If financial therapy seeks the causes and underlying cures for financial challenges, financial coaching is the patient science which makes the greatest difference in people’s lives. The planner, working on retainer, chooses to affirm the best in each client’s life, avoiding fearful policies while listening carefully for new commitments clients want to make. Policies emerge to protect values with general rules–exceptions noted–like “buy term and invest the difference” or “tithe ten per cent to charity.”
Policies enable savings and destroy debt. Savings withdrawal policies can even let you stay in growth stocks into old age with a high probability of superior results.
I may help money deniers consciously track their finances so they are awakened. I may even remind people of how charity and family care can be good uses of money that should not be squandered. Money worshippers need to be reminded, as Scrooge’s ghosts did, that it is good to keep healthy, spend time with family and give to worthy causes. Money status holders should be coached to stop and meditate on each purchase: does it really give them joy equal to what they lose by spending? How do we really feel about buying things and who are we trying to impress? And even the money-vigilant need to know that it is okay to take vacations.
Questions to consider:
- Are you in financial denial?
- Are you making the most of your skills and gifts in this lifetime?
- Obsessively counting money, does success fail to bring you happiness?
- Are you addicted to shopping, gambling, or enabling another person’s bad habits?
- When others control, do you seek freedom?