🎁 How to Gift Your Future Self Financial Peace: Tips From a Planner
🟣 And 25% off financial planning services to help you on your way.
⏱️ The plan for today’s financial self-care session:
👣 Your first step if planning for the future stresses you out;
🥇 The most common mistake when planning for retirement;
🤓 The best approach to learning about retirement planning;
⛏️ An easy-to-use and nonaddictive tech tool that can help;
👥 Tips for finding the right type of professional help for you;
🎁 A 25% discount for financial planning or coaching services.
Hello there 💜
How are you feeling today?
I’m back from a week's vacation full of adventures with my family on the Western coast of Ireland, which my husband and I had long dreamed of visiting. (I blame it on Sally Rooney.)
The return to work would usually be really hard.
You know, that uncomfortable feeling when your brain needs time to readjust to the different pace and mindset of productivity and focus mixed with a bit of anxiety, even a proper fear sometimes (it’s a real and well-documented neuroscience thing).
🌴 Except I’m taking us on another trip, far from Europe this time, for a session I loved working on with Gabbi Cerezo, a financial planner and financial coach based in L.A.
Gabbi is a former teacher and second-generation woman of color who switched careers into finance to help other teachers and people like her put their dollars to work just as hard as they do.
She’s a Certified Financial Planner™ (CFP®), Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®), and Trauma of Money Certified Practitioner who believes in a holistic approach to your money.
🔮 If you’ve been reading the last Money Feelings sessions, you know we’re currently exploring how behavioral finance and psychology can help us care better for our Future Selves (aka the psychology of retirement planning).
Today, I asked Gabbi to guide us in making the first concrete steps to giving our fabulous old selves the gift of financial wellness!
🎁 If you’re a paid subscriber, don’t miss your big present at the end of this session! 🧹 A bit of housekeeping before we start.
This edition is mixed-media, which means you can:
Listen to everything Gabbi has to say, just like a podcast (highly recommended).
Only listen to the answers to the questions you’re most interested in.
Or read!
If you want to make the most of your experience with Money Feelings, I suggest using Substack. It's a fantastic platform for those who enjoy reading and the only social media platform I genuinely enjoy. Give it a shot!
👋 But first, if someone forwarded you this email, Money Feelings is your 10-minute self-care routine that blends psychology & finance to:
Kiss your limiting money mindsets and behaviors goodbye.
Grow your financial wisdom in style: less jargon, more emotion.
Increase your financial well-being, one feeling at a time.
If you don’t want to miss one:
Or invite your friends to subscribe (3 friends who subscribe = 1 month of free paid subscription access for you).
You can also make yourself visible by sponsoring the free monthly newsletter or offering discounts on your services/products to Money Feelings readers:
To know more about my work, follow me on Substack or LinkedIn.
🟣 Gabbi’s full interview:
🟣 I am stressed because I KNOW I should plan for my retirement, but I still haven’t. It’s freaking me out. How do you help me address this anxiety related to my future?
First off, totally valid.
Retirement can feel like this big, nebulous, overwhelming thing. Without regulating our nervous system though, all the jargon and advice is going to go in one ear and out the other.
So first, focus on getting to an emotionally regulated state.
Breathe.
What usually helps you feel safe? Start in this place and then commit to one small doable action. The action has to feel doable for you, and that might be picking up a retirement book written by someone you relate to, or it might be finding an approachable personal finance podcast.
Telling yourself that you don't have to figure it all out at once will go a long way to soothing some of the anxiety.
And remember, you're already here, so keep reading Money Feelings.
🟣 I love to learn from other people’s mistakes! What is a common one regarding retirement planning, and how can I avoid it?
Actually, the previous question is a common mistake folks make regarding retirement a lot, which is avoidance.
Anxiety about retirement both leads to and is caused by avoidance, ironically.
Think of it as a feedback loop. The more you avoid it, the more anxiety it causes you.
So finding accessible, approachable exits from that negative feedback loop will be key to avoiding this common mistake.
🟣 I want to plan for my retirement, but I have NO idea where to start. It’s totally overwhelming. What are my first steps?
First, remember that everyone started in the same place. Nobody was born knowing how to plan for retirement.
Just like every other thing we learn, give yourself some compassion and permission to make mistakes. When you first learn to tie your shoes, hopefully you didn't expect to be perfect on the first try.
