The West End Money Coach Helping Brisbane Families Fight Back Against the Cost-of-Living Squeeze

Alinta Drummond opened her financial coaching practice on Boundary Street, West End, eighteen months ago with a secondhand desk, a whiteboard, and a waiting list of twelve clients. Today she has 340 active clients across Greater Brisbane, a staff of four, and a six-week queue for new appointments. The timing, she says, was not accidental.

Brisbane households are under pressure that would have been unthinkable three years ago. The Reserve Bank of Australia's cash rate, which sat at 0.1 per cent in early 2022, climbed to 4.35 per cent before this year's modest retreat to 3.85 per cent — and mortgage repayments across the city still reflect those years of aggressive tightening. The national property conversation has shifted dramatically: investors are pulling back from Melbourne following state budget changes, first-home buyers across Australia are hesitating despite cooling prices, and demand for land is being squeezed further by a rush to build AI data centres on industrial-zoned sites. For working Queenslanders, none of that noise translates into relief on a grocery receipt or a power bill.

Building a Practice on Boundary Street

Drummond's firm, Groundwork Financial, operates out of a terrace on Boundary Street between the West End Community Centre and Davies Park. The model is deliberately unglamorous: fixed-fee sessions at $195 for 90 minutes, no commissions, no product sales. She charges a flat $85 per month for clients who want ongoing accountability sessions by video call. About 60 per cent of her current client base earns between $65,000 and $110,000 a year — what she calls the "invisible middle," people who earn too much to qualify for most government concessions but not enough to absorb two years of rate rises without damage.

Her average client comes in carrying $23,400 in non-mortgage consumer debt, mostly across two or three credit cards and a buy-now-pay-later account. The first session is a structured audit: income, fixed expenses, variable spending, and what she calls the "phantom" costs — the subscriptions, the unused gym memberships, the streaming services that add up to $340 or more per month for the average household she sees. From there she builds a twelve-month plan, usually targeting debt elimination before any discussion of investment.

She works closely with the Brisbane-based not-for-profit Good Shepherd Financial Wellbeing, which runs no-interest loan programs for lower-income residents, referring clients whose debt levels make paid coaching premature. She also runs a free monthly workshop at Kurilpa Collective in South Brisbane, drawing between 40 and 70 attendees each session. The July workshop, scheduled for the 22nd, will focus specifically on how to structure savings during periods of flat or falling wages growth.

The Numbers Behind the Demand

The appetite for this kind of hands-on, fee-for-service advice is real and growing. The Financial Planning Association of Australia reported last year that fewer than 17 per cent of Australians have ever accessed professional financial advice, citing cost and complexity as the main barriers. Drummond's fixed-fee structure is a direct answer to that — and she is not alone in seeing the gap. Brisbane's Fortitude Valley has seen at least three similar fee-only advisory practices open since January 2025, a cluster that financial services recruiters in the city are already calling a micro-trend.

Her revenue for the 2025–26 financial year will come in around $410,000, she says — a figure that puts Groundwork on track to move to larger premises in Woolloongabba before the end of the calendar year, closer to the Gabba precinct's expanding residential catchment.

For Brisbane families still trying to find their footing, the practical takeaway from Drummond's model is blunt: get a clear number on consumer debt before touching superannuation co-contribution schemes or first-home buyer savings accounts. She structures every new client plan around that sequence. The FHSS scheme — the federal government's First Home Super Saver program — can shelter up to $50,000 in voluntary contributions from tax, but that vehicle is almost meaningless, she argues, if a household is simultaneously servicing 19.99 per cent credit-card interest. Pay the card. Then save for the deposit. The order matters more than the strategy.