Financial Counsellors

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Financial Counseling for Students

Some of the clients you are likely to serve at some point, in your financial counseling practice, are students. The students who seek financial counseling tend to be those who are in college. But there may also be rare cases where you have to take a high school student through financial counseling. In this article, we will be mentioning some of the important things you need to know, when it comes to financial counseling for students.

Why students seek financial counseling

There are several reasons as to why students seek financial counseling services. In most cases, you tend to find a scenario where a student has lost control of his finances. This is where, for instance, you have a college student, who – try as he may — is unable to budget for his student loan. Or you could have a high school student who is unable to properly manage the little money that comes her way. She could, for instance, have recently received her monthly allowance in the form of a gift card. She could then have been introduced to the gift card website where she would be managing the card by tracking its balances and reviewing the transaction history for the card. Then, four days down the line, her parent or guardian checks the card’s Mygiftcardsite Visa balance — only to realize that it is totally depleted. That would be on account of the girl having gone on a spending spree immediately after getting the card.  The parent then, fearful that the girl may be developing poor financial habits at a young age, could opt to refer her for financial counseling services…

So we find that the students who seek financial counseling services fall into two broad categories. There are those who check themselves in, for financial counseling. Then there are those who are referred for financial counseling by their parents, guardians, school authorities and even government authorities in some rare cases.

How to undertake financial counseling for students

The most important thing is to help the students to come up with sustainable ways of managing their finances. You need to avoid giving advice, and instead focus on helping the students to brainstorm/think (for themselves) how they can manage their finances better. You would then serve as a sounding board, and give a listening ear to the students, as they voice the solutions they identify by themselves. And then you would serve as an accountability partner, for the students, as they try to implement the better financial management strategies they identify.

Important things to keep in mind while conducting financial counseling sessions for students

Firstly, it is important to understand that you are probably dealing with people who have very little life experience. So you need to keep this at the back of your mind.

You also need to remember that these are folks who are still in the experimenting stage of their life.

It is also critical to remember that the students you are working with are folks with limited financial resources at their disposal. So some of the measures you’d advocate for, while counseling working people/adults, wouldn’t necessarily apply for the students.

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Why do People Seek Financial Counseling Services?

One of the questions that financial counselors keep on encountering is the one as to why people seek their services. That, in other words, is as a question as to why people seek financial counseling services. And as it turns out, there are several reasons as to why people seek such services, including:

  1. The desire to achieve financial goals: it is not always easy to figure out how to achieve financial goals. Whereas the process of formulating the goals (or wish-lists) is usually easy enough, working out how to actually achieve those goals is usually the hard part. For instance, you may be looking at a person who has just gotten a job at a company like, say, Nordstrom. So he goes to the MyNordstrom website, logs onto the portal, and proceeds to check his paystubs. He does this severally. And every time he signs in at the Mynordstromlogin page, and checks his paystubs, he realizes that what he earns is too modest, compared to the financial goals he has. This then forces him to seek financial counseling, as he tries to figure out how to achieve his financial goals – in spite of the modest paychecks he is earning.
  2. The desire to escape from debt: there are people who find themselves trapped in debt. So they are forced to seek financial counseling, as they try to figure out how they can escape from this trap.
  3. The desire to avoid bankruptcy: there are folks who come to discover that they are on the verge of bankruptcy, after being unable to meet their financial obligations. Such individuals are then forced to seek financial counseling services, in a bid to avoid bankruptcy (which would be ruinous to their creditworthiness in the future).
  4. The desire to overcome financial woes: there are, for instance, individuals who notice disturbing patterns in their financial lives. These may be the patterns where they keep on getting money, then depleting it completely, getting more money, depleting it completely… and so on. To break such cycles, they opt to seek financial counseling.
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Accessing Financial Counseling Services Online

It is possible to access financial counseling services online. This means that you don’t have to visit a financial counselor in person, every time you need this type of counseling. It is, of course, preferable to seek financial counseling in person if you can. But if you are not in a position to do so, there is also the option of seeking and subsequently accessing financial counseling services online.

The steps to follow

There are three key steps you need to follow, while trying to access financial counseling services online.

Firstly, you need to search for the websites through which financial counseling services are offered online. You can use a search engine, like Google or Bing, to identify those websites – through which you can access financial counseling services online.

You then need to visit the various websites through which financial counseling services are offered, to identify the specific one you will be using.

Then next step then is to enroll for the financial counseling services. You may be required to pay a fee at this stage.

After this, all that would be remaining would be for you to go through the financial counseling sessions, in order to get solutions to the issues afflicting you. It could be, for instance, that you are working for a company like, say, Lowes – and your problem is that you are unable to keep track of your money. So you keep on finding yourself going to the Lowes kronos employee login page, signing in, accessing a decent paycheck – and then being unable to keep track of the money! This is the sort of problem that you can get a lasting solution for, if you are diligent in implementing the stuff you learn in the course of your web-based financial counseling sessions.

The upside

You are likely to pay less for web-based financial counseling services than you’d have paid, if you were interacting with the counselor in person.

Further, you may find the web-based financial counseling to be more convenient than office-based financial counseling.

The downside

On the downside, opting for web-based financial counseling will mean have to forego the person-to-person contact associated with office-based financial counseling. Some experts are of the view that such person-to-person contact is important, because the counselor then serves as an accountability partner.

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Disclaimer

This is a privately owned site that the authors have no finance background. Please consult your financial advisor before making any financial decirion.