Next, find a small way to engage in learning about retirement planning. You're not going to go from 0 to 100 overnight, so it's important to engage in it in a sustainable way.
For myself, it was super important for me to find personal finance content created by other women. I wanted to listen to someone who could empathize with my perspective.
So go into your favorite content site, for me that's YouTube or a podcast, and search an identity that is important to you, plus the words personal finance.
So for example, search personal finance for teachers or personal finance for women in tech. This will help you stay more engaged and find content more tailored to your life experience.
🟣 Which technology tools would you recommend to help me care for my future self? Bonus point if it’s not addictive 🙄.
I highly recommend using Google Sheets to track your financial net worth. To me, tracking your financial net worth over time is getting your blood pressure and weight checked whenever you go to the doctor. Which I know might not be a great selling point for you, but it's a great indicator of your financial health.
And if you're not sure what your financial net worth is, you are adding up everything you own, so that's OWN, and subtracting everything you owe, which is OWE.
There are apps out there that link to your accounts and track it for you automatically, but I really like to see the progress over time, which sometimes those apps don't really help you see.
So for example, when I graduated from college back in 2015, my financial net worth was negative $26,000 because I had so many student loans and I had pretty much nothing in my bank accounts.
Then on my Google spreadsheet, I can see in 2018, I had saved and invested enough money that I reached a financial net worth of zero.
And in 2023, I can look back and see that I saved and invested enough that I reached a financial net worth of $100,000.
So, this is what I mean by using a Google sheet to track your financial net worth over time and see your progress.
I think this is an excellent form of self-care to stay organized and motivated with the big bonus that you're comparing yourself to just yourself, nobody else.
🟣 I DON’T want to manage my finances myself. Is it a financial planner I should reach out to? Or another profession? How do I know if I have the budget to get help? How much do your services typically cost for instance? What is a monthly salary you think gives me access to professional help?
While I really empathize with the feeling that you don't want to manage your finances yourself, I want you to start thinking about exercise and flossing and like, can you really outsource these things? Not really, but you can get someone to help guide you and provide accountability. This is what you're looking for in a financial planner or a financial coach.
Honestly, you should never outsource 100% of managing your finances to anyone. That would be a big red flag to me if someone offered that to you.
Since I'm based in the USA, I can only provide you with estimates here. A good financial planner usually costs around $2,000 to $10,000 per year.
To caveat that, we have some excellent companies trying to disrupt the industry and provide good financial planning or good financial advice for a cheaper cost, but I haven't checked them out personally yet.
Really, don't think of a financial planner as a permanent cost. There are plenty of financial planners who would be willing to work with you for a year to help you get your finances all sorted out, and then you can go on your merry way for a while until you feel like you need another check-in.
Then the last thing on this question that I want to say is that depending on your journey and where you are at with your personal finances, you might want to work with a financial coach over a financial planner.
A financial coach is going to help you with more day-to-day budgeting and cash flow, and especially if you need to spend a lot of time getting used to managing a budget and managing your spending.
Some financial coaches help people get out of debt as well. If you have significant amount of debt, a financial coach or even a debt counseling agency or non-profit, would be the place to go.
Versus a financial planner who is typically working with people that already have good cash flow. They can manage their finances pretty well. They're not overspending, they have money saved, and they have more complex needs besides needing to work on a budget. So they might be in a situation where they're having a baby, and they're buying a house, and they're trying to figure out how much to save for retirement, and the list keeps going.
Kind of like the more moving pieces you have in your financial life, the more a financial planner is going to be worth the fee that you're going to be paying them.
🟣 How do I find a good financial planner? Do I just Google away “Financial planner near me”? What should I look out for when I’m choosing?
A good place to start when looking for a financial planner is to consider what is really important to you and to learn about your country's certifications and standards for financial planners.
For example, do you really want to talk with someone in person, or are you okay with meeting virtually?
And then I would also always google something like, “What is the best financial planning certification in France?” Or “What is the best financial planning certification in the U.S.?”
In the U.S., at least, finding someone who is a certified financial planner is a good minimum requirement to start with, and all good financial planners should cover the following topics with you:
They should talk about cash flow and budgeting with you, but that shouldn't be the main focus typically.
