Kelsey Willock and Courtney Cardin on Aura Finance, Financial Mindfulness and Building an Inclusive Economic System: ‘You Can’t Manifest Your Way Out of Debt’
“The disappearance of the middle class is a national security crisis.”
– Courtney Cardin
I had the pleasure of talking with Kelsey Willock and Courtney Cardin.
Kelsey Willock is the co-founder and chief executive of Aura Finance, a behavioral financial wellness platform aiming to reshape how individuals understand, manage, and relate to money. Combining technology, coaching, and behavioral science, the company provides financial tools through employer-sponsored benefits, seeking to address the emotional and psychological dimensions of personal finance — particularly for working Americans navigating economic uncertainty.
Willock’s entry into the world of finance came through a conventional channel: a six-year tenure at Goldman Sachs, where she rose to Vice President in Prime Brokerage. She worked closely with hedge funds and institutional investors, but also participated in Launch With GS, a Goldman Sachs initiative focused on supporting diverse entrepreneurs and fund managers. Her time at the firm offered a foundational education in financial systems, but it also revealed their limitations — especially for individuals without the same access to insider knowledge or institutional resources.
Raised in downtown Chicago, Willock grew up in a household shaped by entrepreneurship. Her parents worked in the healthcare industry, and she recalls early interests in creative expression, including a stint as a child actor in Chicago theater. This blend of analytical and creative impulses would later shape her career. At university, she studied English and entrepreneurship, holding roles at several startups across edtech, fintech, and consumer technology, including Rent the Runway and an early-stage trading education platform. Those experiences, coupled with the weight of student loan debt, helped shape her understanding of the barriers many people face when trying to build financial stability.
It was this tension — between access to elite financial institutions and the lived reality of personal debt — that eventually propelled Willock toward entrepreneurship. She entered the On Deck Founders program in 2021, where she met her future co-founder, Courtney Cardin, a lawyer and former policy advisor with a background in impact investing. Together, they launched Aura Finance with the goal of building not just another financial education app, but a system that integrates financial planning with psychological insight and coaching.
Aura’s core premise is rooted in the belief that most financial decision-making is driven by emotion rather than logic. The platform starts by assessing a user’s “money archetype,” then provides a personalized roadmap and coaching to help guide financial behavior. While many financial platforms are oriented toward high-net-worth individuals or offer advice based primarily on assets under management, Aura charges a flat subscription fee, allowing it to serve a broader user base — particularly middle-class Americans who may not have large portfolios but still need actionable guidance.
Willock’s approach emphasizes what she calls “financial mindfulness.” She argues that reducing money-related stress requires not just awareness of spending habits, but also acceptance — of one’s financial situation, past decisions, and present goals. Aura has worked with behavioral researchers at Georgetown and Cornell to develop a metric for financial mindfulness, which measures a user’s sense of awareness and acceptance around their finances. According to Willock, improvements in this area are often more predictive of long-term financial stability than traditional budgeting tools alone.
Beyond her work at Aura, Willock has maintained a presence in financial literacy and storytelling spaces. She authors a blog, Not Your Boyfriend’s Investment Advice, which uses humor and plainspoken language to demystify investing concepts for a general audience. She also founded Stuck in Notes, a women’s literary magazine and creative community, and has been involved with organizations including WISE (Women Investing for a Sustainable Economy) and Women in CSR.
Willock currently serves as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Jobs for the Future (JFF), a nonprofit focused on economic advancement through education and workforce development. She is also on the executive committee of Wake NOW, the Wake Forest University women’s leadership network. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she enjoys hiking, skiing, and camping.
Despite her background in institutional finance, Willock is vocal about the ways in which traditional financial systems have failed to meet the needs of a broad swath of the American population. She has spoken about the generational frustration expressed by many young adults who feel locked out of wealth-building opportunities, citing the erosion of the middle class and the psychological toll of financial insecurity. Through Aura, she hopes to offer both a corrective and an alternative: a platform that treats financial health not only as a matter of spreadsheets and savings rates, but as a deeply human concern shaped by behavior, emotion, and mindset.
While Aura remains a relatively young company, its early traction — including participation in Techstars’ Economic Mobility program and partnerships with Fortune 100 companies — suggests a growing appetite for a more holistic approach to financial wellness. For Willock, the mission is as much personal as it is professional. “You can’t manifest your way out of debt,” she often says, echoing one of Aura’s guiding principles. But, she adds, mindset is the one variable most people can control — and shifting that mindset may be the first step toward lasting financial change.
Courtney Cardin is a lawyer-turned-entrepreneur whose work spans politics, impact investing, and financial wellness. As co-founder of Aura Finance, she has emerged as a leading voice in a growing movement to reframe how individuals relate to money — not as a cold calculation, but as an emotional and behavioral experience deeply connected to identity, security, and wellbeing.
Born in Maryland, Cardin grew up with strong familial influences that would later shape her approach to financial empowerment. Her grandmother, Shoshana Cardin, was a prominent Jewish leader and one of the key architects of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, a landmark 1974 law that prohibited credit discrimination based on race, gender, or marital status. That legacy of advocating for financial autonomy — especially for women — would become a throughline in Courtney Cardin’s own life and work.
