About Coink

Coink is an independent educational website and free tool provider focused on personal finance and small-business finance.

The website owner is Alicia Heimbaung. You can reach the team at ali.one.cuenta@gmail.com.

Coink does not provide personalized financial, legal, tax, or investment advice and is not a financial institution.

Alicia Heimbaung spent nine years on the wrong side of the table.

Started as a collections agent, calling strangers at dinner to ask for money they didn’t have. Then she moved into bankruptcy law as a paralegal, sitting in the hallway with people while they waited to swear under oath that they were broke. She watched the same four mistakes drain the same kind of household, over and over: no emergency fund, a car payment sized to ego, a variable rate nobody had read, and a lender who knew all three.

In 2019 i quit, took a pay cut, and started writing down what she’d learned in language her clients could actually use. What began as a free email series for thirty-two people is now a library of budgeting, debt, and investing guides read by thousands each month.

Lives in Dayton, Ohio, drives a 2011 Civic, and still keeps a spreadsheet of every dollar she spends — not because it’s noble, but because it’s the only thing that ever worked.

Credentials

Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC) — completed 2021 Certified in Personal Finance (CEPF) — completed 2022 Former bankruptcy paralegal, 6 years (Chapter 7 and 13 filings) Former collections and loss-mitigation agent, 3 years Guest lecturer, community financial literacy workshops — county library system, 2021–present Not a stock picker. Not a licensed investment advisor. Everything here is education, not individualized advice — the difference is explained in plain terms [here].

Mission The mission of this site is to make the mechanics of money boring.

Most personal finance content is either a lecture from someone who’s never been broke or a sales pitch for a product with an affiliate link stapled to it. Both waste your time. The goal here is narrower and duller: explain how a loan amortizes, why a credit score moves, what a fee actually costs you over thirty years — in plain English, without moralizing, and without pretending the math cares about your feelings.

Three commitments:

No shame. You are not bad with money. You were handed a system with bad instructions. Debt is a math problem with a marketing department.

No hype. No “one weird trick,” no passive-income fantasies, no 22-year-old guru in a rented Lamborghini. If a strategy only works with a six-figure income, it says so on the first line.