Search

The Fierce Girl's Guide to Finance

Get your shit together with money

Open Search
Tag

lessons

Four things I learnt in my 38th year on Earth

It’s my birthday, but YOU get the presents!

Ok that was super cheesy but I just wanted to say it. The good thing about a December birthday is that you get to do a ‘reflections on the year’ post and combine it with a birthday post.

I am totally not one of those people who’s all like ‘oh I don’t like to make a fuss about my birthday’. I am like ‘bow down bitches’.

Me on my birthday

So, during my 38th trip around the sun, here are some things I learnt:

1. Success flows where attention goes – I know this sounds like a lame motivational motto, but go with me here. In the time I have been writing this blog, I have been thinking about money a lot. And in that time, I have upped my salary, boosted my savings, bought a property and generally got ahead. (It also helped that I settled a long-drawn-out divorce, but more on that below.)

Now I am not saying you need to start a finance blog (don’t steal my idea, bitches). But by making a conscious decision to focus on money,  and checking in regularly, you have a much better chance of succeeding.

You also need to plan like a boss, but don’t worry, I gotcha. Check out my worksheet!

2. The best investments you make are in yourself – This isn’t code for ‘treat yoself’; I’m not saying to drop your cash on botox or hair extensions. I mean educating or improving yourself.

I was falling into some patterns, mainly with men, that weren’t serving me well. So, I decided to see a counsellor and clean out all the mental detritus from the marriage and divorce.

Turns out I had a fair bit to unpack from my younger years, my own family breakdown and just the general trauma we pick up from playing this contact sport called life. It has been so worthwhile – there is enormous power in someone else looking at your life experiences and helping you make sense of them.

But it doesn’t have to be doing the inner work. I also graduated from my Applied Finance course, and it means that when The Daily Mail calls me a ‘finance expert’, I feel legit.

So, don’t be afraid to spend on important stuff that makes you a better person. (But always get the best deal, of course!)

3. Valuing yourself is hard but important work – I already wrote about my failures to demand what I’m worth in my last jobs (check it out here). I still struggle with this, but this year I have done better. For example, I set a freelance rate and was shocked and delighted when people agreed to it.

I still struggle with all of this stuff, but I feel like I am more aware and more committed to asking for money, as I get older and tougher and more woke.

4. Divorce is expensive – Well duh, you say. And maybe if I had a different kind of relationship, it would have been a swift and amicable split. But it wasn’t. Now, I’m not throwing a pity party – I just want to alert you to some facts that you don’t generally learn until it’s too late:

  • Your super is part of your marital estate.  I have been a superannuation-nerd since my 20s, making lots of extra contributions. It all went into the pot to get split up, so I had to give a big chunk of it away. Most women have less super than their husbands, but if you are in the minority who doesn’t – be warned. I don’t know exactly what you can do to avoid it – you can’t even spend it because it’s stuck in super. My dad told me to stop paying extra contributions when things were on the rocks (because he is smarter than me). I was slow to do that, which I regret. I could have just spent it on champagne and oysters instead of giving it away.
  • It doesn’t matter who earned what – it all gets split. In some  twist of law, the person who earns more, gets less. Something to do with future earnings – which I translate as ‘the tax for ruining your ex’s future’. So, yeah, even though I earned more, and we had no kids, I walked away with less than half. Again, not a lot I can recommend here other than Swiss bank accounts.

Getting to those outcomes was a hard, costly and emotional war of attrition. But it’s done, I’m in my new place and the future lies ahead.

All up…

It’s been awesome, ladies. To be honest, creating and building this community is the best thing I have done in a long time. To everyone who reads, shares, comments and puts it into practice – I love you all. Thanks for being my Fierce Girls.

1

What I’ve learnt from a year of running a finance blog

Today is the first anniversary of The Fierce Girl’s Guide to Finance. Yay! I feel happy and proud about that.

It’s been fun, hasn’t it? If you’re new to Fierce Girl, thanks for coming here. If you’e a long-time follower, thanks for being on the ride.

This whole thing was born out of lunchtime session at work called ‘Get your shit together with money’, part of the now-defunct National MoneySmart Week (long story about why it was canned). Anyway, it was a bunch of passionate advocates for financial literacy trying to put it on the national agenda. I was the PR chick, working on it pro bono.

During MoneySmart Week, I ran a session telling people to roll over their super funds and explaining the wonders of compound interest. And guess what, they got really into it! Weird, I know.

Then my friend Mindy Gold dared me to start this site. She was originally my partner in crime, but selfishly went to live overseas. (With a decent pool of savings btw, because she’s a Fierce Girl.)

The Divorce Thing

The other element of this story is that I was going through a divorce. I’m amazed by how short that phrase is when you say it.

‘I got divorced’. It’s like ‘I got my hair done’.

In reality, it was a slow, painful unwinding and rebuilding.

