Thinking about coaching but not sure what to expect?
In this episode, I’m pulling back the curtain on my five-month coaching partnership. You’ll hear answers to the five most common questions I get about what coaching looks like, how it works week-to-week, and how it helps you create long-term results.
I break down exactly what happens inside the coaching container from building your first real budget to the “ah-ha” moments that help you stay out of debt and stop overspending for good.
If you’ve been lurking, this episode was made for you.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
[01:04] Why booking a consult is the most important step
[04:39] Yes, you’ll get a real budget and no, it’s not just a list of bills
[08:02] How we layer in cultural, family, and life context to make your plan work
[10:16] What weekly coaching actually looks like
[13:22] How clients make their investment back (sometimes within weeks)
[16:15] Why you don’t need to be debt-free to start
[18:45] There’s never a “perfect time”, here’s why you should start now
Tune in to learn how coaching can shift your relationship with money, create sustainable habits, and help you finally feel in control of your finances.
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 this episode helped you see what’s possible, be sure to check out Episode 179: Permission Budgeting: How to Overcome Overwhelm and Take Control of Your Finances.
Transcript for “What Really Happens in a 5-Month Money Coaching Partnership”
Intro: Hi and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work everyday 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.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. So this, I thought this would be a fun episode because I know what it feels like to be in the buyer’s seat. I actually recently was looking for some, like a new coach, specifically related to my fitness and I listen to people’s podcast. I get on their website, I look at their Instagram. So maybe in a very similar seat as you and when you’re in that like searching seat and position, you’re like, okay, I want to know all the details, which I will also let you know like sign up for a consult if you do nothing else, bet on yourself in that way, just go ahead and book a consult. And I am not saying that in like a cheeky way, but there are so many people that come book a consult with me and it is something more than they ever expected. But also you can get your questions answered.
On a consult, you get an entire hour to talk with me. And it’s not just talking, like I am there. I always open up the call. And just to let you know that we spend the first 30 minutes or so of the call and you telling me like all about your money, what is it that is your, what’s your challenge right now? What is your money talking to you about? Why can’t you sleep at night? Because I know that you are up at night thinking about your finances. I know that this isn’t the first time you’ve actually thought about it or that you’ve even tried. I actually am getting ready to record a podcast with one of my clients who, she told me in January was when she started looking at financial coaches and she’s like, the only thing Keina that I wish that would’ve been true is that I would’ve started working with you sooner. And that did happen. I mean she just was researching in January and I remember on our consult specifically, she was like, listen, I’ve already talked to a whole bunch of other people. They’re trying to sell me stuff and blah blah.
So she was like, and I know that you are having different encounters when you’re thinking about like, I want to work with somebody. I’m not really sure if it’s Keina or not Keina. And you might even be worried about the cost. Let’s be honest. And I go into all of that on the consult. And one of the reasons I talk about the cost on my consult is because listen, you are stressed out about money and I don’t want you talking yourself out of something that you can actually afford. And you can’t see that you can afford it because you don’t know your numbers. I know that. Okay friend. But anyways, this episode is really for my Keina lurkers. And you have deemed yourself as such, clients have told me in terms of like, Keina, I’ve just been lurking and following you on social media and I’ve heard from your clients, I listened to your podcast.
I even had somebody on a consult that was telling me like, my daughter knows your voice because we listen to your podcast on the way to work. Listen, I know all about you. So I just thought that this would be a good podcast episode to talk about what the five month coaching partnership actually looks like. And you might just be thinking like, yeah, Keina, but what does it actually look like? So I thought I would try to pull the curtain back a little bit and help you see what this five month coaching partnership looks like. So I’m going to walk through five of the most common questions I get about coaching and give you a little behind the scenes look at what happens inside the coaching container. And I want you to listen to this episode as if you were already one of my clients because the version of you that joins coaching, she’s not overwhelmed. She’s not stuck in shame, she’s not guessing every single payday. She knows exactly what to do.
