Kathryn Amenta Financial Advisor

Folks, I don’t like writing negative Unilocal reviews, or Unilocal reviews in general for that matter. But the fact is that my wife and I were so convinced by what we saw here that we hired and worked with Kathryn for significantly longer than we would have otherwise. We ended up paying her quite a lot of money and getting what we felt was as good as nothing in return.
Kathryn is a kind and lovely person, and it pains me to dump on her professional practice. That said, I feel compelled to warn others who are already in financial difficulties that the services Kathryn advertises and those she delivers are not at all the same.
She begins with a psychological approach. Fair enough. I have a lot of patience for this sort of thing, and poor financial decisions are emotionally driven more often than not. After this stage, we moved on to the spreadsheet phase. I think part of this may be a generational thing. I’m in my early thirties. I grew up using Excel, and am pretty familiar with its functions. Kathryn’s «proprietary» form is needlessly complicated and dysfunctional, and we spent more than one session waiting as she tried to fix it. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking and she demands her payment in cash or check promptly at the end of each session. He had real, immediate questions, but she was so insistent that we work only with the sheet – which wasn’t working at all – that she didn’t want to address them. We barely even got into the meat of our financial habits and difficulties in the course of around five sessions, and the details we did share with her she forgot.
She had an ambitious schedule of sessions planned for us, all of which we’d need to attend to get the maximum benefit from her services. In the end, we paid her a great deal, and regret that we did not terminate the relationship sooner. For financial as well as practical reasons.
I would not have posted this, except that we ran into another friend who’d had nearly the same experience: time (money!) and sessions wasted while Kathryn dealt with her software, all the while not really listening to the client’s concerns and trying vaguely to reassure us. She didn’t post a review of her experience either. Nice folks don’t want to. But in cases like this, sometimes you must.
My advice: do a little more research and find someone else if you really need financial advice.

I feel so fortunate to have met and worked with Kathryn. My ex-​husband and I were referred to her by our divorce mediator two years ago and she ended up playing an invaluable role in helping us through the transition. After 12 years of shared finances, even the mere thought of creating two households out of one – with two children – was daunting. Kathryn painstakingly walked us through the process of setting new budgets and managed our expectations. In many ways, facing the reality of our finances was the most difficult part of separating. I’m quite sure that without her, my expectations would have been unrealistic. Not only does Kathryn know finance and is a master at budgeting, she is such a pleasure to work with. I needed someone at that time who was professional and could calmly guide both of us through the process, and she provided us with exactly that, while showing great support and encouragement. Two years later, my ex and I are great friends and great co-​parents, and I credit Kathryn with helping us get to this point. I’m still using the tools she taught me to manage my finances today. I highly recommend her for couples as well as for anyone who wants to learn how to manage their own money better.

I have had the pleasure of working alongside Kathryn for the past 4 months. Her honesty and expertise is unmatched in her industry. For couples entering new territory with money issues, individuals working out their life plan, or younger people entering the real world, Kathryn’s services are truly a smart long term investment. She will very carefully help you examine and confront your relationship with money and budgeting.
In addition, I would just like to say she is a terrific person to do business with. She is concise, well spoken, and honest.

Kathryn is such a wonderful person to work with – she’s kind, fun, and smart, so meeting with her is always a pleasure. To help me take charge of my finances she created a very user-​friendly system that’s been immensely helpful without requiring a lot of extra time. Working with Kathryn has increased my confidence, helped me realize goals, and made me feel more secure and excited about the future. I would recommend her to anyone who wants a little or a lot of help with their finances.

Kathryn has worked with several of my clients, all of whom were very satisfied. Kathryn brings a wealth of knowledge, and also heart, caring, and common sense to her work. Its a joy to refer clients to Kathryn, and to know that she will provide valuable support and guidance at financial transition points in life. Money is not always easy to talk about or get a handle on. Get help from Kathryn!

I called Kathryn thinking I required a financial advisor but after speaking to me she informed me that what I really needed was a financial planner. Luckily she gave me some really great tips on how to find a proper financial planner and also referenced me to some really great CFPs. Although i ended up not using her services she was so kind and great to set me on the right path. So if Kathryn is anything like she is in my experience during her advising sessions, I would put money on it that she’s top notch!

