In today’s episode, I answer TEN of the most frequently asked questions I get from people who are thinking about working with me. As a former teacher, I know that if one person has a question, there are multiple people wondering the same thing! I also understand the feeling of knowing you need to do something to help yourself but also feeling unsure about taking that next step. This episode is designed to help you overcome feelings of hesitation and paint a clearer picture of what it would be like to have me as your coach!
Remember, working with me is a one-time investment that’s going to pay for itself for the rest of your life. So I wanted to use this episode to answer some questions for people still on the fence. Maybe you follow me on Instagram, or maybe you have opened up the application to work with me several times and are having a hard time saying ‘yes’ to yourself – Wherever you are in the decision cycle, I am always here to answer your questions. My goal is to create a comfortable space to talk about finances.
Tune into this week’s episode to get the answers to questions I am asked all the time, such as…
[01:29] Do you only coach women?
[07:28] I’m not in debt. Can I still sign up to work with you?
[10:44] What happens after I start working with you?
[24:32] Do I have to stop using my credit cards?
Listen to this episode of Money Files and learn the answers to ten of the most frequently asked questions from clients!
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
IF YOU LOVED THIS CONVERSATION ON 10 FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT WORKING WITH ME, CHECK OUT MY EPISODE ON HOW TO BUILD YOUR FINANCIAL CONFIDENCE!
Transcript for “10 Frequently Asked Questions About Working With Me”
Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work every day with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. I thought that I would do an episode this week on frequently asked questions. So sometimes people message me on Instagram or they message me on Facebook, or I’ve even had people that will email me or people on my webinars and there are questions that people ask me. So I’m sure because I used to be a teacher, if one person has the question, multiple people have the question. So I wanted to give you a resource to answer your questions about working with me so we can limit any barriers you have from saying yes to yourself to invest in coaching. So I’m going to go ahead and dive in. So I have 10 questions for you. I’m going to break this episode into two parts, but I’m going to go over the first 10 questions.
So one of the questions that I get frequently is, do you only coach women? The answer is no. So I do predominantly market to professional single women or entrepreneurs. However, as a financial coach I also work with men and I’ve also worked with couples. If you actually go through my podcast episodes and I can tag them in the comments, you can listen to an episode from my clients, Jennifer and Amy. That’s a couple. You can listen to an episode for my client, Damon. He is a male. You can listen to my client, Brent, another male. So I do like I said, predominantly work with women and find myself working with a lot of professional single women or entrepreneurs but as a coach I also do work with men and I also work with couples.
Question number two, do you only coach people who make six figures? So the answer here is no as well. You probably have heard me talk about like six figure earners and you hear a lot of that in my content. So once again, this comes back to marketing. I speak a lot to six figure earners and a lot of my clients are six figure earners or even multiple six figure earners but I also have clients who make between mid sixties to mid nineties in terms of their income. And you also have to remember, or maybe you don’t know this but my clients are everywhere. I’ve had clients in Mozambique, I have Canadian clients, I have US clients. So my clients are international as well as US based, so with that cost of living looks different, people’s goals look different, but I do speak a lot to six figure earners but some of my clients are also making 70,000 or mid sixties into mid nineties.
So I will tell you this, the thing that all of my clients have in common is that they would tell me like, Keina, I’m making the most money I’ve ever made before and I feel like I don’t have anything to show for it. So that does look different for a lot of different people but the thing that I help my clients overcome is the thought that if you make more money you’ll have more money. Just because you make more money doesn’t mean you’ll have more money. There’s this thing called lifestyle creep. In addition to right now there’s inflation, but lifestyle creep, as you make more money you start to want more. Like, ooh, I’m making more money so let me go get a bigger apartment. I’m making more money. Let me go buy a new car. So even though you’re making more money, you still feel like you’re not making enough. So I help my clients overcome that thought error that they have, that just because they make more money they’ll have more money, or they expect to feel a certain way because they make more money.
The truth is that whatever skills, fears, thoughts or habits you had when you were making $30,000 a year, they’ll follow you to you making $300,000 a year because the thing that’s consistent is how you feel, the spending habits that you have, the way you think about money, how that’s parallel to how you were raised, like all of those things. So if you are listening to me and you’re like, Keina, I’m not making six figures yet. I don’t want you to wait to work with me until you make six figures. You could very well be a great fit to work with me right now. That’s why I do consults with people. But the reason that I want to work with you right now is because we can work on your money mindset right now. We can work on your relationship with money so that as you earn more money, you’ll actually get to experience the pleasure and the benefits of earning more money.
