Money Made Human Podcast

Chapter 1. If you’ve tried budgeting apps, spreadsheets, and rules and still ended up unsure, this is the episode that explains why, and why it was never a flaw in you. Kelsa Dickey reads Chapter 1 of SpendFirst, including the story of Jessie and Joe, a capable couple doing everything “right” and still drowning.  The problem was never discipline. It was that traditional budgeting never helped them...

This is where it begins. In the Introduction to SpendFirst, I'm reading the opening of my new book and laying out the premise the whole season is built on: You can manage almost anything in your life, so why does money still feel like a guessing game?  The answer isn’t more discipline. It’s finally being able to see how your money moves, today, next paycheck, and three months from now. If you...

The Financial Coach Academy Podcast is now Money Made Human, and Season 2 starts here.  In this short welcome episode, Kelsa Dickey shares what the new show is about and what makes this season different from anything she’s done before: an entire season spent reading her book, SpendFirst, one chapter a week, in her own voice.  If money has ever felt like a guessing game even though you’re capable e...

This is the final episode of the Financial Coach Academy Podcast and the final episode of Season 1. Starting June 25, this show becomes Money Made Human. In this episode, we’re talking about what 157 episodes built, sharing the story of a listener who changed how I see this show, explaining why the name is changing, and laying out what’s coming in Season 2: The full SpendFirst® book, read chapter...

Every year the same hesitations come up when I talk to coaches about conferences: I won't know anyone.  It's too expensive.  I'm not far enough along.  I don't have time.  I can probably learn all of it online anyway. This week I'm replaying my conversation with Philip Taylor, CPA, entrepreneur, and founder of FinCon, with a fresh intro and outro for FinCon 2026. Philip ha...

Someone on Reddit spent more than $4,000 on a conference and came home with six business cards on their desk and nothing else. No meetings booked, no follow-up calls scheduled, no real conversations. They did all the things people tell you to do: They worked the expo floor, sat through the sessions, showed up to the networking cocktail hour. And they still felt like they had lit that money on fire...

A few weeks ago, an email came across my desk from a financial coach who said she'd never struggled this much to make something work. She'd been posting consistently, running webinars, building a community, and getting engagement on every post. And she had zero coaching clients and six months of runway left. Her friends and family were telling her there wasn't a market for financial...

Every business decision you make has three stakeholders, and most coaches only think about one or two of them. That's usually why the decisions feel so hard. Pricing, marketing, who to hire, what to say yes to, what to say no to. If you've been going back and forth on a decision for weeks (or months), the problem is rarely the decision itself. It's that you don't have a clear w...

If you've been thinking about starting a financial coaching practice, there’s probably a list running in the back of your mind. The certification you should probably get. The website you need to build. The LLC you think you're supposed to file. The handful of topics you still need to master before you'd feel ready to call yourself an expert. I had that same list almost two decades a...

Every client you work with moves through a journey. The situations are always different, but the stages are remarkably consistent. I’ve watched them unfold across hundreds of clients over nearly two decades, and at some point I started giving them language. In this episode, I walk through the four stages I see every client move through when they start working on their money: See Clearly, Stand Fir...

Your client just made a choice you wouldn't have made. You walked them through the options. You built the understanding. They applied it, reflected on it, and came back with their decision. And it's not the one you would have picked. What you do in the next thirty seconds is the real test of whether you're coaching or telling. This is the kind of moment the Clarity–Application–Commi...

Last week you listened to a real coaching session with Lauren, a financial coach working through competing goals, limited margin, and a jumbled mind full of priorities she couldn't rank. This week I want to give you something to do with what you heard. I'm pulling three takeaways from Lauren's session: one for newer coaches, one for coaches who've been at this a while, and one...

Lauren is a financial coach. She knows exactly what she'd tell a client who was juggling competing financial goals with limited margin. She'd say: pick one. Prioritize. Stop trying to do everything at once. And yet, when it came to her own money (her IVF goal, her emergency fund, her coaching business, her serving job she was ready to leave) everything felt jumbled. In this Client Seat e...

Coaches are really good at helping clients build plans, organize their money, set goals, and adjust their behavior. These are excellent things. But something that comes up in almost every coaching relationship, usually several months in, is this: “I think things are okay. I mean, we're getting by. But I don't really know if we're ahead or behind.” The client is still doing the work....

If you followed the recent series on calibration and the three rhythms that money flows through, this session is where both of those ideas come to life. Mary Ann Stenquist is a spending coach who helps ambitious women break free from the shop-regret-shame cycle and align their spending with their values. She knows money. She teaches it. She coaches on it. And she's stuck. For four years, Mary...

Most clients walk into a session already convinced they failed. The bad month is fresh. They went over budget. The spreadsheet is in the red. And every line item feels like evidence that they just aren't good with money. But here's something to note when you look at months like that: most of the time, nothing actually went wrong. The rent was paid, the groceries were normal, and the ever...

There's a question many financial coaches don’t stop long enough to ask: What actually makes us better at this? Not what we think makes us better. Not what the industry says we should do. What actually moves the needle when it comes to the craft of coaching. I’ve spent nearly two decades working with coaches at every stage, from training my very first coach to building a team of 50 practition...

Getting feedback used to make my chest tighten. I'd spend so much energy trying to live a life where I'd never have to hear that I let someone down or disappointed them. The problem? That's impossible. You will inevitably get feedback as a coach and as a business owner. So you need to get good at it. Not just operationally, but emotionally. This episode walks through the three minds...

Something trips up a lot of really good financial coaches, and it has nothing to do with the actual work. It's how they describe it. When someone says, "So what do you do?" the response is often off. And it's not because you don't know what you do. It's because nobody's helped you see the difference between describing your services and describing what your client...

There's a sentence you've almost certainly heard from a client. Maybe more than once. Maybe even in the last week. "I just need to be more disciplined."  It sounds like self-awareness. It sounds like accountability. And most coaches nod and move on when they hear it. In this week’s episode, we’re breaking down why that sentence is rarely what it appears to be and why what you d...

You’re secretly afraid that if you set boundaries around when you work or stop applying pressure, you'll collapse. That the drive you have will disappear. That you won't get anything done without urgency forcing you forward. Does that resonate? For a long time, I thought I only had two speeds: all in or completely off. If I slowed down, I was afraid I would stop. Like if I wasn't pu...

Your clients don't need you to make everything feel better. They need you to help them trust themselves while feeling uncertain. This is the line between emotional over-holding and confidence building. It's subtle. And if you're a coach who cares deeply about your clients, you've probably crossed it without realizing. Emotional over-holding looks like carrying more of the emoti...

Last week, our Client Seat episode featured me coaching Michelle through feeling out of control with her money after moving to Guatemala. The cash system felt chaotic. Multiple accounts, inconsistent tracking, and no clear rhythm for how money moved. She wanted stability back. This week, I'm showing you what was happening on my side of that conversation. The coaching decisions I was making wh...

This episode is part of our Client Seat series, where financial coaches get real-time financial coaching from Kelsa. It’s a great opportunity to showcase what goes into a financial coaching session. If you’re a financial professional, you can apply to be a guest on a future Client Seat episode. Being a financial coach doesn't mean your own money is always perfect. Different seasons of life re...

I’m just going to come out and say it: there is NO “right way” to get out of debt. In fact, there are a number of ways that you can support your clients (or yourself) to pay down your debts - and today, we’re going to examine five of those strategies.  When I first started coaching clients whose goal was to pay off their debts, I would have ask the client to give me their financial details, which...