So I want to talk to her and I know you may not feel like she’s there yet, but I want to talk to her because she is in you and I want her to come out and I want her to meet me. So let’s talk about the first question. First question is, will you actually help me make a budget? The answer is yes. You will get a budget. But we don’t just stop at budgeting because a budget is not a list of bills. Repeat after me. A budget is not a list of bills. And if that’s all you’ve been doing, then I already know why that’s not working for you because your life is so much more than bills. So we are actually going to build and I usually call it a spending plan or even a money plan for your money. And we are going to get real about how you spend money and we are going to cover your bills, we’re going to cover your spending, we’re going to cover what you need to save for. We’re going to cover your debt, we’re going to cover all of it.
And you’re going to learn how to actually manage your money in a way that money feels like it’s working with you and not the other way around. Like, I don’t want your money to have control. Like if your money was a toddler, I’m like, Uhuh, you told your money to go sit down and it still running around. And just so you know I used to be in education and I am very much like, listen, I am the boss of this space and you little 10 year olds, 30 of you, you are not the boss of this space. We give some leeway, but you don’t get to take control. And that’s how I feel about your money. Your money doesn’t get to take control. I want you to take control of your money. And so when we build a system, I am asking you about all of the things that you want to be able to do that maybe you have read other money advice and you’re like, Keina, I’m not really sure if I should do this, because this man in a suit told me that I shouldn’t do this.
And I’m like, no, but we want to pay attention to who you are. Something that I think is very interesting about my work is there are cultural implications when it comes to money. And I don’t think that we talk about that enough. And I work with, first generation Americans and we are talking about the cultural implications of money. What does your family expect? How does that show up? Also thinking about where do you fall in terms of the lineup of how many siblings you have? Are you the oldest? Are you the only girl? Are you the only boy? Like all of those little things can show up with your money. And so when we’re thinking about creating a budget, we’re integrating that because that’s some of the reason why money or budgets haven’t worked for you in the past because you’re not sure how to layer in those different levels of how you’re expected to show up and it could be thoughts, it could be real facts, whatever that is but we want to layer that in.
And so my goal is that within our first coaching call that we’ve already started to flesh out that budget and that system. So it’s not just a spreadsheet, but it’s something where we started to capture what your life looks like. I mean if you talk to my clients, I think we have fun on calls. I think talking about money is very fun. But I’m looking at like, okay, your nails are done, your hair is done. Or there are just things that I’m learning about you even by looking through your expenses. So just to kind of go a little step deeper, when we’re creating a budget and even managing the budget week to week, I’m looking at your bank accounts. I’ve joked that it’s basically like going to the gynecologist. Like at this point I’ve seen everything and I am not looking to judge your bank account by somebody else’s bank account. I’m looking at your bank account for patterns.
I’m looking to see like what are the things that we did include? What are the things that we didn’t include? And I am looking at your bank account through curiosity. And that’s also what you are going to walk away with is how do I look at my bank account with a curious mind? I was just telling a new client of mine that started with me. I said, Hey. She’s like, oh Keina, like I tracked my expenses this week and I noticed this, this and this. I said, listen, probably for the next year you’re going to notice things because you have annual expenses that we may not have caught. You have subscriptions that come out and I just want you to see every new thing that you learn as we’re building and continue to shape your budget as information.
You don’t need to give it any meaning. It’s just information. And so we get to decide what do we want to do with this information? We get to be curious with like, oh, okay, I didn’t realize Costco came out in August. I thought I had already paid it. And if that’s the case, we figure out where the $65 comes from and we move on. But because we actually have the structure, it allows us to be able to move on and not feel frazzled. So the budget is the foundation of everything that we do. And your budget is a living and working document. We will look at it, we will look at it, we will look at it, we will look at it and then it just gets to a point where it just becomes the thing that you start to make your financial decisions from. It’s amazing, it’s magical.
