What is financial mindset coaching?

Financial mindset coaching is a one-to-one process that explores your beliefs, behaviours, and emotions around money and helps you change the ones that are holding you back. Unlike financial advice, it focuses on the psychological and behavioural side of your finances rather than recommending specific products.

Is financial coaching the same as financial advice?

No. Financial advice is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and involves recommending specific financial products such as pensions, investments, or mortgages. Financial coaching focuses on your mindset, beliefs, and behaviours around money rather than product recommendations.

How much does financial mindset coaching cost?

A single coaching session costs £179. A package of three sessions is £479, and a comprehensive six-session package is £879. Sessions can be conducted via video call or face-to-face in Cheadle, South Manchester.

Do you offer sessions online as well as face-to-face?

Yes. Sessions are available face-to-face in a garden office in Cheadle, South Manchester, or via video call for clients across the UK.

Who can benefit from financial mindset coaching?

Financial mindset coaching is for anyone who feels anxious about money, struggles to act on financial knowledge they already have, keeps repeating unhelpful money patterns, experiences conflict with a partner about finances, or wants to build a healthier, more confident relationship with money.

How many sessions will I need?

This depends on your specific goals and circumstances. Some clients achieve significant progress in three sessions; others benefit from the deeper work of six sessions.

Do you work with couples?

Yes. Money is a significant source of conflict in many relationships, and couples coaching can be very effective for surfacing different money beliefs and finding a way forward together.

Financial Mindset Coaching is based in Cheadle, Stockport (SK8 1LN), in South Manchester. Face-to-face sessions take place in a private garden office. Video call sessions are available for clients anywhere in the UK.

What Is Financial Life Planning?

Nicholas Thompson
Apr 4
3 min read

Most people think about financial planning as a technical exercise: calculating how much to save, where to invest, how to minimise tax. And while those things matter, they miss something fundamental. Financial planning that ignores what you actually want your life to look like is just optimising numbers in a vacuum. Financial life planning takes a different approach — one that starts with your life, not your portfolio.

What is financial life planning?

Financial life planning is an approach to personal finance that integrates your life goals, values, and vision for the future with your financial decisions. Rather than asking "how do I maximise my returns?", it asks: "what kind of life do I want to live, and how can my money help me build it?" It was pioneered by thinkers like George Kinder, whose Three Questions framework has become one of the most powerful tools in life-centred financial planning.

How does it differ from traditional financial planning?

Traditional financial planning typically starts with your assets: what you have, what you earn, what you owe. The planner then works to optimise those numbers in line with conventional milestones — pay off the mortgage, maximise pension contributions, build an emergency fund. Financial life planning starts in a very different place: your vision for your life. What matters most to you? What experiences do you want to have? What kind of person do you want to be? How do you want to spend your time? Money is then understood as a tool to help you live that life — not as an end in itself.

What does a financial life planning process look like?

While every practitioner has their own approach, financial life planning typically involves a deep exploration of your values and what genuinely matters to you, an honest examination of your current financial situation, identifying the gap between where you are and where you want to be, and developing a practical plan — informed by your life goals rather than generic benchmarks — to close that gap over time. The process is as much about listening and reflection as it is about numbers.

Who is financial life planning for?

Financial life planning is particularly valuable for people at transition points in their lives: approaching retirement and wondering what it should look like, navigating a divorce or bereavement, considering a major career change, or simply feeling that the financial path they're on doesn't feel aligned with what they actually want from life. It is also powerful for people who have done well financially by conventional measures but still feel a vague sense that something is missing.

The role of mindset in financial life planning

One of the things I find most powerful about financial life planning is that it naturally surfaces the beliefs and emotional patterns that shape our financial behaviour. When you are asked to think seriously about what you want your life to look like, and then to examine whether your current financial habits are aligned with that vision, the gap between the two is often illuminating. Many people discover that they are spending significant resources on things that don't reflect their true values, while under-investing in the things that actually matter to them most.

Financial life planning is an important part of the work I do with clients at Financial Mindset Coaching. If you'd like to explore what it might mean to align your finances with the life you actually want to live, I work with individuals and couples in Cheadle, South Manchester, and online across the UK. I'd love to hear from you.