Money Talks: A Lifestyle Guide for Financial Wellbeing

INTRODUCTION

IT’S (NOT) ABOUT THE MONEY

This isn’t your stereotypical book about money. There are plenty of books out there that will walk you through the ABCs of money management, from what type of bank accounts you need through to understanding how credit cards work, or how to make it onto that first rung of the property ladder. But the thing about money is that for all that society tries to simplify it and boil it down to tips and tricks, practical wisdom and sensible habits, it remains a highly emotional subject. The emotions tied to money are powerful – from fear to security, embarrassment to opportunity – and for most people, they are deeply rooted in our brains. Yet whether we like it or not, money plays a part in everyday life for all of us, whatever our circumstances, financial knowledge or our means. And it’s notable that for even the most logical person in the world, decisions about money can prove to be a stumbling block that appears out of nowhere, blindsiding even the most rational of minds.

And yet the majority of the world continues to operate by a set of money rules which imply that if you play the game correctly, you’ll come out on top. Work hard and earn money. Work harder, earn more. Save your income and receive financial security. Invest now and become wealthy later. Spend less and get richer. Turns out, it’s not quite as simple as it sounds and I’m about to tell you why. Money isn’t just about the numbers, but so much more.

WHY MONEY TALKS

My journey into the financial wellbeing space began long before I started speaking about the topic openly. My earliest recollection of engaging with finance came during my teenage years, when my grandfather gave me a hefty Financial Times book on investing. I’d always known he had a keen interest in stocks and shares, so I took an interest in the topic too. However, when I saw the dense pages of this introduction to the financial market, the book quickly found a safe spot in the back of a drawer. There my interest in finance remained until years later, at the start of my career in my early 20s. After an extended period as a student, when I first started to earn a regular salary I quickly realized that I had absolutely no clue how to make wise financial decisions, both for the short and long term. As a 20-something living in London, I wanted to enjoy my new monthly bank balance and experience the world, yet I equally knew I had ambitions to secure myself financially in the future. I’d always dreamed of travelling, having my own home and being able to treat my family, who supported me through my school years.

Naturally, I started to look for resources to help answer some of the many questions I had about financial literacy. I scoured the internet and bookshops, only to find myself stuck at a dead end with two polarizing camps trying to lure me in. At one extreme, there was plenty of literature set on the idea that I needed to stop spending money and start saving every spare penny immediately if I ever wanted to reach a state of financial security. In this camp, all forms of debt are considered bad, spending more than necessary on essentials such as housing is seen as wasteful, and the aim is simply to save as much of your income as possible. For a girl like me, who enjoyed travel and was living in bustling southwest London at the time, this didn’t strike a chord. At the other end of the spectrum, the core advice was you only live once; why spend your younger years saving money when you can spend it all? According to this viewpoint, there’s a time to make sensible choices but that’s for later, not now, so stop being boring and spend the money.

Although I may have been quick to jump at the opportunity to book a weekend away with the girls, I still had bigger-picture financial aspirations. Surely, I thought, these aren’t the only options out there? There has to be a better option, or a middle ground. A way to make wise, informed decisions for the future while still allowing myself to have fun in the present and enjoy myself. After all, life isn’t just about accumulating as much as possible, yet when money is such an integral part of how the world works there must be a way to feel in control and good about it. I figured that if I was looking for this information and knowledge, surely there were plenty of others out there in the same boat.

Fast forward several years, a career change and accompanying lifestyle pivot later – along with countless hours of reading, learning and knowledge building – and I find myself writing this book. From taking the step into the personal finance field and becoming a commissioned financial writer in major publications, to training as a certified financial coach in order to better understand money behaviours, I have dedicated the last five years to understanding what really matters when it comes to money – from what makes people take the financial decisions they do (clue: it isn’t logic), through to the narratives we tell ourselves subconsciously about money, wealth and privilege. Through building an online platform, I’ve been in the fortunate position to speak to hundreds of individuals about their thoughts, opinions, hopes and fears about money that they haven’t even shared with their inner circle.

