What to do when the plan goes awry. This is the last in the 5-part series looking at how Sarah, a recent postgraduate who’s in her mid-20’s, with just over £40,000 student debt, learned to handle her personal finances. She’s determined to start her own business as a coach because it’s her passion and earns an inconsistent salary throughout the year. She came to me, for financial coaching, as she wanted to achieve her goals.

The first three parts of this blog looked at what Sarah wanted her money to do, her priorities (the heart bit) and some of the reality of finance (head). In this 4th part, we’ll look at the “hands” of the process, taking the information about the person, their dreams and their realities, and putting those into concrete plans for their finances.

In Parts 1 to 3 I introduced Sarah and her situation, looked at how we unpacked the details of Sarah’s dreams and gave them more structure and how these linked to her current life situation and beliefs. In this 3rd part of the five-part series I’ll look in more detail at realities of her finances, applying the “head”, a more objective approach to the “heart” of her dreams.  

In Part 2, I’ll look at how we unpacked the details of her rather vague dreams and gave them more structure. Then we’ll move to how this relates to her current life situation. This is the ‘heart’ of my approach, and in the remaining parts of my 5 part series, I’ll focus on the ‘head’ and the ‘hands’ of making personal finance for Sarah (and others like her) fit into their current realities.

“Why don’t you do an article for coaches on financial wellbeing?” “What, on providing it for themselves, or adding a string to their bow with clients?” “Why not both?”

That’s the origin of this series. In Part 1 I introduce Sarah, a recent graduate with both a Masters and a Bachelors, who was exploring for the first time what is personal finance, how this relates to her situation and her dreams for the future.