From the day I decided to leave, until the day the financial settlement was agreed, three years went by. And that doesn’t include the time spent watching my marriage fall apart. I’d say the last five years of my life have been spent in the strange, murky land of relationship failure.

I don’t say this to elicit sympathy, but to provide context. I’ve learnt many things from the process, some of which I’ve written about here and here. But the mistakes I made about money during my relationship, and the important role it played in allowing me to leave, have fueled my passion for this issue.

Put simply:

If you don’t control your money, you don’t control your life.

This is why it breaks my heart to see women hand over control to a partner, or to the universe. The attitude of ‘oh, I’m so bad with money but, haha, aren’t I adorably helpless‘ is still far too common.

Nobody is perfect with money. We all make bad decisions from time to time. But we need to remember who’s in the driver’s seat.

Not your credit card, not The Iconic, not the hipster-bearded bartender, and most certainly not your significant other. You, and you alone. (And maybe me, a little bit, haha).

Getting the basics right is hard – and important

When you hang out in the finance industry, you think everyone cares about whether your fund has beat the benchmark. And if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry – you’re not alone.

Finance people live in a bubble of complexity, products and jargon. Most regular people don’t care about alpha (which is how much an investment outperforms the benchmark, if you’re wondering).

They want to know how to pay off their credit card debt. Or to spend less on groceries. Or to have more money left before payday.

While I love explaining economics and investments, the readership stats for those posts are relatively low. My most-viewed post of all time is … wait for it … about bank accounts.

Turns out, how to structure your banking is far more interesting than the ingredients of Gross Domestic Product.  But the people running the banks and investment companies of the world don’t understand this. It’s taken me a year to fully appreciate it.

And that’s why so many people switch off and fall asleep when it comes to finance companies selling them stuff.

Success flows where attention goes

That sounds a little Tony Robbins, I know. But what I mean is that, since I’ve been thinking about money and finances and budgets A LOT in the last year, I’ve become way better at all those things. When you focus on something, you get better at it. Who knew!

My budgets are less liable to blow-outs, I feel confident about meeting my financial goals, and I feel comfortable about spending money on something if I’ve mindfully allocated funds to it.

I feel more in control, more confident and more optimistic. And that’s the goal, right?

Plus, I guess I have to really practice what I preach. Don’t want the paparazzi snapping me in the Jimmy Choo store.

At some point, you just have to back yourself

For someone in PR, I have a weird aversion to promoting myself.

But I have to remember I’m on a mission: to help you all take control of your money, give yourself choices and live your best lives. And a mission needs an appropriate level of bad-arse bravery and hustle.

So , as I enter Year Two of the blog, I’m getting serious. Site redesign, e-book launch, PR blitz – the lot!

If you love what I do, please be an advocate. Share things you find useful. Send me your feedback. Sign up for emails. And tell me when you’ve had Fierce Girl wins!

We are all in this together, fighting, dollar by dollar, to own the world and everything it has to offer.

So, go forth and be Fierce! And remember…

11

What marriage – and divorce – taught me about money

My house was sold on Saturday. It sounds exciting but is in fact painful. It’s one of the last steps on the road to settling my divorce.

Regardless of the price my property commanded, selling it was one more loss in a long process of shedding – which is what a marriage breakdown all comes down to.

You shed your identity as a couple and as a wife. You leave behind cherished memories and possessions that hurt too much to think about, so you shed them too.

And when it’s all done, you find yourself stripped back to a strange hybrid self. The single self you were all those years ago, when you were on your own. But she is overlaid with a new, wiser, older version, burnished by loss and forged in fire.

So because I am a bit too sad and emotional to give you awesome happy money tips today, I instead give you some hard-won lessons. Take from them what you will.

You can walk away with (almost) nothing and be happy. I left a 3-bedroom townhouse with a double garage and extra storage. I ended up with 1 room in an apartment, no garage and no storage.

It was already furnished, so I left a house full of furniture, appliances, books and ‘stuff’. Left it there, threw it out, donated it or squeezed it into a few boxes in mum’s garage. I kept my (real) Tupperware though – that shit has a lifetime warranty!

So, I barely own any stuff now. And I am happier than I have been in years. Now, correlation is not necessarily causation – I am happy for other, more fundamental reasons.

But this process of leaving things proved to me that beyond the basics (like containers for your epic food prep sessions), you don’t need heaps of stuff to be happy.

Money means choices. Nobody gets married thinking it will end. I didn’t think it would happen to me. But sometimes it does, and it did.

And if you’re the one who wants to leave, you have to deal with the emotional upheaval just as much as the practical shitstorm. Finding rent and bond for a new place is a big expense.

I was able to do that because I had savings. I had an income. I could choose a nice apartment in a nice area. That meant I could focus all my attention on the essentials, like bursting into tears on the train every morning, for example.

You need to share the responsibility for money. You won’t be surprised to hear that I was in charge of all the finances. This wasn’t good for either of us. I felt burdened and he felt frustrated by my decisions.

