Do you use AfterPay? Tread carefully…

Can we have a little chat about AfterPay? – Lovely AfterPay – which has cropped up in the last couple of years and has now grown to 700,000 odd users.  Unfortunately, this have-it-now-pay-later innovative credit option is causing all sorts of havoc for people financially.

I was inspired to do this video after a client discussion last week. Our client no longer has any credit cards or anything like that, no debt anymore, but she’d put a couple of things on AfterPay. And so I wanted to address this thing AfterPay because I see it gets people in a lot of trouble.

Is it really just another form of Laybuy?

AfterPay make out that it’s just like LayBuy. But it’s not really LayBuy – it’s quite different. With a LayBuy, you cannot take the items out of the shop until you’ve paid that final payment. With AfterPay, you can take it straight away and you get to enjoy it and then you’re left with this trail of fees that you have to pay.

That $100 pair of jeans on AfterPay could end up costing you $160-170 dollars if you miss any payments.  That can be worse than credit card interest.

And the problem with it is that all of a sudden your cashflow gets squeezed.

The AfterPay Trap

So you make this spot decision to buy something on AfterPay because you think, “Oh yeah, I’m going to have the money. I don’t quite have it but when I hit payday, it’ll be there”. But with every decision to buy something on AfterPay, your cashflow gets squeezed… And if you don’t have a really clear idea of exactly what your surplus is, your real surplus – I’m talking about your real surplus over and above all of your predictable, regular expenses, your unpredictable expenses and, all of your weekly expenses, then you can’t really know whether you’ve got that extra to make that AfterPay purchase.

So you have to be super careful.

With our Spending Planner clients, we divide up expenses into three distinct areas. One is predictable, one is unpredictable and one is weekly. And from there they can see exactly how much they need to have in each of those accounts. And so, with an AfterPay expense, generally that type of expense is an unpredictable expense, so it would ordinarily come out of your unpredictable expenses account. You should be able to see exactly how much you’ve got accumulated in that unpredictable expenses account to pay for that item.

Would you still buy it if you had the cash in four weeks time?

You should be able to pay cash for that thing, is what I’m saying. If you have enough money accumulated in your unpredictable expenses account and you can see pretty quickly whether or not you’ve got the money for that dress or those extra Christmas presents or that item for the house or whatever, if you’ve got the cash, why not buy it with your cash, rather than putting it on AfterPay.

And then getting a surprise later when you don’t have enough to pay for the fridge when it blows up or the new car tyres or all of those sorts of things which we really do need to have money for.

AfterPay is just another form of credit. It’s using other people’s money to pay for your stuff, which can be okay if you’ve got a really tight money management system and you can see that you’re definitely going to have enough money to pay for those ongoing payments and ALSO enough for your unpredictable expenses.

But if you don’t, I really recommend you steer clear of AfterPay. It’s dangerous, in the heat of the moment, when you’re out and enjoying shopping and you want to make that purchase.

If you have a problem, sometimes abstaining completely is the best way

Sometimes our brain, our reptilian brain, gets in the road and starts to make these decisions for us. So if you feel like you have a problem with AfterPay, consider cancelling your account. Just like chopping up the credit cards or putting credit cards in the freezer, because it really is another form of credit.

The post The Pros and Cons of AfterPay appeared first on Bright Spenders.

Lance has been personally using the Spending Planner to transform and manage his own finances since 2002.

Lance Box has worked with clients helping them take control of their finances over the last four years, and is now serving Bright Spenders’ clients and helping them rock their finances.  Learn how Lance always ‘pays himself first’ and about his famous ‘Start Over Again Fund’ which he’s had to tap into a couple of times over the past decade.

Anthea:   Hello everyone, Anthea from Bright Spenders and I have a real treat today. I want to introduce you to one of our newest members of our team, Lance Box, who is with us today. I always like when we’ve got a new team member to introduce them to the community. So you can get to know him a little bit and hear about his experience with using our program, firstly and how it’s, how it’s changed things for him because he’s actually been using it for a long time. A lot longer than me. In fact, I think I’ve been using this since about 2010. Lance – 2002. He’s a serious veteran at this stuff and really knows his stuff. So welcome, Lance.

Lance:     Thank you very much, Anthea.

Anthea:   Why don’t you just start off by telling us a little bit about yourself. We’d love to find out a bit more about you.

Lance:     Sure. My wife and I’ve been married nearly 40 years. I have two adopted children from the Philippines. My eldest son is doing his second apprenticeship in locksmithing. He completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter. My second son is married to a Walpuri woman and lives in a community called Gargaringi in the centre of the Northern territory. I’ve three Aboriginal grandkids, Walpuri grandkids. And I’ve been on the journey with the spending planning as you’ve mentioned since 2002, when it was called Simply Budgets. I started.

Anthea:     Fantastic. So you’re actually up in Darwin, aren’t you?

Lance:   Yeah. In Palmerston, which is sort of the twin city to Darwin.

Anthea: Yeah. Great. Okay.

Lance:   And also have a PhD in education.

Anthea:   Right. Okay. So you’re actually a teacher?

Lance:   I have been in a past life, but I’m not anymore.

Anthea:   I know – now you’re teaching in other areas, teaching people great financial management skills so they can really rock their financial goals. So why don’t you tell us a bit about what life was like before you found the Spending planner system of money management for yourself? I know back then it was called Simply Budgets, but what drew you to it and what shifted as a result?

Lance:  Sure. Well, when I grew up, money was never talked about in, in our family, probably wasn’t talked about in a lot of families. And as a consequence on you, nothing about money. Got married and we had a roller coaster ride, big ride because at times I would look at my bank account and I think we’ve got heaps of money. Let’s go out and spend it. And we would go and spend it and then bills would turn up and we didn’t have the money. Or I would think, Hey, we got bills coming up. I don’t know how much I’m going to need and my wife would say we need X, Y, and Z. And say, no, we can’t spend on that. We can’t do anything because we’re gonna need it. And I was a little tightwad or a Spendthrift and it was just an absolutely insane rollercoaster ride.

Lance:   And then my wife said, “Hey, you need to learn about money.” So I went to a meeting on the Gold Coast and David was there, David Wright, creator of the Spending Planner business. And he was selling his software. I bought a copy of the software and started the process of learning how to use it in time. Initially, there was no coaching which made it hard to learn. So we learned the hard road. But anyway, in time what I found was that having the Spending Plan in place gave me huge predictability and took away that rollercoaster ride, we knew to the day what amount of money we needed in our bank account every single day to be able to cover out bills up to 10 years. And we could have conversations and discussions and we would say, spending plan tells us, yes, we can do that. Or it tells us we can’t do that. And just, for example, my wife and I were thinking about getting a new car. So we went and had a look at a new car in the last couple of days, put the numbers in the Spending Plan, Spending plan said, can’t do it. Okay. So we’re not going to do it. We’re just going to hang onto the old car until we can.

Anthea:   That’s such a great practical example of how of it in action in your life, having that question, “Oh, can I really afford to do this? Or not?” Like even on the little things like, “can I really afford to go out to dinner tonight? Can I really afford to get, piano lessons from my son or daughter? Can I really afford that car?” And you just can find out that information so quickly and easily with this program, you don’t have to do all the juggling of numbers in your head, which just leads to a whole lot of fatigue and foggy thinking. I think of it like my second brain really. It’s definitely my financial brain and it means I don’t have to be juggling all those numbers.

Anthea:   So I imagine that you, like me back in 2002, were probably on the phone to David Wright for hours trying to set it up. And, the whole model is changed now and you can’t access it unless you work with a spending planner like ourselves. That has just proven to be a much better system because I don’t know if Lance, but my experience is that there are a lot of apps, there are a lot of books out there, there’s a lot of things that people can do, which we did initially to try and work out how to manage our money. But there’s no guiding force to help you, keep you accountable, really customize it for you and your particular finances, your goals, your lifestyle.

Anthea:  And so that’s what we do. We actually guide people through the process of setting up their own very personalized spending plan so that they can achieve their goals and really maximize their savings. Lance, you have worked with a ton of people over the years and I would love to hear about one particular, one or two sort of stories of people that you’ve worked with. I don’t want you to name names, but if you can share a little bit about what they were like when they came to you and what the result was.

Lance:  Well, if I can very quickly share two. Yeah. One of my clients was a woman who had a very well paid position and she received redundancy and went away and accumulated $97,000 worth of debt, having spent her redundancy payment. Came back and realized that she needed to get her old job back. And they said, yeah, sure. But at half the pay. So she came to me, half the pay, same lifestyle, $97,000 worth of debt. What can we do? So they put all the numbers into the spending plan and as it turned out she found that there was a lot of things that she was spending on did she didn’t need to. And in a very short time, we had her situation in control. She was paying off again, hammering it down. She was going on trips overseas and she’s living a better lifestyle than she did before.

Lance:  She took the redundancy. She threatened all sorts of dreadful things If I ever stopped being her Spending Planner And we’ve remained really good friends over on very long time. And she is doing extremely well. And a second one was an accountant. An accountant who had no idea where his money was going and he had significant mortgages, and other debts and we put them into the Spending Plan and we saved him over, I think it was $26,000 of interest that he didn’t have to pay and a reduction of his debts by 18 years so that we reduced his repayment commitments to the point where he knew he would be totally debt-free by the time he was planning to retire. It was astounding. Amazing. He just absolutely couldn’t believe what this program could do.

