Enriched Academy Review

Editor’s Note: When the Enriched team approached us about completing an Enriched Academy Financial Coaching Review, we thought it looked pretty cool – but a bunch of money nerds who write about this stuff in their spare time aren’t really Enriched’s target audience.  So what we did is set them up with a friend of mine.  

Stacey (not her real name) is a fellow teacher who we both felt was perfect for Enriched.  Like a lot of Canadians, she was vaguely familiar with a lot of financial terms, and had a good idea of the basics, but she knew that she could probably be more optimized when it came to she and her family’s overall financial picture.  Enriched graciously decided to provide Stacey with access to their platform – but also to 6 one-on-one personalized coaching sessions.  Here’s Stacey’s review in her own words.

We were looking for some solutions on how to pay back debt, plus build for our future –  and I just felt that I did not have a good understanding of finances!

When I stumbled across Enriched Academy and told my husband that it would be nice to have a better idea of where our money is going, we reached out to Kyle (our self-described “Money Nerd” friend) asking if he thought it would be something beneficial.  I was pleasantly surprised when he told me that Enriched had recently asked him about doing an Enriched Review of the product on MillionDollarJourney, and he thought it would be the perfect opportunity to see the company through the eyes of someone new to the world of financial planning. I decided that doing an Enriched Academy Review in return for finally understanding all of this money stuff seemed like a great deal, and so began my financial learning journey. 

To give you a bit of background, my husband and I are both middle-class professionals. We both attended university, paid for it by ourselves, did a little travelling, and soon after getting married we bought a house. It did not take us long to fill our house with three little boys in seven years – we were living the slightly chaotic Canadian Dream!

But it felt like we started off with debt, added more debt, and then we realized just how expensive kids are… so, when Covid hit we thought it was the perfect excuse we needed to sit down (with minimal distractions) and get our arms around our financial situation.

Enriched Academy One-on-One Coach Review

I started working with Enriched Academy in April 2020 and got set up with Financial Coach Alanna Abramsky. Adding the financial coaching option was the best decision that I made during the course. I felt that I really got a thorough understanding after having her answer about a million of my specific questions! A financial coach provided a more tailored learning opportunity.

I had six meetings with Alanna, where she provided me with a ton of great advice, as well as a little (super manageable amount) homework that needed to be sent a couple days in advance so that she could look at it and make assessments before our scheduled meeting. I was responsible for watching videos, filling out worksheets, and practicing skills with the tools that were on Enriched Academy. 

Our first session was all in reference to learning about my finances (the basics). I filled out a “before we start survey” where I provided personal info, such as gross income, whether we had life insurance or a will etc. All this information helped Alanna get an understanding of where we were financially and helped her plan for our further sessions. Both my husband and I were worried about this first meeting. 

It felt like we did not have a lot going for us and many of the questions on the survey we did were left blank. Alanna was great and quickly put our minds at ease, helping us understand that we had a lot of equity in our house and that we had already made a good start by setting up life insurance for ourselves and our sons, as well having a will in place. However, she did say we could make some fairly simple improvements and would continue our next session after we took some time to fill in our net worth tracker and a budget.

Enriched Academy Review: Apps and Unique Financial Tools Designed for Canadians

I spent the next month filling out a net worth tracker and working towards creating a budget. The Enriched net worth tracker was really easy.  It basically went through all of our assets and debts, and then could be quickly updated each month. The hope is that you see your net worth increase and this keeps your spending in check as it positively reinforces the idea that you are building something for the future. 

I also spent some time using “The Debt Crusher”. Enriched web tools such as The Debt Crusher were powerful for visualizing and understanding the savings potential of paying down debts, and identifying which debt repayment method would be the most beneficial. 

Our budget was a little trickier.  Tracking down where all our money goes in a month took some time. However, we had Covid-induced home time on our side, and so we buckled down to get a handle on our spending. The goal of a budget is to “teach us to live within our means and not spend money that we don’t have.” I really feel like  the biggest thing I learned was to just see exactly where our money went each month – and then to decide if that was really what would make us the most happy in the long term.

