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Finance coaches help other climb out from debt
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Like many people, Ericka Young first approached the idea of a budget reluctantly. “The word has negative connotations,” she says. “People think, 'Oh, these are restrictions. These keep me from what I want to do.’ But that’s not the truth. A budget is just a plan to tell your money where to go, so it doesn’t tell you where it went.”
The Mesa-based budget coach brings firsthand experience to her work. Like many young couples, Young, 31, and her husband, Chris, found themselves in the red simply by trying to start their lives.
“We both had student loans,” she says. Add in car loans and credit card debt, and the Youngs started married life $60,000 in the hole. “I had a decent-paying job. My husband had a decent-paying job,” she says. “But no tells you how to handle money once you get it.”
A course with budget guru David Ramsey taught the couple the virtues of financial planning. And Young worked it into a personalized system that paid off nearly $100,000 of debt. “I tell (clients) that, and it cheers them up. They say, 'I didn’t owe near as much,’ ” she laughs.
Their newfound financial clarity opened up other possibilities, as well. Young left her engineering job at Motorola/Freescale to coach budgeting full time. “We needed to share this information to other people,” she says.
So Young now runs Tailor Made Budgets, and will teach personal finance classes at Chandler-Gilbert Community College this fall. In both settings, she will urge others to approach budgets from the standpoint of possibility.
“I start by asking people to dream a little: What do you want to do? Where do you want to be? If your dreams cost money, a budget is a way of getting you there.”
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