Everyone walking into a financial coaching session at the Capital Good Fund (CGF) comes in with a unique set of goals. You might be saving up for a new car or planning for your children to go to college. You might be facing foreclosure or accumulated debt that you don’t know how to conquer. The way CGF benefits their clients’ personal journeys, however, is the same: Capital Good Fund provides people an opportunity to learn about and take ownership over their personal finances, and a community of supporters to help make that happen.

Financial Coaches, trained student volunteers from Brown University and other colleges in Providence, will work with clients step-by-step over the course of several months to set personal goals, keep track of budgets, and find financial services. They’ll get to know the individuals they work with on a deeply personal level and make an investment in their financial futures. More than that, Financial Coaches are changing their own futures, too, by seeing firsthand the impact that their work has on the people they serve.

“Every day that an injustice continues makes it that much harder to remedy it moving forward,” CGF Executive Director and co-founder Andy Posner said. “You can’t silo off injustice in one area. I think one of the most dangerous things you can do is live your life as though the inequality around you won’t affect you.”

Coach Mintaka Angell: Trust x Connection = New Perspectives

I was at a client’s house recently—I’ve gotten to know her really well, we’ve built this really rewarding connection. We have these long conversations about things like the rainy season in Puerto Rico, where she’s from, and higher education. She’s saving for her young daughter to go to college, and now she’s also pregnant.

The last time I saw her, she had just had an ultrasound done. She showed me the pictures of her baby and I was there when she showed her husband and her daughter. She was really, really proud and the family was just really happy. And I know the family is going to be in a tight financial situation after the new baby is born. So, when we sat down that day to start talking about how savings work, it was very present in my mind that their coaching was going to have an immediate impact on them.

Working as a financial coach, I get these little windows into very intimate parts of people’s lives and it’s great. But it’s a strange amount of responsibility to go into somebody else’s life and have a frank, open discussion about what is considered by our society to be a very taboo and intimate subject. That needs a lot of trust, which you need to engender very quickly. It needs a willingness to connect with people on the kind of level that you don’t generally have with strangers. Once you get access to those aspects of people’s lives, you can see not only how to help them, but why it’s so important to. It can be very easy to view any group of people as statistics until you actually get in there and learn the individual personal narratives. I think that’s why forging those relationships and hearing those stories is so important.

Coach Muna Idriss: Knowledge + Support = Solutions

I came from a family that was very financially stable. There was no struggle. The bills were always paid. I grew up with that engrained in my mind. When I turned 18, I got banked and I got my first credit card. I built my credit score to a place that was higher than my mom’s! I understand the leg up I have in that way.

Working through someone’s finances with them can be difficult. Personal finance is just that—personal. And society has stigmatized people who struggle—even through things that are beyond predatory, just poisonous. One of our clients got a payday loan online. The cap for payday loans is somewhere around 260 percent interest in Rhode Island, which is absurd. It’s absurd. The client who got her payday loan online was paying at 700 percent. How do you bounce back from that? At CGF, a client needs to be invested not only in the tangible benefits of working through a financial program, but also feel like they have someone in their corner who is helping them make decisions, but isn’t judging whatever decisions they make. I need to be that cheerleader for them, when they’re facing those type of tough choices.

That’s the type of work I’d like to do long-term. It’s definitely different from other financial advising jobs, when you’re in a fancy office building and your clients make six figures and already have 401k’s. Your job is basically just picking and choosing different services that are available to them through their financial abundance, moving money around. You are not helping people actually solve problems, and that’s ultimately what I want to do with my life—to be some sort of problem solver, like I am with CGF.

Coach Austin Mertz: Power2

I describe my work as financial therapy, because clients can tell you their problems, and you can help them talk it out, but also work through it with some solutions that you can find for them. It always depends on what the client needs, as to what we talk about and what I can do for them. That changes from client to client, but there are many who are getting by paycheck to paycheck. It definitely puts your work into perspective.  

My fourth client believed a debt consolidation loan would help to lessen the burden of her costly credit card debt. In our coaching sessions, we went through every single option. We talked about everything that was available to her. Eventually, we realized that she couldn’t get a loan—she had to pursue bankruptcy. While it was really tough to tell her that, and it was a sad realization, at the same time, she was empowered to take action. She had spent so long just sitting on her debt, not knowing what to do about it. But through our coaching sessions, she really came to understand what her options were moving forward. With each client, there's always that moment of appreciation for your work. It's not always this “a-ha” moment and all of their problems are solved. It takes a lot of hard work to dig yourself out of a financial hole. 

It takes some getting used to, providing advice to people who are much, much older than you. I go into their homes, or their offices or conference rooms when working with businesses. And I’m there to educate and be a resource. With the first client, it’s kind of scary asserting yourself and being confident. Eventually, you get the hang of things.