Christine knows that many families look similar on the surface, but it’s what makes them unique that matters when creating a financial plan.
Six years ago Money Coach Christine White was working as a chemical engineer for Dupont, in Mailtand, Ontario, about an hour south of Ottawa. She had a young son, a second son on the way, two teenaged step-daughters and a husband who also had a busy career.
“I was then, who my ideal client is today” says Christine. “I know what it’s like to have so many competing demands on your income that you’re uncertain whether or not you are making the best decisions. It doesn’t matter if you are single, married, have kids or no kids, there is that time in life when the financial demands of establishing yourself seem at odds with the demands of planning for your future.”
“I wanted to learn more but I wasn’t sure where to turn for unbiased advice,” says Christine. “Will I get unbiased insurance advice from a person who sells life insurance? If I’m wondering how much I need for retirement do I ask a person who sells mutual funds?”
Christine’s solution was to read and to learn and to take a cleared-eyed look at what her and her husband’s needs and goals were. “I love my calculator,” she jokes, “The more I learned the more fun I was having calculating our possibilities.”
Christine was born and raised in Newfoundland within a family that has many teachers and social workers, “In my family we like to help people, and we like to support each other,” she says. So it wasn’t long before Christine naturally became the source of unbiased advice for family and friends that she had been looking for herself.
Outside her finances Christine’s life was changing too. She was restless in her engineering job, it wasn’t bringing her the fulfillment it once had, and her husband was offered a career opportunity in Whitby, Ontario he was excited to pursue. Christine knew she wanted to enter the financial field, but becoming a traditional financial planner who sold products, wasn’t what she was looking for.
The solution came when she was flipping through an issue of Canadian Family magazine and happened on an article about a woman who had been helped with her finances by a money coach. More than the woman’s story, Christine was intrigued by the term Money Coach. A fee for service approach to financial advising was just what she was looking for.
Christine found Money Coaches Canada through a Google search for the term money coach and within a month had started her training. “I was so excited to have found a company that was setting the standard for this new approach to financial planning.”
Christine’s Money Tip
When your property taxes are due do you have the money? When you have to pay annual memberships or activity fees for yourself or your children, are you scrambling to find the funds, or worse, borrowing on a line-of-credit?
Christine says that one of the fastest ways to reduce money stress, is to take control of the expenses that come every year, but still catch you off-guard. Make a list of all those annual expenditures and divide each one by your number of paydays, then be diligent about putting that amount into a savings account each pay. This one change can have a huge impact on financial peace-of-mind.
One of Christine’s favourite moments since becoming a money coach was when a client she had helped months before, called her out-of-the- blue, to say that his son’s hockey fees had recently come due and without a blink of an eye, he had the money on hand to write a cheque. This was such a success moment that he had felt the need to call and thank Christine again for the guidance she had given him and his wife.
Christine never tires of working with clients who are ready to make changes, who don’t want to be told what to do, but who want a knowledgeable collaborator to help them sort out the many demands on their income. Her past career as a chemical engineer makes her well aware that a solution must be tailored to a specific problem, that all the variables have an impact on the solution. That’s why she enjoys getting to know the people behind the financial numbers, so together they can create a unique formula for success.