Anthea:  Both of those are just phenomenal stories. Like the first one – it really speaks to that whole idea that it makes no difference how much you earn. Absolutely no difference. I’ve worked with clients who are earning 50 grand a year, right up to clients who are earning 50 grand a month. And it’s often the ones on the higher incomes that are actually struggling more because they have this perception of there’s lots of cash around, there’s lots of cash coming in through their accounts, but little control in terms of holding onto it and that sick feeling that they’re having of, “Oh, it’s going out faster, than it’s coming in.” And the second story – we work with lots of accountants, financial planners and bookkeepers. Interestingly. And what I always say to people, because clients come to me and they say, Oh, I went to my accountant and they couldn’t really help me with this stuff.

Anthea:  And I say, those professionals are super, super important in our lives. We need accountants. We need bookkeepers to minimize our tax, to make sure we’re compliant, be able to have really good business books. Financial planners are essential for future planning our investments. But they don’t really do this stuff. There really is no professional who looks after purely the cashflow part. Purely the budgeting part. And so that’s what we do as spending planners. So, – I’d just like to say there’s absolutely no what’s the word? Not disparaging accountants or anything, it’s just that doing a different thing that completely focused on a different part of finances.

Anthea:  So they’re amazing stories. Lance, thank you so much for sharing those with us. And I just want to leave our listeners with one tip. , if someone’s listening in today and they’re struggling with control over their finances, whether they’re a small business owner or wage earner, what would be your number one tip for an action that I could take today to get their finances on track?

Lance:  It’s a bit of a cliche, but pay yourself first is an absolute critical thing. It has got me through periods. I’ve had up to two years of periods of no income where I’ve known the exact moment when I needed to get a job or some kind of income. But I’ve paid myself first almost religiously since I’ve had a spending plan. And as a consequence, I’ve always had a Start Over Again fund

Anthea:  And so what do you mean by paying yourself first? What does that actually look like for you?

Lance:  Well, for me it’s, I take 10% of whatever income comes in and I put it into my Start Over Again Fund and then I live off the 90% live as if the 90% is my wage. Not the 100%

Anthea:  Yeah. Right. Okay. So you’re always spending less than you’re earning. And so is that sort of when you get paid or when do you actually… Do you use your spending plan to work out the detail of exactly how much? So you put your income in, you put your expenses in, you make sure that your expenses are always only 90% of that income. And then that is surplus showing up as…

Lance:  No, no, no. First thing I put in is a transfer from my spending plan account to my Start over again account. That then it becomes my 100%.

Anthea: Right, And then you put in your expenses after.

Lance:  And then I put my expenses in.

Anthea:  Right, I love it. So that really is paying yourself as it’s, it’s starting with how you mean to go on. That’s fantastic. Thank you so much, Lance. It’s really great talking to you today and introducing you to our community. I know that people are going to love working with you. You’re such a, I don’t know… Lance, you probably hate this term, but I feel like you’re the Teddy bear professor. You felt like you’re super smart, but you’re also incredibly lovable and warm and , I’m just so excited to be able to gift you to our community, so thank you.

Lance:  So anybody who works with me has to obey my rule, and it’s an inviolable rule to be fun.

Anthea:   I love it. Lance, thanks so much. I know we’ll be seeing a lot of you again. Bye.

The post Meet our newest Bright Spenders Team member, Lance Box! appeared first on Bright Spenders.

Could being over 45 be your secret weapon when it comes to creating a great business?

Hunter Leonard is a business owner, marketer and speaker who has developed a significant reputation for outstanding marketing and strategic growth through his first business – Blue Frog Marketing. He founded a second business in 2016 – Silver & Wise – which is changing the world one mature age Aussie at a time.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Hunter about how people over forty-five can protect their income-earning potential and make a huge contribution.

In this interview we talk about:

• The massive elephant in the room when it comes to ageism in the workforce and why it’s such a problem
• What Hunter has been doing about resolving this issue
• The best thing that someone between 45 and 60 could be doing to protect themselves and better their situation?
• Why starting a business is such a good option for older Australians?
• The best (and simplest) tips for funding your business
• How to tell if your business idea is worth funding?
• The #1 thing that Hunter sees entrepreneurs doing badly and his best tip for fixing it?

About Hunter Leonard

Hunter has written six books; won six major awards for marketing excellence; surveyed more than 10,000 business owners; delivered over 600 presentations, and contributed to over $2 billion in sales growth for his clients since 2001. He is highly regarded for his innovative thinking and perspectives, and his ability to engage his audience and contribute positive energy to anything he is involved with.

His latest book – Generation Experience is a best seller and it details 8 steps to mature age business success. He is currently writing three more books on various topics.

He has developed partnerships with some of Australia’s largest corporations and is on track to create billions of dollars of economic benefit for the Australian economy through these partnerships.

When not running his business, Hunter is a keen musician, photographer and cook.

You can find Hunter over at Blue Frog Marketing or  Silver & Wise

Over 45 might be your secret weapon – An interview with Hunter Leonard

Anthea:  I want to introduce you to an amazing gentleman I met a couple of months ago now – Hunter Leonard. Hey Hunter, how are you?

Hunter: Very well Anthea.

Anthea: I’m very well too. So let me tell you a little bit about Hunter. He is a business owner, marketer, speaker. He has developed a significant reputation for outstanding marketing and strategic growth for businesses. He has a marketing company called Blue Frog Marketing. But what I’m really interested in talking to him about today is that he started another business a few years back, 2016 called Silver and Wise, which is all about changing the world, one mature age person at a time.

Anthea: Most of us don’t want to consider ourselves mature, right? I know, I definitely don’t. I’m turning 40 something tomorrow, actually 48, and I don’t consider myself mature age. But interestingly workplaces are considering anyone over, is it 40, 45? Is that the definition of mature-aged?

Hunter: Whether or not you think that or not. But, there’s a lot of statistics around saying that around about the age of 50 is the age at which corporates start turning off the tap, so to speak. They don’t want to employ people over that age. So it’s quite interesting. It’s quite young. When you consider the retirement age is supposed to be late sixties.

Anthea: Absolutely. And with so much experience. This is why I wanted to get you on today – it’s a major issue. And I know a lot of our Bright Spenders clients, a lot of people that follow the work that we do are in this position where they’re getting retrenched. They’ve had these amazing careers and are getting retrenched and not being able to find work again. And it’s a really, really serious problem because financially there’s a massive hit on their income. So I’d really love you to share a little bit about your experience in getting people up and running in their own business because there’s so much wealth of experience there. I just want to just touch on a couple of things. You’ve written six books. So you’ve quite a lot of experience that you’ve published.

Anthea: You’ve won quite a few awards for marketing excellence. You’ve surveyed more than 10,000 business owners and delivered over 600 presentations and done an awful lot in regard to thinking about how to engage an audience as a business and how to build a business. You’ve written a book called Generation Experience, which I did a Facebook live on a little while ago, which specifically deals with this issue of older people and all this wealth of knowledge and understanding and experience that they have and being able to package that into a new business idea. So that’s what I really want to know about today.

Anthea: You’ve got these eight steps to mature-aged business success. I’m going to introduce you as the Ageism Sucks Guy because I know you use that hashtag a lot.

Hunter: That’s okay. It is a real problem. It’s a massive problem.

Anthea: So why is it that people over the age of 40 are getting retrenched and turned away from jobs because they’re too old?

Hunter:  Basically it’s because we have an organizational corporate culture in Australia, which seems to value youth and energy more than it does experience. There’s a number of factors with it. I’ve spoken with the Human Rights Commission about this at length and they were very nice to be able to share a lot of their data when I first started the business. So they’ve been amazing in terms of being able to access the latest market data on what’s going on. So they’ve done a number of studies, one of which was called the Willing to Work-Study. And this study found that there were over 100,000 people in this 45 plus age group who are willing to work. But the stats show that they can’t get jobs. So if you then take that down to one individual, like somebody in your network they will have probably noted the fact that it’s much harder to then get back into work.

Hunter:  In fact, the statistics say that they take up to two years to find another job and that’s a huge impact. If somebody coming out of a corporate position where they might’ve been earning six figures or more to then have a two-year gap in that income, it can be talking about two or $300,000 of earning power. So if they haven’t got anything backing them up, that can create a significant gap in their financial security. And that’s where we started the discussion. I’m happy you mentioned the Ageism Sucks one because I guess how we have a very longterm strategic plan. So we’ve set a plan, but in 30 years we’d like to see an end to ageism. The first part of our solving that problem is creating this business called Silver & Wise, which is aimed at helping mature age people start businesses.

Hunter:  And the reason we started there was because I know that market very well. I’ve worked with small business owners for the last 20 years in our marketing business and because we also had these surveys of 10,000 business owners, I also knew a lot about what they were running into as business owners. So what were the challenges? They had challenges they had in running a business. So I thought, well, that’s a perfect place to start. Somebody’s already on the journey and running into those challenges, those challenges didn’t seem to change over time. So I thought, well, they’d be a good place to start to teach new business owners about the things they likely to run into. So if we can train them with some skills in those areas, then they’re going to be less likely to run into those, those challenges. In other words, less likely to fail, I suppose.

Hunter:  So that’s, that’s how I am, is for all of these people that are willing to work and who can’t find a job, a percentage who are crazy enough and mad enough to think about starting a business need somewhere to go. Cause they, they’ve been in corporate all their lives, they’re not really aware of what it takes to run a business. And so that’s where we, where we come in as to say, well, you’ve got some experience, you’ve got some wisdom. Let’s combine that with a few skills and skills development in how to run their business. And then you can use that as a platform to build some financial security by doing your own thing rather than waiting for somebody else who considered the year to be ready for pasture. And banging your head against a brick wall, sending out all these resumes. Why not have a crack and do something yourself.