So my clients that have worked with me that have made like $70,000 a year, $80,000 a year, the thing that I love is so many of them have gotten $20,000 raises, $30,000 raises. And so they’ve become six figure earners while working with me or shortly after working with me. The thing that they’ve been able to do is actually experience the lifestyle they thought would come with making more money. When I talk about that experience, what I’m saying is like they’ve been able to save money or they’ve been able to pay off debt, they’ve been able to contribute to their retirement or have money to be able to travel because we were able to look at their finances and help them clearly define what’s the purpose of money in your life? We were able to look at and say like, okay, when you earn more money, when you start making more money, how do you want to use it? So we were able to look at like when you think about the next job that you have, how much money do you want to make? Why do you want that amount of money? So they were crystal clear on the amount of money they wanted to make and they know the goal that they’re working towards.
They’re not just passively earning more, they are very active when they think about how much more money they want to make and why they want to make that amount. So it’s tied to the things that they value, it’s tied to their goals, they have a crystal clear picture for themselves. Then when I think about the entrepreneurs that I’m working with, maybe they don’t have a six figure business yet, when they work with me, we put in the financial systems for them to feel confident with how they’re managing their money, to feel confident with how they’re saving for taxes, to feel confident with how they’re paying themselves. So some of the people that I work with that are entrepreneurs also have a job. The same time, like I’m thinking about my client, Lyna has a part-time job and then she also works in her business as well. So she manages her business finance as well. She knows how to manage her part-time income well and that came from us working together before she was making six figures. So it’s not just about coming and working with me as a six figure earner, it’s really about helping you have this healthy relationship that you desire to have with your finances so you’re able to make the money moves that you desire.
The next frequently asked question is Keina, I’m not in debt, can I still work with you? The answer is yes. Like being in debt is not a requirement to start working with me and believe it or not, not all of my clients are in debt. I’ve had clients that have had trust funds and they’ve encountered, like they have inheritance. I have clients that have just fully paid off their home, they’ve already managed their money really well. I have clients that they have never had debt but they feel like they can’t save money. They’re kind of like stuck in the middle. So not all of my clients, like I said, not all of my clients are in debt and really that group of clients, like they’re really looking to feel comfortable maybe spending money or they want to feel comfortable making money or they just simply want to start being more involved with their numbers as they transition into entrepreneurship or get back into the workforce or maybe they’re entering a new season of their life like marriage or a partnership or home ownership or parenthood.
I speak a lot about debt but not all of my clients are in debt and we still are able to talk about their finances because debt isn’t the number one indicator that you need a financial coach. You wanting to avoid your numbers and not wanting to look at your numbers and knowing that you have thoughts about spending money or thoughts about saving money. Like those are keys that you want to work with a financial coach. That is not the number one key.
Question number four in frequently asked question is, I’m married but I handle the finances, can I work with you? The answer is yes. If you actually go back through my podcast episodes my friend, we actually have two podcasts that we’ve done together. Martha, we did a podcast on ADHD but then we also did a podcast early on when we worked together. So Martha is married to her husband, she has two girls and she did the work with me alone. She did not do the work with her husband. So we definitely talked a lot about what did the work that we were doing together mean in her marriage and in her partnership. So it’s also not a requirement that you and your spouse or you and your partner work with me because that might not be how finances are managed in your home. But then on the flip side of that, like if you and your husband or you and your wife want to work with me, you can do that as well because there is the space for that. But there’s that flexibility for clients to also come to me and only one person in the relationship be working with me and we talk about how their finances can work and how they can make the financial coaching benefit their entire household.
So what I find is that a lot of people that come to me and maybe only one partner wants to work with me as they’re like, okay, I want to get my stuff in order and then I feel like we can tackle the household finances. So sometimes I have people that are coming to me and they have joint finances, sometimes they don’t have joint finances, but as a coach I am listening for what you want and I want things to make sense for how you manage money within your household or how you desire to manage money within your household.
