Financial Coach, My Secure Advantage

My name is Savannah Youngblood, and I am a financial coach. Our mission is to improve people's financial lifestyle. So we have lots of places where we track goals like crushing $8,000 of debt, increasing your credit score by 56 points, or creating a savings account for emergencies. I have the pleasure of talking one-on-one with individuals who are seeking advice about specific topics in their financial life, like credit or how to best increase their cash flow, where to make adjustments in their spending habits. Also, we look at what kind of home that they could afford. We could see how much would be a good monthly payment for them based on how much they have coming in and their other existing expenses. So I get to answer all these questions for them, and give them confidence after our conversation. So as a financial coach, you want to have both the education to have analytical skills, in order to create creative strategies, but you also wanna have personal people skills that give you the empathy to understand their situation and realize they're real people who have real problems and real challenges, and they don't know always how to fix that. So they are coming to you to seek help like a friend. So you want to be an encourager as well. So recently I helped someone create a spending plan tracker and what that is, is they go through three months of writing down or keeping track on a spreadsheet, every purchase that they make, every bill that they have come through their bank account, whether it's a check, whether it's cash and they keep a receipt, or whether it's an automatic payment that's gone out of their checking account, we wanna see what that is. That way we can compare it to what they budgeted. And I'll, oftentimes, you'll see that their budget is a little bit different than what we've tracked. So they overspent in the areas or they've underspent in areas. And so we make adjustments for the future, because you want your spending plans and your budgets to be realistic and flexible. I end up meeting with people between the hours of 11:00 AM and 8:00 PM. Sometimes it's different than that. It looks like a normal eight to five job, but because I enjoy what I do so much, I don't really notice the hours.