Personal Finance Coach: Ashley Shares Tips for Retail Workers

Personal Finance Coach features stories, insights, and tips from TrustPlus to help workers, businesses, and organizations thrive. This blog offers tips for retail workers from TrustPlus Personal Finance Coach Ashley Denae Hannah. She sounds off on savings, taxes, and her coaching style (spoiler alert: she will hold you accountable to your goals!). Funding from Target Foundation has supported the development of our blog series.

What are some tips you share with your clients who work in retail?

I’m looking at: are the clients banked, can we sign them up for direct deposit, if we can sign up for direct deposit, can we sign up for multiple accounts and have a portion of it go automatically to savings and to checking? My more advanced clients who I’ve been working with for a while have a full account structure laid out. You get your direct deposit and it’s automatically going into the accounts that we’ve designated that work for you. So if you work at a retail store or anywhere, really, I would be looking at how you are getting paid, how can we make sure that you keep your paycheck and save as much money as possible.

What should retail workers be thinking about ahead of the May 17 tax deadline?

Often my clients don’t know that they’re eligible for free tax assistance and filing through the IRS’ Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program which offers free tax preparation help to people who generally make $57,000 or less. I used to be a VITA volunteer. People can find a local VITA site on the IRS website.

I have quite a few clients out in California this year who filed through VITA for the first time. And they’re telling all their friends, “you need to file through VITA!” It’s been a great resource for my clients all over.

I’m getting a lot of questions from clients who haven’t filed taxes in the past and are feeling pressure to file because they want to receive the stimulus or other things [like the Earned Income Tax Credit] that might be predicated on taxes being done. So, this season has included both this year’s taxes and for a lot of my clients filing past years of unfiled taxes.

Millions of workers qualify for EITC for the first time this year, so check your eligibility at www.IRS.gov/eitc! 2020 income eligibility tops out at $56,844 for households with three or more children. And whatever you do, take advantage of the lookback provision enabling filers who earned less in 2020 compared to 2019 to choose 2020 or 2019 earned income when determining EITC eligibility — whichever yields you the biggest return!

How should retail employees prepare for filing their taxes?

I tell my clients to get organized before going to file your taxes. Usually that’s the biggest part of reducing the anxiety or stress around taxes. I walk my clients through it. We create a folder, we create a checklist: do you have all your W2’s; do you have all your 1099s; do you have your healthcare forms; did you receive unemployment? Usually there’s quite a bit of paperwork and the biggest part is putting all that paperwork together. So, I tell all my clients to designate a folder for all of your tax documents, and that will make this process easier. Whether you go through VITA or a tax preparer.

What’s a TrustPlus personal finance coaching session like?

The way that I think about a session as a coach is what is the bite-size activity that we can do today to take you along the next step of your financial journey. I might plan out, okay, you want to address your credit, your debt. I know in my mind that we might be making a budget, we might be looking at your credit report and I don’t want to overwhelm clients by trying to do all of that in one session. So my job as a coach is how can I make this a bite-sized process so that way we can continue working on it over time and my client doesn’t feel overwhelmed and they see progress along the way.

In general over the course of sessions, I often find that clients go from being nervous or scared to talk about their finances to, “hey, Ashley, I’m really excited, I opened that bank account and I set up that direct deposit!”

Describe your coaching style.

I often get asked what’s my personal coaching style and I can summarize it as people describe me as a nice person who pushes them really hard.

With a lot of my clients, I am very serious about keeping them accountable to their goals. So you said my goal is to save $100 in three months. I will be asking you every session, how is the savings going, how can we strategize to help you save more. Let’s look at your budget. So I am very much about keeping my clients accountable to their goals. And some of them are like, “Ashley, it’s so intense,” but they’re all doing great!