothers, men that have sisters, really love the concept. 

So, I do belong to a few organizations and chair nonprofits. I believe in community. In Princeton, I was the president of the Princeton Merchants Association, which was a bridge between the chamber, municipality and the private business sector. And that’s really where I realized the heartbeat of entrepreneurship and community was. So, economic development councils, chamber of commerce, places where people come together to make their community stronger and more interesting and fill the missing teeth of the smile and bring different enterprise in. So, that is how I attracted my audience. And then through word of mouth now is, I would say, more than anything else. I think my professional background and acumen and the wonderful professionals like yourselves that I work with and refer business to when the time is appropriate. 

Hank Smith 11:48 

So, now it’s really referrals from people that have had success employing The Freckled Strawberry methodology? 

Carly Meyer Bentley 11:57 

Yes. Last year, we had 1,165 conversations. We’ve helped over 200 women. And the conversations continue. And what happens is in the first 90 days, we do a lot of work together. It’s a lot of understanding those proximal and distal influences and then teaching those technical concepts. And then what happens after 90 days is we have habit changes. And so through cognitive behavioral therapy strategies that are scientifically based, it changes the biochemistry of the woman and how she looks and feels around money. And her confidence is reported higher, her financial acumen is greater and her individual net worth, on an average, Hank, is 33% higher. That’s an average. Some are 200%, just based on learning these techniques. 

Hank Smith 12:53 

It reminds me somewhat of, I think, one of the best books I’ve read about money that has nothing to do with the X’s and O’s of making financial decisions, PE ratios, book value, called the Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, which to me, is so much more important, understanding who you are and the psychology of why you’re making decisions than actually book value, PE ratios, cashflow. Now, that’s all important, but you can get that with any research report. You really have to understand yourself and your emotions because everyone reacts to volatility differently. And it doesn’t matter what your age is, your background, how much wealth you have. Some of the wealthiest people have an aversion to volatility, and they should be in the equity markets, but they’re not because they do not like volatility. But it sounds like you capture a lot of that psychology in what you’re doing with women. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 14:18 

Yes, Hank, you hit the nail on the head. I think every person should read that book. I think it should be required reading in college. We’re just getting ready to create a new program called Launch, and it’s for college students. Of course, we focus on women, but we’re not excluding anybody because these concepts are real. And right now, we have a focus group together at St. Joe’s, DePaul University, West Chester University, some great institutions locally, Temple, where I’m talking to the students and getting real data on how they relate to money in college, what they witness. Going back to those three primary influences, you hit it. I can have a conversation with very educated, financially literate people about standard deviation and reversion to the mean and PE ratio. And we can go into those very technical intellectual discussions, which I enjoy. But at the end of the day, conversations that I have with women sound different. 

They sound like, can I have the shore house and have the kids go to college and make sure that the generation-skipping trust is in place so that generations after me will be okay? And it’s all about legacy and protection and security, which is a different dynamic than men typically have, which is based on performance and metric. And the emotion isn’t necessarily right in the middle of that because it’s a different type of conversation. So that’s exactly what it is. We run a retreat every year. We bring women offsite three nights. That first night is really about coming to terms with which voice is loudest. Is it the values and beliefs that are steeped in family life that are generations old? Like grandma saying turn off the lights in the room or finish your plate or these types of things that come forward. Is it social? Are you more influenced by going and having a shore house down in Avalon or is it the lake house or is it sending your kids to the dream camp? And once we get through those feelings, Hank, we can bring them into their frontal cortex, and then they’re leaning in, physically leaning into the conversation, and starting to learn about PE ratio and nuances in the portfolio. And it’s wonderful to sit back and watch them evolve into this different type of person and watch that relationship completely change. 

Hank Smith 16:51 

Well, congratulations to you for bringing this to the college level because I think you would agree, it’s just utter shame that there is no financial literacy taught from junior high through high school, let alone college. And really, financial literacy should be a core curriculum of junior high and high school, equally as important as history, arithmetic, sciences, and yet it’s completely ignored by the education system. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 17:34 

I totally agree. You know what the big pain point is for college students, and you’ll get a chuckle, but it’s real: Their parents give them a stipend, if they get one. Some students just have to figure it out on their own, and they’re working at the same time. But Starbucks seems to be a pain point for these college kids. They sign on to school, and they get their Starbucks almost every day, and it’s a $10 drink. Halfway through those first two weeks, they’re running out of money for that first month’s stipend. So, that kind of seems to be the common denominator in every school across the country. 

