Speaker Bio:

Karen Coyne is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER™, speaker, author, and host of the
Money Without Math podcast. With over two decades of experience in the financial services
industry, Karen has worked closely with individuals and families to navigate not just their
numbers, but their fears, habits, and deeply personal relationships with money. Through her
work, she’s come to a powerful realization: many intelligent, high-achieving people eventually
discover that the basic tenets of financial literacy that they’ve followed for so many years now
need to be unlearned.
Whether she is on stage, behind a mic, meeting with clients or sharing stories online, Karen is
driven to open up conversations that are meaningful, practical, and real.

Talk Title:

Why Financial Literacy Fails (Even When You’re Doing Everything Right)

Talk Summary:

Why do so many people who follow all the “right” financial advice—saving more, planning carefully, staying disciplined—still feel unsettled, even when everything looks right on paper? In this talk, Karen Coyne reframes financial literacy, arguing that the issue isn’t always a lack of
knowledge or discipline, but a misunderstanding of the problem itself. Drawing on real-world
experience and patterns observed over decades of working with clients, this talk invites you to
unlearn some of the assumptions we’ve been taught about financial literacy, reconsider what we
are actually solving for, and whether we’ve been applying the right behaviors to the wrong
problem.