Anthea:  And presumably a lot of people in corporate would have thought about going out on their own at some point. So it wouldn’t show in such a foreign concept for them. Why do you think starting a business is such a good idea for these older Australians? What do you think it is that they’ve got? What do you think the potential is there?

Hunter:  Look, I think the potential is much higher now than it’s been because the opportunity to work in jobs is declining and it’s going to decline more. In fact, I think I shared the numbers when we had that meeting recently when I was presenting that in 20 to 30 years, we can expect this number to be more like 2 million people out there willing to work and not being able to find a job. So if the same, if the same I just attitude stays in corporate for the next 30 years. We’ll have 2 million people out there trying to find a job and that will have a massive impact on the overall economy as well as of course the devastating impact on the individual who can’t find work. So the fact is that trend for the foreseeable future is likely to continue.

Hunter:  I’ve run my own business for 20 years. So there’s, there’s all of those elements of running our own business. It’s not for everyone, but there is the fact that you are taking control of your own destiny and, and ha if you’re successful at whatever you do, then you can create a world where you have control over your financial security. You’re not waiting for somebody else to give you a gig. You’re not waiting for somebody else to give you a job. You’re not waiting for something for the hammer to fall, so to speak. When they decide that, okay, all the 50-year-olds are all now going to be made redundant because for whatever various reasons and that there’s a whole lot of arbitrary reasons why people were made redundant and that age. Why are they considered to be expensive?

Hunter:  Because they’d been in corporate for a while. So they’ve relatively high wage probably because people are only looking at wage. They’re not looking at the value of that individual broader than their actual salary or what they’re owed. The other ones are really done, like, and I’ll call people out on it, is that they say that people in their 50s are not computer literate. Well, most people in their 50s have had a laptop in there in their hand since they were 20. Sure. They might not be able to turn the computer around and they pop in the back and work out how it works and they might not be able to code the back of a website. But for me, as a, as a business owner, I see those things as irrelevant. You can fire, you can hire an expert to do those basic things.

Hunter:  But what these mature people bring is a real understanding of how life works. They’ve been, they’ve seen a lot of things done. They’ve seen things how work, they’ve seen things fail. They’ve probably been in the industry for a number of years enough to know what the successful actions are in that particular industry or in that particular skill area. So so I feel that there is a major opportunity for people to start businesses and run them. And I’m not talking about the next unicorn business. , unicorn being defined as $1 billion business because a lot of the incubators out there are all focused on finding the next massive big software company or the next Google or the next ad software. I’m talking about average everyday Australian starting average everyday businesses. I don’t mean their average businesses, do you know what I mean? They’re just a small to medium enterprise that maybe be a couple of people that generate six figures in profit or margin for the person who owns it so that they’re financially secure through their fifties and sixties and possibly even into their seventies

Anthea: With a service or a concept that’s really needed out there. That’s not necessarily breakthrough technology or anything like that. It’s just literally similar to what I do, I suppose, as my service is hugely needed out there. There’s this huge need for people to get their finances in order. And I’m bringing on contractors all the time who can work with clients on that. So, there’s got to be just hundreds of ideas for service-based businesses or online businesses, online education courses that, that people can do that, are really needed services out there.

Hunter:  And we’ve got an aging population too, so if you’ve got mature age people who understand what it’s like to be mature and can service. Other than that you are people with some kind of expertise because you got to remember that a lot of these people are coming out of corporates. They might have 20 or 30 years experience in finance or HR or marketing or sales or business development or logistics or whatever. I saw a great example the other day, 75 year old or something that had been re-employed in a warehouse. And he had saved this company heaps of money and time because he just understood how warehouses work. He had been in logistics for years, but no one had given him a job, and he was in his seventies. So he’s almost at the extreme end of what we’re talking about.

Hunter:  We were talking before you started recording about coming back from the Northern rivers doing a set of presentations to business owners up there. And we do this survey all the time. Whenever I do a presentation, I ask them what’s their biggest challenge? 50% of the people in those rooms. And it was 150 business owners, 50% said that they had a challenge with getting new customers. In other words, their marketing, so there’s five jobs straight away because the average marketing that’s all 19 needs half a dozen clients to make a reasonable amount of revenue. They just put an outsourced marketing department for six small businesses and then they’ve got themselves a job and they can potentially live in the Northern rivers, which would be nice, but there is a need for hundreds of marketing consultants who understand small business, hundreds of business consultants hunt. There is so many, so much opportunity out there for people who’ve got some experience and wisdom about business, whether it’s a services business or a mature age focused business or whatever. I just say there’s more opportunity there than there is in trying to bang your head against a brick wall, giving people resumes and them not wanting to employ you because you’ve got a bit of grey hair or something, which is just nuts.

Anthea: Yeah, really, really nuts and and something I just want to touch on – something that you said in that presentation that you gave was that, okay, there’s one cost to the people who are losing their jobs and getting retrenched and being out of the workforce, but there’s another massive cost to the taxpayers who are having to fund the pensions for all those people who are so-called, out of the workforce and, and depending on social security or pension or early retirement or whatever. Can you just touch on that for a minute? What that cost is likely to be, for our kids, our grandkids, if all of these people are out of the workforce.

Hunter:  The economy is built on the individual production of individuals and individuals work by paying an amount of tax to the government. And the government uses that to run the country to provide a social or civil society as what used to be called the idea of social security for people who can’t work or who need some help. So when the pension and superannuation and all these things were invented, people were basically retiring at 65 and dying at 70. So you had a five or maybe 10-year retirement, that retirement now could be 20 years, it could be 30. The whole reason that governments are increasing the retirement age to 67 with plans to push it even higher is because they can’t afford us to live that long.

Hunter:  So imagine what it’d be like if everybody is now not working at 50. That’s 17 years of productive work life, 17 years of paying taxes, blah, blah blah. And on the converse side, 17 years of requiring some kind of social security or work for the dole or whatever term you use. So if on the one side we’ve got the number of taxpayers declining and on the other side, we’ve got the number of people needing social security, increasing. That balance has to break sometime. And my belief is most Western governments are panicking right now because they’re seeing it drop off the cliff and, you don’t have to do too many calculations to realize that if we had half the number of taxpayers and twice the number of social security people, our Texas would double.

Hunter:  So then you’re looking at 70 or 80% tax and that scares the hell out of me. I’m a productive guy and I want to have some benefit from the fruits of my labour. I don’t necessarily want to give 80% to the government, not that I’m not happy to pay some tax. I’m happy to do that. That’s our job, I think, as a productive business owners to pay some tax. But I certainly don’t want to pay 75% or 80%. The other stat, I’ll share it very quickly – when I said this to the human rights commissioner, I said, look, this is very early on. I didn’t really understand how much impact, and I said, so if we were able to train say a couple of thousand mature age people to run businesses, and they were all turning over an average size of a business, which was about $200,000 in Australia, roughly. He said, well, immediately you get 2000 businesses at $200,000, that’s 400 million. And she said you haven’t even factored in the cost of handling people’s mental health or their social security or any of the negative costs, or the things that are going to come in if you don’t do that. So her thought was that for every couple of thousand business owners we train, and we can, as long as they’re successful, then it could be a $1 billion impact on the economy. And for me, I just went well okay, that’s something worth doing.

Anthea:  That is definitely worth getting behind. Hunter, I’m thinking about people listening into this interview today and, maybe they’re in that age bracket somewhere over 45 under 55 maybe or under 65, and maybe they’re still working in corporate. They’ve had that thought about starting a business. But they’ve got a lot of fear about it because they’ve heard that people who start small businesses, that many small businesses fail within that first couple of years. And also that starting a business takes money. What would your best tips for funding a start-up business? And how do you tell if your idea is worthy of funding?

Hunter:  Sure. The first thing is that I’d say is that the idea’s worth nothing.

Hunter:  A lot of people think the idea is worth everything, but an idea without a good plan has no value. So if anyone of your listeners comes up with an idea for a business, the first thing I’d say is go through a process of checking the validity of it. So, is there demand for that idea from the audience that you want to target? So for want of a better example, if you wanted to mow lawns, then you’d at least need somebody to probably own the home and have a lawn. And then you want to probably go and talk to them about what they require or somebody mowing lawns so that you understand their needs and wants. And then you’d want to understand whether you are able to deliver on those needs and wants. In any business, there’s a starting point.

Hunter: There’s lots of businesses that don’t require a lot of money to start. With a lawn mowing business, you need a lawnmower and maybe a few brochures and then go and talk to some people that have lawns. So you could do it on the side. If you’re working now and you were thinking about starting a business or building one, then there’s this concept of the side hustle, which is why you work in your job and while you’ve got some security, start something on the side and build it up to a point where you can then transition into running your own business. And one thing that is quite popular I suppose now is there are corporates that are more than happy for people to transition into the next phase rather than that sharp drop off of a redundancy.

Hunter: So often if you can have that conversation. If you’re thinking about moving on, why not talk to your boss or your manager and say look, in the next three to four years, I’d like to start dropping down to four days a week or three days a week. And then I’m going to start my own thing. And then you can sort of do this transition, which makes it a nice soft landing if you like. You’re not suddenly on no income. And then having to make sure that this business is going to be absolutely booming by the time you start.