I worked with Kathryn for over two years and she was excellent — super competent, always pleasant and a pleasure to work with at all times. She has all the expertise you could want plus a great deal of compassion for the emotional difficulties that accompany financial issues. I highly recommend.

My partner and I started seeing Kathryn very shortly after we began dating. I knew I’d snagged a good one and wanted to keep arguments about money – a common cause of break-​ups – to a minimum by consulting with a counselor early on.
My honey and I come from very different attitudes about money. He’s a spender with a turbulent history, and I’m a saver with established habits and anxiety about overspending. The great thing about Kathryn is that she’s accustomed to working with all kinds of people and has never made either of us feel bad or guilty about our actions or attitudes, while carefully guiding us to healthier behaviors.
Kathryn’s very patient and flexible, and she is totally willing to try new approaches if other ways don’t work. For example, her budgeting program didn’t work well with our Macs, so we skipped it and devised our own system for tracking spending and setting up savings accounts. She was all for it.
She has made the transition of moving from entirely separate accounts to sharing some joint ones a breeze. She’s helped my honey get on the road to reestablishing credit, and she’s helped both of us determine how much money we can sock away, how much we need to cover monthly expenses, and how much we can spend freely.
I feel strongly that working with her is a really healthy thing for our relationship – establishing good money habits has made it a lot easier for our relationship to evolve, and my honey and I relish the chance to work together on such a meaningful project as a team. Plus, money is so often a taboo subject to discuss with friends and family that it’s nice to have her objective opinion if he and I have differing opinions on how to handle a financial matter.
As one poster mentioned, her rates can be pretty high if you don’t have a lot of money to begin with (it’s more cost-​effective to go with a partner) and you miss an appointment at your peril (her no-​show fee is a toughie).
But Kathryn’s rules and fees about keeping appointments can serve as a kind of external discipline that makes backing out really hard – especially if you’re prone to avoiding your financial problems rather than facing them. She’s a reasonable person and she’ll work with you to come up with a good solution if you can’t make the timing work out for legit reasons.
My partner and I couldn’t be happier about working with her.

It is hard for me to describe the difference I feel in my relationship to my finances because of Kathryn.
When my girlfriend (now fiancée) and I started seeing her, my approach to money was simply to spend it until it was gone. I had not accepted credit for years and years, not since having a truck repossessed, so I had no credit to speak of, and was frightened of even applying for any. My habits included overspending for holidays, birthdays, dinners out. Then finding myself short at the end of the month even though I make a decent salary and have no debt. I would let bills pile up until they became entirely overwhelming. I had a huge wall of fear built up about anything to do with money because I had made so many plans and failed so many times to follow any of them.
Kathryn’s approach to counseling me has had to include listening to all these fears, and all the shame and doubt that comes up when I don’t always work my plan, and help me work through those moments so I can move forward with forming better habits. She is able to do this, AND give sound financial advice, AND do the same kind of counseling for my fiancée, AND give us good communications tools to use as a couple.
We have been seeing Kathryn for almost a year, and for the first Christmas in memory, not only am I not stressed about what I spent on presents or didn’t spend on presents, and how screwed I was going into the new year, I am instead happy with what I’ve given, proud of what I’ve planned and saved, and excited about the plan we’ve got for the new year. and this includes the plans for the wedding. Oh yeah, and I have a credit for the first time since college.
Financial matters can be very emotional topics for alot of people. Kathryn really is as much therapist as financial advisor. And for me that has turned my life around.

Kathryn has been an amazing help to me. She makes you look at why and how you spend your money. She doesn’t judge, she makes suggestions and goals and ways for you to obtain Financial Freedom! She’s always an email or phone call away when you need help. A great person to talk with and be honest with she is a total cheerleader and wants you to succeed.