While we were doing some personal learning, I also worked through the following courses on the Enriched Academy Platform: 

• Money Myths
• Understanding Credit
• Where Are We Today
• Budgeting
• Beginners Investing

As I completed the courses I filled out a workbook, that really helped me cement my understanding – as opposed to just passively reading through a text. 

Enriched Academy Review: Investing and Financial Planning

Our third session with Alanna was all about investing. This is a topic my husband gets very excited about – but I really was never sure why. My homework assignment had me watching a couple courses on investing and I started to understand what some of the excitement was all about. It definitely gave me some more motivation to get our finances in order so that more focus could be placed on building wealth, and obtaining financial freedom (the ultimate goal for anyone who wants to learn more about their finances).

My husband and I are looking forward to our future, especially travelling after retirement. Enriched provided us with the understanding that planning for that now – even though we are only in our 30s and feel like we really just started our careers – is super important.

Alanna had us fill out a retirement planning form looking at the idea of: If we retired tomorrow, what would we think we would want in order to live our best life? During this session she broke down what we hoped our retirement would look like and how we could get there. It seems crazy to think of what 25 years from now would look like, but if we start putting little bits away now, then we can really have the future that we are dreaming about. 

Our Next Steps

Alanna checked in again in January to see if we were ready for the next course. While we definitely will be going back to Alanna as we progress further into the investing part of the journey, for right now we thought it best to have some time to work on our basics and increase our net worth more before taking the next leap. 

However, continuing to see increases is super motivating, and we can’t wait to see where we are in two or even three years. I will say that if you want to get the full benefit of all that Enriched Academy brings to the table, you do have to be willing to commit some time and effort.  We are still using many of the tools that were provided, and getting your finances in order can be challenging if you do not have the time to spend working on them. 

Enriched Academy Review: Six-Month Results

During our wrap up session, we came full circle and looked at our net worth tracker.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out that during the six months working with Enriched Academy and enjoying our progress with Alanna, we had already made some serious progress. 

We were amazed to see that over the course of approximately six months, our net worth had increased by $16,388.62! We set goals from where we would like to be in a year and are continuing with our budget and net worth tracker.  I think it’s super important to understand that this was achieved with minimal changes to our lifestyle – and while feeding/clothing/caring for some ravenous young cubs!  The small optimizations that Alana recommended really added up.  Here’s a quick recap of what we gained in six short months:

• Net Worth increased by $16,388.62
• Paid Off $24,984.19 in Credit Card Debt (or consolidated a big chunk of it at a much lower interest rate)
• Consolidated our Line of Credit to a lower interest rate
• Saved $3,351.46 in interest charges 
• My credit score increased by 30 points
• My husband’s credit score increased by 41 points

Taking the Enriched Academy course was such a positive experience for me. The only glitch we ran into was that the net worth tracker was in Excel format, which wasn’t working on my Macbook (but was working on Alanna’s Macbook).  It would be nice if there was a version integrated in the Enriched website, or on Google Sheets. 

[Editor’s Note: Since Stacey wrote this review, Enriched Academy has now fully integrated their Net Worth Tracker.]

For anyone who feels they are struggling to understand finances like myself, Enriched Academy makes it easy. The videos are quick and explained everything from getting started to advanced investing techniques – but the key is that it did it in bite-sized chunks that I could access at my own pace.

While I know it seems a little counterintuitive at first to spend a decent chunk of change in order to get yourself in a better financial position – in our case the five figure increase to our net worth quickly eclipsed the cost of any of the courses/coaching price packages (and we just started reaping the benefits). 

When I look at how much money I have spent on university courses – which taught WAY less and were WAY less useful – Enriched Academy was a no-brainer investment in myself.  I think that for a lot of people the course fees and one-on-coaching costs will help make them accountable to themselves and really make sure they are putting the time into getting the most out of everything Enriched offers.

So – a big Thank You to Alanna and the Enriched team for helping us maximize the downtime during Covid and asking us to write this Enriched Academy Review!