Hank Smith 18:18 

And my parents had instant coffee. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 18:20 

Yes! 

Hank Smith 18:21 

After dinner. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 18:23 

Yes. Right?! 

Hank Smith 18:25 

Which is probably about 5 cents a cup. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 18:28 

Yeah, right. I was telling the kids: You guys could get McDonald’s coffee for $1.70. They’re like, nah, not good. Okay. 

Hank Smith 18:41 

I think it’s more than quality. It’s also that social aspect Starbucks provides. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 18:48 

A hundred percent. That’s exactly right. So, we’re working on changing that culture with these college students. We’re going to try to disrupt the culture and see if we can start to make some headway. 

Hank Smith 19:04 

Now we’re going to take a short break for our Planning in Practice segment, featuring Bryan Tracy and the Wealth Planning team at Haverford Trust. 

Bryan Tracy 19:14 

Hello, all. It’s time for Planning in Practice. I’m Bryan Tracy, Vice President and Director of Wealth Planning at Haverford Trust. In this segment, we’ll take a short break from the incredible conversations between Hank and his guests to uncover key insights and tangible advice for your own wealth planning journey.  

So, when we talk about financial disruption, I think most individuals and a lot of our clients think markets, economy, job loss, etc. And those are all financial disruptions, more on the financial side. But what we see in a lot of cases is that a bigger financial disruption is really silence. And what we mean by silence is really dialogue between spouses, between families, not having conversations about money. And with our speaker today, with Carly joining Hank on the podcast, she talks a lot about her relationship with money and what she’s doing with The Freckled Strawberry, working with individuals. And knowing a little of her background with her father, she talks about her relationship with her dad as far as it relates to financial literacy and being part of the conversation. She comments on how she’s always been the finance person in the family and how that’s been a positive thing because since she’s been a child, she’s really been part of those conversations. 

And that really is impactful, and we see that as very beneficial, working with our clients that have open dialogue around money, values, financial habits, and it’s really that silence aspect where we see issues that can occur. Here at Haverford, we really try to create an environment and a culture around having open conversations, whether it be between spouses or families. And I’m excited to be joined by fellow wealth planner Gina Parissi here. And we just wanted to talk a little bit of how we try to set the stage. Gina, do you want to jump into how, here at Haverford, we try to foster this environment and this culture of open dialogue between individuals? 

Gina Parissi 21:20 

Absolutely. Thank you, Bryan. So, the way I view our role oftentimes is we really wear two hats. Maybe the first, and the ways that many folks think about their financial advisor, is really from that technical aspect, bringing information, especially from a wealth planning standpoint, looking at projections, looking at their finances from that dollars and cents perspective. I think the other side of our job is to be a facilitator of conversation and to allow space for that meaningful dialogue to happen. So, oftentimes we may be blending the two of those together, where we’re talking about a conversation around their cashflow and maybe the topic of retirement comes up as a question. There’s been instances where that has happened, and folks may say, “Hey, I’m thinking about retiring next year.” And then their spouse may look at them and pause, and that’s brand-new information to them that they’ve received at this meeting. 

And I think it’s really incumbent upon us to acknowledge that and to allow for those spouses then to continue to have that conversation, even if that’s just the beginning of it. So, I think it’s very important for us as advisors to create an environment where those conversations can get started. And I think it’s helpful if folks come to those meetings and they feel they’ve brought questions where they feel comfortable in that environment to have those open dialogues. Something else I heard recently that I thought was interesting in terms of conversations between spouses that came up, they said something in terms of “we worry about different things.” And I wonder sometimes how many partners know that about each other, that they worry about different things and what those different things are. So, I think again, it’s very important for us to have that space to encourage the conversations and be facilitators of that dialogue and curators and maybe leading our clients down that road, whether it’s to encourage conversation between themselves or to start bringing their children into the conversation. And when is the right time to do that? Bryan, do you have any stories about how you’ve experienced dialogue amongst families in these planning conversations? 