Cardin’s childhood was split between Maryland and Oklahoma, where she moved at the age of seven with her father, who worked with the Schusterman Foundation. Experiencing life as a Jewish girl in the American South left an indelible mark on her. Craving a broader sense of belonging, she later attended Emory University, drawn in part by its Jewish community. After graduating, she pursued a legal education at Georgetown University Law Center, which launched her into a career in Washington, D.C.
Cardin’s early professional years were marked by high-level legal and political work. She served as an associate at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP and held various roles advising U.S. senators and political campaigns. She later worked with the Democratic National Committee and took part in major public interest efforts, including time on Capitol Hill with the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. It was during this period that she began to see financial insecurity as an underlying force in many of the issues she encountered, from healthcare policy to national economic instability.
In 2016, Cardin pivoted away from corporate law to pursue a career in politics and public interest. But after going through a divorce in her early 30s — despite being well-educated and professionally successful — she realized she lacked the financial literacy and confidence to manage her own finances. That personal reckoning sent her on a new path.
Cardin moved to Australia to work in impact investing with Small Giants, a family office and venture firm focused on aligning capital with values. There, she helped facilitate conversations among ultra-high-net-worth families about the purpose and philosophy behind their wealth. While advising others, she found herself still grappling with her own relationship with money. The disconnect was both personal and systemic: even individuals with vast financial resources often lacked a healthy understanding of how to wield their money in alignment with their values.
Returning to the U.S., Cardin became certified as a money coach and decided to address a gap in the financial services ecosystem: the lack of tools that combined financial strategy with emotional understanding. In 2021, she co-founded Aura Finance with Kelsey Willock, a former Vice President at Goldman Sachs. The platform emerged from the belief that financial education alone is insufficient if it doesn’t take into account the emotional and psychological drivers behind financial decision-making.
Aura Finance is built as a B2B2C platform that operates as an employee benefit, combining wealth management with coaching and behavioral science. Drawing on insights from cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), and mindfulness practices, the company aims to help users not just budget or invest, but transform their relationship with money. It uses tools like personalized money archetypes and financial wellness scoring to offer tailored experiences rooted in each person’s financial history, emotions, and values.
As the company evolved, Cardin and Willock recognized that financial anxiety spans the socioeconomic spectrum. Aura’s earliest version primarily attracted users who were already positioned to invest, but its real breakthrough came when the team began offering interactive workshops to employee populations at large enterprises. These workshops — grounded in behavioral science — invited people to talk openly about money, often for the first time, and gave them a safe space to begin shifting long-held mindsets.
Cardin’s leadership at Aura continues to reflect her broader commitment to financial inclusion, democracy, and impact. She has served as a Fellow at Common Future, a Venture Partner at Clearstone, and a Managing Partner at BC Global Partners. Her work sits at the intersection of public interest and private capital, a space she believes is critical to reshaping both the financial system and the broader economy.
Her vision is rooted in the belief that expanding the middle class is not only an economic imperative but a democratic one. She frequently speaks about the erosion of economic security in America as a national crisis — one that demands urgent, human-centered solutions. In her words, tools like Aura are not a cure-all, but a catalyst: a way to give people a moment to pause, reframe their goals, and move from scarcity toward intention.
Yitzi: It’s a delight to meet you, Kelsey and Courtney. Before we dive in deep, our readers will love to learn about each of your personal origin stories. Kelsey, can you share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up?
Kelsey: I grew up in downtown Chicago to parents who were entrepreneurs in the healthcare space. I also have two younger brothers. I’m the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter in my family, which I think has a lot to do with who I am as a person.
I was always really drawn to creative pursuits, whether through entrepreneurship or even acting. I did a lot of child acting at theaters like Lookingglass in Chicago. As I got older, I went to college to study English and entrepreneurship, continuing to blend those two worlds — business and the arts.
I think those themes have stayed with me throughout my life. While I was in college, I took on pretty significant student loan debt, as many folks in America do. That really shifted my mindset. I had always been told, “You can do anything,” but the debt made that feel less true. It felt like I was in a bit of a hole.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that during college, I worked at a bunch of different startups. I worked at Rent the Runway, testing their subscription model on college campuses. I worked for an EdTech company called MentorZen, which connected high school students with college students. I also worked at a FinTech company that was building a synthetic trading environment to teach college students how to invest. That was my early dream — to join or start an early-stage company after college. But with the debt I had, that no longer felt possible.
I was lucky enough to get a job at Goldman Sachs, and I thought that was going to solve all my financial problems and stress. I was so grateful to be working there because I thought it was the best place in the world to learn about money. But it turned out not to be the case for me. I found myself in a system I didn’t know how to navigate.
Very early in my career, though, I had a manager named Amy who helped me figure things out. She taught me how to play the game and play it well. She helped me refinance my student loans, start investing for retirement and beyond, and understand the power of capital efficiency.
Flash forward — after spending six years there — I realized there are so many people like me dealing with financial stress, but not everyone has an Amy in their life. That’s what led me to build this business with Courtney. We’re essentially creating a digital Amy, giving people guidance, accountability, and prescriptive advice.