I see both men and women fall into this trap. It seems easier to give up control, but it actually drives you apart. Managing money together means you share the wins and handle the challenges together, rather than one person shouldering the blame for your financial outcomes, or guilt-tripping the other one.

Ultimately, nobody is going to look after your interests like you do. No matter how happy your relationship, you’ll never regret giving yourself the knowledge and tools to be in control of your life and your choices.

You can always reinvent yourself – I’m the Arts graduate who fell into PR. I was all about words and books and writing. And here I am, rocking an actual qualification in finance and being called an ‘expert’ (haha thanks Mamamia).

I was the unsporty, uncoordinated one, and here I am about to compete in a powerlifting competition this weekend. (I won’t beat anyone, but will rock the outfit anyway).

You just never know how things will turn out. You are just one decision away from changing your life, or someone deciding to change it for you.

This is both liberating and terrifying. The only thing to do is be ready for anything – to embrace the new opportunities or tackle the crises. And to put away what money and resources you can, in order to do that successfully.

So that’s what I learnt once I picked my life up and put it back together. If I had to sum it up, I’d say, no matter what happens: you’ve got this.

2

3 money lessons I’d give my 21-year-old self

My first degree was Arts, with Honours in English literature. If you want to know about Latin declensions or 19th century novelists, I’m your girl.

I don’t tell you this to impress you (although, feel free to be impressed), but to give you the context of how financially literate I was when I started my career. I even dropped maths in Year 12!

Now, I’m about to finish the final exam in an Applied Finance course. It’s not a full degree or anything crazy like that, but it’s the pathway to becoming a financial analyst (which I don’t intend to do).

In the 16 years between my first graduation and my imminent second one, I’ve muddled along on my own. I’ve learnt from smart clients and bosses, and the great Tom Buchan hounded me into loving economics. But I am not a numbers person, I don’t love maths and I can’t split a bill to save to myself.

Yet here I am, talking about money and stuff.

If I can do it, anybody can. However, there are things I wish I’d known earlier. If I sat my 21-year-old self down, this is what I’d say.

Capital Growth + Income = Returns. Think about all your savings in this way. Capital growth is when your asset increases in value without you doing anything to it. Your house’s value goes up while you live in it, or your shares increase in price while you own them.

Income is what you receive along the way. Think rent on an investment property, interest on a savings account or dividends on shares.

Every investment or asset will have some or all of these ingredients, e.g:

  • The house you buy to live in receives no income, but it gets capital growth.
  • A bluechip share portfolio will usually have a bit of each but skews towards income (more about that here).
  • A savings account has no capital growth but will pay income from interest.

There is no perfect combination of growth and income; it’s like lipstick. One that’s super glossy and glides on beautifully won’t stay on past your morning coffee. You can get one that makes it well past lunch, but it dries your lips out like a desert. Every lipstick has some combination of shine and durability, but the perfect ratio doesn’t exist.

Generally, the younger you are, the more you look for ‘growth’ assets because you’re building your wealth. When you’re retired, you generally need more income because you don’t have a paypacket. There are a hundred different scenarios in between, so you need to decide what’s important to you.

Every dollar you spend is a dollar you can’t make money from. The thing about money is that it can make you more money. Buying a house, investing in shares, contributing to super, even just getting interest on a bank account: all of those things give you more money – FREE money! Because that’s what capital growth and income are: money you DIDN’T HAVE TO EARN by working.

So, while it feels good to drop 100 bucks on eyelash extensions (don’t get me started on the ridiculousness of that price point), that’s money you could have put towards a holiday, or a home, or a degree, or any number of things that will actually improve your life.

If you can look me in the eye and convince me that extensions have genuinely improved your life (better job? hotter man? happier heart?) then go ahead. For example, I genuinely, deeply believe being blonde is an expensive but essential part of my life. But that means I don’t do other things like spray tans or nail salons.

It’s part of my approach to mindful spending and while it’s not perfect, it means I have some money leftover to do other, more productive stuff.

Get to know your money personality – and manage it. Everyone has their own approach to finances . I’m the ‘going broke saving money’ type: I can’t go past a sale … but still buy stuff I don’t need. (And, of course, it’s not a bargain if you don’t need it).

The key is to identify your own quirks and work around them (e.g. I try to avoid shopping malls in January). It’s all about self-awareness.

In a partnership, it’s more complicated. I was often in a tug-of-war with my ex-husband because we had different ideas about our money. He spent far more on ‘stuff’ than I’d like; I spent more on travel than he wanted. Neither of us was right or wrong, but if I had my time again, I would keep more money separate, accept that we have different priorities, and work from that basis.

Nobody is perfect, and I’m certainly not . I still get mad at myself for breaking my own budgets. I am the worst at claiming back money from my health fund and the tax office. I never have all of my shit together, all at once.

But like most hard things, doing a little bit to improve, all the time, can have a big impact.

Do you know some Fierce Girls who could use this advice? Share this post! Or subscribe if you want more real talk and lipstick analogies.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