What is Financial Coaching?
Financial Coaching is a process, supporting you creating the financial life you desire to have. This process involves four steps.
Step One, is gaining clarity on where you currently are in your financial life. This means looking at your numbers (savings, earnings, spending, giving) without judgement.
Step Two, is understanding your Money Blueprint and Personal Money Story with compassion. This understanding sheds light on patterns of behavior no longer serving you. Together, we create a new Money Blueprint, which includes money practices (action), money mindsets (ways of thinking), and a new belief system supporting you in meeting your goals.
Step Three, is stabilization and strategy with cash flow. This means earning more than you spend. It means paying off current debt while not creating new debt. It means connecting to your deepest values, allowing your dollars to nourish those values and live a life with an internal experience of abundance. It means saving enough money for short term needs, emergency situations and for your later years.
Step Four, is sustaining new habits and behaviors supporting you long term. In this phase, you become accountable to you instead of being accountable to me!
Do I have to commit to a certain amount of Financial Coaching sessions?
No, you don’t have to commit to a certain number of sessions. Financial Coaching is client centered. This means you set your goals and we talk about how often we meet. Usually, we begin with meeting twice a month, which decreases to once a month, then once a quarter and then annually.
You can begin and end the process anytime you desire. Everyone has different needs. Some of my clients want one breakthrough session, others want a couple of consulting sessions and others want a coaching relationship that helps support permanent behavioral changes.
How is Financial Coaching different from Financial Planning?
Financial Coaching’s process supports that inside change (in ways you think, beliefs you hold to be true, actions you take and emotions you hold around money) creates a new outward financial picture for you. Financial coaching integrates psychology, spirit and money.
Financial Coaching is a therapeutic process focusing on your strengths, while closing the gap between where you are and where you’d like to be.
Common reasons people seek out Financial Coaching are:
- Feeling out of control with money
- Overspending
- Under Earning
- Not knowing how to have conversations about money with their partner
- Fear of looking at “what is”
- Not saving enough
- Living in a chronic mindset of scarcity
- Don’t know how to make money work in life or business
- Avoiding money
Financial planning is a process focusing on your long term plan, integrating estate planning, tax planning, risk protection (insurances), and investments through all of life’s stages. Most financial planners and advisors do not have training in psychology or processes that motivate people to make changes in the short term to support the long term goals. Financial planning is a very important part of creating financial well-being however and long term strategies in creating wealth.
For me, financial planning has been an invaluable road map (big picture vision) supporting my husband and I toward our long term goals.
What groups of people do you work with?
I work with couples, individuals and small businesses.
How do I determine if we are a good fit?
I offer a free 20 minute phone consultation to help see if we are a good fit for one another. It is important to me your need fits the services I offer. Otherwise, I am happy to offer you a referral that better fits your need. You can call me at 650-592.8239 or email me at denisehughes@comcast.net.