Financial coaching for families
Budgeting help now. Retirement planning for later.
Financial coaching for families who’ve built a solid foundation and want to know what goes on top of it. We start with a free call and go from there.
Who you’d be working with
Nobody ever taught us this part.
My money story started in grad school. Half of my stipend went straight to rent. My first budget was just about getting through the month. Some weeks that meant homemade pancakes that cost about four cents each.
Then I got my first full time job, and the questions got harder. Roth or traditional. A 401(k) or an IRA. Which health plan. How to invest for something decades away. Budgeting had gotten me that far, but it had nothing to say about any of it.
So I started figuring it out. I read a lot, and I made plenty of mistakes with my own money. Over time I saw how it all connects. Budgeting, taxes, investing, insurance, and retirement are not separate problems. They pull on each other.
I have a PhD. I still had no idea which health plan to pick. That’s the part worth saying out loud. None of this is hard because you aren’t smart enough. It’s hard because nobody teaches it.
Running numbers is what I do for a living. Retirement projections and Roth conversion timing are the same kind of work, and I’m glad to sit in that math so you don’t have to learn it from scratch.
What I don’t do is manage your money. I never touch your accounts, I sell nothing, and I earn no commission. I teach you to run it yourself, so the plan still holds when I’m not in the room. That also makes me the wrong person to ask for stock picks, or if what you really want is to hand it all off and never look at it again.
I work with families in their thirties and forties, over video, anywhere in the US. I’m taking on a small number of them right now.
What working together looks like
We meet every month and go through your actual numbers.
Coaching runs month to month, because that’s the rhythm money already has. A month of spending happens, we look at what it did, and we decide what the next one should look like. Every so often we look much further out, at the decisions that don’t arrive for decades, so they aren’t a shock when they do.
- A video call every month. On your calendar, no travel, no office.
- Your real numbers on a shared screen. We go through them together instead of me handing you a report.
- A short list of what to do next. Specific, and small enough that you can finish it before we talk again.
Included · the LGZ Planner
The planner we work in together.
I built this to run our own family’s money, and it’s where your numbers live while we work. Export a CSV from your bank, tag the transactions once, and it remembers. Next month the same items sort themselves.
- Tag a month of transactions once and it keeps your categories from then on.
- Your data never leaves your browser. No bank logins, nothing sitting on a server.
- Built for the sessions, so we’re always looking at the same screen.
- It models the retirement side too, down to things like Roth conversion timing. That’s a long way off for most people, and seeing it early is what keeps it from being a shock later.
There’s a demo with a few premade families in it. Pick whoever looks closest to you and click around. Nothing to sign up for.
You might be wondering
Honest answers to the awkward questions.
How do we know if we’re on track?
There isn’t one number that means on track. It depends what you’re aiming at, so that’s where we start. Once the target is clear, the math tells us what this month needs to look like, and usually the change is smaller than it feels from the outside.
What does this cost?
It depends on what you need, so we settle it on the free call. Nothing gets decided before then, and the call itself costs nothing.
What happens on the first call?
We talk for about thirty minutes. You say where things stand, I tell you what I’d look at first. There’s nothing to prepare and nothing to send me beforehand.
Are you a financial advisor?
No. I’m a financial coach, which means I teach and I don’t manage money. I never touch your accounts, I don’t sell financial products, and I don’t earn commission on anything. If what you want is somebody to invest on your behalf, that’s an advisor, and it’s a different job.