Money Coaching, or Financial Wellness Coaching, is not financial services; it’s “people services.”

It’s a practice dedicated to helping you reach your fullest potential by fixing your relationship with money, through discovering your unconscious and destructive beliefs, biases and behaviors that have held you back from making smarter money choices.

It’s about creating unobstructed pathways to achieving your most important goals and attaining financial self-sufficiency.

In its ideal form, wellness coaching helps you and your personal coach will help you reach your financial goals, such as how to build savings, create a financial plan or pay down debt. 

As your behaviors change, and your financial literacy improves, your coach can help you identify what drives your personal financial decisions, develop healthy attitudes about finances, and create dependable lifelong habits.  

Financial Wellness Coaching identifies people’s biases and behaviors relating to money (behavioral economics), and builds sound money management skills around those behaviors, ans many times in spite of them.

Advisors from big, national firms fill a need, but can’t afford to offer wellness coaching services because it doesn’t fit the corporate models of their employers: big banks and brokerages. They make a living when they sell you financial instruments, but very few of them are offering wellness coaching to their private clients. The emphasis of money coaching is on self-improvement and skill development, not on product sales.

As a result, authentic financial wellness coaching has become the province of independent professionals, and it’s no secret that most qualified money coaches have migrated away from traditional financial services.

Financial Wellness Coaching (Money Coaching) is a highly personalized process and is designed to deliver exactly what you need it to deliver toward achieving your most important goals in life.

For instance, if out-of-control spending is your downfall, your coach may have you do some self-examination about what goals are truly important to you, examine your current spending patterns and develop a better strategy to ensure you improve.  

A seasoned money coach can help you:

• Understand and control your spending.

• Understand your money fears, and the emotional aspects of personal finance.

• Create a budget that you can live with.

• Create a financial plan for long-term success.

• Establish an emergency fund.

• Manage debt.

These areas should be examined and developed to build a solid foundation that you can build a beter investment plan upon.

From a philosophical standpoint, working on investor behaviors is often a necessary step before working on the money.  

Fix the Investor. From a behavioral standpoint, coaching can help you to modify or eliminate the behaviors and biases that have caused you to be fearful or hesitant when making financial decisions. The objective is to eliminate destructive, loss-producing habits and become an emotionally intelligent investor, which is far more important than merely picking the right stock. In other words, fixing the investor.

Fix the Investments. From a purely functional perspective, the coaching will help you get out of debt, structure a workable budget, find the best investment solutions for your particular goals, or structure the best possible retirement planning strategy, to name just a few. This simply means fixing the investments so they work harder for you. Fixing the investments means that you must stop trying to BEAT the market, because in the long run, you won’t. It’s not the solution to achieving financial self-sufficiency. 

That depends on how well you and your coach collaborate.

Money coaching is definitely a team sport, so coaching success comes down to your expectations and your openness to being coached, and your coach’s ability to know what drives you.

Some people are simply not “coachable,” because they’ve had some bad experiences with other “financial professionals” using manipulative sales tactics. It happens quite a bit, and if this sounds like you, your defensiveness is understandable.

Through building trust, most clients come to learn that money coaching is not just another wolf in sheep’s clothing, and its not a product; Its a process.

A process centered around guided self-improvement.

A successful money coach is one you outgrow…really!

Client self-sufficiency is the singular desired ultimate outcome of money coaching, the state of being where clients no longer depend on Wall Street, its brokers and agents, big banks, or even their coaches!

Having developed the emotional composure and intellectual ability to make their own money decisions based on their personal objectives, clients kind of know when they are ready to “go it alone.’

It means fixing the investor.

It means fixing the investments.

It means fixing the money.

It means fixing the future.

If you’ve worked with a traditional investment broker, adviser or financial planner, you already know they may add value. Or they may not.

Client self-sufficiency is the last thing Wall Street wants for you.

The principles of financial wellness coaching tell us that our clients already have the instinctual ability to determine and achieve their goals, but often don’t achieve them because they may have emotional biases and behaviors that destroy their ability to move forward.

Coaches and clients share the same goal:  Client Self-sufficiency.