The Importance of Service, Trust, & a Shining Reputation

Tiffany Aliche, AKA The Budgetnista, shares her story, how she grew her business into an enterprise, and why service and education are critical in the financial planning profession.

Tiffany Aliche, AKA The Budgetnista, is an award-winning teacher of financial education and is quickly becoming one of our favorite personal finance experts. She has an online community of over 800,000 and is growing her reach with financial education. She's a blogger, she's a co-host on her podcast Brown Ambition, a speaker, and the founder of the Live Richer Academy. The Academy teaches women how to create, implement, and automate their personal financial freedom.

But Tiffany’s journey to personal finance expert isn’t at all what you’d picture. 

A Rocky Start

Tiffany wasn’t always The Budgetnista. She started out with a bachelor’s degree in business but knew the corporate world wasn’t for her, so she started working in a childcare center, where she taught for 10 years. During that time, she received a masters degree in education and loved her work — which she says is the reason she is so education-focused today.

After receiving her masters, though, Tiffany was laid off from her childcare center, which was funded by a nonprofit. Add the $50,000 in student loan debt, her $220,000 condo mortgage, and $35,000 credit card scam by a “friend,” Tiffany had a rough 2008. And, as she admits, she struggled for two years to really fix the problems that had found their way to her.

But then, she started using the tools she’d learned from her dad, from her degree, and from her own money-savvy mind to dig herself out of debt. She immersed herself in personal finance and, as she started helping her friends also dig themselves out of debt, she realized that there might be something to her skills. 

She began doing outreach to help with personal budgets, but Tiffany admits that charging clients who had really tight budgets, or who couldn’t afford the services they really needed, was difficult. And then she made a connection at the United Way… and there, the Budgetnista was born in 2010.

Start With Service

Even in her own struggles with debt, Tiffany kept service first. She started working the United Way and, after staff trainings, began to offer the same services she wanted to offer to the public — to people who really needed it. After her work with the United Way grew, and she began to build on her Budgetnista title, she remained focused on service. She also focused on what she knew: budgeting, credit building, and getting out of debt. As she’s expanded her enterprise, she now works with larger organizations and brands to offer personal finance curriculum, and built the Live Richer Academy in 2015. Throughout all of the threads of her business (and there are a lot of them!), service is still always first and foremost in Tiffany’s mind.

The idea of service and building trust with your clients was one of the biggest themes in this episode, and her words are worth taking note. In this episode, Tiffany also talks to me, your host Alexandria, about why telling your story is so important, how focusing on education can convert contacts into clients, and why it’s time for financial planning professionals to shine if they want to do work they love and make money doing it.

If you want some motivation and some technical how-to’s to help you educate, empower, and serve people, don’t miss this episode.

 

What You’ll Learn:

  • The rocky road that led Tiffany to her personal finance work
  • How a connection at a nonprofit led to the birth of the Budgetnista brand
  • How to grow a business based on what you know
  • Why working with fellow experts is the best way to build a team
  • The power of partners and different business models to better serve an audience
  • Why consumers are looking for “team player” professionals who work together
  • The importance of the what, the how, and the why in your work
  • How to focus on service and trust in your relationships with client
  • Why telling your story is so important to attract the clients you want to help
  • The growing interest in financial education
  • How focusing on education can lead to clients in the future
  • The power of different offerings, funnels, and “chaperoning” people to your services
  • Why financial planning professionals need to “shine” in their particular specialties — and how the door is open for financial planning rock-stars 

 

Show Notes:
During our talk with Tiffany Aliche, “The Budgetnista,” we discuss:

 

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