Yitzi: How about you, Courtney? Please share with us the story of your childhood and how you grew up.
Courtney: Well, I was born on July 29th, 1987, at GBMC — right around where you are. My grandmother, Shoshana Cardin, was a huge inspiration. I always knew her as an incredible Jewish lay leader, but it wasn’t until later that I found out we had a deep connection in empowering women to access financial independence.
When I was seven, I moved to Oklahoma with my dad. He went to the Schusterman Foundation, which became the largest Jewish philanthropic organization in the world. Growing up as a Jewish girl in Oklahoma was definitely interesting, and honestly, I wanted to get out of there as soon as I could. So I went to Emory, mostly because I wanted to be around more Jewish people. That’s where I met my ex — a nice Midwestern Jewish boy from Ohio.
We did everything “right.” We met when we had no money, I went to law school, and once I was making money in Big Law, I gave it to him — by then, he was a wealth advisor. I had always wanted to work in the public interest, so in 2016 I left the firm to go work in politics. That’s when we first had the real conversations about money and what we wanted our lives to look like. Once we were no longer living on a high income, we had to make adjustments. It turned out we wanted different things.
So, at 30 years old, I found myself divorced and thinking, “I’m a smart person — I went to law school, I did everything right — and yet I still feel a lot of shame around not knowing how to manage my own financial situation.” I’d been working in politics on a public interest salary, and I realized I needed a change. I decided to move to Australia to work in impact investing.
Back in Big Law, I had enough financial resources to do meaningful pro bono work, and I loved having those resources to push forward causes I cared about. But working for the government, everything moved slowly. I realized the private sector could be a powerful place to drive impact — even influence policy. I saw impact investing as the bridge between the efficiency of the private market and the social change I wanted to make through public interest work.
In Australia, I worked for a guy named Danny Almagor. He and his wife, Berry, launched an impact fund. He was on a mission to help people align their investments with their values. He had a family office, a real estate venture, and an impact fund. Once a month, he brought together some of the wealthiest families in Melbourne and Sydney to talk about what money means and how to use it to build the world they want to live in.
As I was helping them do this, I realized I was still trying to figure out my own relationship with money. And these folks — who had more money than they’d ever need — had their own complicated, sometimes weird relationships with it. That was a lightbulb moment for me. When I came back to the States, I thought, “I’m a lawyer — lawyers explain things. I’m going to build Duolingo for financial literacy.” Because finance is just another language, right? And Duolingo works. That’ll solve the problem.
But I quickly realized that just explaining things doesn’t fix it. The more information you throw at people, the more they tune out. There are already tons of tools out there, and they can all start to sound like the teacher from the Peanuts cartoons — wah wah wah. People have to be ready to take in the information, and that’s where most education-based tools fall short.
That’s when I met Kelsey in OnDeck. She was this total unicorn — she had come from Goldman Sachs and was writing this hilarious blog called Not Your Boyfriend’s Investment Advice. People were really drawn to it. I remember thinking, “Who is this magical unicorn who’s funny, can write, and also has a serious finance background?” She was building a really important tool to help women access private equity, and I talked her into building a “Noom for financial wellness” instead.
I said, “Yes, getting more women into private equity is critical, but there’s a foundational issue we can address that could help a lot more people, more quickly, and move us toward a future with more equitable and invested capital.”
So we started building what essentially became Noom for financial wellness. And it took off — thanks to Kelsey’s blog and the community we were building, people were beating down the door to talk to us. They wanted help getting started with investing. We saw people from across the socioeconomic spectrum. But we also realized that, at first, the only people we could really help with our MVP were those who were already in a position to invest.
We weren’t quite reaching the people we truly wanted to support — those who didn’t yet have access to the emotional space or language to talk about their relationship with money.
But over and over, we heard vendors say, “Oh my God, I need this tool — can I have it?” So we started running workshops with our vendors. We did behavioral, experiential workshops, and we realized we could reach way more people at once. We were finally getting to the folks we wanted to reach, especially those at lower and moderate income levels within large companies.
That’s when we joined Techstars’ Economic Mobility program and made the full pivot to B2B2C. We began focusing on enterprise contracts with companies whose employees spanned the economic spectrum. And what we found was that there was huge early interest — because most people simply aren’t given a space to talk about their relationship with money. It’s just not something people do.
We created these really fun tote bags that say “Friends don’t talk about money,” with the word don’t crossed out. In the workshops, we say, “We’re here to help you flex your money-talk muscles. We want this to feel natural. We want to demystify the conversation.”
And going back to my grandmother — when I came back to the U.S. and started my own money story journey, I got certified as a money coach. That’s when I learned something I’d never known: Shoshana was one of the lead architects of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. That law, passed just 50 years ago, gave women and people of color the legal right to open bank accounts and get credit in their own names, regardless of race, gender, or marital status.
I had always known her as a strong Jewish leader, but it wasn’t until I explored my own money journey that I connected to her legacy of financial empowerment — especially for women. And now that I have my own little three-month-old, Noa, it’s become even more meaningful to carry that legacy forward.
