Who can I ask for financial advice?

What is a lifestyle coach?

A lifestyle coach is a wellbeing professional who works with a client on an individual level to help them improve their life. They offer holistic advice, helping clients to manage stress, identify their goals, embrace challenges, and, most importantly, build a fulfilling and balanced life. They tend to focus on every-day habits, mindset and achievable weekly goals. 

In many ways, the work of a financial adviser is not too dissimilar. Some notable similarities between the professions:

• Future-focused: lifestyle coaches and financial advisers both help their clients to build the foundations of their future. They look at what can be done today to make a better tomorrow for their clients. 
• Bespoke: Both professions involve the creation of bespoke plans for clients to help them to achieve their goals. Lifestyle coaches and financial advisers both work with clients on an individual basis – because every clients’ goal is different.
• Relationship-based: In order to best realise their clients’ goals, lifestyle coaches and financial advisers must develop a professional relationship that is built on trust, honesty, and a deep understanding of individual client needs.
• Planning: Both lifestyle coaches and financial advisers create plans, suggestions of next steps in order to help their clients to achieve their goals. Though the plans may look different, they share the same intention – offering a roadmap to their client’s end goal.

Where does financial advice fit in this?

In the same way that lifestyle coaches create a bespoke plan for their client, financial advisers create bespoke financial strategies. These strategic plans are often complex and incorporate several different factors relating to the client. For example, they will consider investment opportunities, attitude towards risk, and current assets and income when creating this plan. However, the very best advisers will dig deeper than this – which is where lifestyle coaching comes in. 

The very best financial advisers will incorporate elements of lifestyle coaching in their client meetings. They will look far beyond just their finances, using their technical expertise and knowledge of investments to offer clients tangible investment plans that respond to challenges and events in their clients’ lives. Like a lifestyle coach, they will learn about the lives of their clients in order to create a holistic financial plan, taking into account their goals, challenges, lifestyles and relationships. 

Similarly, lifestyle coaches who reflect on their clients’ finances will be able to offer a more holistic plan for their future goals. Wanting to buy a house, getting married or having a baby are all personal goals, but they require financial preparedness. It is important that advisers and lifestyle coaches can incorporate a bit of both into their client meetings.  
We turn to experts with every other aspect of our health without a second thought – we see doctors and dentists for regular check ups even when nothing is wrong. We need to turn to experts when it comes to our mental and financial wellness too. 

Money matters. It effects our health and our lives extensively, so we need to take care of it like we do ourselves. Seeing a financial adviser can relieve more than just financial stress, but mental and physical stress too. “I’m a financial adviser, but I like to call myself a ‘lifestyle doctor’” St. James’s Place adviser, Marlene Francisco says. Finding a ‘lifestyle doctor’ like Marlene could be the secret key for unlocking a balanced mental, physical and financial wellbeing. 
 

Financial advisers offer the missing piece of the wellness puzzle – the technical and actionable next steps that help bring peoples’ dreams from fantasy to reality. 

If you want to find out more about how you can become a financial adviser (and life coach!) click here to talk to a member of our team.