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• Build awareness around spending habits. Most clients I work with have never made a budget, or if they have they couldn’t stick with it for more than a few weeks. This means my first task as a Financial Coach in Thame is to help them discover how much money is coming in, how much is going out, and where it is going.

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• Dream your “Awesome” lifestyle. Since Financial Coaches view money as a tool rather than a goal, I provide an opportunity for clients to explore and define the life they want to live—not just in retirement, but now! Ask what they really want out of life, and challenge them to think about how they will make it happen for themselves today, not in 30+ years. This means taking a hard look at personal values, fears around money, and desires for life.

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• Explore emotions and behaviours. It’s easy to tell people what to do. It’s much harder to get them to do it! Humans are inherently irrational when it comes to money, so as your Financial Coach in Thame our job is to help clients identify their stories/patterns of behaviour, and get them to understand that it’s often their own beliefs about money that are at the root of their spending issues.

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• Address their tough financial problems. Establish an emergency fund. Manage debt, and create a plan to pay it down.

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• Accumulate 3-6 months savings. Most clients of Financial Coaches in Thame have never had 3-6 months of money saved at once, so this is both a practical challenge of how to put the funds away each month, and a behavioural one (since they’ve never done it, it can appear overwhelming, scary, and feel unattainable).

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• Develop a spending plan and budgeting system that actually works for that client. 

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• Support and Follow-up. Upon completing the process, a client will often continue to engage a Financial Coach, to call upon him/her in “times of weakness”, when other life challenges come into play, for general questions, emotional support, clarifications, etc.