I don’t know if you know this story, but in the Bible, there’s a girl named Noa — she’s one of five daughters of Zelophehad. At the time, women weren’t allowed to inherit property, so after her father died, Noa led her four sisters in a successful campaign to secure women’s right to inherit property. I named my daughter after my great-great-grandmother, Nahama, who was killed in Latvia in the 1940s. I wanted a name that started with an “N,” and when I read Noa’s story, everything just came together.
So the legacy continues — and I just love that.
Yitzi: Courtney, you’re an amazing storyteller. Beautiful. Each of you has an amazing background and incredible careers before this, so I’m sure you have some great stories. Can you share one or two that really stand out from your professional life? We’ll start with Kelsey.
Kelsey: This might be an easy one — a bit of a layup — but I’ll say one of the things I’m most proud of in terms of what we’ve accomplished is that Courtney and I are real anomalies in the world of fintech. There are so many articles showing that women get only 2% of venture capital funding. And when you really break that number down, it’s even smaller for women building in financial services — especially those trying to create more inclusive economic systems.
So what I’m most proud of, from a storytelling perspective, is that we’ve done what has felt almost impossible. We’ve raised venture capital against all odds, in one of the most challenging environments — and we’ve done it while doing good. We really believe in doing good and doing good business. We don’t see those as separate things. And I don’t just mean “impact” in the traditional sense where you have to sacrifice returns to do good work. We believe we can build a billion-dollar company while also achieving our ultimate goal: a more inclusive system.
The current system has locked out and left behind so many people. Courtney mentioned how her grandmother helped build a more inclusive economic system 50 years ago — but that’s not enough time. There’s still a long way to go, and we see her as an inspiration to keep pushing forward.
Over the past four years, I’m incredibly proud that no matter the odds or the economic shifts in the market, we’ve continued to grow. We’ve even landed Fortune 100 partners — and we’re still a very small team. I think that’s because we’re building something people need now more than ever.
There’s a generational feeling of hopelessness. People say, “I’ll never own a home. I’ll never retire early. I’ll never live like my parents did.” And Courtney and I have spoken to thousands of people at this point. That hopelessness is loud. And we’re on a mission to shift that mindset — to show people they can.
It takes work. You can’t manifest your way out of debt — that’s one of my favorite lines that Courtney always says. But your mindset is the single most important thing you can control and change. And I’m just so proud to be running a company like this in a time when most people would say it shouldn’t be possible.
Yitzi: Amazing. How about you, Courtney?
Courtney: I’ll share two quick stories. The first one isn’t really a story, but when I was working on the Hill, I was with the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Claire McCaskill was the chair, and she would often say, “I can go from restaurant to restaurant and compare the price of a cheeseburger in any city, but when I need a knee replacement, I can’t figure out how much that’s going to cost.”
Healthcare is so complicated in this country and the underlying issue in healthcare is really financial insecurity. Everything comes back to that.
The healthcare system and insurance companies are a giant black box. It becomes an issue that ends up bankrupting countless Americans. Something is broken and while we can’t fix healthcare policy on a national scale at Aura, maybe we can help people better understand the financial system so they don’t run into this problem at scale.
The other story that stands out to me — again, not going into too many details because it’s all politicized — but right after the 2016 election,I was looking at the stats and digging into why people voted the way they did — and it became obvious very quickly that economic insecurity and fear drove voter turnout in a way no one really expected.
Again, this moment hit me — there’s deep economic insecurity among voters across the spectrum. Good political strategists know that all politics is local, and all politics is economic. What we’re seeing now is a continuation of what we saw in 2016: extreme economic insecurity that’s being politicized and exploited for political gain — on both sides. If you talk to the farthest-left progressives and the farthest-right conservatives, they’ll both tell you about the lack of security and opportunity they’re feeling. This isn’t a country anymore where the American Dream feels accessible to everyone.
And actually, that’s core thesis is how we ultimately made it into Techstars. I sat down with the managing director and said, “The disappearance of the middle class is a national security crisis.” If we’re not willing to provide tools to the people who need them most, we’re going to end up in a French Revolution-esque situation. That might sound dramatic or alarmist, but we really believe that a failure to address the growing economic divide between the haves and have nots is a serious threat to our Democracy and our country.
We just saw an article that said you can now use buy-now-pay-later for fast food or Uber Eats. We’re one step closer to a “company town” situation where people mortgage their future because we don’t know how to talk about or manage their money.
As Kelsey noted, we like to say, “you can’t manifest your way out of debt.” The growing income and wealth gaps are real problems that require an array of solutions. And while Aura isn’t designed to help people living well below the poverty line, there’s a massive number of Americans feeling like they are living paycheck to paycheck. These are people who need a moment to pause and realize the American Dream might still exist, but just looks a little different now.
You don’t have to buy a house just because that’s what you were taught to do as an adult. Technology has enabled different lifestyles.Maybe you want to be a digital nomad and travel — that’s within reach. Any goal you truly have is possible. Our workshops really focus on behavioral mindset, setting goals that align with your values, and understanding what money should be: a tool to live the life you want.