Bryan Tracy 23:57 

Yeah, I really think, to that point, it’s a lot about financial literacy, and I know Hank and Carly are really big on financial literacy. Hank likes to talk about how no question is a dumb question. And I think in family dialogues, in conversations with clients, I think there’s always that concern of asking a question that could be considered dumb per se or be embarrassed from the question or the answer that they may receive. So we really try to do a good job of creating that environment where you feel comfortable in asking those questions and really with the end goal that everybody has a seat at the table, everybody understands the reasons why we’re making or we’re helping make these decisions for your family or your family are making these decisions so that everybody feels they have a seat at the table and can have confidence and clarity. 

And it really goes back to that independence piece of really having that understanding that those decisions that they’re making really has the input of everybody that is involved in this situation. So, I think if you’re sitting here today and you’re listening to this conversation between Gina and I, and you’re really getting a lot out of the overall podcast with Carly and Hank around creating or having these types of conversations, we’re here to help. We work daily with our portfolio management teams to have these conversations, talk about money, values, and how they relate to both your investing and your financial planning, your wealth planning here at Haverford. So, we’re happy to help, and please reach out if you want to start a dialogue around this. 

Hank Smith 25:40 

Look, there are two factors. One is making money, but the other equally-as-important factor is how much do you spend? You can make a lot of money, but if you’re spending more than you make, that’s not a good trajectory for the future. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 26:00 

No, not a good relationship with money. One of our first steps, Hank, is that the first one, we call it the personal manifesto. Who am I? What do I do? And why did it matter to the world? And getting connected with your “why.” Are you a career diva? Are you a trailblazer? Are you making change, or are you focused solely on your family and making them a champion? That motivation’s important. But the second one is really the pivot. And I tell people, if you ever get lost in the conversation of money ever, your true north is your cash flows. It’s really fundamental. How much do I cost every year? How much does my family cost? And from there you can make all kinds of plans, and all kinds of strategies can be executed and implemented. 

Hank Smith 26:57 

These are relatively basic, simple concepts, but they’re so impactful. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 27:04 

It’s hard to do. And that’s where our methodology comes in to change habits. The conversations I have with money, with women in the keynote that I do, we’re playing on relationships. Is your relationship with money complicated? How would you feel about going from complicated to committed? And the smiles show up, and it’s about getting to know yourself. It’s about getting to know your needs, wants and wishes, and then creating a plan based on those needs, wants and wishes because there are answers, but you have to be able to articulate it, and you have to have the habits. It’s like those people that say that they go to the gym but don’t really go. The people that say they do sit ups, but they don’t really do them you. You can kind of catch them. I know you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing. 

Hank Smith 27:55 

Exactly. So, you’re a career entrepreneur, and yet you started The Freckled Strawberry as a nonprofit. Talk to our listeners a little bit about your thinking behind that, your purpose and where you see the future of The Freckled Strawberry. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 28:18 

Yeah, so women in general, who wants to see another blue suit, another masculine type of label? I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if a nonprofit entity created a safe and comfortable conversation style of learning about financial services, letting go of the jargon, not including the jargoning conversation, having it whimsical and fresh, but if we wanted to have complex conversations, we certainly could. So as a nonprofit, it was friendlier. It was, no one’s selling me anything. I don’t have to worry about buying a product. I don’t have to worry about not understanding what a product is. I think what happens sometimes in our profession, and I have to apologize to people often, if you are not financially literate going into these conversations, you could be sold something that isn’t necessarily the right thing for you. So having this nonprofit, non-threatening, less formal, conversation-type education platform that’s based in cognitive behavioral therapies is a lot more friendly than making a mistake and buying into a product that you don’t really understand. 

Hank Smith 29:41 

This is somewhat analogous in medical terms. An individual has a GP, their go-to doctor, but that GP is not a spine doctor, is not a gastroenterologist. And then you have specialists. So, you are the general practitioner with connections to all sorts of specialists. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 30:06 

That’s exactly right. If I think of a bicycle wheel, it is a simple, fun, I even imagine the little fringes on the handlebars, right? It’s a bicycle wheel, and the wheel is the person. And there’s these little spokes that make up this person’s relationship with money. And what happens in the first few moments where a woman starts to connect with her own independence around money is she sees that the money lives in her, and it’s an expression of her, that money is not outside of her. It’s not something she’s chasing. It’s a golf ball on the tee. That ball has no power, that power is me hitting the ball. So, they start to understand that like a ball, money is an object, totally powerless, that they own the power, and they’re acting on that ball or on that money to do the thing that it’s doing. 