I’m surprised this woman has any stars at all! Buyer beware! I spent $ 200 telling this woman my life story on the first session, where I grew up, my relationship with family members, etc. None of which was relevant to consultation with an FA. I felt as if we were seeing a psychologist, by the way, something she bragged about having a degree in during my first meeting as if it was relevant. The contract she makes you sign even states that she will provide a financial plan in the first consultation you pay for, something I did NOT receive.
I’ve only seen missed appointment fees in the medical services industry, psychology, and medicine. NEVER from financial planners or advisors. The funny thing is, her rates dictate a large firm out of a high rise in downtown San Francisco when in fact her office is her house.
The spreadsheet she will give you is actually another company’s spreadsheet. Its not even hers! I’m convinced after this situation that this woman is nothing more than a con artist using another company’s spreadsheet to sell her own services.
After all was said and done, for someone who is wanting to advise someone on how to assist liquidity-​strapped individuals, she went after me for a missed appointment fee demanding $ 700 or she’d take us to court, something she also bragged about having to do to other customers in the past that she claimed she always won.
I finally settled on half the amount that was remaining.
I have met with many Financial Planners and the best advice I can offer you is to stay away from Kathryn Amenta. Your money will be better invested elsewhere.

Kathryn Amenta is (no over-​exaggeration) the best money we’ve ever spent in our lives. My husband and I have both had tricky relationships with our finances in the past. The tricky kind where you stick your head in the sand ostrich-​style, have no idea what your balance is and feel a sense of joy when the ATM actually lets you withdraw money. We moved to SF, had a baby and decided that we wanted to save up to buy a house and that we needed help getting a US credit rating. She came highly recommended by several members of the Yahoo parents group that we’re a part of. We’ve been seeing Kathryn for nearly a year now and have paid off all our debts in the UK and saved tens and tens of thousands of dollars. We honestly couldn’t have done it without her. She is incredibly supportive and her method is the complete opposite of the stuffy accountant that I was anticipating when we decided we needed a financial planner. Instead of our sessions being entirely mathematical, she gets down to the core of why you have the relationship with money that you do and encourages you to improve upon your bad habits, without judgment. She has completely turned our lives and finances around and helped us to finally have a healthy relationship with our dinero. We are, in fact, off to see her again in eight hours time!

This is a long one, but well worth it. So is Kathryn.
I decided that I needed to make some financial changes in my life back in December. To say that I was scared for my first appointment with Kathryn was an understatement. I had NEVER gone to anyone before about money. Money and credit cards have always been this dark thing that scared me to think about or possess. I had a tendency to immediately rid myself of money as soon as it came my way and I was definitely guilty of retail therapy prior to my meeting with her. Sitting down with her was going to be sitting in financial confessional and admitting my sins. I was hesitant, but ready to walk into the fire.
But it wasn’t walking into the fire. She didn’t ask me a single question about how much I made the entire first session. She got down to business with questions like:
How is your relationship with your parents?
What is your parents relationship to money?
What are their parents relationship to money?
Did you have an allowance growing up?
Were there boundaries with money?
How do you feel about your dynamic with money?
How does money stress you out?
How does it make you happy?
What do you want to do with your money?
What condition and how old is the car you drive?
How does it make you feel to talk about money?
I felt like I was in checking/​savings/​credit card therapy.
Nothing I said made her flinch. Not how much debt I had. Not my student loan numbers. Not what I wanted to do with my life. Nothing. She was a neutral slate. Beautiful, right?
She did ask one question that made me pause before answering. She asked me to come up with one or two words to describe what money meant to me. I paused and said that I was being corny, but I immediately thought «opportunity and love». She asked me to explain each of them further and I said, «Because it has the endless potential to create opportunity… and you have to love yourself to give and receive it.» She wrote that one down because no one had said that before. :)
And then after getting the base structure of my history and heredity with money, she presented… THE SPREADSHEET OF MY DREAMS… Seriously. This 2MB file is a love letter to Microsoft Excel. It gave me goosebumps. I know. Dramatic, but this file became my new best friend. Anyone who knows me at work knows that I have spent the past 3 years of my life being a little obsessive compulsive about making and organizing and summing the perfect spreadsheet. Someone out there did the mother of all programming on this bad boy.
The short summary is it takes every last corner of your life that consumes and accumulates currency and lays it all out in blessed line item detail. It pulls all information into a clearly readable and defined daily, monthly and yearly worksheet. All information is connected and dynamic. Spending too much for the year? Take a look at your annual budget and adjust backwards until you know what you can spend each day. It’s magic. Each month has about 7 worksheets, so it has a macro that hides all sheets except the month you’re looking at. It’s streamlined and sexy. Yeah, I just called a spreadsheet sexy. Welcome to my geek.
Basically it took the part of my personality that lines up my shoes in my closet, folds and stacks my towels with the crease to the left, gets irritated when the blinds are crooked, and other nervous «things are out of place» habits and gave it a money room to straighten up in computer land.
It took one month of «looking» at my money to realize I could move out of my parents home without the fear I held onto for so long surrounding my student loan debt. So I did.
The second month of working with the spreadsheet let me know how much money I needed to live on so I could quit my job and pursue the life that had been whispering to me. So I did.
Once I saw where my money was going I could start to be more accountable for how I spent it. Trust me. Seeing the potential for 1K of my life going towards wine after work? Hello, wake up call. At least for me.
Kathryn is the best teacher in all of this. She has been patient and kind and has listened to me rant and rave about my tendency to eat dinner out and drink too much. She has been there when I have become VERY uncomfortable with my CC debt and she can see that it wasn’t about the debt, it was about the person behind the card at the time of purchase. She’s truly a gifted teacher and advisor. If at any point in time you are finding yourself hiding in a corner and ignoring your bank statements – face the fire and INVEST in Kathryn. She’s amazing.