We want to give people space to figure that out — and then help them put a number to it. Because if you don’t do that, you’ll always feel like there’s never enough. You’ll stay in a scarcity mindset. We want to give people the freedom to design whatever life they want, and then help them reach an achievable number and feel good about that progress.
We’re not promising any specific lifestyle. We’re just helping people build a pathway that actually makes them happy — so they can stop thinking, “It doesn’t matter what I want, I’ll never have enough. I’ll never be able to afford a home in New York or San Francisco. I’ll never make enough to retire.”
We just want to help people get out of those negative mindsets and old scripts.
Yitzi: Okay, so let’s talk more specifically about your product, Aura. Courtney, you mentioned that your ultimate goal is to help expand the middle class. Kelsey, could you be a little more specific? How are you aiming to expand the middle class, in concrete terms?
Kelsey: Yes. So Aura is a psychology-based financial wellness employee benefit that combines coaching and wealth management. For employees, it starts with access to a digital coaching system that begins by getting to know them and their relationship with money.
For example, we use a money archetype assessment — you can think of it like a Myers-Briggs for money — to create a personalized user experience. We have to understand your relationship with money before we can help you take action.
We also measure your baseline financial well-being score so we know where you’re starting and where we want to go. Our goal is to move you into the high wellness score category. Then we get a full picture of your financial situation — what’s happening in your checking and savings, how you’re saving, spending, and investing your paycheck and beyond.
Once that intake is complete, we design a personalized plan for your money and your mindset. The goal is to take the guesswork out of what to do next. There are so many platforms that ask, “How much do you want to invest?” But the reality is, most people don’t know the answer to that. So we’ve found it incredibly important to remove that barrier so you can take the next steps with confidence.
To answer your question more directly about the middle class — I think it’s important to point out that Aura is built to provide quality financial care regardless of how much money you have. A lot of financial wellness solutions are built on assets-under-management fees, which typically only serve people with a million dollars or more. Their revenue models depend on how much money is in your account, so the more you have, the more they make. We saw that as flawed.
That’s why we charge a subscription fee instead. Whether you have $5,000 in net worth or $300,000, you get the same quality of financial care. We meet our members where they are — whether they’re just getting started, trying to build an emergency fund and pay off debt, or they’re already in the wealth-building phase and have maxed out retirement accounts but don’t know what goals to set next.
Our goal in supporting the middle class is to meet people where they are, reduce the intimidation that comes with financial conversations, and recognize that some folks might be nervous even showing up to this kind of platform. So we start by getting to know them before we ever tell them what to do.
And I think the final component is that we really believe in the power of coaching. We don’t think everyone needs a financial advisor, but we do believe everyone needs an accountability partner.
One of my favorite things we’ve found in our research is that good financial care is 95% therapy and 5% strategy. The hard part is getting someone to follow through on the strategy. With a coach, you’re 95% more likely to follow through. That accountability piece is huge, and it’s a big part of how we’re aiming to serve the middle class and beyond.
Yitzi: Courtney, anything else?
Courtney: The only thing I’d add is, when you look at the market, most true financial products — like robo-advisors, as Kelsey mentioned — are catering to people with higher net worths. The products that aren’t geared toward those individuals tend to be financial education platforms, and most of them are affiliate-based. They don’t actually give you a place to take action.
The reason we added a wealth management tool is because we kept hearing the same thing: “Great, you’ve given me amazing information. I love the holistic way you’re approaching this. But what do I actually do next?” So one of our main differentiators is that we provide both the education and the holistic framework, and a place to take tactical action.
As we’ve moved into the enterprise space, we’re seeing that we’re really reaching a broad range of people across the economic spectrum. A lot of traditional financial tools tend to cater more toward men, especially those who already feel confident talking about finances. But what we’re seeing is that many men don’t feel comfortable joining those conversations — often because they haven’t had access to that education either.
We’re seeing people show up with debt, little to no savings, or just no idea what to do with what they have. And that’s across the board. On the women’s side, we’re seeing everyone from young, type-A women who are excited to dig into financial planning and love our approach, to women with large retirement savings who never really knew what to do with it — or are realizing they still don’t have enough to retire.
We suspected that our approach would resonate with women — because women make up 51% of the population and tend to respond well to a more holistic method — but what surprised us is how many men feel locked out of traditional financial conversations and are drawn to our coaching model. They finally feel like they have somewhere to go.
So, in a way, it’s like therapy for your wallet. Our hope is to help build a thriving, robust middle class by guiding people to internalize healthier habits — coping mechanisms, mindfulness, tools rooted in CBT and DBT, and just generally good life practices — but through the lens of money.
Most people know they don’t have the healthiest relationship with money, and a lot of them have internalized that as a personal failure.We’re just opening up that conversation and showing people it’s not their fault — it’s the way our capitalist system has evolved. So let’s talk about it. In our workshops, after a session where people start sharing, there’s this visible sigh of relief — even over Zoom. You see people relax, their shoulders drop, their breath slows down. They’re just waiting for a safe space to release the anxiety and reset their nervous systems when it comes to money.
All of these techniques already exist and have been proven — we’re just packaging them in a way that feels approachable and helps people feel better. And so far, it seems like that approach is really resonating.