Hunter: You could pick any type of business you like, but basically the key thing is you have to understand if there’s a market. You can’t just think I’ve got a great idea and I’m going to sell this widget to a million people and we’re going to be a millionaire and I’ll go and sit on the beach drinking Pina Coladas because business is more complex than that. It doesn’t have to be difficult. It’s about understanding your, your target audience, the customer you want to target. Let’s say it’s mature-aged people. Where are they? How do they make decisions about the product and service? How does your product or service that you’re thinking about competing with other products and services that are already being offered? How, how much of a market do you think you could get in a specific region?

Hunter:  And that requires understanding the population and how many people are in that age group in your area, for example. So there’s a lot of research and understanding that idea, a lot of businesses then could be self-funded because you pick up one client and service them and then pick up two clients and then four clients and then eight clients and do it that way. Rather than thinking as a lot of gurus on Google and Facebook these days tell us that they’re all talking about, and you can have a global business, you can have millions of dollars, you can have hundreds of leads and all this sort of, excuse my expression, bullshit that gets thrown at people. The reality is that most people will start a small business that will probably operate on a local basis servicing local people. So it’s a matter of understanding where you live now.

Hunter:  Is there a market for the idea you’ve got and is that what you want to do? Because 97% of all businesses will never employ anyone. So the chances are that 97% of your listeners who are going to start a business will never employ anyone because that’s just the statistic. It’s been that statistic for the last 30 years in Australia. I’m not saying that people can’t come up with the next trillion-dollar idea, but the chances are very low and it’s incredibly risky and requires probably a lot of funding. But the average everyday business, it doesn’t. It’s just a matter of understanding if there’s a market and then seeing if you can sell the idea to someone at a price that allows you to make a profit. Cost you $100 to do it and you can sell it for $150 and you can do that every day, all day. You’ve probably got yourself a good idea for a business.

Anthea: So start low key, low cost. And maybe transition, if you’re not already retrenched. I hadn’t even thought about that idea of starting that conversation with your employer before you get there. I don’t know how early you have to start that conversation, whether if you’re 45, you should be starting that conversation now with your employer. I think probably a lot of people would be a bit in denial but maybe if you’re noticing a lot of people around you starting to getting younger and younger, it might be a good time to start having that conversation.

Hunter:  I think so because then you just take control of it and I think you’re far better to have the conversation than you are to not because otherwise what they used to call the old pink slip just arrives on your desk one day, you’re cleaning your desk out and you’re gone. Maybe with a bit of a redundancy payment, but that depends on how long you’ve been there. So I would much prefer to be taking control of it. And if somebody is in their forties and they’re seeing a lot of the late forties and 50-year-olds being made redundant, there’s a chance that the business will do it again. Again, I’d be taking control. I certainly wouldn’t be going out into the world thinking I can get another job because at the moment it looks like the stats say that that’s not going to happen.

Hunter:  Even super sophisticated, incredibly talented people with 30 years experience are not getting jobs all based on age. Which is my point, that ageism sucks. It does suck because you should be able to look beyond the person’s age to what they can give you for the business. And so there is some individual responsibility to be trained and be skilled and be able to transition. But certainly, if you’re in that position now there’s no reason why you can’t start a business. There’s no reason why it requires a lot of money. I wouldn’t even be thinking about websites or business cards or brochures or fancy logos, or any of that. The most important thing is to have conversations with the customer. You want to see whether they like what you can do and whether the price that you’re thinking you’ll make some money at is doable.

Hunter:  Because if you’re thinking you’ll get $1,000 for your service and everyone else is thinking $300 and it’s costing you $500 to deliver it. Well, chances are there is no business at that price if you know what I mean. So it’s just about getting a bit of reality on it. I heard a great example the other day with somebody who came up with a course they were wanting to do, it was in the Northern Rivers and they wanted to charge $39 I think for this service. But when they went through and worked out the cost, it was going to cost them $42 to deliver it. So they really had to be at $50 or $60. But they just plucked this number out of the air where they hadn’t really worked out all the costs that it was going to go into delivering this service. So I always say that marketing starts with a maths problem, that’s working out can you make money out of it? Do people want it? And if you don’t want it, and you can’t make money out of it, then it’s a bad business idea.

Anthea: Absolutely. I work with a lot of small business owners and I had a conversation recently with a new client. He’s in a trades business and was charging according to what he thought HE would pay for his product rather than looking at his numbers and also what the market could bear. So there’s two things going on there and really undercharging because of that and suffering. So there’s certainly a lot of mistakes people can make without the experience, so it’s really beneficial to get some good business guidance. And that leads me to another question that I had for you, Hunter, which was, for people who are in businesses already, what would you say is the number one thing you see people are doing wrong? That entrepreneurs are doing badly, and what would be your best tip to fix that?

Hunter:  Okay, cool. Maybe I’d phrase it: the challenges they have. The two big challenges, businesses have with money and marketing. And usually, it’s the marketing that led to the money problem in the first place. So the lack of good marketing. So I’ll give you a couple of stats from a recent survey we did. So this is from a smaller survey we did of 149 businesses with a local business association. 80% of those businesses, where their only marketing was being online with social media and a website. But when we asked them what their confidence was in their marketing, the average was four out of ten, so they’re doing the marketing, but they’re not confident that it’s working. And what we found is that most businesses start with the communication. So they’re starting with a social media post or a website or a brochure or an advertisement or a phone call.

Hunter:  They don’t start by asking the question of the customer, what do you need and want? So surveys, research. In fact, 80% of businesses haven’t surveyed their customers in the last 12 months. So they’re operating off an assumption of what they think the customer wants, not what the customer wants. And time and time again, over the last 20 years, I’ve found that as soon as you start surveying customers, the answer to all of your marketing problems comes to light because you find out what they’re looking for. And life really is about helping others find what they’re looking for. And if you’re a business owner, you can say, okay, that person needs X and I can deliver X really well. You’ve got a business, but if you go out there saying, I’ve got X, I’ve got X, I’ve got X, and everyone’s looking for Y you’ve got no business. Unfortunately, most businesses are just shouting at their markets. Their ears are shut and they’re shouting, and it doesn’t take too many scrolls down a Facebook page to see that these days.

Anthea: And there’s already so much noise anyway that you really have to hit a nerve, otherwise you’re just part of the noise, aren’t you? So, Hunter, there’s just so much in what you’ve been talking about today and I know that people listening in are going to want some direction, maybe like a checklist to get going. Like you talked about surveying your potential audience and asking the right questions. You talked about just really understanding what it is that the market wants. And I know that you have this great book in which you talk about some of those things. I annoyingly didn’t bring mine so I could hold it up. Have you got it there?

Hunter: That’s a good question. I don’t know whether I’ve got a copy with me.

Hunter:   I just got back from this business trip and I reckon I sold about 80 copies of the book during the week. So anyway, the book on how to run a business or as a mature-aged person is called Generation Experience. It’s available on Amazon. And then my other book is a marketing book called get your marketing cooking. So if they’ve got a specific marketing challenge they’re trying to handle, that’s probably the better one. And that’s also on Amazon as well. And it’s got a crazy photo of me dressed in the chef’s uniform because I like cooking. So I thought I’d use the analogy of cooking as a recipe with marketing to explain the subject. So they get some free recipes in the book as well. There’s a particularly good one for beer bread and also lamb with saganaki cheese if they like barbeque lamb.

Anthea: So where can people find you, Hunter, if they’re looking for more? I know that you have this program where you train mature age business people to help other business people set up businesses, right?

Hunter: That’s right. . . So we’ve got this licensed network if you like. They’re all mature age people. And then I train them in the eight steps and then they go out and work in their own business. So it was part of my process of helping people start businesses was to help some people start businesses that would help me help people start businesses. So that’s really cool. There’s a couple of advisors now and we’re just about to add a few more to the team in the next six months or so, but they can look me up. I write on a business website called smallville.com, which is like a repository of all this amazing talent of people that write about stuff. So I write about all of these topics on there and also write on LinkedIn.

Hunter:  There’s not too many Hunter Leonards around so they should be able to find me there. Otherwise, they can go to Silver & Wise or Blue Frog marketing.com.au If they want to get some more tips. Again, I write articles on there and in my books. I tend to like to just give away all of those secrets. I don’t hide things back. I don’t say read the book and then the other half you have to pay me lots of money for, I just say read the book and you should be right. If they need help, great. We’re happy to help. But the books contain a fair bit of the secret sauce.

Anthea:  Well most people can find that out there on the internet anyway, but it’s nice having one package where they can read it and get a lot and then, if they want some extra help to get it going, they can contact you. Totally. Awesome. Thank you so much, Hunter. I just love this topic. And I know that so many people in our community, Bright Spenders community will really benefit from this talk today.

Hunter:  Well then my job’s done. Cause that’s what I like to do is share the tips and pass it on. And I appreciate you doing the video the other day and talking about the book because it’s really lovely when somebody else sees the passion and the purpose and shares it. So thank you.

The post Over 45 might be your secret weapon – An interview with Hunter Leonard appeared first on Bright Spenders.

How to Take Control of Your Small Business Finances… and Sleep Better at Night!

If you’ve ever felt that sickening feeling that wakes you in the middle of the night when you know you just don’t have the money to pay your bills, then you’re going to love my interview with Janet Beckers for her podcast Romance Your Tribe Radio.  We talk about all things small business finance and personal finance.

