Sara Rands, CMHC

Financial Therapy

Individual therapy in Utah for adults navigating money, work, security, freedom, and what comes next

You may be thoughtful, financially capable, and good with numbers—and still face questions the spreadsheet can’t answer.

Financial therapy offers room to explore the emotional and existential dimensions of money, work, security, freedom, and enough.

When the freedom finally arrives

You planned carefully, postponed gratification, and built real financial security.

Maybe you’ve reached the number you worked toward for years. Maybe you’re close. You expected that getting there would feel like freedom.

Instead you hear yourself saying, One more year.

The planning, discipline, and delayed gratification that helped you create options are real strengths. But those strengths can become rigid when fear takes over.

Planning can become a search for certainty that doesn’t exist.
Discipline can make stopping feel irresponsible.
Delayed gratification can make it hard to notice that the future has arrived.

You can be financially ready and emotionally unprepared at the same time.

The question may no longer be just:

Can I retire?

It may also be:

Maybe you want to retire fully. Maybe you want a sabbatical, fewer hours, unpaid work that matters to you, more time for family, or a life that moves between contribution and rest.

There may be several possible lives here, each offering something real and each costing something real.

Therapy offers room to explore them without requiring one perfect answer.

When the choice arrives before you are ready

Sometimes the decision isn’t yours to make.

A layoff, burnout, or sudden change in your industry can unsettle much more than your income.

Work may have provided identity, structure, status, community, competence, and a sense of being needed. Losing it—or realizing you can’t keep doing what you’ve been doing—can bring fear, grief, shame, anger, or disorientation even when the money is fine.

You can know the numbers are fine and still be terrified.

You may wonder:

This may be the first time you’ve had to think of your financial position not as protection against disaster, but as something you can actually spend.

Perhaps you already have room to pause, recover, reduce your expenses, care for family, return to school, take a sabbatical, or wait before making another major commitment.

Knowing the options exist doesn’t make them feel real, or safe.

Therapy can help you understand what has been lost, what remains available, and what this interruption may make possible, without rushing you toward reinvention before you’re ready.

Money and safety

Money can carry the emotional weight of earlier experiences.

You may have lived through poverty, instability, illness, divorce, betrayal, religious pressure, family conflict, job loss, or times when survival depended on being exceptionally responsible.

Your circumstances can change without your sense of safety changing with them.

Money doesn’t automatically resolve:

Therapy can help explore both the present-day question and what it touches from the past.

When appropriate, this work may include Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) for difficult or traumatic experiences. Ketamine-Assisted Psychotherapy (KAP) may also support deeper work around identity, fear, grief, meaning, and transition.

The aim is not to dismiss realistic concerns. It is to understand more clearly how present circumstances and earlier experiences may both be shaping your choices.

What financial therapy can offer

Financial planning can help you understand what is financially possible. Coaching can help you set goals and create a plan.

Financial therapy makes room for uncertainty, contradiction, grief, fear, and questions that don’t have immediate answers.

This work may help you:

The goal isn’t to prescribe retirement, continued work, or any particular kind of life. It’s to help you see the choices you have and decide what you want them to support.

What this work is—and isn’t

I provide individual therapy for adults.

Financial therapy with me is not:

I am not here to tell you whether you can afford to retire, how to invest, or which option will produce the best financial outcome.

I am here to help you explore the emotional, relational, identity, and meaning questions that remain after the projections have been run—and to help you see the information and options you already have with greater clarity and agency.

A therapist who understands the conversation

You should not have to spend therapy time explaining the logic of financial independence or defending the desire for a life that does not center paid employment.

My familiarity with this world is not academic. I spent years deep in frugality culture, taking real pride in making a very small income work—before recognizing that frugality alone could not create the life I wanted for my children. A later career in software engineering, and years inside the financial independence community, put me close to the books, the blogs, the forums, and the arguments that have shaped it.

And I’m in the middle of a sabbatical right now—a mini-retirement, more or less—which is one way of putting my money where my mouth is. This is territory I’m currently walking around in, not just reading about.

I understand that early retirement can make room for a rich life, that having money doesn’t eliminate fear, and that financial freedom raises questions no calculator can answer.

Your financial choices will not be romanticized or resented. They will be treated as part of your actual life: meaningful, complicated, and worthy of thoughtful exploration.

You don’t have to translate your financial reality here, minimize the options you’ve built, or apologize for having them.

You don’t have to justify why a fortunate situation still feels frightening. And you don’t need to know what you want before we begin.

You can read more about my background and therapeutic approach on the About page.

Fees & Scheduling

My practice is private pay and structured around every-other-week appointments, with additional telehealth sessions available on alternate weeks when you need more support. Individual therapy is $200 for a 53-minute session. Superbills are available on request for out-of-network benefits.

Learn more about fees, scheduling, and working together.

I am currently on sabbatical and not accepting new therapy clients.

I plan to reopen in private practice in January 2027, seeing clients in person in Salt Lake City and online throughout Utah. If you’d like to be notified when scheduling becomes available, you’re welcome to join the notification list.