Yitzi: You’ve articulated how many of us have an unhealthy relationship with money, and part of your goal is to rewire that. Can you be more specific? Can you help explain why so many Americans have this kind of relationship with money, and what a healthier version of that would look like?
Courtney: Well, I don’t want to say it’s unhealthy because I don’t want to put any stigma around it. I’d say we have a complicated relationship with money. And I think there are a few reasons why. First of all, the reason we’re here is because our ancestors thrived off a scarcity mindset, right? The people who thought they’d never have enough resources to last the winter were the ones who typically survived the winter. And the people who were more laid-back, who felt like they had an abundance mindset and were going to be fine — they didn’t usually make it to become our ancestors. So we’re all working with this scarcity programming from the earliest levels of evolution. That’s the old programming we’re dealing with.
On top of that, you’ve got systemic issues that make it hard to use financial tools equitably and to build wealth equally. There’s the history of redlining. There’s the fact that women couldn’t open bank accounts in their own names. And for a long time, it was mostly backroom Wall Street people talking about money, creating products nobody really understood, and then selling them — things like mortgage-backed securities that helped lead to the global financial crisis. There are all these compounding factors that created confusion and made it harder for people to show up financially.
Until recently, we didn’t even have the tech tools that allowed people to easily buy stocks, bonds, and other key wealth-building components. When we were growing up, the main way our parents built wealth was through homeownership. But homeownership is now drastically out of reach for so many people. The good news is, there’s more access now to ETFs, index funds, and the stock market than there used to be — but all of that can feel scary. And then you’ve got things like Robinhood, meme stocks… it becomes confusing and anxiety-inducing. For a lot of people, it’s just too much. They don’t understand it, they’re scared, and so they just don’t touch it.
But that leads to a kind of “cash under the mattress” mentality, which isn’t good either — because inflation eats away at the value of that money. And big banks are giving you 0.01% interest, so your money isn’t growing. Most people don’t even know about high-yield savings accounts. Meanwhile, the banks are making money off our money, and unless we’re putting it in a high-yield account, we’re not getting any of it back. The system isn’t really designed to help the individual.
And yet, we spend so much time in school learning things like trigonometry and geometry — which, sure, might be important — but why are we leaving school without understanding personal finance? You turn 18, and suddenly you’re getting bombarded with credit card offers, but you have no idea how credit works. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never used a hypotenuse in my adult life. So why are we spending time on that instead of learning what an asset, a liability, or a net worth is?
Now, I think there’s a growing number of states starting to require financial literacy in schools, which is great. But it’s still not all 50 states, and there’s no real standard for what that literacy should include. And as we talked about earlier, just throwing jargon at people doesn’t help. Money is emotional. Your money story is written for you by the time you’re seven years old. There’s research that shows kids understand the concept of money before they understand the concept of death. And most of that comes from your parents — what their beliefs around money were. We’ve all heard it: “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” or “You can’t take it with you when you’re gone.” Totally different mindsets.
There’s also research that shows you might be a spendthrift and your partner might be a tightwad — or vice versa. And there’s an actual scale. You’re often attracted to the opposite. If you’re someone who finds it hard to spend money and feels guilty doing it, a spendthrift can seem really generous and abundant. That feels attractive at first. But then you move in together, and you think you’ve got a $10,000 budget to furnish the whole place — and your partner falls in love with a $10,000 couch. Now that same trait that attracted you to them becomes a big problem in the relationship.
Because we don’t have the language for this, and we don’t understand the interpersonal dynamics that money brings up, we just think, “Who is this person?” without realizing that what attracted us is now something we need to work through. But if we give people the knowledge and language, we can start addressing these complicated issues — which often aren’t really about money, but show up through money.
And that’s why we believe our approach can actually help rebuild a more vibrant, holistic middle class.
Yitzi: Courtney, you were very articulate in describing why we have a complicated relationship with money. Kelsey, can you give an example or an avatar of someone who went through your program and came out with a healthy, wholesome relationship with money? Nothing specific, but just paint a picture of the kind of person who’s benefited from your company.
Kelsey: Yeah. So, we measure success pretty carefully at Aura, and we do it in a few different ways. But I’ll talk about one that focuses on financial mindfulness. And to back up a bit — why is financial mindfulness important? We’ve found that most people make financial choices from a place of fear and anxiety. And when you do that, you tend to make irrational decisions. Those irrational choices lead to poor financial outcomes, and then the cycle of stress just keeps repeating itself. Our whole goal at Aura is to break that cycle of stress-based decision-making, so people can make better choices and have better financial outcomes.
If you can buy into the idea that mindfulness helps reduce anxiety, then it’s not a big leap to believe that financial mindfulness reduces financial anxiety. We actually partnered with researchers at Georgetown and Cornell to build a financial mindfulness scale. And what it measures is two key things: your acceptance of and your awareness of your financial situation.
It’s not just about knowing what’s in your bank account — it’s about being okay with where you are.
Interestingly, acceptance turns out to be far more powerful than awareness. Most traditional financial tools, like Mint, are focused entirely on awareness. They’ll show you charts, graphs, spending categories — but they don’t help you feel any better about what you’re seeing.
