Vivian is a freshly minted CS graduate, and she has accumulated quite a bit of student loans and credit card debt. Luckily, she was offered a great opportunity with an established tech company that has a whole buffet of benefits for her to choose from and a starting pay of $70,000 with Restricted Stock Units (RSUs). She is overwhelmed with all the new responsibility and choices she now faces. With a new job, she does not have much free time to research and does not feel comfortable talking about her finances with her coworkers. Her parents were never great with money and it is something that she worries she may not handle well either.
She finds out about the Starter Pack service level and not only does it fit reasonably within her budget, but she is also excited about how relieved it will be to have a better understanding of how to navigate her finances.
The intro meeting allows Vivian to confirm that her three main areas of concern are in areas that Level Up specializes in serving tech professionals like her. To get started, they prioritized the topics they expected to cover over their three meetings together:
1. Student loans
2. Credit cards
Over the course of the first two meetings, Vivian discovers that although she feels that the student loans are the biggest financial burden, it is the credit cards that are impacting her finances the most. Working with Level Up she restructures her payments that allow her to make lower student loan payments, while drastically increasing the speed she pays off her high-interest credit cards, saving thousands of dollars in the process.
The RSU meeting is very eye-opening and relieving for Vivian. She now understands what to expect when her RSUs vest in terms of income and the tax impact. She also recognizes that she is not comfortable with the risk of owning a single non-diversified stock who is also her employer and sets a reminder in her calendar to sell her shares as they vest.
Vivian feels even better than she expected adulting. She took responsibility for her financial situation and invested in a resource that provided her clarity on her most pressing financial stresses. One positive side effect of setting aside time to intentionally think about her finances, is that she was more intentional in her finances outside of meetings by reducing expenses that were not adding value and shifting those funds to pay down her debt even faster.
If Vivian’s financial life becomes more complex in the future, she is relieved to know she already has a trusted relationship with an expert who has already helped her take her financial confidence to the next level.