Numbers and dealing with money has always made my head spin. At a time when my personal and business finances were in disarray, I was led to the services Kathryn provides via The Financial Recovery Institute referral. She accepted me and my tangled web of money issues without judgement. Setting up a solid and well thought out, long range plan, I took a personal financial history inventory. She helped me replace my ideas of deprivation-​based «budgets» with an abundance-​based «spending plan». Supported by monthly meetings in-​person and/​or on the phone, the momentum created constructive and much-​needed relief from my feeling of drowning in debt and money fears. I had the concrete sense that I was on my way to financial recovery. Kathryn ‘s experience and sensitivity have proven her value to me personally and professionally over the years. I repeatedly recommend her to friends and colleagues and will continue to do so because of her expertise, talent and welcoming personality.

Even if you don’t think you need counseling in matters financial, you actually do. You just don’t know it yet.
Like lifting a veil from your eyes, Kathryn helps you to see your financial situation in a new light — one that’s focused on the nitty-​gritty as well as the big picture. And it doesn’t matter if you’re living paycheck to paycheck, or you’ve got a drawer full of them stacked up waiting for you to take them to the bank.
As with anything worthwhile, it takes work to see the fruits of your investment in your financial future, and Kathryn has the know-​how, tools, and drive to help you do this, from the ground up and in a very healthy way.
I can’t recommend Kathryn’s services more highly.
Greg

Since I’m the first to recommend her on Unilocal,here are the basics & then I’ll tell MY story about her. «Solving money problems… from the inside out» is her slogan. Kathryn’s web site says: «Kathryn…helps people come to terms with the underlying beliefs and money behaviors that have caused their financial problems. It’s a financial strategy she’s shaped for over 20 years, starting with transforming her own financial problems.» I was referred to Kathryn when I needed someone to help my hubby and I find a constructive way to communicate about money. We have/​had very little in common re how we dealt with or thought about money and this was getting in our way. We met with Kathryn more often in the beginning and eventually once a month. With hard work, we got ourselves out of debt, cut up the credit cards, devised a monthly record-​keeping tool, and achieved a number of our financial goals. Kathryn is straight-​talking, no BS, skilled, creative and unwavering in her willingness and desire to help her clients with their financial issues. She has many concrete tools to suggest and will be with you as much as you need her to be. She’s flexible, non-​judgemental and has a good heart. I could not recommend her more highly. Feel free to call me for more specifics if you need them. (see my profile)

I saw myself as financially hopeless before I went to see Kathryn. I mean, I was living check to check and not always making it. I knew I was capable of getting things under control, but the road from here to there just seemed to hard to navigate without a map. Kathryn gave me that map. Gently, over the course of several sessions (and without judgment — I can’t tell you how valuable THAT is) Kathryn helped me and my sweetie figure out where our money went — and then start channeling it in more productive ways.
One cool thing about her is that Kathryn tries to get to the bottom of why you behave the way you do around money. (It’s like food or sex — it makes you act weird and crazy, but you can change all that if you respect what got you to this place, right?) She doesn’t scold or shame you — just has a great, positive attitude to help you go forward.
I’ll admit, it seems daunting, when you already have money woes, to spend a chunk of change on financial counseling. But when you’re set up with a debt-​reduction plan, monthly and yearly spending plans, and most important of all, a three-​tiered savings plan, you’ll see what a good investment that is.