So, the kind of person who finds success through Aura has both. They have awareness — they know what’s coming in, what’s going out, and how their money is being allocated. We use the 50/30/20 rule to help them divide spending between needs, wants, and savings. But just as important, they also have acceptance. They’ve forgiven themselves for past mistakes, they feel content with where they are, and they believe they’re worthy of abundance in the future.
It’s not just about behavior change — it’s about emotional change.
At the end of our coaching calls, for example, we say things like, “We’re so proud of you for showing up today. Give yourself a pat on the back. You’ve done the hardest part, which is showing up for yourself.”
And a lot of times, people try to minimize it and say, “I didn’t do much.” But our response is always, “Yes, you did.” It’s hard to show up to these conversations. Most people avoid talking about money. So giving someone peace of mind and contentment in their financial life — that’s actually a bigger success marker than just knowing how to budget.
Yitzi: Brilliant. Let’s shift gears a little bit. This is our signature question. Each of you has been blessed with a lot of success, and I’m sure you’ve learned a ton from your experiences. Can you share five things you’ve learned over the course of your career and running this company that you wish you knew when you first started? Courtney, you want to start?
Courtney: Sure. Five things I wish I knew when I started Aura. One of the things Kelsey sends me in some form regularly is a post an entrepreneur has shared on Twitter or LinkedIn. It basically breaks down the week like this:
Monday — feeling great, I got this.
Tuesday — oh my God, the product is a mess, no one’s going to like it, I hate it, I’m worthless.
Wednesday — oh wait, people are actually using the product, maybe it’s not so bad.
Thursday — something breaks, dear Lord, this is the worst thing ever, I’m a total failure.
Friday — actually, things might be okay.
And that is the founder cycle. Normalizing that — I wish I’d known that was normal. I don’t think it would’ve changed our approach. Kelsey and I are unique in a lot of ways. One big reason we stand out in tech is that I’m a lawyer and she’s a banker. That’s not something you typically see with startup founders. But in some ways, I’m glad I didn’t know everything going in, because honestly, I might not have done it.
I also wish I had known how tough it is to navigate the expectations of being a female founder — the titles, the roles, the games you have to play just to get into the right rooms. You can do your research and know the stat — women get only 2% of VC funding — but there are just some things you don’t fully understand until you’re living it.
Knowing there’s an incredible community of other founders who support you, and impact-driven investors who truly want to see you succeed, is something I eventually discovered. But knowing that upfront would’ve helped during those tough Tuesdays and Thursdays. Just having that sense of community from the beginning would’ve given me a bit more confidence to keep pushing.
Another thing: this will be the hardest thing you ever do, but you’ll learn more than you could ever imagine. I’ve worked in Big Law, in government, in impact investing — none of it compares to running your own company.
And also, your co-founder will probably be the best mirror you’ve ever had. I joke all the time that Kelsey and my husband are insanely similar. They both reflect back all my triggers and flaws in the best way, and help me grow. Having two people give you the same feedback is a clue that maybe you’re the common denominator. It really pushes you to work on yourself.
Finding a co-founder who truly complements you is huge. Neither Kelsey nor I are technical, and I wouldn’t change that. She’s the best partner I could’ve imagined, and I’ve learned so much about myself through this partnership. Co-founder relationships are often why companies don’t fail — they’re that important. You’ve got to be intentional and diligent about it. I just knew, when I met Kelsey, that she was going to be the perfect partner. Like I told you, she’s a magical unicorn. But I had no idea how much she’d teach me about myself. Going on this journey with her has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. So, those are the things I wish I had known.
Yitzi: How about you, Kelsey?
Kelsey: I’m going to try to add to that rather than repeat everything Courtney said, but I’ll start by saying she’s 1,000% right — this world is all about people and having good people in your orbit. I’d read articles about that before, but I never really absorbed it. Your business partner, your employees, the people you surround yourself with — they’re the ones who get you through everything. Investing time and energy into those relationships is incredibly important.
At the beginning of this journey, Courtney introduced me to the idea of business coaching. Honestly, I didn’t believe in its value at first. I thought it was unnecessary and really expensive. But eventually, I realized it’s one of the most important things we can do — cultivating strong relationships with each other. Being in business with someone is like being in a marriage. And your business is your baby. So, it’s been a huge learning moment for me to realize that doing good work isn’t just about having great financial models or sound economics. It’s about setting your people up for success so they can achieve what they need to. Coaching and therapy are essential to that.
I wrote down a few things. I think the best advice comes from people who are close to you or just one step ahead — not twenty steps ahead. I used to read a ton and listen to all the podcasts, like “How I Built This,” and I thought that’s where I’d learn the most. But the reality is, those people are at the bookend of their story. You’ve got to learn from people who are still in it, because markets shift and dynamics change. Someone just a step ahead is usually more relevant and their lessons are more applicable. Cultivating relationships with those folks is often more powerful than chasing advice from some major CEO who already had a massive exit.
