In our modern way of life where we must juggle many different priorities, we often don’t take the time to learn or practice certain life skills.  When athletes want to accelerate their pace of improvement, they seek out a coach.  The coach typically is a veteran of the sport and has the outside perspective to guide the athlete onto the correct path.  Budgeting is no different.  A budget coach is someone on the outside, detached from your daily life that has the ability to see areas of improvement that you may be blind to.  They have experienced the pitfalls and payoffs of budgeting and can guide you on your budgeting journey.

I customize my coaching to match the needs of each client, but in general, it works like this:

• After you reach out initially, I will send you a questionnaire to learn more about your current situation.  There are many different reasons why someone might be looking for a budget coach.
• If you scheduled a free consultation, I will review some information with you about the budgeting method I teach along with the software (YNAB) and general philosophy.  In the consultation session, I will go over the different types of things I can help you with, based on your questionnaire responses.  Based on your needs, I will recommend one of my various services or create something customized for you.  I will only recommend to continue if I believe I can help you reach your goals.
• You sleep on it and decide whether or not you want to work with me.
• If you do decide to move forward with more coaching sessions, we will discuss which service might be the best fit for you, whether that’s a discounted package deal, or ad-hoc sessions.
• Once we schedule our first session, I will give you a list of things to prepare beforehand.  This will help maximize our one-on-one time for important things like evaluating goals and setting up processes.
• Depending on your needs, we may go over your existing budget, create a new budget, review your finances, plan and set goals, or go into advanced features of YNAB.  The sky is the limit!
• We will evaluate your progress at the end of each session and set goals for follow-up sessions, if needed and desired.
• While I make every effort to meet your needs, it may become apparent that I am unable to further assist you, whether that’s because you’re already a pro, or maybe we’re just not the perfect fit.  That’s ok!  At that point, I can refer you to other resources if desired, whether that is another coach in my network or other online resources.

A big part of successful budgeting is building good habits.  The level of coaching required depends on your pace of building new habits, learning new methods, and how quickly you reach your personal goals.  In the first session, we will go over the different types of habits that you will want to form and design a plan to help you form them.  I will coach you for as long as needed as long as we are making progress during each session.

YNAB is a budgeting method and amazing software product created by You Need A Budget LLC.  I generally prefer to teach people how to use the YNAB software and follow the YNAB method.  The method is based on the concept of “zero-based budgeting” which means that for every dollar you have, you assign it to a specific purpose.  There is a separate cost associated with using the YNAB software, but don’t worry – we will budget for that!  YNAB includes a free trial, so for initial budgeting sessions if you do not already use YNAB, you can try it out for free.  Find out more on the YNAB website.

While it is not a requirement to use YNAB for my budget coaching, I truly believe that the ease-of-use of the YNAB software, along with their well-thought-out methodology, increases your chances of reaching your goals and budgeting successfully.

I encourage my clients to be fully open about their goals and needs.  I also have a lot of experience in eliciting information from individuals from my career in Information Technology.  I am confident that I can understand your needs and provide a service that will meet or exceed your needs.  With that said, it is always possible that your expectations of what you will get from coaching might not be fulfilled.  In such a case, I encourage you to let me know as soon as possible if you feel you are not getting good value from your sessions.  Refunds for services already rendered (time spent) will generally not be provided.  If you purchased a “package” service at a discounted rate and decide to cancel, I may grant prorated refunds on a case-by-case basis.  I would encourage you to read the service agreement on the Privacy Policy and Service Contract page.