Strategic Money Mindset with Kerri Jackson

As an entrepreneur, when you hear the words budget, finance, or investment – do you automatically feel out of your comfort zone? Most of us aren’t taught in school how to manage our money, budgeting, or anything to do with our personal finances.You may even have a scarcity mindset around your money and feel like you’re lacking in some areas, right?

You can actually be confident about your money and have a strategy in place to reach your financial goals. Thanks to Kerri Jackson, our special guest today, is going to be giving us some insight and tips into our finances and our mindset around money. 

From a young age, numbers were just her thing. An aptitude for math led Kerri into a 15+-year career as a Canadian Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA ,CA). Kerri started her finance career at a mid-sized accounting firm in Toronto, Canada. Ditching the cold winters, she then moved to Bermuda, where she worked at KPMG for 5 years in the Alternative Investments audit team. Her next stop was London, England, where she was the controller and risk manager for a secured-debt financing investment fund.

Kerri knew early on in her life that she wanted financial independence and the freedom to choose how she lived her life. Early in her career, she created a solid strategy for her money, focused on saving, investing and building wealth. She saved bonuses and pay raises until she accumulated over a million dollars in her portfolio. After achieving her version of financial freedom and independence, she quit her job and is now pursuing a life with the freedom to choose how she wants to live it. The freedom of choice is her big why. And her mission is to help more people do the same – be strategic with their money and create financial freedom, ease and choice in their life.

In today’s episode, we are going to cover Kerri’s background, how your money mindset impacts your decision-making, how Kerri works with clients as an introvertpreneur in her coaching business, passive income streams, and more that will help you with your finances.

From Corporate Career to Financial Coach

Starting at a young age, Kerri was really good with numbers. After going to university for accounting, she became a qualified CA in Canada. She spent around 16 years in the professional accounting industry and worked with alternative investments in banking, a hedge find manager in London, England, and she eventually hit a plateau that led her to question quitting her corporate career.

After things changed in her personal life and she came to a place of financial security, she quit her full-time job! She realized that she loved personal finance and wanted to help others do she did – finally becoming financially independent to potentially quitting their jobs or having a life with way more independence, ease, and confidence with managing their money and accomplishing their money goals. She took the leap in working with people last year to do just that.

Isn’t her journey to becoming a financial coach really interesting? 

Knowing that math wasn’t my strong suit in school and how out of my comfort zone it made me, I now love talking with people in the financial world because it allows me to become more comfortable with the subject of money.

How Do You Manage Your Money?

Were you also out of your comfort zone with the subject of math in school? Not many of us are taught anything though about personal finance or anything to do with managing or budgeting our money.

Our experiences may have come from those in our family or those around us, and like Kerri mentioned, whether it be good or bad – those are the examples we learned from. A really great asset to help you see how you manage your money, is Kerri’s quiz called What’s Your Money M.O.? This quiz was so insightful for me and showed how I manage money along with my mindset around money. I have more awareness now around my habits with money and the way I manage mine.

What Does It Look Like to Work With a Financial Coach?

If you are now wondering how you manage your money and want to be more strategic about your personal finances, then working with Kerri can be done in 2 capacities. A shorter coaching package called, Your Finance Fixed and then her more full-scale financial coaching program called, Your Complete Money Plan. So of course, it depends on what you are looking for and how you want to go forward.

• Your Finance Fixed is for you if you feel in control of your finances, but have one specific area that you’re wondering about and want to learn more about like how to start investing or the different options for how to invest and make your money work with different strategies. This is a way for you to get to know Kerri more, get started in a specific area without doing a full scale program.
• Your Complete Money Plan is a three-month package, where you meet with Kerri for 10 weekly sessions on things like how you allocate or distribute your cash, plan for how you’re going to save, getting clear on your goals and visions, your context for your money, why you want to grow your money, how you want to use it, and then getting into creating an entire strategic plan related to your spending. 

I believe that having more than one way to work with someone is very beneficial and allows your potential clients to meet you where they’re at with the goals they want to achieve. When it comes to money, there’s such a wide variety of what people need and where they’re at.

Coaching vs. Digital Products

Launching a business to help others with managing their money can definitely look different for everyone. The two that come to mind for me are when you have it set up for more of a coaching platform to help people one-on-one or you create a set of services, like digital products, which allows you to be more hands-off. 

In Kerri’s case, even as an introvert, she loves connection, so she has it set up more for one-on-one help with her clients. Not all introverts are the same, and I love that she shared she enjoys the more persona experience of connecting with clients in this way.

Some introverts may not like to structure their business in this way because the one-on-one terrifies them. In this case, a great way to structure your business may be set services or digital products to help your clients financially or in any other service you may provide.

Mindset Obstacles to Overcome When Launching Your Business

Launching your business can be a scary thing, even as a financial coach like Kerri! I think it is even more present for introverted entrepreneurs because they are so in their head and tend to overthink more.

The important thing is that you do take the leap, but something that really triggered Kerri mentally about starting was seeing others showing up on video all of the time on social media because she knew she couldn’t do that, especially starting out. What she found was that she enjoyed writing and has focused her efforts on being more strategic with blogging to show her expertise along with email marketing. She said she had to, “dig deep and find that internal motivation and discipline, when the motivation wasn’t there, to just keep going, and trying new things”, which is so true. You have to, at some point, dig deep, and finding your why for doing the work you do helps to find your discipline.

Where to Start On Your Journey to Financial Independence

If you are struggling with managing your money, budgeting, saving, or investing your money – Kerri has some great advice for you!

She mentions that one of the easiest and quickest things you can do is just start looking at your bank account. Look at it every day or look at it once a week and see what’s going on in there and check your credit card. See how often you’re using it. What are you spending it on? Just become more aware and engaged in your finances and just start there. And then once you have a little bit more awareness, then you can start asking yourself these two questions: 

What am I spending my money on? 

What do I actually want to be doing with my money? 

Then from there, she says you can build out a budget and a savings plan to use your money more strategically for the future. This is great advice because a lot of people that have credit cards and things coming off monthly that they signed up for months or years ago, may not be aware of it still coming out. They may not even actively use that account or card anymore. And I think a great thing to remember here too, is that it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s about trial and error to see what works for you. 

Letting Your Money Work For You 

Your money can do so much more for you than just sit in a bank or just be spent. There are so many other opportunities for growth, like passive income. This type of revenue stream can be non-risky investments or even digital products that you create in your business.

Something you can do depending on where you live is to search for the types of non-risky investments to start making. There are so many other ways to make passive income like affiliate marketing, and digital products from your business.

I hope you have found this episode beneficial in regards to managing your money and that it gave you some helpful tips on being more financially savvy. Even though you weren’t taught these things in school, you can take charge of your money and your mindset around money with confidence and the knowledge you gain. Be sure to check out Kerri’s quiz, What Is Your Money M.O.? to see how you currently manage your money. 

What is something you want to be more strategic about in managing your personal or business finances?