David Tenerelli CFP^®, CSRIC^®

Senior Financial Advisor

What do you love doing outside of work?

I come from a long line of musicians, and I love listening to and making music; jazz has a special place in my heart. I also enjoy exercise, hiking, learning new plant-based recipes, and reading about sociology, heterodox economics, and systems theory. I’ve also discovered an interest in science fiction, which, when done well, can inspire worldbuilding that can help us rethink what kinds of societies and futures are possible and challenge entrenched systems.

My happy place is toting my young daughters around in the bike trailer to parks and playgrounds with my wife. Because most of my days are spent at the computer, I try to prioritize tending the small vegetable and herb garden and observing the changing seasons in the restored Blackland Prairie in the backyard, as a reminder that the land is not a commodity that we own, but a community to which we belong.

Why did you decide to become a financial advisor?

I found my way to financial services by way of a very different career: music education. Serving as a public school band director for nine years was a fun, challenging, and rewarding career, helping young people experience the joy and power of music and collective accomplishment. While the classroom and the concerts made for moving experiences and fond memories, over time I found that it was the relationships with the students and their families that was the most rewarding part of the job. Because of that, I explored a possible shift into counseling, and I had also been developing a passion for personal finance and investing, which led me to realize that I could combine the two into a role as a financial life planner, helping people understand and improve their relationship with money while using money as a tool to design financially-secure lives of meaning.

As I shifted into a financial planning career in 2017, I joined a firm that specialized in comprehensive, customized financial planning and investment management with a tax focus and a strong orientation towards viewing clients as people, not just as portfolios. During that time, I was awakened to the opacity of conventional finance and the collateral damage of traditional methods of investing. My new direction that brought me to Values Added in 2025 was motivated by two questions: 1) How can one truly have a healthy relationship with money if their financial resources are inadvertently supporting (and being supported by) objectionable things? And, 2) How can those financial resources be at least partially redirected to more aligned purposes? With Values Added, it’s my goal to prioritize a comprehensive financial planning approach with an additional orientation towards personal values alignment.

What’s one of my favorite things I’ve helped a client change in their life (financial or otherwise)?

It’s so rewarding to watch a client go from feeling uncertain about their financial future to feeling empowered around money. It brings me a lot of joy to partner with them as they examine and sometimes recalibrate or realign their money behaviors – earning, spending, giving, and investing – and to see how those factors influence their long-term outcomes.

For example, a young professional who felt stuck at a high-paying, high-stress job in a field they found objectionable, and through the planning process they realized they could afford to downshift their compensation by taking a new position in a different field while still meeting their needs and goals, just by making some tweaks to their spending (which ended up making their spending more aligned with their values at the same time). It was as though they knew all along that such a change was possible, but they needed permission or validation in order to make the leap.

Sometimes just seeing a client feel the peace of mind that comes from the process of organizing their financial life into a cohesive and understandable picture is rewarding in itself, and opens the door to conversations around their visions for new possibilities. Am I on track? If I am under-saving, what “levers” can I pull to improve my possible outcomes? Or am I over-saving? If so, could I increase my charitable donations or devote more of my investment portfolio to impact/regenerative/transformative investments?

What experiences do you bring to your work helping clients?

Having shifted to a financial planning career in 2017, I’ve had the honor of partnering with clients with a variety of backgrounds and a diversity of perspectives. The left side of my brain thrives on the technical elements of financial planning and investment management, and my background in financial life planning and financial therapy also informs my approach – some of the most interesting and rewarding parts of my work involve helping clients uncover their money stories, money beliefs, and money attitudes, and how those influence their money behaviors, perhaps even in ways they didn’t realize.

I believe my interest in the “interior” dimension of money is influenced by my prior career as a middle school teacher, when I tried to always keep at the forefront of my mind the idea that each child who came to my classroom had a story – a bundle of experiences, beliefs, hopes, and fears – and their story influenced their focus, their motivations, and their outcomes. And part of my role as a teacher was to guide and challenge them within the context of that story, as they continued to write their story through their middle school years, which is not so different from my role as a financial advisor: understanding client’s stories while helping them to envision and design lives of meaning, providing guidance where needed and partnership along the way.

One issue I am passionate about is:

Food security, but not necessarily only in a charitable or philanthropic way. Of course, let’s distribute healthy food to people who need it, when they need it. But let’s also transform food systems into a more regenerative, agroecological model which supports healthy food and soils, agricultural livelihoods, and long-term reciprocity with the living world, rather than the current dominant system of extraction, profit, and short-termism. This also means transformation within a variety of complex and intersectional issues, including nudging food production and consumption towards relocalization, addressing food waste, and using food technologies responsibly. For all of this to happen at a meaningful scale also requires a collective awakening to the unsustainability and injustice of existing dominant food systems, and a collective yearning for a pro-social role of food in the larger web of life and the sentience and agency of the natural world. That awakening seems to be underway, and I’m passionate about helping to accelerate it.

CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER^® professional
CFP Board of Standards
Chartered SRI Counselor™
MS, Financial Planning, Kansas State University
BM, Music Education, University of Michigan

David Tenerelli CFP®, CSRIC®