A woman came to me two years ago having already hired the wrong person twice.

First an advisor, because that is what you do when you start making real money. He was competent, he was pleasant, and he rebalanced her portfolio quarterly. He also had no interest whatsoever in the fact that she could not open her own banking app without her chest tightening, because that was not the job she had hired him for and he knew it.

Then a therapist, because the chest tightening clearly meant something. That was genuinely useful and she stayed for eight months. But at the end of it she understood her mother's relationship with money extremely well and still had no idea whether she could afford to leave her job.

Neither of them failed her. She had simply been buying halves of a thing, twice, without anyone telling her there were three doors and she had been standing in front of two of them.

The short version

• An advisor manages money: investments, allocation, projections. Usually licensed and regulated, often with asset minimums.

• A financial therapist works the emotional and psychological material underneath your behavior. Usually a licensed clinician with added financial training.

• A coach works the relationship, the behavior, and depending on the coach, the plan.

• Needing two at once is completely normal.

• Four questions to ask anyone before you hire them are at the bottom of this page.

Let me tell you what is behind each door.

what a financial advisor does

An advisor manages money. Investments, allocation, tax-aware positioning, retirement projections, insurance, estate coordination. They are usually licensed and regulated, they often hold credentials such as the CFP, and many are compensated as a percentage of the assets they manage for you, though fee-only and flat-fee models exist and are worth asking about.

Go to an advisor when the question is about the money itself. How should this be invested. Or if you want someone to completely manage your investments for you.

What an advisor generally will not do is work on why you cannot look at the accounts, why you undercharge, or why the plan they built you is sitting untouched in your inbox. That is not a criticism. It is scope. Many advisors have no training in much outside of investing.

One practical note: many advisors have asset minimums, sometimes several hundred thousand dollars. If you are earning well but have not accumulated yet, you may not be able to hire one even if you want to, which is a real and under-discussed problem.

what a financial therapist does

Financial therapy sits where mental health meets money. Practitioners typically come from clinical backgrounds, licensed therapists or counselors who have added financial training, and the work goes at the emotional and psychological material underneath your behavior. Trauma. Compulsion. Anxiety that lives in the body. The conclusions you drew about money before you had language for any of them.

Go to a financial therapist when the feeling is bigger than the finances. Compulsive spending you have genuinely tried to stop. Financial abuse, current or past. Panic rather than dread. A specific memory that takes the floor out from under you every time you get near it. Grief tangled up with money after a death or a divorce.

The Financial Therapy Association is the field's professional body and the sensible place to start looking. If you read that paragraph and recognised yourself, go there. That is the right door and I would rather you walk through it than mine.

What a financial therapist generally will not do is build you a plan. They are not going to run your retirement projections or tell you whether you can afford the sabbatical. That is not their training and it is not what the hour is for.

what a financial coach does

A coach works on the relationship and the behavior, and depending on the coach, the plan as well. There is no licensing body, which means the quality range is enormous and you have to look carefully at who you are actually hiring.

Go to a coach when you know roughly what you should be doing and are somehow not doing it. When the plan exists and is not being executed. When the money is fine on paper and the life does not match. When you want someone in the room while you look at it.

What to watch for: because the field is unregulated, "coach" covers everyone from someone with two decades in finance like me to someone who completed a six-week certification last spring. Ask about background before you ask about method.

what I do, so you can calibrate

I am a money coach and a former corporate CFO. Thirteen years running finance at startups, VP of Finance at twenty six, an accounting degree and an MBA. I have also spent years of my adult life tearing up credit card statements while they were still inside the envelope, too ashamed to look.

So the work I do is both halves: the inner work on vision, identity and belief, and a real financial plan built in professional planning software to match it. I am not a licensed therapist and I do not do clinical treatment. I am not a registered investment advisor and I do not manage your assets.

I tell you all of that so you can rule me out quickly if I am the wrong door. That is a feature.

how to tell which one you need

Answer honestly and the door usually picks itself.

If you just need someone to manage your investments, you want an advisor.

If the distress is the loudest thing in the room, and it is present most days, and it predates having any money to worry about, you want a therapist. Start there. The rest will still be waiting.

If you know what you should do and cannot make yourself do it, or you have the numbers and no sense of what they are for, you want a coach.

And it is entirely normal to need two. Plenty of women work with a therapist and a coach at the same time, or hire me now and an advisor in four years when there are assets to manage. These are not competing purchases. They are different jobs.

the question underneath all three

Here is the thing I most want you to take from this page, whichever door you end up choosing.

An advisor answers how should this money be invested. A therapist answers why am I like this about money. Both are real questions and both deserve good answers.

But there is a third question almost nobody will ask you, and it comes before the other two.

What do I want this money to do for me?

Not your goals, not the boxes on an intake form. What is it actually for. Which life is it supposed to be building. Because an investment strategy without an answer to that is a very efficient way to fund a life you did not choose, and insight without an answer to it explains the drift without steering out of it.

The woman I opened with is doing well now. She kept the advisor. She still sees the therapist occasionally. What she did not have, and what changed everything, was an answer to what the money was for. Once she had it, the advisor's plan finally had a target, and the therapy had somewhere to land.

what to ask before you hire anyone

Four questions, whichever door you knock on.

• What is your actual background, and how long have you been doing this.

• What specifically will I walk away with, and by when.

• What do you not do, and who do you refer to when someone needs that.

• What does this cost, in total, including anything that is not in the headline number.

Anyone worth hiring will answer all four without flinching. The fourth one is where most of the evasion happens.

where to start with me

If you want to find your pattern before you spend anything, the Money Mirror Quiz takes about two minutes.

If you want to see your whole financial landscape clearly, The Expansion Map is two sessions where we pull your complete picture together in professional planning software and look at it side by side. Where you stand, where you are headed if nothing changes, and what to do first. No budgets, no shame, no judgment.

And if you want to chat about what it's like working 1:1 with a money coach, schedule a free Money Chat.