A Conversation with Rebecca Brooks, Financial Coach
Financial coach who views planning as self-care
Rebecca Brooks is the co-founder of radcoaches, a company she started with her husband to help outdoor-minded people achieve financial freedom. After going on their own journey of paying off debt and planning for the future, Rebecca wanted to show others, specifically women, how to break down the money taboo and quit dreading conversations about finances.
In this edition, Rebecca and I dig deep into financial wellness, which is a topic that I intentionally bring up in every interview to equip readers with knowledge and confidence around money. She shares about the nuances of coaching women, her own journey to financial freedom, her top tips for setting financial goals, and why she considers her work a self-care service.
How do you describe your craft?
My craft is personal financial coaching and helping outdoor women craft their plans as part of their journey to financial wellness and, ultimately, financial freedom. Being an entrepreneur means I’m doing a lot myself, so it’s actually forced me to be more creative than I normally am.
I love that you call it a financial journey. How did you get to a place where you felt confident in giving other people financial advice?
I grew up in Texas. My husband, Dylan, grew up in Georgia. We both always wanted to move out West. We said whoever finds the best opportunity, we’ll go there and the other one will figure it out. I got a job working in Washington. It was good, but it wasn’t really the best fit. We very quickly realized we might not last as long as we had hoped. We wanted to start playing out other options, but we spent all our money getting there. Our own debt and reliance on every paycheck meant we didn’t have a lot of choice. Then Dylan proposed, and we really got serious about our finances. We knew that we were going to be paying for our own wedding. Dylan had more student debt. I graduated with virtually none, so I was really nervous about how it would affect our relationship. We viewed money as something we could control. For many people nobody teaches them how to manage their money, so people are scared to death of money. I was homeschooled so self-educating is how I figured it out. And I had gone to business school, so that was helpful. In every free moment I had, I soaked up as much as I could—not only budgeting and how to get out of debt, but taxes, investments, and whatnot. Within 18 months, we paid off $45,000, paid for a wedding in cash, and had a 3-week honeymoon.
(Rebecca and Dylan started radcoaches after they realized they wanted to help people in the outdoor community.)
Did that lead to the business? What were the steps to starting your own company?
We had always known we wanted to start a business. That’s why I went to business school. My dad’s an entrepreneur. That was always the track for me. I knew I wanted to help people, but I wasn’t sure how. I was working outdoor retail for 10 years and then we figured the financial stuff out for ourselves. We noticed the taboo around money, so we were that annoying friend constantly like, “So what do you do for investments?” And they were like, “Why are you so weird?” But eventually, they’d circle back. We realized it was a calling when there was the government shutdown of winter 2018. At my job at the time, we had to cut some staff hours because we were in a very seasonal business and in a gateway to a national park. Seeing that our community was hurting so much really got to us. We started doing a lot of reading about how 74% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. It’s not for lack of income, it’s for lack of knowing what to do with it. We were like, this is a problem. It just really hurt my heart.
How is women's financial advice different from advice tailored for men?
A big difference is the belief we have around money. Most of us don’t feel very confident talking about it, especially when it comes to asking for our value, asking for a raise, and negotiating our salaries. It’s hard just knowing where to even start. So what I do is provide space for women to talk about money in a place where they feel it’s OK to be vulnerable. It’s empowering to talk to another woman about money, whereas for some women it can be really challenging to talk openly and freely with men. Dylan can help a woman with a negotiation conversation, but I can be more specific when it comes to helping women price their birth control.
I’m also just genuinely passionate about coaching women because we’re so underserved. We’re spoken over a lot when it comes to money. We’re underpaid in a lot of places. Millennial women still are deferring a lot of their financial decisions to their husbands. Depending on which survey you look at, only 12% of women feel confident in their financial decision making ability. That just got me really fired up. I was like, not on my watch.
What is it like for you to set your rates?
It’s really hard, especially as a service. I want it to be very approachable to the people who need it, but it is a lot of work. It’s a lot of brain space, it’s a lot of emotional space. Those are all things you can’t type into a calculator. Just like any good business person, as our time continues to be taken up more and more, it’s probably going to affect our prices. It’s grown with the results we’ve seen with our clients. We’re really not trying to price out people who are just getting started. We’re working on creating more tools and resources so we can still help people if our one-on-one time starts to get a little bit pricier.