Another thing — solve problems with good business decisions, not investment. Investment shouldn’t be used to fix problems; it’s for growth after you’ve solved them. There were times at our company where we felt like we had to do better, grow faster, and we ended up solving those problems with real business decisions. I feel lucky to be in that space. If you look at companies that made it through times like 2008, they often ended up with some of the strongest foundations and became the most resilient. That’s a lesson we learned — whether we wanted to or not — and one we plan to carry forward.
Also, people need to pay you for you to trust their advice. That’s not to say you don’t do tons of user research — that’s different. But if you’re launching a product and want to know if it’s valuable, ask people to pay for it. You’ll learn very quickly whether they will or won’t. You don’t need to take advice from folks who say, “This is great,” but won’t give you a dollar for it.
Courtney: I have one more that you made me think of, Kelsey. It’s not just about San Francisco venture capital. There are incredible alternative ways to access capital, especially in the early stages. A lot of people don’t know this, but you can use donor-advised funds to invest in early-stage startups and get catalytic capital into the hands of new entrepreneurs. We’re passionate about educating people about this, especially angel investors who are new to the space and want to use philanthropic dollars to support diverse entrepreneurship. It’s a huge opportunity — like a $230 billion unlock.
Some of our most aligned investors have actually been outside of Silicon Valley. We’ve had policy wonks and inclusive leaders from D.C., finance people from New York, and folks from all over the country. So it’s not just about the big-name VCs in Silicon Valley. You’re not unsuccessful if you don’t land an Andreessen Horowitz or a Sequoia. Like Kelsey said, there are so many ways to build a great, strong business.
I think Techstars actually did a great job reminding us of that. They take you in early and say, “We’d love it if you IPO, but we’re going to teach you how to build a sustainable business. You’ll be a success whether you get acquired, go public, create a great franchise, or just build a self-sustaining company.” They teach you how to do good business.
And as Kelsey said, good business always beats sizzle, hype, and more investment. The key is having a strong product that truly serves people and building for the end user — not for hype or glory. That’s what leads to real success.
Yitzi: Brilliant. This is our final aspirational question. Each of you are people of enormous influence because of the platform you’ve built and your great work. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most good to the most people, what would that be?
Kelsey: That’s a hard question. I would say: you’re not bad with money, and you should try to talk about it more. I think creating safe spaces where we can talk about the situations we’re in helps reduce shame, makes us feel less alone, and makes us more willing and able to take action.
For me, obviously we’re on this mission to create a more inclusive economic system and rebuild the middle class, but at the simplest level, we hear it so often — “I’m bad with money,” “I don’t know enough,” “I’ve made so many mistakes.” My hope is to help shift that mindset into one filled with hope.
No matter what the news cycle says — whether it’s “you’ll never own a home” or “inflation and debt are at all-time highs” — we need to shift that narrative from hopelessness to, “we can make change, we can be okay, I can be okay, I am enough.” That’s what I hope to spread in the world.
Yitzi: How about you, Courtney?
Courtney: I’m here in this beautiful location, looking out at this incredible nature preserve, and I think the idea that we can give people space to reconnect with the world around them — revisit nature and really understand that every person is part of this whole ecosystem — is so important.
And as part of that, we can do our part. We all have the ability to take action in our own lives and make the world just a little bit better. Even if you’re just stopping to pick up a piece of trash, you’re still making the world a little bit better.
What Aura is about is empowering people to believe that the small actions they take really do add up. I think there’s a lack of awareness, education, or even interest in all the tools that help us do that. There are easy things we can do — like picking something up — and there are also lots of opportunities to support people: diverse founders, new ideas, technologies that promote regenerative agriculture, climate change solutions, economic inclusion. Learning about and supporting those things, and taking action to build them, matters.
Empowering people to feel like they can do a little bit more to repair the world — that’s a really powerful thing. We don’t have to create massive change on a global level. But if we can get individuals to feel like they can make a difference, that little bit of empowerment, that belief in their ability to take the next step and show up better in the world, could really be transformative.
Yitzi: Unbelievable. So, how can our readers continue to learn more about Aura? How could they purchase a subscription, and how can they support you in any possible way?
Kelsey: Yeah, you can go to our website, aurafinance.io to learn more about us. We’re currently available as an employee benefit, so if you’re in HR, Benefits, Total Rewards, or a CFO, we’d love to talk to you about what it might look like to bring Aura to your employees. And if you’re just someone who wants access and you’re not sure how that works, we’d love to talk with you too — maybe even help you start a conversation with your HR team about what it would look like to bring Aura to your company.
Yitzi: Thank you so much for this amazing conversation. I usually stop after 30 minutes, but I was basically enthralled, so we had to keep going. Thank you again for your time. This is going to be an amazing article, and I’m excited to share it with our readers. I hope we can do a follow-up a year from now.
Kelsey: We’d love that. Thank you so, so much.
Courtney: Shabbat Shalom.
Yitzi: Shabbat Shalom to you, Courtney. Thank you so much, and I wish you continued success.
Kelsey: Thank you so much.
Courtney: We appreciate it.
Kelsey Willock and Courtney Cardin on Aura Finance, Financial Mindfulness and Building an Inclusive… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.