Gail and Ruben came to enable.me in 2024 with the aim of sorting their finances – getting on top of their spending habits, improving their mortgage structure, and looking towards property investment to build their wealth.
Soon after their initial financial consultation, they learned some exciting news: they were pregnant! This changed their priority from building wealth, to making sure they had a solid foundation prepared for parental leave and starting their family.
We recently caught up with Gail to check-in on how their financial situation is shaping up, how enable.me has supported them to feel in control, and their goals for the future.
Setting Goals When Everything Suddenly Changes
When Gail and Ruben first started working with enable.me, their focus was on the future.
The Auckland couple were thinking about investment properties, improving their mortgage structure, and making smarter long-term financial decisions together.
Like many couples, though, they each approached money differently.
“I was the saver in the relationship and Ruben’s more the spender,” Gail shared.
“We needed a third-party neutral opinion because we had different styles of spending and saving. And [we] didn’t have enough experience or knowledge… to kind of be sure in our decisions that we were making.”
Originally from Zimbabwe and South Africa respectively, Gail and Ruben had built a life together in New Zealand. Living in Millwater with their dog Patrick, they’d been married for a couple of years and were starting to think more seriously about what they wanted their future to look like.
Then, almost immediately after beginning their enable.me journey, everything changed.
“We started with [enable.me] and then I got pregnant,” Gail said.
“The plan kind of changed, which was actually really good.”
Instead of focusing on investment property, their priorities shifted towards preparing financially for parental leave, restructuring their mortgage, and creating enough flexibility and security to navigate a major life transition without constant stress.
That shift became one of the biggest benefits of working with their enable.me financial coach.
“The huge benefit that I didn’t see initially… I was able to take maternity leave with a lot of confidence,” Gail explained.
“If we were stressing about savings and that kind of thing, I think [our experience of having a baby] would have been very different.”
Creating A Realistic Plan That Worked
One of the things Gail valued most was having an outside perspective on their finances.
Not someone emotionally attached to the decisions. Not someone ‘taking sides’. Just someone experienced enough to step back, look at the bigger picture, and help them build a plan that worked for both of them.
“Really beneficial to get someone very neutral looking at our finances from the outside,” she said.
Working towards shared financial goals can be difficult with conflicting money personalities, but aligning their budget with their goals gave the couple freedom that matched up with their money behaviours. For Ruben, that meant having structure and boundaries around spending. For Gail, it meant something equally important: permission to spend without guilt.
“When we actually broke it down and set budgets for certain things, it was freeing to be like, ‘oh cool, well actually I can spend money on that’ because this is how much we’ve budgeted and it fits into everything, we’re still tracking towards our goals.’”
“It was nice for Ruben to have a limit and for me to have a bit of guilt-free spending.”
The couple also used moneyfit.me Tracker throughout the process, which Gail says helped make their finances far more visible.
“I really like moneyfit. I like being able to track stuff, I’m a bit Type A. I really enjoyed it,” she said.
“Having that transparency… sometimes you think that you spend a certain amount and then when you see it, you’re like, ‘Oh… that is not quite what I was expecting.’”
The couple also mentioned how the app’s ‘gamified’ approach let them quickly get an overview of their progress.
“It almost kind of gamified it a little bit… the charts and that kind of thing. And then all the savings amounts and planned versus actual and you’re under budget.”
More Than Just Saving Money
For Gail and Ruben, the biggest difference wasn’t necessarily learning how to save more.
It was learning how to make their money work better.
Their enable.me coach, Shaila Contractor, helped them restructure their mortgage in a way that reduced interest, improved flexibility, and still gave them a financial buffer to fall back on if something unexpected happened.
“The maternity leave situation… we definitely wouldn’t have been able to do that by ourselves,” Gail said.
“The advice that we got in how to restructure our mortgage… there’s nothing that we could have thought of on our own… to set up and organise and that kind of thing. Having that advice, made it so our mortgage was super manageable.”
Instead of simply throwing extra money at repayments and hoping for the best, they created a strategy that balanced progress with flexibility.
“It’s going down faster because [of how] we’ve set it up,” she said.
“We’re paying less interest, but we still have a bit of a safety net if anything goes wrong… Security around the decisions that we were making and we had fallbacks if something went wrong. I don’t think we would have had that if we didn’t speak to someone who knew what they were doing.”
That cohesive combination of structure, security, and flexibility became especially valuable once Gail went on maternity leave.
Their Next Exciting Chapter
Now, with their child growing quickly and Gail back at work, the couple’s goals have shifted once again. They are revisiting their enable.me coach to create a new strategy for this exciting next stage of their financial journey.
Their current two-bedroom townhouse served them well as a starting point, but with the possibility of growing their family further, they know they’ll eventually need more space.
“Our priorities are family,” Gail said.
“If we want to extend our family… we’re going to outgrow this property quite soon.”
Rather than chasing investment property for the sake of it, their focus has become upgrading their home in a way that still allows them to enjoy life and avoid unnecessary financial pressure.
“Balancing how to upgrade and also, you know, live life.”
Gail also spoke about how the experience of working with their enable.me coach made a huge difference to the couple, especially when it came to creating a sense of peace of mind during those potentially stressful financial conversations.
“Speaking to someone that’s so knowledgeable, and who’s done this with multiple people hundreds of times is really comforting.”
“Just Do It”
When asked what she’d say to someone considering financial coaching, Gail was honest about one hesitation she initially had: the cost.
“We were thinking, ‘Do we even have [the money] to spend on this?’… but I guess what I would say is that you probably will save more than it actually costs.”
Now looking back, she says the value far outweighed the investment.
“The savings, and the confidence, and the knowledge you gained from it kind of outweigh the cost.”
For Gail and Ruben, financial coaching helped them organise their money, but it also gave them something greater: the freedom and peace of mind to welcome their child into their family without the stress of mortgage payments looming overhead.
At enable.me, this is one of our favourite things to hear from clients. That speaking to, and working with, an enable.me financial coach helped them navigate one of the biggest transitions of their lives feeling calmer, more aligned, and more prepared for whatever came next.
We’re as excited as Gail and Ruben to see what the future holds for their new family and financial goals, and we look forward to seeing the progress they’ll make through continuing to work with enable.me.
No matter your goals, we have a coach for every client. If you’d like to see what you can achieve with an enable.me financial coach in your corner, book an initial consultation with enable.me today to take control of your money and take the first step towards financial freedom.