Question number five, that’s a frequently asked question is, what happens after I start working with you? This may or may not land with some of you, but I know some of you are going to be like, girl, I completely understand this. So I would say that after you start working with me it just feels like you were able to take your bra off after a long day and you get home and you’re like, yes, this is amazing. But really like on consults with clients, I do a 60 minute consult with people that want to work with me. And when we get to the end and people have said like, yes Keina, I want to move forward and work with you, I ask them like, how are you feeling right now? What’s coming up for you? And so many people say like, I just feel like there’s a weight taken off my shoulder. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone about finances. I feel comfortable with you, I feel like you understand me, I feel like you’re going to help me achieve the goals that I desire. So they immediately release some sort of stress that they’ve been walking around with, right? And that’s before we’ve even looked at numbers. But just that opportunity to feel heard is allowing them to release this weight and they know that they’re going to spend five months working with me to address the goals that we talked about on the consult.
So on the consult, when I’m working with people, I ask them, after they say yes, we go ahead and we book their first coaching call together and I coach on Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays. So we find a mutual time that works for them and then clients, well after they say yes, they have their coaching call on the calendar and I ask them to fill out a client profile so everything’s automated, they get a welcome kit, they fill out a client profile, they tell me more about their hopes, their dreams and they let me in on some more of their numbers. So after that, I take the information from there and I use that information and everything that I’ve learned about them to help them set and monitor their progress during the five months that we’re working together. So in addition to the hour call, it just gives me some more context for who you are and it allows me to really support you and help you feel comfortable in having a space to work on your finances.
Question number six, will you help me make a budget? The answer is yes. I get this question so much, it’s so funny to me because people are like, okay, but will you help me make a budget? And I think that’s just because it depends on where people are coming to me from. Some people are very focused on making a budget, sometimes on a consult people are telling me about a relationship with a family member or they’re telling me maybe about an experience that they’ve had with their finances. And so when we’re talking about this, like we get into the emotional side of money and sometimes they come back and they’re like, but wait, am I actually going to have a budget? So like they want to make sure that their emotional wellbeing is taken care of, but then they also want that practical piece too and they want to know if they’re going to have a budget and so the answer is yes, you’re going to have a budget. As a part of working with me and saying yes to me, one of the things you also get in that welcome kit is a financial plan template. And in the financial plan template there’s a tab that says money plan ao that becomes where we start to build your budget.
So there’s a whole video for you to watch and it explains the numbers that I want you to put in. I don’t need you to have anything, right, I just need you to give me your best guesses. So in that money plan that’s like I said, the beginning framework of us making a budget together, but we revisit that spreadsheet that I share with you on our first call and we’re going to use that spreadsheet throughout our work together. So the goal is for you to know your numbers and for you to walk away with a budget that reflects your life, your business, or in some cases it’s going to be both your life and your business. I want you to have a budget that you actively use to make intentional decisions about how you want to manage your money day to day. So your budget in the beginning is like this static thing where you’re like, I don’t know how much I spend on groceries. And I’m like, hey, let’s make a guess, maybe it’s $800 a month.
So in the beginning we’re playing with the numbers, but by the end of our relationship together, my goal is that this budget is an active budget for you to have as a tool that informs how you spend and think about money. Because I want you to be someone who says, oh my goodness, budgeting is so therapeutic. I love knowing my numbers. This is the best thing ever. I didn’t know that money could feel this good. And so you’ll definitely walk away with a budget that feels good to you and a budget that you also know how to adjust as life shifts and adjust.
So question number seven, how long do you work with clients? Once again, another question I get and some people are like, I don’t know Keina, how long do you work with clients? So I work with clients for a minimum of five months and in my five month coaching partnership we have three one-to-one coaching calls on Zoom each month. So like I said, we’ll meet three times a month, they’re 45 minutes each, they’re on Zoom. I look at you, you look at me, we can share the screen. We have tools that we’re able to access, worksheets that we’re able to access and we do that for five months. Over the course of five months, you have 15 coaching calls and the reason that I’ve made my partnership five months is because I want to do life with you. And I say that because the thing that makes coaching with me different is that when you try to budget on your own, when it doesn’t work at the end of the week or the end of 30 days, you throw it out the window.
When something happens, like your car breaks down and you have to use your credit card, you throw the budget out the window but with five months of working together, we get to do life together, which means you’re going to learn how to manage your money and to feel confident about your finances through all of life’s hiccups. Through a month where you’re like, oh my goodness, Keina, I made $20,000 in my business but the next month I made $8,000 in my business. Or I’ve had clients that have bought homes, they’ve gotten engaged, they’ve changed jobs, they’ve moved states, they’ve booked vacation, they’ve sold homes, they’ve bought new cars, they’ve gotten in car accidents, they’ve started businesses, they’ve experienced loss of a loved one. Like there are so many things that I’ve experienced with my clients through the five months and the beauty of that is that they learn how they can use their numbers regardless of any situation.