Yet there’s only so much depth in which you can explore a topic in an Instagram post or TikTok video. It soon became clear to me that our lives are scattered with moments, relationships and interactions where money fundamentally impacts our experience. From the friendships we form on the first day at school, to the wedding invitations we receive as adults, the role of money is everywhere – and still no one dares to acknowledge it. Until now. Throughout this book, I explore the most influential parts of our lives where, whether we’re aware of it or not, money plays a part. Combining statistics and data with first-hand experiences and expert commentary, Money Talks unpacks the complicated, often confusing way that money shapes our lives and provides actionable insights to deal with the challenges that issues around money and wealth can throw our way.

THE FEMALE FINANCIAL EMERGENCY

Looking over the history of the financial sector, it’s clear to see that the world of banking and finance has been built by, and for, men. By no means does this mean that men don’t have financial challenges or struggles too; however, countless years of data and research have shown that by almost every measure of financial security or confidence, men fare better than their female counterparts. History has a major part to play in this: only 50 years ago, women across the world had significantly fewer financial rights than men. It wasn’t until 1974 that American women could apply for credit without a male signatory, or 1982 in the UK when women were allowed to spend their money in a pub without being refused service.¹

But despite the passing of time and progress being made in many respects, the needle is shifting at an extremely slow pace when it comes to closing gender gaps across the financial board. Women continue to fall behind men in terms of pay, investments, wealth and pensions, leaving them less financially secure and experiencing lower levels of financial wellbeing. The Money and Pensions Service put it bluntly: There is a financial emergency for women. Women’s financial wellbeing outcomes, amplified by low confidence and low engagement with advice and guidance, are significantly worse than men’s.

It’s time that we change the story.

THE SEARCH FOR FINANCIAL WELLBEING

It’s safe to say that the last few years have thrown a curveball into the lives of almost every person on the planet, with a pandemic causing chaos to global economies and a war triggering worldwide inflation. With consecutive shocks to the financial situations of households of all shapes, sizes and incomes, the concept of financial wellbeing has risen in the consciousness of both individuals and businesses. But what actually is financial wellbeing? To best understand how our finances fit into our wider wellbeing, let’s take a holistic view of wellbeing first. There are typically thought to be four pillars of wellness – physical, mental, social and financial – which combine together to provide a foundation or platform for overall human wellbeing and happiness.

Focusing on one or two of these pillars can lead to improvement in specific areas, but only when you look after all four pillars can you reach optimum wellbeing. Wellbeing isn’t an end destination, either; it’s an ongoing journey full of highs and lows, wins and challenges, and financial wellbeing is no different.

Of the four pillars of wellness, mainstream society tends to put the most emphasis on promoting physical wellbeing. From a young age, we’re encouraged to pay attention to our physical wellbeing through movement and nutrition. Increasingly over the last ten years or so, there has been a notable rise in discourse surrounding mental wellbeing too, both in terms of how critical it is to pay attention to our own mental health, alongside the importance of supporting the mental wellbeing of those around us. Closely tied to mental wellbeing is social wellbeing, as connection to others and community play a key part in maintaining our mental wellbeing. Loneliness and social disconnection contribute to poorer mental health, whereas strong social networks can help support you in navigating tricky times in your life. And financial wellbeing? It’s the pillar of wellbeing that for so long has remained in the shadows, yet arguably has the biggest impact on our lives.

With over a quarter of adults feeling stressed about money every day, financial wellbeing has a knock-on effect on the mental wellbeing of millions of adults, causing more worry than work, health and family matters do.² The picture is crystal clear that we’re heading for a financial wellbeing crisis, yet for too long the approach to financial wellbeing has centred on budgeting tips and savings hacks, rather than digging deeper into the root of the issue. After all, if we could budget our way out of poverty then we’d surely be living in a completely different world? The truth is that money isn’t just practical, but emotional and political too. Diving head first into the conversation about financial wellbeing requires us to take off our blinkers, set aside our assumptions or biases and look at the way that both we as individuals and the society we live in address the topics of money, wealth and privilege. Only when we look at our everyday interactions, our gut feelings and our deep-rooted beliefs about money can we start to understand what financial wellbeing truly means for each one of us and how we can get closer to improving our own unique relationship with money.

