Defining Financial Coaching : Silke Integrated Wealthcare Advice process

Coaching is differentiated from counselling in that it focuses on changing financial behaviours, rather than focusing on a specific event or problem. Counselling tends to be more therapeutic in nature, while coaching endeavours to help you improve your behaviour in order to achieve self-defined goals. Of course, counselling and mentoring all can involve coaching to some degree.

Financial coaching is part of a wider field of personal coaching. This field has developed rapidly in the last decade, including the emergence of standard-setting organizations and academic studies on the psychology of coaching. Financial coaching is one of the smaller and least studied subsets of the personal coaching field.

You will no doubt be familiar with the concept of financial planning. What then is financial coaching? Let us briefly discuss each of these components:

1. Financial planning: If you want to be a rugby coach, you need to ensure that you understand the game and know the rules. Slimily a financial coach needs to have mastered the subject matter pertaining to personal finance. The "Certified Financial Planner ®" designation, or "CFP®" in short, is your assurance that your financial coach has met the highest academic and professional qualification within the financial planning profession in South Africa. You can read more about the CFP® designation here: Certified Financial Planner® (CFP®)

2. People skills: Coaching is a dynamic and interactive process where client and coach work together to achieve a desired outcome. Skills such as listening, facilitation and problem-solving are important for this process to succeed.

3. Behavioural finance: An important question asked by the relatively young science of behavioural finance is why seemingly rational individuals tend to fail so frequently to make rational investment decisions. A good financial coach will sensitise you to the fact that we all suffer from so-called cognitive illusions or biases that interfere with effective investment decision making.

Delivering Financial Coaching. Coaching models vary significantly from program to program, while far from definitive, the key elements of coaching include:

• a focus on long-term outcomes
• an ongoing, systematic, collaborative process for assisting clients to change behaviours
• support to practice new behaviours
• building skills and teaching content based on the client’s unique needs and goals

While passive financial planning is a strategy, we believe that we can achieve better financial outcomes by using an active approach. We rely on a consistent and disciplined Six Steps in the Financial Planning Process that drives the Silke Integrated Wealthcare Advice process. The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards defines financial planning as a six-step process that allows individuals and families to determine whether and how they can meet their life goals through the proper management of financial resources. These goals can include retiring at a certain age, saving enough money to send a child to college or buying a new home.

Our Integrated Wealthcare Management approach to financial planning. We consider all the areas in your life that are touched by your finances and design a comprehensive plan that is UNIQUE to you. We believe each client is unique and has unique goals and priorities; we strive to accomplish the following:

• Development of a positive and intelligent way to handle your financial affairs so that you can go forward with confidence by controlling what is controllable and measuring the uncertainty of that which is uncontrollable
• Positive use of your money for personal empowerment and the disabling of fear
• Understanding of the interrelationship between the variables of your financial plan
• Alignment of your spending habits with your value system and goals
• Accommodation of unexpected events that may affect the attainment of your goals
• Avoid lifestyle sacrifice by achieve goals that might otherwise be ignored
• Maximisation of the probability of achieving your financial goals by your determined target dates

The field of financial coaching as is in an exciting stage of development, but have to be ready for the approach before it can be effective in helping them achieve their asset-building goals.

Do regard your advisor as the architect of your financial journey through life.