What's your top tip for someone who wants to have a better handle on their finances? Where do they start?
The first step is to have a really clear, defined goal. A lot of people have probably already heard of this, but it has to be a SMART goal: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. The next thing is just to make sure you’re benchmarking yourself and tracking your progress. Anytime Dylan and I were paying down debt or saving for the wedding, we set a SMART goal. It helped us know exactly the task needed to be done. That can be really hard to do on your own.
Is there a goal you have in mind right now?
Building our business is our biggest goal. There’s always the classic maxing out retirement accounts and adding to our nest eggs. And then, we want to buy a travel trailer so we can go digital nomad hopefully in the spring. I love having independence and being able to have that full control over what I do or what I decide not to do. It’s really empowering to live life totally on my terms. The digital nomad thing is a new idea that I’m very excited about. We love traveling in the states to national parks, and there’s so much still that I haven’t seen or I want to see again. That’ll be really enjoyable. We don’t really know where we’re going to put our roots down for a while.
As somebody who’s working as an expert in a field, does imposter syndrome come up, and what do you tell yourself to get out of that?
I call it the imposter monster. He’s very real and yeah, every entrepreneur experiences it. There are definitely times when I check if I said something right. And if I feel like I misspoke, I take the time to humble myself and clarify or correct myself. It’s not worth me agonizing over and it’s not worth my clients taking the information the wrong way. The other thing that comes up with imposter syndrome is comparing yourself to other people who have more followers or who make more. Even though they’re farther along in their journey, I like to remind myself to connect to the transformations I’ve brought my clients through. I think to myself, “Well if you were able to do that within the first year or two years, imagine what you can do when you’ve been doing it as long as they have.” And if I think there’s something they know that I don’t, how do I get that information? How do I fill that gap? That really helps.
Is there anything surprising about your work?
I definitely underestimated how emotional it can be. I do describe myself as an empath, but I didn’t realize how much that would factor into my work. That surprised me. I really have to protect my time and my energy. That, and then just learning how to communicate with people about the importance of the business. For me, it was really easy to come to the conclusion that financial freedom made sense and financial independence made sense. But when you tell people, “Hey, I’ll help you with your budgets and get you out of debt,” they’re like, “No, please don’t, I don’t want to think about money.” Straight out the gate, it was hard to set the tone. You can’t be super direct because the solution doesn’t sound like any fun. And it’s also hard to be vulnerable because it’s very easy to sound braggadocious. I don’t like it when I see a lot of financial influencers posting about net worth. It’s like budget shaming or net-worth shaming. Thankfully, I think we figured out how to brand ourselves.
(Before starting radcoaches, Rebecca was an operations manager at a mountain guiding company.)
When you feel the lull in energy, how do you set boundaries?
It’s interesting because I’ll get off a call and I’m so excited because my clients are really excited too. It’s hardly ever a negative conversation. They’re having breakthroughs, and I’m helping them figure out their problems. It’s just so much fun. But when it’s such a high, it just takes so much energy. I have to either go outside or move my body, or do something that helps me be very present with myself in order to process that. Salt baths help. Those are very purifying. There are a lot of different ways I will process it. It just kind of depends on what else is going on. But I have a nice little tool belt of what I need to do to be ready for the next thing or to talk to the next client.
How are you helping other people to get excited about their finances?
I think it’s important to view money as self-care. It’s not selfish or greedy or anything other than meeting your needs because you can’t pour from an empty cup. So many people miss that component and don’t realize that it’s about wellness. We’re focusing on helping people live their true, authentic life and release the money burden. So many people don’t realize how much it’s affecting them. I really want people to view it as just as important as drinking eight glasses of water a day, doing yoga, and eating their vegetables. It’s worth the effort.
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Before you go…
10 Wellness Resolutions for the New Year You Can Actually Keep (Kassondra Cloos for HGTV)
Use code HHC2020 to get 20% off the Honing Her Craft Etsy shop (Etsy)
The Best Plus-Sized Women’s Hiking Apparel for Winter (Backpacker)