Janet and I go way back, when she was my mentor, helping me establish my first business. So we talk a little about lessons learned from starting one business and building it into an asset that I could then sell, then the reason I started Bright Spenders.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this interview:

• The transparent story of my wake-up moment, and what can happen when you are not living extravagantly, but simply don’t pay attention to your finances.
• Why women in business are at greater risk of financial stress.
• The types of expenses that can tip you over from seeming OK to, Oh S#*t, I can’t pay the bills.
• Why making your spending decisions based on your bank balance is a recipe for disaster.
• Why budgets, as they are usually done, don’t work.
• How to separate your personal and business finances so you have “fences” around your finances as a small business owner.
• The exact number of accounts you need to manage the finances in your business.
• How to determine how much your business needs to pay you each week.
• The 3 accounts you need to manage your personal finances.
• What happens if your business doesn’t make enough to pay you 🙁
• Why great revenue does not guarantee you will have better control of your finances than a smaller business
• Some great free resources for calculating your expenses for your personal finances and your business plus heaps of free training so you can make a change in your personal financial management this week.

This is a total no judgement zone here.  As Janet says, “I know this is something I haven’t totally nailed myself which is why I have Bazza da Book-keeper so I can sleep at night :)”

You can find out more about Janet and grab the worksheet she mentions in the interview HERE.

The post How to Take Control of Your Small Business Finances… and Sleep Better at Night! appeared first on Bright Spenders.

Today I want to talk about the two biggest drivers of our habits:  pain or pleasure. I was talking with a client this morning and she mentioned that she noticed certain habits she had around spending money.  

Your emotional drivers affect EVERYTHING.

We are either always running away from pain or running towards pleasure in some way.  And these drivers, emotional drivers that we have, will affect everything. They’ll affect what you choose to put in your mouth. They’ll decide whether or not you want to sit on the couch or go for a walk.  They will decide whether you want to get up early in the morning or stay up late at night and they’ll also determine the way you spend money.

So it’s super important to realise what your personal drivers are.  My client was telling me how strong her desire to spend money that was sitting in her account as ‘spare’ was.  

We’ve got her spending plan sorted, and she’s been living it for quite a while now. And she’s managed to put away – really within the first eight weeks she put away $2,800 into her emergency fund – So, really incredible wins all around for her. 

But one thing she noticed recently was that when she got her tax refund, and it was a couple of thousand dollars, deposited into her weekly spending account, she’d forgotten to let them know it should go into a different account.

And so all of a sudden she thought, “Oh, I’ve got this extra money to spend!” And noticed herself starting to spend it. And we were talking about how she felt bad about that because she really wanted to save.

The best thing you can do is embrace your humanness!

I said to her, “It’s really human nature. The way that we’re designed is either with these two drivers – pain or pleasure – and, this is why lottery winners burn through their cash within the first year they received it. They’re as broke or more broke than ever!  Often they go into more debt, living it up, they decide that they’re going to take on more debt.

But it happens to us every day in much smaller ways. And so how do we manage that so that we don’t fall into those old traps, those old habit patterns that take us back to spending money that we don’t want to spend?  

If you’ve got really strong desires and goals, like you really want to save for a home deposit or you really want to pay off that credit card or you really want to go for an amazing trip, it’s going to take some delayed gratification to actually achieve those goals. And we can think, “Oh, this is extra money on top of that. I’m still saving and, so why not have a bit of fun? Why not live it up a bit and spend that money, right?

Strategies to protect yourself from you.

So with my client, we were brainstorming ways to prevent that from happening.  We talked about strategies. And one of those strategies is to make sure that money like that comes into the right accounts the first time. That’s the first thing.  

Another thing is that you have thought about a plan before it actually happens of what you’re going to do if extra money, suddenly it manifests itself. Because it will happen when you start to take control of your money. 

All of a sudden when you’re not fighting fires all the time and you’re not stressed out and you’re not worried about paying your bills, all of a sudden you will open yourself up to the possibility of money coming into your life. 

As to earning more. I’ve had clients who have sorted their finances and all of a sudden they’ve got a job, a new job opportunity or a raise or, a new client or, something like that. So it will happen, and all of a sudden you’ll start to have new money coming in and what are you going to do? 

What are you going to do about that? Because our tendency is to go, “Oh goody, I’ve got a pay rise. Let’s spend it!”

That means I can go and buy that piece of home-ware that I’ve had my eye on. Right?  And those things are fine, but are they forwarding your primary goal? 

What IS your primary goal?

We’re so distracted in society. We’re so taken hither and yon that we forget about what those, what our definite major purpose is. What is it that you REALLY want to get done that would give you a deeply satisfying feeling of accomplishment? 

So setting up structures and actually deciding beforehand, what are you going to do with that money when it actually comes in.   Thinking about that and having a strategy so that when that money comes in, you put it straight away into whatever account your primary goal is in. So if it’s to pay off your mortgage faster, it gets straight away put into the mortgage.

Should you keep some to play with?

Maybe you keep 10% of it to play with, but the rest of it goes into the mortgage or the rest of it goes into your holiday fund, or the rest of it goes into your kid’s education fund. You decide that at the outset when you’ve got a really clear goal. 

You’ll never be a “saver” unless…

The other thing that I wanted to add was that Suze Orman, great personal finance coach. If you haven’t heard of her, Google her. She says you will never be a “Saver”, someone who actually saves more than they spend, unless you actually derive more pleasure from saving than you do from spending. So actually feeling pain when you spend money and feeling pleasure when you see your bank balance going up, when you actually transfer that money into your savings account or into a long-term savings account, maybe it’s an investment fund or something like that.

And so how, how do we cultivate that? 

Suze Orman is a real believer gamifying your savings. So even though she’s a very wealthy woman these days, she still gets pleasure from saving in little ways. If she goes to a shop and she gets a bargain, she has a little celebration afterwards. 

That’s not to say that you should go to sales so that you can get a bargain. I would personally stay away from sales and shops as much as you possibly can. If you’ve got a serious savings goal it’s going to provide too much distraction from the main message. So the more you can stay away, the better. 

But we all have to do the grocery shopping. We all have to go to the shops at some point. 

And so if you can, in your regular day to day adventures, get a discount –  all the better!  

I know that a lot of people experience this feeling of, “Oh goody, I’ve got money, I’ve got a pay rise, I want to spend it!”. And it’s something that we need to talk about more and more. Drop your comments below if this resonates with you. 

Do you have any particular strategies for keeping your savings locked down?  What do you do to trick yourself into feeling more pleasure from saving than from spending? Put your comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

The post What Are Your Emotional “Drivers” for Spending? appeared first on Bright Spenders.

Tradies in Business Interview – Why Diversifying Your Income is so Important?

It’s harder than ever to be in small business today, and with the possibility of a recession on the horizon, it’s vital to sure-up your income source.  Diversifying your income streams, whether you’re a small business owner or wage earner, is critical for your financial success. In this interview with Nicole Cox and Warrick Bidwell we dive deep into the topic why it’s important and what you can do to bullet-proof your income stream.

Here’s a snapshot of what we covered in the interview:

• Why diversifying your income is so critical to financial success
• Nic and Waz’s best tips for diversifying your small business income streams
• Some excellent examples of Australian businesses who are diversifying for success
• How to retain customers for the long term so you can make the most of your marketing efforts
• Their best tip for what you should do TODAY to get the ball rolling on diversifying your income.

There’s 100% actionable content in this interview so definitely take the time to listen, and share this post with any small business owners in your life.

If you’d like to find out more about Nicole or Warrick, Tradies In Business and how they help Trades business owners to get ‘off the tools’ and into a real trades business then stop by www.tradiesinbusiness.com.au

And here’s the Transcript for our interview today…

Anthea: (00:00)
Hello there. I’m so glad that you could join us today. I am super, super excited to introduce you to a couple of people that I just adore and love their work and love the work that they do with small business owners. So I’m going to introduce them to you in a second. Just quickly, if you don’t know who I am, I’m Anthea Falkiner and I have a company called Bright Spenders. We help small business owners take control of their personal finances. We have a really unique system that allows them to pay off debt and save faster for whatever it is that excites them in life. That’s who I am and what the topic is about today is really specifically for small business owners, I suppose. But I think this really applies to pretty much everyone out there in the workplace today because we are living in a gig economy.

Anthea: (00:56)
And I’m going to ask Nic and Waz what they think about that, share with you some of their best tips for diversifying your income stream and why that actually matters today. You know, we are looking ahead at possibly a recession. So maybe we can talk a little bit about that as well. So let me introduce these lovely people. So I’m just going to apologise if it looks like I’m reading this. I am, because I just want to make sure that I get everything in about Waz and Nic, but basically Warrick Bidwell and Nicole Cox, affectionately known as Waz and Nic by their following on the Tradies in Business podcast, share very similar passion in life and that is to help tradies, get off the tools and into real business ownership. So let me tell you a little bit about Waz first. He began his career as a labourer in his father’s building business and, while his dad was self-employed, and he’ll probably tell you about this, he never actually got off the tools and he warned Waz – “if you go ‘on the tools’, mate you’ll end up broke and physically ruined.” which is a pretty harsh thing for a father to say to a son.