And that even includes sometimes working together. Some of my clients try to put their head in the sand and so for me as a coach, I just want to know, like tell me what’s coming up and let us work through it together because that’s a normal feeling that you have even if we weren’t working together. So you are paying me, so let me help you work through this so that you can move forward and be making steps forward. They don’t even have to be big steps, but I can help you problem solve for what you’re experiencing. So that’s why I work with clients for a minimum of five months is because we get to do life together. So when you’re thinking about like, yeah, Keina I want to work with you, but what happens if I get back into debt or what happens if my car breaks down or what happens if I want to take a last minute trip with my friends?
We actually get to answer those questions in real time together. I have clients that’ll come to me and they’ll be like, Keina, I need breaks, but because we made a budget and on my money plan, I have auto maintenance, I’ve already helped you start to think about how you want to use your finances to prepare for auto maintenance. So in the past you maybe had to put the whole expense on your credit card. Well we’re not going to have to do that because we’ve started working together. So that’s the beauty of spending five months with me and also you’re not always going to be focused on learning how to budget, you’re going to be wanting to hit new goals. Like maybe something on your radar is you’re like, oh my goodness, I do want to buy a house or Keina this job opportunity came available or now that I’m not thinking about paying off credit card debt, I want to start a business. Like once again I think about my client Lyna, she came to me, she was in like $10,000 of credit card debt. She paid off the credit card debt and then we started working on building her business and raising her prices.
So she was able to transition from like where she only talked about debt to now she’s talking about building. So in her building, she was building a business. She was then expanding to think about an investment property, something she never saw herself being able to do before because of the amount of time that we worked together. So like I said, I work with my clients for a minimum of five months and then I also have clients that will work with me for an additional five months. So we might work together for 10 months or 15 months or whatever that is, so people have the ability to work with me more than just one five month partnership.
So frequently asked question number eight, I have a life event happening soon, should I wait to work with you Keina? The answer is no, girl, no. I don’t care what’s happening because the truth is that life will always be there and you are at an age right now where you know that regardless of anything going on around you, you know life always comes up and life is always there in your face. Like you have a wedding, you have a kid, you have a move, you have a job transition, all of these things are always going to present themselves. And what I can guarantee you is that you are always going to be up against finding a perfect time but as you’re trying to figure out a perfect time, things are still going to be happening with your finances that you aren’t going to feel in control of or feel confident about. So whether you feel like, oh my goodness, this is the perfect time and you feel confident and ready to start, I’m going to tell you that you’re probably not going to feel very confident, like you’re going to feel confident in me, but you’re going to be looking at the things going on around you and maybe some things won’t feel solvable, but that’s why you hire a coach because the coach can help you break things down and help you see a different picture than you’re able to paint for yourself.
They’re going to help you be able to make progress that you couldn’t make on your own. And so with my clients that are wanting to buy a home, like I think about my client, Taveana, you should go listen to her podcast episode because Taveana, she gets on a consult with me, actually Brent referred her to me because he had worked with me so that’s his friend. And he was like, you should work with Kena and Taveana just thought that Brent had drank the Keina Kool-Aid. So she had it on her radar that she wanted to buy a house. And so she actually used the money that she had in savings to buy a home to pay for coaching. But I was like, one of the things I told her, I was like, you’re going to go and buy this house, but you’re going to go into the house confused about your finances. That’s not how you want to go into buying a home because you’re going to be like house poor. And by house poor, I mean like you’re going to have bought a house that you don’t know if you can afford it. You don’t know if you can furnish it. You haven’t built your numbers around where you desire to go.
So she started working with me before her life event or in the midst of her life event, she had also gotten engaged. But like, because she said yes to coaching, I was able to help her plan her wedding, I was able to help her and her fiance actually join their finances together. Like those are the things that we were able to do. She was able to pay down debt, she actually replaced the money that she used for coaching. She replaced her money in her savings account. So what I’m telling you is she actually learned how to save money and knew that she could save money on demand. But those are the things that you are not going to be able to see for yourself but as a coach, I can see for you. You probably might be in a space where you’re like, okay, I want to start coaching once I start making more money. Here’s the thing, start with where you are right now because this is probably the least amount of money that you’re going to make in your entire life, which I told one of my clients who’s currently working with me and I’m like, you’re going to get a raise this year.
