Work With Us
The first call is free and lasts about thirty minutes. We'll ask what's going on, tell you honestly whether coaching would help, and say so if it wouldn't.
What a financial coach does
A coach teaches the skills and keeps you honest about the plan. We'll sit with your actual numbers, show you the options and what each one costs, and check in while you work it. We're not here to lecture you about lattes, and we don't have one method we push on everybody.
What we help with
Paying down debt
Feeling underwater on credit cards and loans is the most common reason people call us. We'll organize what you owe and build a plan you can actually run:
- Put them in order. Highest rate first costs less; smallest balance first pays off sooner in a way you can feel. We'll show you what that trade is worth on your debts rather than telling you which camp to join.
- Check whether consolidating helps. Sometimes refinancing or a balance transfer is genuinely cheaper. Sometimes it just moves the problem and adds a fee. We'll tell you which one you're looking at.
- Set the payment. What you're required to pay and what you actually send are two different numbers, and only the second one changes the payoff date.
Start on your own: the debt payoff calculator runs both orders side by side, and this article walks through what the difference costs.
Setting a budget
A budget is deciding where the money goes before it goes, rather than reading the statement afterward and wondering. Done well it is not restrictive — it is the thing that lets you spend on what matters without the low-level dread.
- Built around your life, not a template. Percentages from a book do not know you have a kid in daycare or a commute.
- Survives a bad month. The yearly bills — insurance, car registration, the holidays — get a monthly set-aside, so they stop being emergencies.
- Reviewed, not just written. The first month is a draft. We adjust it with you rather than handing it over and hoping.
Start on your own: the monthly budget worksheet is the intake form we use, and this article shows how to find your real number from ninety days of statements.
Large purchases
A house, a car, a roof, a wedding. Nobody falls into a house — but plenty of people fall into a car, because the dealer asks what you want to pay a month and a long enough term makes any price fit.
- What it does to your cash flow. The payment is the small part. Insurance, fuel, maintenance, and on a house the tax and insurance escrow, are the rest.
- Save toward it on purpose. A sinking fund for the thing you know is coming, so the purchase does not land on a card.
- Whether to buy at all, and when. Sometimes the honest answer is next year, with a bigger deposit and less borrowed.
Start on your own: the loan calculator runs backwards from a payment you can afford, and the escrow calculator covers the tax and insurance a mortgage payment hides.
Student loans
Student debt is confusing by construction: subsidized, unsubsidized, private, consolidated, several servicers, and a repayment menu that changes every few years. Most people we talk to have never seen the whole picture on one page.
- Sort out what you owe and to whom. Balance, rate, type and servicer for every loan, in one place.
- Work out which options you qualify for. Federal loans carry protections a private refinance gives up for good, which makes refinancing a decision rather than a no-brainer.
- Build the payoff plan. Including what extra payments do and where they should land.
Start on your own: what actually differs between the three kinds, and how CJ cleared $85,000 of it.
Money and relationships
Two people, one budget, and two different sets of instincts about what money is for. This is usually the hardest part of the work and it is rarely the math.
- Get both people looking at the same page. Often one partner has been carrying the whole picture alone, which is its own kind of exhausting.
- Name the difference instead of arguing it. A saver and a spender are not a problem to be fixed; they need a plan with room for both.
- Agree the rules in advance. What we each spend without asking, what we decide together, and when we check in.
We coach; we are not marriage counselors, and when something needs a counselor we will say so. Sessions are for both of you — the budget worksheet is a good place to start the conversation before the first call.
Planning ahead
Once the debt is moving and the budget holds, the question becomes what the money is for. This is the part people rarely get to on their own, because the urgent things keep winning.
- Margin first, then a cushion. An emergency fund is what turns a car repair back into an inconvenience.
- Use what work already offers. The employer match and the tax-advantaged accounts are the cheapest money available, and they are routinely left on the table.
- Name what is next. A career change, a move, a baby, a business. Goals with dates behave differently from goals without them.
Start on your own: the 401(k) and HSA calculators show what you are leaving unclaimed, and net worth is the number that tells you whether any of it is working.
How it works
Discovery call
Free, about thirty minutes. We get to know each other, you tell us what's going on, and we explain how we work. You'll leave with a bit of homework so the first real session isn't spent gathering paperwork.
Coaching session
We go through your homework together and start working the plan — the budget, the debts, whatever brought you here.
Follow-ups
Plans fall apart in month two, not month one. We check in and adjust until you're running it comfortably on your own.
What it costs
$75 an hour
For a specific question you want a straight answer to: whether to recast or refinance, what to do with a bonus, whether this car payment works. Book it, bring the numbers, leave with an answer.
Quoted after the call
What we'd rather sell you, because it is the thing that works. One session can answer a question; it cannot change how money runs in your house. A package starts with the free discovery call, so we can see what you are dealing with and say honestly how many sessions it takes — and whether it is worth it.
Coaching is education, planning and accountability. We are not registered investment advisers — we don't recommend specific funds, stocks or insurance products, and we don't manage money. More on what a coach is, and how one differs from an adviser.
Schedule a session
Email us and we'll come back with a couple of times. No obligation, and no pitch at the end of the free call.
or write to info@ziegler.services
Three things make the first reply useful rather than a round of questions:
- What's going on. A sentence or two — debt, a budget that will not hold, a purchase coming up.
- Roughly when you're free. Evenings, weekends, a particular day: enough for us to offer times that work.
- Who's coming. One of you or both. If money is a two-person question, the call goes better with both.
We usually reply within a day or two. Nothing you send is stored anywhere but our mailbox, and you can ask us to delete it at any point.