Alright, question number two. I wasn’t supposed to talk that much about question number one, but question number two, how does coaching actually work? What happens week to week? So I kind of probably already talked a little bit more about that, but we meet three times a month for 45 minutes. We do it virtually and it’s just me and you on a Zoom call and it is all built around you. One of the things that I love starting with clients is I start thinking, I love talking to clients about like what are your wins? Because I want you to be able to unearth like what are the good things that are happening? What are the little intentions that you’re setting that you’re able to talk about? It may be like, Keina, I went to the grocery store and I actually didn’t throw away the bag of spinach.
I cook the bag of spinach. Keina I had a conversation with my partner about the work that we’re doing and we were able to get on the same page. Like those are the things that we are tracking week to week to celebrate. And then I also asked my clients like, Hey, what’s top of mind? Inevitably because we’re doing life together for five months, there are things that come up. You’re like, I have a client that’s like Keina, our HVAC just went out or Keina, my dog has to go to the vet. And so that’s not necessarily in the plan, that your dog is going to the vet or that your HVAC is going out, but because you have me to meet with, we can talk about let’s make a plan so that you can think about how you want to experience coming out of taking your dog to the vet. How do you want to experience being able to pay for the HVAC system?
And so every session we are going back to your spending plan. A lot of the coaching calls in the beginning are us learning how to update your spending plan. And so you probably heard me talk about the three money bucket system. So we’re looking at like, okay, how are things feeding into your different accounts? Also thinking about what’s the money you have in your account right now? What is it for and how are we using it? But we’re setting a level of clarity and over the five months you’re going to build habits. You’re going to be able to build sustainable structure and figure out what it is, how do you want to respond to different situations. So in between calls you can reach out to me with any questions that you have. At the end of each call, we try to make sure that we wrap up and ask like, okay, what do you want to be held accountable for? What are your next steps? And like what do you want to accomplish in order to make forward progress in between this call and the next call? So those are the things that we capture.
You co-create your homework with me and on the calls like we’re not just talking about money, we’re changing how you think about money. We’re changing how you make decisions. We’re creating a system, like I said that is doing life with you. And so many of my clients talk about how coaching feels like therapy because I think it’s the first time that they’re able to actually be like, Hey, I have a safe place to talk about the things that I don’t feel like I know, to talk about the things that make me stumble. And we build that in from the very first call. My goal is to allow you to come as you are like, I don’t need you to come fix up because that’s not the version of you walking around in life.
I want you to come as you are. And then we build around that person.
Alright, question three. I’ve heard you say your clients make their money back. How does that actually happen? So let me tell you something I see every single week. Clients come to me saying I make good money, but I don’t know where it goes. And so in our first session we usually find hundreds of dollars that my clients weren’t accounting for. They have money that’s leaking, money that’s just like not being accounted for. So it just disappears. Money that’s being used reactively and I’m teaching them how to find it. I’m also teaching them how to keep it and how to use it to fund the life that they want. It’s not magic, but it feels like magic because we stop using fake math and we actually get everything out there. And so when we have the real math, we can find out, we can find the extra money.
And so because we’re using real math, what ends up happening is that it increases our savings, it decreases our credit card balance and clients start to have options. I have one client who she is getting ready to start saving $3,000 a month. Keina, how do you go from saving zero to $3,000 a month? You make a real budget with Keina. That’s how you do that. She has multiple streams of income because she’s like in retirement but also working and she makes about $12,000 a month. And she’s like, Keina, I didn’t even know I made that much money. And that’s not the first time that’s happened. I’ve had clients that think that they make a certain amount of money and then when we actually go and look at what they make, they make more, just because they’re so scared to look at the money.
So you are going to make your money back through coaching in terms of us finding the leaks in your budget, you actually being able to save money and you being able to trust yourself. And so money isn’t just going to start leaking. You’re not going to just be throwing money at different things. And so I have clients that make the whole cost of coaching back in the five months. Some clients that might take them a year to make the cost of coaching back, but it compounds. It’s not just a one-time investment in yourself. It is a system you get to use year after year after year. I had a client just recently message me telling me that she had a praise report, like I think it’s maybe been about a year, but she was like, Keina, I did my net worth from when I started working with you and it’s increased and I can see how slow and steady is going to help me win the race here.
