Financial Health: Our First Speaking Opportunity

It’s no secret that we like talking about personal finance. I mean, look at the majority of our posts on the blog. However, when a friend of mine asked us if we would be interested in talking about how to be financially healthy at a health fair that she was having at her church… We were hesitant. * gasp! * Why? Because it was our first time being asked to do any such thing. And then all the self-limiting beliefs started to kick in.

• What will we talk about?
• What if they ask us questions that we don’t know the answers to?
• What if someone challenges us and tells us that our information is wrong?
• What if no one comes to our booth because “no one likes to talk about personal finance”?
• What if no one believes us because we’re “so young”?
• Do we really know enough information about financial health to tell other people how to be financially healthy?

Luckily for us, when she asked us we had a month to decide if we would do it. It didn’t take us a month to decide; more like two weeks to talk ourselves into it and push away our self-limiting beliefs. After all, what did we have to lose? We decided that this could be our test to see if we would like to do something like this in the future if more opportunities presented themselves. Or if it was absolutely something that we disliked and would rather just stick to the blogging aspect.

Project Preparation

To prepare for this project I did some research on being financially healthy and came across some good statistics. I also decided to create a display board and printed copies of our free budget templates for people to be able to see. And lastly, I printed some brochures that people could keep and refer back to for some of the information that we would discuss.

If you’re interested in the information that we shared, you can check out our post: How To Be Financially Healthy.

Project Jitters

Once I got over my initial fear of being asked to do this project, I enjoyed being creative with putting together the display board and the brochures. The display board took me back to the days when I had to do science fair projects. And using Word to do the brochures and figuring out how to print double-sided correctly definitely took me down memory lane. That aside, even though I knew we put together good information to share with people about being financially healthy, I was still nervous the morning of the event.

The day of the event, I was nervous yet again. However, Omar said that he wasn’t. Once we arrived and set up our supplies, I did start to feel better. As more people stopped by our table I felt more and more comfortable talking about financial health and sharing our information as well as answering people’s questions.

Project In Action

It was interesting to see the array of differences among people and their finances and stages of life. One person was realizing the urgency of doing a budget so they could prepare for retirement. Another was considering putting more of their income and their spouse’s income into their joint account so that they could hold each other accountable and not spend all their extra money, especially since they had a child who would be going to college in a couple of years. We also met someone who had paid cash for their home. Of course, we loved the thought of that, especially since we’re in the midst of our mortgage payoff journey.

On the other hand, we did meet someone that was questioning our information and asking why we left certain things out from our display board if we were there to talk about being financially healthy. This person was also sharing financial advice with us that we don’t agree with. It was definitely interesting to hear this person’s perspective none the less.

Our Thoughts

We loved hearing the stories and encouraging people. It was especially nice helping them realize that they too could have a better financial health status.

By doing this event, we realized that each person has to know what their goal is with their finances and then try to align themselves with sources of information that they believe in. Otherwise, you might be easily misled and regret it later.

Overall, this was a good experience on a smaller scale and we enjoyed it. We would definitely do something like this again if the opportunity presented itself. We might even look into being financial coaches one day.

How is your financial health status looking? Have you ever wished that you had someone that could coach you through your financial decisions?

Feature Image: Unsplash