Need to tone up, trim down or tailor your workout to target specific muscle groups? You’d likely contact a personal trainer who can provide the knowledge and accountability necessary to reach your health and fitness goals.
But if your financial behavior needs to shape up, you might not know who to turn to for advice. Enter the financial coach. Like a personal trainer for your pocketbook, they can give you tips and tricks to improve your relationship with money and achieve your financial ambitions.
Here’s a closer look at why a financial coach might be the best bet for you, and what the process entails.
A financial coach is NOT a financial adviser… So what do they do?
“[Financial advisers are] not going to help you have a healthier relationship with money,” Jenny Whichello says. Whichello, previously a corporate CFO for over 16 years, is a money mindset and financial planning coach.
“They’re very tactical,” she says of financial advisers. “‘Here’s how much you should be saving. Here’s your tax situation. Here’s when you can retire.’ But for anybody to follow through on a plan of any kind… it has to be meaningful to you.”
That’s where Whichello comes in.
“I help people prime themselves on the inside to be successful with their financial plan or their financial goals,” Whichello says, adding that no financial coach should also give investing advice, unless they have the right credentials.
Content creator JC Rodriguez earned his financial coach designation through Ramsey Solutions. He provides free financial coaching for followers of his social channels, where he gives tips on how to build a life of financial peace.
“Financial coaching is built around people and their behaviors over the math,” he says, adding that it’s about addressing people’s habits and backgrounds, too.
When should you begin working with a financial coach?
“When you have awareness that something isn’t working, that is the time to ask for help,” Whichello says. She tends to work with women in their late 30s to mid-40s who are on the precipice of change. As they enter midlife, they want to build on their professional success to do something completely different.
Rodriguez coaches people who are going through life milestones—graduating college, getting married, having a baby—and experiencing an awakening that they need to be more financially responsible.
“A lot of it is people who don’t feel like they’re at the level they want to be or feel like they’ve been stagnant for a while, and they’re just trying to get to that next level,” he says.
How to find the right financial coach
Unlike financial advisers, being a financial coach doesn’t require a standardized designation. So Rodriguez thinks it’s critical to have an initial meeting to determine a fit. “It comes down to that first meeting,” he says. “‘Does this person actually care about me? Does this feel relational or does this feel like a transaction? Are they listening to me?’”
He also thinks it’s fair to ask where the coach is at in their personal finances. Then you can compare their content and lifestyle on different social media channels to make sure their message is accurate and consistent.
The financial coaching process
Following that first meeting or initial consultation, Rodriguez says that coaching sessions contain a lesson or financial principle to apply to the person’s life. Then the session ends with an invitation to commit to an action, whether that’s automatically transferring money into a high-yield savings account, creating a budget, etc.
Whichello’s process takes five to six months, with biweekly meetings and support offered in between via Voxer and an option to reconnect every quarter. She begins by helping clients unpack the core beliefs that have led to their money issues. “Whatever your financial situation is—you have too much debt, you’re living paycheck to paycheck, you’re [not] making enough money, you’re not saving any money, you spend all your money—there’s a belief and a whole set of behaviors behind that.”
After helping clients gain clarity, she then works with them to re-envision what their relationship with money could be and uncover what vision they have for their life. “What is it going to cost for this to be your life in one year, five years, 10 years, whatever.”
From there, Whichello helps build a road map of actions clients can take, such as restructuring their cash flow, to achieve that vision. She says the reality is that most people don’t have any awareness of where their money goes and aren’t intentional when it comes to spending decisions.
“When you give people clarity on what they really want and you help them surface a vision that makes them teary-eyed, when they think about that being their life, all of a sudden the money they were spending at Target every Saturday is not important anymore. And they make those decisions almost in a subconscious way.”
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