So question number four, should I wait to pay off debt before working with you? The answer is no. I’ll always say no and I’ll tell you why. If you’ve been in and out of the debt cycle, the issue isn’t how you’re paying it off. It’s that you’re relying on like your sheer willpower to stay out of debt and you actually can pay off a credit card. But if you don’t have savings, if you don’t have a plan for how you want to spend, you’re just going to reel right back into debt. People tell me all the time, I use my bonus to pay off debt. I used my tax return to pay off debt and then before the end of the year they’re right back into debt. And I don’t just help you pay off the debt. I’m helping you stay out of debt with the habits that you form, with the decisions that you learn to make, with the three money bucket system that we use, it’s going to protect your money before it even leaves your account.
So if you end up paying off debt slower because you work with me, I’m okay with that because I also know you’re going to end up having more in your accounts because money isn’t just going to be leaving your account. So no, you don’t actually need to be debt free to start working with me. We get to build that plan together. My client, Lauren, we paid off, I want to say $30,000 worth of debt. It’s one of my old podcast episodes. And she actually used money that she was saving to pay off a car to work with me. And guess what? We still paid the car off, but she had more money. She created a five figure savings account by working with me. So it’s a myth to think that you should like pay off debt. Sometimes people think like, well Keina what I’m using towards coaching I should just put towards my debt. And I’m like, you could, but you’re just going to be right back in debt this time. I don’t know, three months from now, whatever. So I would rather you pay to work with me than pay to get out of debt because I’m going to help you get out of debt and help you stay out of debt.
And last question would be, life is really busy right now, Keina, should I wait until it slows down? Let me just be really honest with you. No b3cause life is never going to slow down. And you keep talking about life needing to slow down and there are just different versions of slow and fast and slow and fast. Most of my clients, they’re working full-time, they’re parenting, they might be running businesses, they have very full lives. And that’s exactly why coaching works because you don’t actually need to find the time. You actually just need a system that compliments your life. And I see you working with me as a form of self-care. Like you would make a therapy appointment every single week if you needed to, or like you would make a doctor’s appointment if it meant your health. That’s what this is about. So if you’re like, Keina, I have a lot of stuff coming up. Okay, well let me help you plan for it because you’re going to be in less financial distress when you come back from it than waiting until the perfect time.
Every once in a while I get some clients that tell me no on consults and then they come back to me and they’re like, okay, Keina, I should’ve started working with you and I don’t want you to make that mistake. And maybe you’re already like, Keina, I should have because I’ve been thinking about it. Book the call today, literally today. Stop talking to yourself about how you think you’re just going to wait. No, like if you book a call today, we get to plan for the holidays, we get to plan for the new year, you get to cross off, make a budget. I want you to cross that off. I don’t ever want that to be on your list of New Year’s resolutions. And we’re going to make every decision that you have to make this year easier because I’m going to help you create a season for this part of your life. And then when you feel like life has slowed down, you’re going to be like, oh my goodness, this was just so easy to roll into. So if you’ve been thinking about Keina I should apply to work with you, maybe I should do this. Maybe now isn’t the right time. Maybe I’ll wait for the next time.
Let me ask you this, what would change if you didn’t wait? What if this was really the moment that you gave yourself permission to get support? So coaching isn’t just about money, it’s about creating self-trust. It’s about realizing that you’re worthy of making an investment with yourself. It’s about your identity, it’s about deciding, you know what, I can do this because I’m not going to be able to do it alone. And so I have some spots in my five month coaching partnership. They’re open, they’re available for you. And I would just encourage you, go to the show notes, apply to work with me, or go to Wealthovernow.com and fill out the application. Your change is going to start with the application, then you’re going to talk to me, you’re going to be like, oh my goodness, she’s just as nice as she is on her podcast. And you are going to be able to really start working towards the financial goals that you’ve set for yourself. So the scariest part is just saying like, I am actually going to apply to work with her. That’s the scary part. So I am looking forward to seeing your application and until next time, have a great week.
Outro: 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.
