What to Expect in Your First Month Working With Me

Let’s unravel the mystery together...

I love working with clients. I love talking with them, listening to their thoughts, feeling their emotions, and guiding them through their financial situations to move forward on meeting their financial goals and, even more so, their life goals.

MY APPROACH

When you work with me on an ongoing basis, we go through a personalized combination of holistic financial planning, detailed financial coaching and day-to-day money management learning. I find that my clients most often benefit from integrating each piece into understanding their complete financial life and how each applies to their everyday decisions, choices, and progress toward goals.

A big part of our work together focuses on holistic financial education - how to make sure you’re saving and investing for retirement appropriately, what constitutes a sufficient financial and insurance shield against any unexpected or unfortunate events, if/why you should be preparing an estate plan (even at 25!), and yes, how to invest appropriately too. But we also cover the day-to-day money management side as well - how to set up your credit card payments to make sure you’re not being charged interest, how to create a good cash flow strategy to make sure you spend less than you earn, how to read your pay stub, what to look for in your employee benefits package, how to open your first brokerage account, and so much more.

I take the approach of not just telling you what to do, but educating you on why you should be doing it, how you can make it happen, and how it applies to your future as well. We will often screenshare together to get the job done in our meeting itself. I focus on building habits, tackling any projects that need doing (like an older employer 401(k) rollover), and making sure you understand your financial life in its entirety. My philosophy is that if you can learn about all of this now in a personalized and relevant way, this knowledge and these habits will serve you well in the future many years beyond our work together.

THE FIRST MEETINGS - TALKING YOU

So, the first few meetings - 

After our initial chat where we decide if it’s a fit, we’ll schedule our first meeting. In our first one to two meetings we won’t necessarily talk about numbers at all. Perhaps unintuitively, we take money out of the picture for a moment to better understand you as a person. To give the best financial advice for you, this matters; it doesn’t matter if it’s the best financial advice for someone else, or even the best financial advice mathematically. It has to be the best advice for you as a person.

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We will focus on having a conversation about your background with money, how you think about money, how you approach different aspects of your financial life, and understanding where we might preliminarily focus our work together. We also talk through your general life goals, non-financial values, how you like to spend your time, etc. After that, your homework begins :)

YOUR “FINANCIAL LIFE WORKBOOK” - TALKING MONEY

At this point, you’ll be asked to provide some documents about your financial life - enough for me to get a sense of what’s happening, how I can help, and what to tackle first. So much of this information tends to be scattered across our lives, and part of our work together is gathering it all together and organizing it. With this information in hand, we start putting together your “Financial Life Workbook”. Your “Financial Life Workbook” is one place to gather information about each aspect of your financial life - your personal balance sheet, your cash flow, your employee benefits, your insurance policies, your investments, etc. Each of our subsequent meetings will generally focus on one of these areas. As we identify new areas to focus on, we might add a tab - say for stock compensation or for a housing savings worksheet.

Our first meeting after submitting much of this information, we’ll go through your personal balance sheet and cash flow worksheet (don’t worry if you don’t know what this means!) and decide our next steps. At this point, we are off to the races and will go through each module in your Financial Life Workbook and learn if/how they each apply to your life. 

MY FEES AND MEETING STRUCTURE

I charge a flat monthly rate for my ongoing services because this kind of support for early career professionals is a journey and requires ongoing support for some time, and you shouldn’t have to worry how much money you already have (to pay a traditional advisor on a traditional ‘AUM’ model) in order to receive financial advice in the first place! (How backwards is that). Financial coaching is all about learning and habits and lifestyle changes, which are not overnight processes for most of us. I want to be there and guide you at your pace, generally about one meeting per month, through that entire journey, generally six to twelve months. At that point, you are welcome to either “graduate” or continue working with me. :)

Ready, set, let’s do this!

Sound like a plan and ready to take the next step? Schedule a free 15-minute intro call with Sarah to see if it’s a fit at momentumfinancialcoaching.com!

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