Like let’s put in the five months now so that when you get the raise you feel the impact of the raise like that is going to feel good to you and I want that to feel good to you. And so we’ve been working together for several months and like she can actually see like, oh, I can save a thousand dollars a month. Okay, I can prepare to start repaying my student loans, but if she had a waited for the raise, I can tell you she’s going to consume the money because she doesn’t have the thoughts and the skills and the habits that are required to manage the amount of money that she wants to manage. So life is always going to happen. Don’t wait, because more often than not, you are going to do better with a coach right now and of course there are like real things where my clients are like, Hey Keina, I’m going to Europe for two weeks, can we start when we come back? Yes. But on our consult, what we do is we just push your coaching call out two weeks or your start date out two weeks, but you make the decision now so that you have that commitment to yourself so you feel that accountability and support in the beginning and you’re not waiting and outsourcing your control.
So frequently asked question number nine, do I have to stop using my credit card? The answer is no. You do not have to stop using your credit card to work with me. I’m not the financial coach that’s going to make you shred your credit cards. I’m not going to put your credit card in a block of ice and say like, freeze it. In fact, some of my clients have used their credit cards to pay for coaching. But my goal is for you to feel clear about where your money is going and I want you to feel clear and in control. So when it comes to credit cards, my goal is to help my clients feel responsible and not be in that space where they’re feeling like, okay, I’m robbing Peter to pay Paul. I want them to actually know like I am making an extra thousand dollars payment to my credit card and I want them to feel the impact of making an extra payment. I have a client right now who in her spending plan, she’s making like $1,100 a month, she’s putting towards credit cards. She’s like, oh my goodness, Keina, this feels so good because I see my credit card balances going down.
She’s like, in the past before I started working with you, I was putting like $1,800 payments towards my credit cards, but nothing was happening with them and I could never figure out why. But because we put all of her numbers in one place, we have a clear strategy for how she wants to pay off her debt, she can actually figure out like, okay, I can see my credit card going down each and every month and I know that I can actually comfortably use my credit card as well because I know how to to manage both of those things. So she’s learning and has learned how to be responsible with her credit card and her credit card not just be the thing that she uses to carry her from one month to the next.
And then lastly, a frequently ask question I get is like, how do your clients find the money to invest working with you? And so sometimes this is like the elephant in the room, like, okay, Keina, you’re asking me to pay you to work with you, but I don’t have the money. Or I don’t just have $8,000 saved to work with you. And so for some of my clients, they have taken out a personal loan. Some of my clients have used it as a business expense. Some of my clients have taken a loan from a family member. Sometimes people take it from savings. Like I told you, my client Taveana, she took money from savings and she paid to work with me. Clients have used a bonus, clients have taken out a PayPal loan, they’ve done 0% interest on her credit card. Some of my clients have repurposed money that they saved for another goal. One of my clients had a goal to pay off her car. She invested in coaching instead of paying off her car. And the benefit of that was we paid off the car and we paid off over $30,000 worth of debt while we were working together.
So if you want to invest in coaching, there’s a way for you to invest in coaching. And coaching is going to be the thing that pays for itself year after year after year. And so this is a one-time investment that’s going to pay for itself the rest of your life. So I don’t know where you may be in the cycle of being like, okay, I want to work with Keina, I want to join and sign up for her five month coaching partnership. But I wanted to take this time to answer some questions because I know that I have Keina lurkers as you guys have deemed yourself, whether that be on Instagram or people that have opened up the application several times. I know what it feels like to be in that point where you’re like, I know I need to move forward with this but then your brain keeps saying like, okay, but what about this? But what about that? So I’m always here to answer your questions. It’s one of the reasons that I do an hour consult because I want the opportunity to get to know you and I also want the opportunity for you to feel heard and to have a comfortable space to talk about finances.
So I’m going to do a part two to this episode as well. But thank you so much for tuning in to some of the frequently asked questions that clients have. And if you are ready to move this work forward and you want to dive deeper and actually engage in this work and spend five months with me, you can go to the link in my show notes and you can apply to work with me. You can also go to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and I look forward to talking to you. Have a good one. Bye.
Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