LET’S TALK ABOUT PRIVILEGE

There’s one issue that comes hand in hand with the conversations throughout the course of this book that it’d be careless to skip over, and that’s financial privilege. Privilege manifests itself in many different forms, and when it comes to money then the way privilege impacts our experiences, opportunities and challenges can be vast. Although many other aspects of privilege come into play when we talk about money, such as gender and race, the economic privilege underpinning many of the discussions throughout this book refers to a level of financial stability or wealth that gives you access to opportunities or advantages that others may not have. In the so-called race of life, financial privilege can serve as a ten-second head start for hitting other financial goals, such as funding education, landing a sought-after job role or getting on the housing ladder.

Although the role of privilege means that equality of opportunity is sometimes a distant dream, by acknowledging our own economic privilege we can be more aware of the ways in which we have benefited from our circumstances and act to try to level the playing field. Privilege is too often considered to be a dirty word, and many conversations about privilege descend into a defence of how much effort or hard work people have put into achieving their goals, without the acknowledgement of how privilege can help provide a platform for us to flourish. While it’s true that financial privilege alone is no guarantee of happiness or success, there are plenty of studies which show that the combination of economic privilege and effort can lead to outcomes that those without an equal level of privilege may struggle to achieve, despite their hardest efforts. So, as you turn the pages of this book, I would encourage you to explore the way that financial privilege can impact all facets of our lives – from work to relationships to motherhood – and to start to reflect on your own journey with money, taking note of the role that financial privilege has played in your life. Only once we have an awareness of the cards we’ve been dealt that have influenced where we are today can we start to advocate and lift up other women and push for greater female financial wellbeing in our own circles, communities and afar.

FINDING YOUR RICH LIFE

At the root of taking steps toward improving your financial wellbeing, there is one question that I believe underpins everything else: what do you want your life to look like, truly? It’s a question that frequently evades us, as we get swept along in the checklist of adulthood and milestones that society expects us to meet. Even when we step away from the well-trodden path, there are often ideas embedded in our brains from a young age about what our life should look like. Yet only when we really tune in to ourselves and understand what makes us tick, what matters to us and what motivates us, can we start to piece together a picture of our own rich life. The term rich tends to evoke an image dripping in gold or luxury in a Succession-like style, yet the word itself has layers of deeper meaning. Collins Dictionary defines a rich life as one that is interesting because it is full of different events and activities, with no mention whatsoever of wealth or material resources. So here I challenge you to take some time out, switch your phone onto aeroplane mode and ask yourself: what does my rich life look like?

Financial wellbeing is intrinsically linked to our idea of a rich life, as one of the core jigsaw pieces in the financial wellbeing puzzle involves separating our own value from our bank balance. The exercises in this book are designed to help you understand what wealth truly means to you, because when you have a clear idea of what your own rich life looks like, you’ll have a north star to guide you when it comes to making difficult decisions relating to your work, money and lifestyle. Without clarity on your values as an individual, it can become all too easy to find yourself sacrificing your financial – and mental – wellbeing in pursuit of riches. Understanding your own why is not easy, though; much like the lack of practical financial education at school, there’s a gaping hole in the education system around helping individuals really connect to their passions and purpose. As we’ll explore throughout this book, increasingly this lack of support early on will manifest itself later in life, with more and more adults today seeking meaning and fulfilment in their life and in work.

Wherever you are in your journey toward building better financial wellbeing, I hope that in reading this book you’ll be inspired to dig deeper into your own relationship with money. Because taking steps toward improving your financial wellbeing can open the door to a life full of purpose that brings you joy and lights you up …

LIVE TO WORK, OR WORK TO LIVE?

1

Let’s start out with some perspective. The average person spends one-third of their entire life at work. Yes, one-third. That comes in at around 85,000 hours, more or less.¹ That’s a whole lot of time that we spend working,