Anthea: (02:16)
But obviously there was a lot of emotion in that. So, while Waz wanted to continue on and get his ticket and his license in building, auto mechanical, and even as a professional race car driver (as all of us hope to do!), he instead chose university and a business degree/accounting qualification. Fast forward 20-plus years work and Waz has owned and run several businesses, including a financial planning firm, accounting practice. And for the past 11 years a business coaching and mentoring operation. Since 2014, Warrick has worked exclusively with tradies to help them avoid the fate of his father and to inspire them to create true trade businesses that provide solid income, time flexibility and choice. And we all want some of that for sure. He’s now tradie wingman to trade business owner right around the country. And then we have the lovely Coxie, Nicole Cox or ‘Coxie’ as Waz likes to call her.

Anthea: (03:25)
She’s the daughter of a plasterer and, quite literally, the builder’s wife, with early experience in both plastering business and her own building company. Nic has a long history in the construction industry. After watching both her father and husband get caught in the gut-busting cycle of working in their business. She went on a quest to find a better way. Nic has been working with tradies to help get them off the tools since 2014. Something both her and her husband have a great passion for. After all, who goes into business to stay on the tools, seriously? So you can see, they’re very well matched, This pair, they’re not married, by the way, each has their own partners but they work really well together. Having owned four small businesses herself, including a construction company. She is very well-qualified to talk about business and has managed several others.

Anthea: (04:22)
Nic is passionate about improving the lives of business owners and encouraging, encouraging them with both personal and business growth. So hopefully you’ve got a sense of these guys. They really know their stuff. They know businesses inside out. So if you’re listening and you have a trades business, this is particularly interesting and important for you. But no matter what kind of business you’re in, I don’t think it really matters whether you’re a tradie or not. This information is going to apply to you today. And that’s why I brought them in. So, welcome guys. Do you want to say anything? I feel like I’ve been blabbing for hours.

Waz: (05:04)
I know, it’s nice for someone else to talk about me, instead of me.

Anthea: (05:10)
So, Why don’t you tell us a little, I mean, I know that intro kinda talked a little bit about why Tradies in Business, but I want to hear from you – like why did you create this podcast and this whole kind of empire that you’ve designed around this help for tradies?

Nicole: (05:31)
Thanks, Anthea. Both Warrick and I’ve got a lot of experience. I supposed with I guess there’s a couple of things that built Tradies in Business. So there was obviously trade business fails. We see them every day. We’re talking about businesses here where, the business owners are too tired, too stressed, too overwhelmed. They’ve got too much going on to actually get themselves to a point where they can pull themselves out of the business and do the stuff they need to do to run their businesses effectively. But then we also see that effect on mental health.

Nic: (05:58)
We both have a great deal of personal experience on how that affects business owner’s mental health, and that’s our real driver behind what we’re doing. We really want to help them improve the mechanics behind their business so that they have that space to have good, healthy, mental health. We see far too many tradies or tradie business owners or business owners in general, really that are in a terrible position in their lives where they are so stressed and overwhelmed that they just don’t have, I guess, the space in their lives for the relationships that they should be having, for their family, for even friendships and time to go out and play golf or hanging out on the weekends and just relax and a lot of what we’re teaching trade business owners, we’ll allow them that time within the week and their day even to have that space so that they’re not trying to cope with the mental pressure as well as the pressure from their own business. So that’s how we came to be. It was over a cup of coffee.

Waz: (06:52)
A cup of coffee at a roadhouse – a truck stop. Yes. halfway between where we both live because we live about 90 minutes apart. So yeah, we got together over a cuppa, re-connected cause we’ve worked together a bit over the years and pretty much got to the end of that and said “Hey um… We should work together.” cause it’s sort of both coming at trades from our own angle and yeah. So, thought we’d combined forces so

Anthea: (07:22)
Awesome. And so yeah, so you recognized this shared passion and thought, it just makes sense to come together? Beautiful. So I’m going to just launch straight into the topic today cause I don’t want to faff around. Not that, you know, finding out about you guys and faffing around at all! I love chatting with you guys, but let’s just really hit it hard. Hit this topic hard. So, you know there’s a lot of talk about us living in the gig economy, right? And people have different ideas about what that means. I’d love to know what you think that means and why you think it matters to have a handle on that for us as business owners.

Waz: (08:05)
Well, I thought I knew what it meant, so I Googled it to make sure and I guess, you know there’s the whole gig economy. It’s so these bite size chunks of, of work being done and the why I see that is, is both an opportunity and a challenge or a potential risk for what are largely, with trade business owners, traditional businesses, you know, they’re the bricks and mortar type businesses. They, have to come to my house to fix my toilet or to install my, my pool or put in a new driveway or whatever it is. You know, they’re not digital businesses, although they do exist in the digital realm. And I think the risk there for trade business owners, for any small business owner really is that consumers have been trained in that gig economy headspace. You know what I mean? That transactional nature of buying something,you know, we’ve got online shopping where I can go and compare seven different pairs of mountain bike shoes before I pick the one that I want and then I’ll go find the cheapest price and the lowest shipping and the fastest delivery. And it’s just all about a transaction. There’s no relationship there. Well I think that’s a big risk for trade business owners being small to medium enterprises is it they get swept up in that whole transactional nature of business and that generally draws prices down. Which is a big risk to Families, you know, creates more financial stress if we’re not making a margin out of fix a cashflow. Well, I think the opportunity there is being in that bricks and mortar business, it’s almost like there’s this embedded opportunity to develop relationships with customers that isn’t there for a shoe business, selling online, you know, it’s really hard for an online shopping business to actually build a relationship with me as a customer.

Waz: (09:56)
But for a tradesperson we’re generally, I’m going to phone up or maybe email, there’s going to be a quote process. There has to be sort of that human to human contact. I think that’s a huge opportunity to really build relationships with customers and give people more than what they’re seeing elsewhere with gigs. You know, whether that’s getting your letterhead created by someone in the Philippines, or whatever it is. So I sort of think there’s that double-edged sword nature to it. It’s a, I’m going to defer to Coxie because she’s probably got a better answer than that.

Nic: (10:26)
No, that was great. That was great. I love that. I also did a bit of Googling today and I actually think that it’s a huge opportunity to be educating our clients around what they can expect from our service because it’s so different than, you know, when by talking about a gig economy, it’s just a pay for do, it’s just come in and do whatever it is and move on.

Nic: (10:51)
Whereas what we’re talking about in so many small businesses is actually an opportunity to educate our clients and build a relationship much like what you’re saying. So that we have the know, like, and trust factor so that we have an ongoing relationship that can encourage loyalty, which is the big thing when we talk specifically about trade businesses is that loyalty so that we have the repeat customers. So yeah, I certainly think there’s a real risk there with the way currently we’re being educated as consumers around this, you know, just get it over cause it’s cheaper, it’s quicker, it’s the same car that gets me where I want to be versus a cab, but we can actually educate our business consumers around what it is that the value, of what we’re doing is bringing to them as the consumer. So yeah, I think it’s a race, but I think that if we’re quite smart now and we start educating and building upon that education and become the experts in our field, which we all are, then we’re really negating a lot of that risk.

Anthea: (11:48)
And it sounds like so much about relationship building, you know, isn’t it? And what’s really interesting to me is that you know, we live in this so-called gig economy. It’s a very atomised, you know, where we are looking for the cheapest kind of consumable out there. But on the other side, we’re craving relationships with people. We’re on social media, we’re disconnected from people and we’re actually really, craving that connection. So that’s a huge opportunity for business owners to create that connection. And if you think about the amount of money that you might spend as a business owner on advertising your business and getting the word out you know, it’s all about retaining customers so that you can actually get the value of all that, the money and the hard work and effort that you’ve spent on, on getting that customer in the first place.

Anthea: (12:46)
Yeah. Great. So let’s have a talk about particularly about diversifying income and why, why do you think it’s important to do this? So this is really, I think for small business owners, but it’s really anyone and even wage earners this is important for, because, well, why do you think it’s important?

Nic: (13:10)
I had a really different view on this to Waz, so I was probably thinking really tradie specific and if you’re thinking about a typical tradie in business, their body is their biggest tool, but their bodies are going to break, there’s just no way to stop them from breaking down over time. Yeah. Again, it might be mentally because the overwhelm is too much or it might be that, physically, we start to break down like my husband, his shoulders are no good and suddenly can’t work, so we need to be looking at ways in which we can diversify our business so that we aren’t relying on the one income stream in case something goes wrong.

Nic: (13:42)
Like I have an accident on the way to work. Or somebody calls in sick and suddenly that job can’t be performed. We need to have a broad, or as broad as we can, at least a couple of streams of income that we can rely on within our business so that if worst-case scenario comes in, whatever form that might be. I was thinking physically, you’re thinking a bit broader than I was that we have a diversified stream of income to draw from.

Waz: (14:09)
I probably look at, in terms of my old financial planner hat that I used to wear for years, which, which is, you know, you go see a financial advisor, they’ll talk about spreading your investment risks and not putting all your eggs in one basket. And I suppose when we, we’re sort of narrowing our business and if all I do is paint new houses for builders, if that market gets affected, which you mentioned the big “R” word earlier in recession, then one of the early things that we see as building approvals fall away and the building market softens or collapses.

Waz: (14:51)
It’s a, you know, if all I’ve been doing is painting houses for builders, I’m going to be really badly impacted in that sort of market condition. But if I also have an aspect of my business that is resealing old roofs for existing homes that’s going to help sort of buffer me from that those market fluctuations or risks. Or if one of my builder customers falls over and goes broke, you know, I’ve got this other aspect of my business. So for me, it’s sort of like investment risk where you don’t want to have everything in property or everything in BHP shares, you want to sort of spread it across a few. So you, you sort of take a few of the hits with the means. That’s kinda how I looked at it.

