Tool Shop
I wear many hats: financial coach, podcaster, blogger, YouTuber, writer, speaker, course creator, and business owner. People frequently ask me about the tools and resources that I use to manage it all, so I decided to put them all in one place—here. Heads up! Many of the links below are my affiliate links, meaning I may receive a commission if you use the link. But my commission is at no additional cost to you.
Airtable is one of our favorite tools. We aren’t going to try and hide our favoritism. If you haven’t heard of or checked out Airtable before, you need to. It’s a cross between a database and a spreadsheet to help you manage your business and projects. We use it for our podcast, video planning, content calendar, and for the management of MilMoneyCon. Airtable has templates you can use to help kick-start your organization. It’s our #1 tool that makes our life and business easier. Absolutely, love this one!
I use Bluehost to host this website and MilMoneyCon. I’ve found them to be good, especially with having WordPress sites.
Calendly is an easy and convenient way for me to schedule meetings with not only clients but anyone trying to find a time to meet up with me. It takes away the back-and-forth emails of trying to figure out what day and time work with each person you are trying to meet with.
Canva is a super fun graphic design tool that we use for pretty much all areas of business. It’s graphic design for people who are not graphic designers. We use it to create images for social media, presentations, digital products, and images for the MILMO Show.
There are many things that we’re good at, but spelling and grammar aren’t at the top of the list. Because of this, Grammarly is something I use ALL of the time. If I’m writing anything online, I’m using it. I have it attached to Google Chrome, and it helps me with anything from emails to websites and Facebook posts. So if you see a mistake in our writing, blame it on Grammarly. Maybe.
HemingwayApp is a great resource to make sure your writing is clear and easy to understand. It’s helpful to make sure your writing isn’t getting long-winded and boring.
I use Sticker Mule for stickers and some swag items. They have great quality stickers and magnets and always have a sale going on, which I love to take advantage of to afford to buy swag for MILMO and MilMoneyCon!
I’m a fan of Thinkific. This is the platform I use for my course, The Financial Coaching Business Builder. They make it easy to create a course with lots of templates and tutorials to help you build it professionally and fast.
Unless you’re into that sort of thing, bookkeeping isn’t a whole lot of fun. But it’s a necessary evil when you’re self-employed. What I like most about QuickBooks is how easy it is to do things like invoice my clients and track my receipts.
To meet with coaching clients and business partners online, I use Zoom’s Pro plan. I used the free plan in the past, which worked great, but I need to upgrade to allow for longer meeting teams and the number of attendees allowed in meetings. I have Zoom connected with my Calendly to make it easy for people to schedule video calls with me.
The MILMO show is hosted via Libsyn. I’ve used Libsyn from day one of the podcast and have found it easy to use and reliable.
The recordings of the MILMO Show are done using, Riverside. Clips of the recordings for social media are also created using Riverside.
The editing for the MILMO Show podcast is expertly done by Steve Stewart. I highly recommend him as a podcast editor and coach.
We like Qube Money as a budgeting tool because it’s a digital version of the envelope system, which is the foundation of money management that we grew up on.
If you want to get out of debt, the USAA Educational Foundation has the Debt Destroyer, a debt payoff tool that uses the two most popular debt payoff strategies, debt snowball, and avalanche, to help you get out of debt.
The Department of Defense has a listing of calculators based on the retirement system you’re under to help you plan your future income.