Coaching on the Fundamentals of Personal Finance Financial Coaching Toolkit

One area where financial rules-of-thumb don’t make sense for everyone is in regard to emergency savings. “You should have 3-6 months in savings for emergencies.” What if there was a better way? In this lesson, you’ll learn how to help a client identify the types of emergencies they fear or worry over the most. Then you’ll see exactly how to help them to think critically and financially prepare for these emergencies should they arise.

When a client has their reason for saving money, their motivation to save soars. It’s not just a certain percentage or number that everyone should have. It’s creating their unique target and their specific plan that will truly set your clients up for success.

Bonus! Even if you personally already have an emergency savings, do this exercise for yourself and see if it changes your target or if you feel differently about it!

This lesson is 38 minutes and contains 2 handouts.

When it comes to credit scores and reporting, more than almost any other topic in this lesson, it’s likely your client knows a lot. Unfortunately, what they know may be a lot of misinformation and myths. If your goal is to meet your clients where they’re at, it’s important to first identify these falsehoods. Only then can you coach your clients from a clean slate to prevent confusion, create buy-in and encourage them to commit to reviewing their credit information consistently.

This lesson is 35 minutes and contains 1 handout.

I know why I love calculating my net worth. I know what it tells me, what it shows me and how it makes me feel. But none of those reasons may necessarily be true for our clients. Their reasons are likely very different and it’s your job to unlock that for them. Once you do that, then you can dive in to helping them calculate and understand this important financial health number.

Coaching on net worth is one of the best opportunities to challenge the way a client sees themselves with money. But that can only happen if we seize that opportunity during this conversation. In this lesson, you’ll learn an exact process for creating buy-in, explaining net worth, calculating it, and then setting goals around it. You’ll never talk about net worth the same way again.

This lesson is 22 minutes and contains 1 handout.

Our principles serve as the foundation for a system of beliefs or behaviors. They help us live our lives in purposeful ways. In this lesson, you’ll learn a coaching exercise that will help your clients identify and establish their own financial principles around things like debt, spending, savings, communication, loaning money and more. These principles will guide your clients’ decisions around money for the rest of their lives.

Bonus! Do this exercise yourself coach!

This lesson is 56 minutes and contains 2 handouts.

Planning ahead is my superpower and in this lesson, I pass that power onto you. Planning ahead is like flexing a muscle — it gets stronger and stronger the more you do it. This lesson will give you a step-by-step approach to help your clients plan ahead in every area of their financial life without it being daunting or overwhelming. You will be able to help your clients create a plan for their money a year in advance and teach them how to master this skill and do it all on their own.

This lesson contains ready-to-go spreadsheets and handouts galore that will help you (and your clients!) with this necessary part of managing money. This lesson is the most practical and immediately applicable to your business and current clients.

Bonus! You can use the planning ahead handouts provided with your own money!

This lesson is 33 minutes and contains 16 handouts.

Your savings rate is the amount of money, expressed as a percentage, that a person deducts from their disposable income to set aside as a nest egg or for their retirement. Do me a favor coach, don’t ever use that definition with a client!

This lesson helps you communicate to your clients how their savings rate is one more building block they can use to gain insights on their finances. It provides your clients with awareness of their financial habits and can be a way they challenge themselves to improve over time and save even more. Most importantly, knowing your savings rate helps prevent lifestyle creep. In this lesson, you’ll learn step-by-step how to teach and coach on this important topic along with the tools you need to calculate it.

This lesson is 35 minutes and contains 2 handouts.

Chances are, you help your clients evaluate their expenses, the value they add to their life and whether or not that expense stays or goes. In this lesson we teach a coaching method you can use with the example of tithing — but this method can (and should) be applied to every expense your clients may have. Why tithing? Because you probably hold a personal opinion on tithing. And when it comes to helping our clients think critically about their expenses and the value they add to their lives, your personal opinion doesn’t matter. We show you how an effective coaching conversation should go — using one of the expenses people (even coaches) feel most strongly about.

This lesson is 25 minutes and contains 1 handout.

Retirement is a concept that can feel panic-inducing for some clients, and others have a hard time even connecting with that far-off season of their life. Learn how to navigate retirement conversations with your clients, build their buy-in, and help them redefine what “retirement” means to them!

This lesson is 61 minutes and contains 5 handouts.