Bethel Habte is an Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®) and the founder of Good Bones Financial Coaching, LLC.

She helps money-avoidant individuals and couples finally overcome their aversion to personal finances through storytelling and a simple, values-aligned system for money management.

Bethel is the daughter of a U.N. finance officer who prepared taxes in retirement for fun, but she did not inherit her father’s love of numbers. Instead, she spent many years as a narrative podcast reporter, producer, and editor in New York City. (She has bylines at Radiolab and This American Life, among others).

When her father died in 2018, Bethel realized she needed to become the financial adult in the room.

She proceeded to give her money-avoidant, liberal arts–oriented brain a crash course in personal finance. She developed an approach that rejected harsh, loud and overwhelming money advice in favor of something more humane and simple. Using this system, she paid off nearly $60,000 in student loan debt in two years.

Four years after making her final student loan payment, Bethel decided she wanted to start a venture to share this approach with others. She passed the accredited financial counselor (AFC®) exam in November 2024, founded Good Bones Financial Coaching LLC in December 2024. She earned her AFC® certification in November 2025 after accruing 1,000 experience hours as an AFC® candidate.

She has since guided more than 60 individuals and couples and counting through The Good Bones Edit. You can some of their reviews here.

Bethel writes the newsletter Deconstructing Money and has appeared on the Death, Sex & Money podcast.

She is a graduate of the University of Virginia (B.A., Political Philosophy, Policy and Law) and Northwestern University (M.S. in Multimedia Journalism).

She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, a trombonist-turned-therapist.