The miracle question
Plus: I launched my financial coaching practice!
First, the big news: I launched my financial coaching practice, Good Bones Financial Coaching!
I’m offering discounts on packages for the first cohort of clients as I build up AFC experience hours, so if getting your finances in order in 2025 is on your list of resolutions, now’s a chance to get a great deal on a newbie financial coach.
I’m offering a six-session program over three months designed to help you become a good steward of your own financial life. My approach is less about helping people make decisions about money driven by “should” — “I should save”, “I should cut back on shopping.” Rather, it’s about helping you figure out what you truly want to spend money on, considering your income, values and both your present and future self, and co-creating a tailored system, brick by brick, to get there.
You can sign up for a free intro session with me here, or message me directly:
The Miracle Question
My favorite question to ask clients on intro calls comes straight out of my financial counseling textbook. It’s called “the miracle question.”
The most basic construction asks this:
If you were to wake up tomorrow and some miracle occurred that made all of your money problems go away, what would you do?
You’d get out of bed, move through your home and what would be different about your day? How would you move through the rest of your week? Your year? Your life?
The thing I love most about this question is how so much of the time, so many elements of our lives would stay exactly the same. If we’re lucky, we so often would do the same work we do now, live in the same place, hang out with the same people, go to the same favorite spots. The question gets us pretty quickly into a state of gratitude for what we already have that we love. Gratitude for all that is already present.
The question also points us to dreams, big and small, that suddenly become a lot more vivid.
When I ran this exercise once, and really imagined myself walking through a future home, I suddenly visualized a nursery with an extremely lush and comfortable area rug. It never occurred to me before, but the exercise helped me realize that it’s something I want to provide — a really, really comfortable floor space for a yet-to-exist kid! It pointed me to a small tangible desire within the context of a bigger, salient dream.
As we transition into the new year I wonder how you’d answer the miracle question. So I opened up the subscriber chat to hear your answers. I’d love to know if answering it helped you feel gratitude for elements of your life now, or helped you visualize any dreams more clearly:
Thank you to everyone who’s read and supported this newsletter this year, especially the paid and founding subscribers, who really helped me with the start up costs of my business.
I’m fully planning to continue to muse about money — what it is and what it isn’t — within this space in the new year. I hope you’ve enjoyed these missives as much as I’ve enjoyed putting them together. Shout out to my editor/husband Sam for his set of eyes.
If you think someone might enjoy Deconstructing Money or benefit from financial coaching, please spread the word.
With gratitude,
Bethel