They'll cover insurance of all kinds, so that's like auto insurance, homeowners, medical, life insurance, and just make sure that you are appropriately insured. They might tell you, “Hey, you have too much insurance in this area, like you don't need to have this much.” Or they might say, “Hey, you have the bare minimum auto insurance; I think you should increase it to this amount.
They should talk with you about investing and retirement.
They should talk with you about estate planning considerations. Financial planners aren't like estate planners, but they can help you figure out what kinds of estate planning documents you might need and give you a big picture of what you should talk to an actual attorney about. And that's like telling you, “Hey, you need a will or power of attorney documents for yourself.”
And then they should help you with taxes. They won't usually do your taxes for you, although there are a lot of financial planners that get certified to be able to do that as well, but they can help point out any areas where you could be saving more money on your taxes, or doing something in a more tax efficient way.
These aren't the only topics financial planners should cover with you, but these are the big five.
But at least when I work with clients, I tell them they can ask me any financial questions, and I will do my best to help them.
I'll tell you if that's within the scope of our work together or if I think someone else would be a better fit for that.
Another big consideration for a financial planner is how they get paid, and again, in the U.S., this is unfortunately complicated, so I want to break down the three biggest categories.
There's commission, fee-based, and fee-only.
“Commission” is when a financial planner gets paid a percentage of something that they sell to you. This could be recommending you invest in a certain investment, and then they get a piece of that. Whatever amount of money you put into that investment, it could be selling you a life insurance policy or something. But, typically, what this looks like is the financial advisor or financial planner works with you for free, quote-unquote, but they're getting paid because they're recommending something to you. Often, I would say the incentives are misaligned because, typically, people want to get paid the highest commission they can, so they might recommend something that's okay for you, but it might not actually be in your best interest.
“Fee-based” is when a financial planner gets paid both a commission, which we just talked about, and they ask you to pay a fee directly to them. They might ask you to pay a much lower fee, like maybe a hundred dollars or something, or $50, to help with putting together a financial plan. Then, they recommend different investments that get them a commission or financial products like that. So fee-based means that a financial advisor or financial planner is getting paid in multiple ways.
“Fee-only” is when a financial planner gets paid only directly from their client.
This is where that $2,000 to $10,000 a year fee I mentioned earlier comes in. The moment a financial planner accepts a commission or a kickback for recommending an investment or a product to you, they are supposed to relabel themselves as fee-based. But it's so convoluted in the U.S. that it can be confusing to figure it out.
🟣 And something personal: What would it look like if you could paint a picture of your ideal future self and retirement scenario?
Before becoming a financial planner, I was a teacher and loved it so much. I love working with kids. I loved being able to create creative lesson plans and come up with fun activities for my students to do.
However, in the U.S., teachers aren't paid very well, and I decided that I couldn't afford to be a teacher anymore.
My goal is to save and invest enough money so that I can return to being a teacher without being stressed about money.
So, my ideal second career retirement goal is to teach for fun and not because I need the money.
Thank you, Gabbi!
🎁 For Paid Subscribers of Money Feelings
I'm excited to share that all paid subscribers of Money Feelings can now enjoy a 25% discount on financial planning and coaching services with Gabbi.
If you're interested in taking advantage of this offer, simply reach out to me, and I'll provide you with your exclusive discount code.
Learn more about Gabbi and her exceptional work on her website and her LinkedIn page.
You can also check out our ever-growing list of discounts on other services available to paid subscribers of Money Feelings over here:
👏👏👏
Well done to you for dedicating the past 10 minutes to your financial self!
What did you think of this session?
I hope you found some value for yourself or someone you know.
If you did, you can:
Let me know by clicking on the 💜 at the bottom of the newsletter. It means a lot and helps get the newsletter in front of other eyes on Substack.
Invite your friends to discover Money Feelings (3 friends who subscribe = 1 month of free paid subscription access for you).
Lastly, I research and write Money Feelings for you 🫡, so never hesitate to share your feedback, ideas or ask questions.
You can do it in the comment section below or via a direct message:
🔮 If you want to keep reading about how behavioral science and psychology can help us care better for our Future Selves (aka the psychology of retirement planning), here are some sessions you might like:
Get motivated by learning three crucial facts about your Future Self and use four quick exercises to set goals.
Learn all the reasons why we care so little about our old selves and reflect on which one is stronger in you.
See you soon and,
Pauline 💜