Anthea: (15:33)
Yeah. And I’ve actually got a really good example of this with a client that we started working with probably about four or five months ago. And they run a fibreglass fabrication, business for they make, they make the molds for one of the big motorhome companies. And they’re, their only client. And so suddenly something happened where that company was taken over by another organisation and all of a sudden their invoices were getting super, super delayed, you know, where they had been paying really promptly. All of a sudden the rug was pulled out onto, under them. And they were in a real bind. And so luckily it all came good and that, that client started paying again, right. But they were working through some internal sort of change issues. But it was a huge wake up call for them that they needed to really think about either having a number of different clients or you know, creating products for themselves and actually on selling them, you know, so, yes, it can be a very serious problem if all of your money is tied up in one client, or one particular investment model, or something like that.

Waz: (16:59)
Okay. Or You know, the tradesperson is the only one who can currently make the most money for the business and they bugger their back. It’s like it’s a sudden financial impact from the business side.

Anthea: (17:12)
Yeah. And we all know that income protection insurance usually doesn’t cover anywhere near what it should.

Waz: (17:21)
I don’t know what the stats are, but I think it’s something like 70% of Australians are underinsured.

Anthea: (17:29)
Massive problem. So can you give some examples of some businesses that you’ve worked with or even you know, that you’ve noticed out there in the marketplace that have diversified successfully and done this well?

Nic: (17:46)
So one of the biggest examples I’ve seen is Brisbane local example and I’m not entirely sure now whether they’re just still based in Brisbane. I think they’ve actually branched out quite a bit further. But we stopped. It’s Fallon Services I think they’re now called, and it was one gentleman, Mr Fallon, he’s quite elderly now and he started his business as an electrician and from there he started to see the demand. He brought in other services to his business. So he’s gone from offering not just electrical services but plumbing, painting, carpentry, air conditioning, gas fitting, the whole game of, I guess of some home maintenance services that you might need. So it’s gone from just being a Sparky. Suddenly he actually stepped out of the business and created a business with other service trades they could run out and actually perform the work so that he had all of the answers for the industry. So whenever somebody had a problem at home and they needed a quick answer, and I’m pretty sure now it’s a 24-hour service as well, it’s not just you got to wait till the next business day and they have someone on call ready to come to you immediately. So you can imagine what a big structural change that would be in business to be able to step out of just being a one single tradie growing that business to becoming a substantial business and then stepping right out and having all of these other types of businesses within your business. That level of diversifying is quite enormous, but it’s a great example of how one small business with a sole trader can grow and become something quite terrific.

Anthea: (19:16)
So in that situation, Nic, that’s an example where the business owner is not literally doing all of those different things. What they’ve done is they’ve partnered with all sorts of other companies who do that really well, and you know, and can guarantee their work and they’re really just putting it all together and they’re packaging it, aren’t they?

Nic: (19:40)
Okay. I guess it’s no different to a supermarket selling various brands or popping into Bunnings and I need X, Y, and Z and I have a choice of different brands? It’s all in the one spot. So, and that’s exactly what they’re offering with Fallon. I mean, it’s so under the one label as Fallon, it’s his Brand, it’s his name, but there are all these sub-services that they’re able to offer from the one spot.

Anthea: (20:03)
Very interesting, what about you Waz?

Waz: (20:07)
Yeah. So, so we actually have one of our partners, in tradies in business that we’re starting to do some more work with. And I got some big things coming over the next sort of six to 12 months with these guys, privately owned company in Brisbanestarted by one guy. And they have plumbing, they have electrical wholesale, so it’s the PGW group.

Waz: (20:30)
So they’ve got Samuels, plumbing stores, nationally, CNW electrical, Sheriff electrical. They’ve got solar divisions. I’ve got, I’ve lost count of how many different divisions within this one business across multiple industries, different product supply types, different niche markets. They have even branched out overseas now into Southeast Asia and it’s, it’s all started with one guy and started in the trades and it’s sort of spread from there. But yeah, you know, they are also very buffered I guess. I mean there’s a lot of building industry spin to it, but some of the brands are into renewable energywhich is obviously a huge market now. So, you know, they’re sort of they’ve got these aspects to their business that are really future-proofing them. But I guess helping with that multi-service model kind of thing, I guess.

Anthea: (21:29)
Yeah. Beautiful. So, I mean, imagine people listening to this, maybe they’re running a small business and they’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, that sounds really overwhelming to have to, you know, create a package or something like that. You know, how would they even start to do that? They’ve got all these questions. What I mean, I guess my answer would be don’t try and do it on your own. Like try and find a business coach or you know, check out tradies in business to actually get support to do something like that. Because there are plenty of business coaches out there who’ve really worked at and helped other businesses restructure and create a new model for doing business and have to do it on your own. We’re, we’re, we’re so lucky that we have people that you can connect with and so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel, basically. But what would you say, what’s one action step that people could take today to start diversifying their income?

Waz: (22:34)
I think we agree on this one. We did chat about this before we spoke with you and, well I think we agreed, we’ll see if we agree is a, I think a big one is looking for that recurring income stream. So a lot of, you know, if we’re talking trade businesses, that’s who we coach. That’s who we consult to. A lot of them tend to be on that sort of installation, new work. I’ll come in and I’ll put in your new garden for you as the landscape architects. And once it’s installed then you know, we hire five, I’ll give you the gift basket. You give me a testimonial and that’s great. See you later. But there’s this opportunity that I think goes begging for a lot of trade businesses in the maintenance, and you know, it might be that you introduce a landscape maintenance aspect to your landscape installation business or same with the pool companies.

Waz: (23:35)
You know, there’s a lot of trade businesses that do this well. And there’s a lot that haven’t really tapped into that opportunity. Even builders, you know, set up a subscription to come back and adjust your doors and windows once a year. And I’ll just pay you an annual subscription to do that. Plus, you know, up here on the Darling Downs where I live, everyone has adjustable collars on their stumps because the horrible black soil up here moves and houses move. So, you know, come back three times a year and adjust the stumps for me and charge me a fee for that because they don’t have to worry about it. So I think there’s those ongoing sort of maintenance or subscription type things that are not only a great way to create a recurring income stream but also keep you in contact with those customers that ordinarily you would do a job for once and probably never see again inside of a five-year time frame. But now you’re talking to them on a regular basis. They paying money on a regular basis. They’re part of your customer base. It’s an excuse to talk to them about your latest and greatest product or a fantastic event that you’re running or whatever it is. And sort of loop all the way back to what we said at the start, which is building a relationship with your customers because that’s going to create more of an income stream and more of an opportunity to solve problems with it.

Nic: (24:51)
Let’s not forget, it’s almost all your marketing done once you’re being paid to do your own marketing because they’re a customer and they’re locked into that relationship, they’re not looking anywhere else. You’ve just made it easy. So if something else goes wrong, I’m coming back to you because you’re the person I always use. So subscriptions are a great way to start to inject another income stream into your business. And you can start looking for those by just having a big broad look at what your business is, who it services and how it services them. And is there just one small tack on that you can add to that over a lengthy period. And from that brainstorming session, yeah, I guarantee you’ll come up with several different so that you can add into your business and show there’s some strategy and some thinking around how you’re going to add those in. But once you’ve got the idea and you open the door, it’ll just come hard.

Anthea: (25:38)
So what you’re saying is take pen and paper right now, a blank piece of paper. Brainstorm all the kind of ways that your business could help your customer. And that’s really what it’s about. Like, I can hear people going, Oh, this subscription model, everyone’s doing it. You know, they just want our money. I can hear it. You know, I can sense that there’ll be people listening into this conversation thinking that but what I think about that is your customers, if you’ve done a great job for them, they want to actually have that ongoing relationship they’re actually looking for. It’s a bit like, like I remember when I did my first and my only ever skydive I remember coming down from that skydive and just being like a million miles an hour talking and saying, Oh, it’s like, well, how much does it cost to get a parachute? And lessons and all that. Honestly, if someone had up-sold me at that point, I would have been in, but no one did. And you know, I then I kind of forgot about them and now I’m 40 or something. And I’ve never done it again. Right? But your customers, if you do a great job, they WANT to have that ongoing relationship with you. So you’re giving them an opportunity to do that. That is serving both of you. It’s, it’s allowing you to create value for them, but also giving you a long-term income as well. There’s a good partnership. So coming back to the piece of paper, what is the, what is the question that they should have with their pen in hand as they’re brainstorming? Like what, what are they brainstorming exactly?

Waz: (27:24)
Alright. I like to think of this in terms of the problems that your customer might have. Say, In the 12 months after you leave the job site, their house, their commercial property, whatever the heck it is that you’ve done, what are some of the problems or frustrations that they might have, or that they might need to solve, over the next 12 months? And in that I guarantee that there is a service, there’s a followup product, there’s a maintenance plan, there’s a subscription service, whatever you like, but there’s, there are problems that are going begging that the customer probably doesn’t even know someone can solve for them. But they hate the fact that after the trees grow a bit and the stakes that were holding them up are all loose and the ropes cutting into the trunk, they’ll don’t know what to do about that. And so if you come back three months later and remove them and restate the trees to make sure they grow straight, you’ve solved the problem for the customer. Sometimes they didn’t even know they had but there’ll be grateful that you did because they realised that that could have created a bigger problem by you know, killing the damn tree that you planted for them and now they’ve got to replace it.