So, the investment manager is a spoke in her wheel, and the banker is a spoke in her wheel, and that insurance is a spoke in her wheel. But all of these things are conversations that she has that she expresses the love she has for her family and for herself. And what she starts to realize is that she’s taking care of and protecting her family because everything she’s doing is for that anyway. But now she’s armed with the knowledge to include. So, I make introductions that are appropriate, people that I trust, the people that I’ve done business with, that I personally work with. I know the experience and the extension is very similar to the values and beliefs that they have. That’s how I work. So, I appreciate you pointing that out. 

Hank Smith 31:44 

So, Carly, how many teammates do you have at The Freckled Strawberry? 

Carly Meyer Bentley 31:49 

So, it’s interesting. I have a board of 47, but I only use six. There are six people that are in that inner circle. And it goes to show that 80/20 rule that we may have a million people out there doing these services, but it really does matter who the person is. And I call that the “giving a care quality.” Out of all these people in financial services in some way, they have to possess a characteristic that’s innate in them as a provider, that they care about your family, they want to get to know you, they care about your decisions, and they’re not in it for themselves. So, I only do business with six or seven people consistently. 

Hank Smith 32:36 

Yeah, it’s interesting because quite often when we make a presentation at The Haverford Trust Company for a prospective client, we’ll be very upfront and say, “do you have a preference as to working with a male, a female, someone older, someone younger?” Because why not make the effort right in the beginning to have the right fit as opposed to learning two years later? “Well, I really don’t like working with a male portfolio manager. I want a female portfolio manager.” But sometimes they’re reluctant to really express what they want. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 33:19 

That’s exactly right. And that’s where The Freckled Strawberry comes in because they don’t feel alone in that conversation or shy or insecure. We make sure that they’re asking the questions they should be asking. And for the most part, they start to see that male-female teams really do well together because they’re representing two thoughts or two points of view. 

Hank Smith 33:42 

I bet we have listeners out there who don’t have the advantage of a wealth planning team like Haverford offers its clients. If our listeners are interested in learning more about The Freckled Strawberry, how do they go about doing that? 

Carly Meyer Bentley 33:56 

Our website is https://thefreckledstrawberry.org/. That’s one way to book a meeting and learn more. We also host once-a-month Women’s Power Breakfasts, and they’re two hours long. It’s a completely non-threatening, secure environment that we have once a month. September 26 is the next one coming up. It starts at 9:30, and it ends at 11:30. We feel two hours is plenty of time for women to unpack and get comfortable with each other. We meet at Flex in Chesterbrook in a shared space that we have there. And I encourage any woman interested in learning more to actually go on the retreat because you’ll learn so much more about yourself.  

Hank Smith 34:40 

That is fantastic. Well, Carly, I cannot thank you enough for spending some time with us today. This has been incredibly enlightening. What you’re doing is so important and is so powerful. I just wish you continued success, and again, thank you for spending some time today with us. 

Carly Meyer Bentley 35:01 

Well, Hank, thank you very much for having me, and thank you, Haverford Trust, for continuing to do an amazing job for our clients. I look forward to working with you and helping more women become empowered women. 

Hank Smith 35:18 

That is great. Thank you for listening to this episode of Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights. Our next episode will be released shortly. In the meantime, please send suggestions or questions for me or the Haverford Trust team to marketing@haverfordquality.com. And don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review and share this podcast. Until next time, I’m Hank Smith. Stay bullish. 

Maxine Cuffe 35:46 

Thank you for listening to this episode of Speaking of Quality: Wealth Management Insights with Hank Smith. To hear future episodes of Speaking of Quality, please subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. To learn more about The Haverford Trust Company, please visit https://haverfordquality.com/. This podcast is provided as general commentary and market overview, and should not be relied upon as research, a forecast or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt an investment strategy. Any opinions expressed are as of the date this podcast was recorded and may change at any time and are the opinions of that commentator, not Haverford. Any opinion or information provided are believed by Haverford to be reliable at the time of this podcast’s recording, but are not necessarily all-inclusive or guaranteed for accuracy. Before making any financial decisions, please consult with an investment professional.