Nic: (28:34)
So to add to that, I’d be suggesting thinking about the things that your clients are currently complaining about. So if you’re getting callbacks to say that, ‘hey, my tree looks a bit wonky’. Why is it wonky? There’s a service there or if you’re knowing that it’s actually gonna make your life easier. If you are the regular landscape gardener and you go twice a year to do the hedging, it’s, you know, it would be so much easier to do that hedging if you did XYZ every three months and then the hedging on the sixth month, then there’s another service there as well.

Nic: (29:05)
So if you’re thinking about those annoying calls that you’re getting that you don’t really want to get the problems that natural problems like, you know, with the expansion of the, the walls, we get cracks. So how can we fix the cracks before the clients are actually seeing that they’re a problem, or the doors get jammed, or the windows get jammed? All of those kinds of problems that happen naturally, normally, it’s a normal part of your business is where your extra business can come from. There’s another stream there every time because clients just want the problem to be gone, they don’t mind paying a little bit of money for the problems to be gone, but they want it gone. They don’t want to have to about it. And if you’re doing the thinking for them, not only creating an income stream, you will become a rock star business who is always tacking in for any problem before it’s a problem.

Anthea: (29:51)
Perfect. Some really, really amazing examples that you’ve given us today. I love the one, what was the business called that, brought in all those other. (Fallon) . Yeah, I’m totally going to Google them. So thank you. Thank you so much today for just everything you’ve contributed, so much food for thought and I think like, I’m just going to keep this really short, this interview because I think we’ve got gold just in what we’ve got today. I don’t want to ramble on for hours and so I really appreciate your time. Tell us a little bit about how, you know, we can find you. There are people listening to this and they maybe want to get a bit of business coaching. Just help to do exactly what we’ve been doing. Where can they go

Waz: (30:40)
We’re everywhere. Just start by Googling Tradies in Business. We’ve got so many different offerings. We start with a freebie podcast, which has got, you’ve been on the podcast with us Anthea, absolutely nuggets of golden information in the podcast from the podcast, the natural transgression really from there is the Facebook Group. We have a huge Facebook group. It’s a free group with 1200 likeminded tradie business owners and we invite our, tradie business owners to come in as a couple of questions you’ve got to answer so we can make sure that you’re authentic and you’re not there just to glean the information and run away or spam us and then from there we have some paid offerings. So if you head on over to TradiesinBusiness.com.au, You’ll find that we have some lower-end levels for those tradies that are really go-ahead and try to use and ready to DIY their own business education. From there we have a couple of steps up including business coaching as a final level if that’s something that people are interested in. Did I miss anything? Not really. We’re on Instagram, Facebook, wherever you. All socials are Tradies in Business, you can find us everywhere.

Anthea: (31:43)
Easy, peasy and I have, I have consumed your podcast on my walks pretty much every day for the last, I don’t know, eight months or something like that and it’s super entertaining. They have, he F$%it Friday. Do you still do that? That’s pretty hilarious. Like they get into some pretty seriously, serious, topics on that F’it Friday. I highly recommend listening to it. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate you coming on. We’ll definitely connect again, I’m sure. Thanks so much.

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How Much Is ‘Winging It’ Costing You? $36k Per Year?

I recently did the sums on what not managing your finances, in the way that you know you should, is costing the average person or family earning $100k a year.

I like to nerd out on this stuff because I work with hundreds of people every year to help them get their finances on track and get ahead.

So Let’s assume, for this exercise, you’re earning about 50 bucks an hour.

Did you know that winging your finances (that is, not having a plan in place for spending and saving) is costing you somewhere in the vicinity of $36k a year?  

Some of these costs are to do with money, time, lost opportunity, stress levels and emotions, and health.

So here’s where your money’s going if you’re a middle to high income-earner in Australia without a solid plan.

Let’s look at direct money lost first.

Overspending  

Money spent is not money saved and it’s also money that is not compounding interest over time.

Just $100 extra a week spent is $5200 a year. We’ll talk about the compounding interest loss in a minute.

If you have credit card debts around 10k then at 20% interest that’s $2000 extra per year.

Bounce bill payments and late fees, another huge drain on finances – 20% late fees on just $1200 is $300 per year.

So the total of those things so far is $7500.  And If you were to invest that money at 9% interest (the average of the Stockmarket) you could make $675 on that) so the total conservative cost per annum is $8175.

Time is money

Then there’s the time-consuming aspect of having to redo your budget every month.  If you spend just 3 hours a month trying to figure it all out that’s 36 hours a year. At $50/hr that’s $1800 a year.

It also takes a lot more focus and attention to pay off debt.  Say you spend an hour a week thinking about your debt. At $50 an hour that’s $2600 a year.

The more time you spend at the shops is also less time you have to spend on income generation.  

An extra 2 hours a week at the mall is 104 hours a year, and at $50 an hour, that’s $5200 a year.

Then what about the time you spend arguing with your partner about money, or just giving them the silent treatment because you’re pissed off with some aspect of how they’re not aligned with you around money.  That’s an hour a week that you could have been focused on income generation. Just one 1 hour argument a week costs you $2600 a year.

(Side Note – I haven’t included any losses or legal costs for relationship breakdown or divorce proceedings when relationships breakdown due to one of the biggest causes – misalignment around money)

The emotional costs of not managing money

Now let’s look at the emotional costs of not managing your money in the way you know you probably should.

Stress shuts off your mind to opportunities, lack of confidence and control also affects your income-generating potential.  Let’s say you could add an extra 10k a year to your income if you weren’t so frickin’ worried about money, which eats away at your self confidence. And 10K is conservative.

The physical and health cost of not managing money

There’s one more major financial drain as a result of not managing money well.  And that’s the effects on health and your immune system.

Worry, poor sleep, eating out more, smoking, alcohol all cause health issues which means more medical costs and time off work. Just one day off per month  – 12 sick days per year – will cost you $5400 plus out of pocket medical costs of $1200. That’s $6600 that stress is costing you (conservatively).

Summary

Add all that up and you get $36,000.   If you earn more than $50 an hour then it’s likely to be a whole lot more, or less if you earn a bit less.

Do you want to avoid hemorrhaging money like that?  Then you need a really clear plan for spending.

Thumbnail Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

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Do You Feel Like You Get Hit For 6 Whenever A Big Bill Comes In?  

Do big power bills, vet or dental bill sidetrack your savings goals?  Maybe your hot water system or fridge breaks down – and there’s a $1200 to $2000 cash outlay right there to get a new one.  

You might be earning really good money, so you SHOULD have the money available for when things like this happen, right?

The truth is that most people are not factoring all of these so-called ‘unpredictable’ expenses into their budget.

They’re just factoring in the things that they can see right in front of them, whether they’re bills for this month, or sometime in the next year.  

Most people are not factoring in the replacement cost for items they use daily – like computers, cars, or white goods etc.

They’re also not factoring in longer-term things they might want to do – like being able to pay for, or at least contribute to, a child’s wedding, or put their kids through university.

For most people budgeting looks like looking at their bank balance to see if they have enough money to do something right now.

And if they don’t have the money for it they get a credit card or a loan or AfterPay to address that need or want. 

The problem with that is that it will ALWAYS bite you in the butt down the track as you have less and less available cash to accumulate for the unpredictable things.  

That’s how we ended up in trouble.  It’s how some our clients end up with $5k to 95K worth of unsecured debt.

Even people who have an excel spreadsheet budget usually don’t factor in these kind of unpredictable or long-term expenses.

But let’s face it, these expenses are actually going to happen.  

So here’s some tough love:

It’s time for you to lift your head out of the sand and face the fact that you’re being a child about money.

Being an adult is about looking ahead and planning your spending for this month, this year, and into the future.

Do you have a minimum of $2.5K sitting in an emergency fund bank account?  Do you have cash in another account building up for those unpredictable or long-term expenses?  

Are you an adult or a child when it comes to managing your finances?  If you’re a child that’s okay – I was a child up till 10 years ago (and that’s why we were in such a huge financial hole – I get it) – but what’s your plan for becoming an adult?

Thumbnail Image by Circ OD from Pixabay

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When people talk about wanting to create financial freedom they often talk about owning their own home.  

The Great Australian Dream is to own your own home.

But actually owning a home is not an asset in the true sense of the word asset.

An asset should be income-producing if you want to create real financial freedom.

Your home, unless you’re renting out rooms, is actually a liability.  Homes generally cost you a bomb in maintenance and repairs.  Then there are all those homewares, furniture, garden supplies and equipment, and other trappings that you want to buy to make your home beautiful.  More liabilities.

If you own a home in a major city, chances are most of your cash flow is going into paying your bank for the privilege of living there, and not leaving you with much else.

And that’s before you’ve even paid rates, renovated or furnished it.

So if you really want to get ahead you need to think about ways of creating income-producing assets.

Maybe instead of living in your own home, you might consider rent-vesting where you rent where you want to live, but buy where you can afford a positive cashflow property.  Or maybe consider renting out rooms in your place to increase your cash-flow.

There are definitely more ways than one to peel an orange.

I have a friend who never paid rent because she bought a house and then rented out all the rooms except her own to foreign students.  Her international tenants paid extra for short term rental.

What ways can you think of to create income-producing assets?  See if you can create a list a mile long of all the ways you could get ahead financially by thinking outside the square.

Further recommended reading to help you get there faster:

How to Stop Spending money – 7 of the best tips ever

103 Great Tips to Save Money So You Can Reach Your Goals Faster

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It’s true.  Budgeting can help you make a greater contribution.

I’m a huge believer in what Ted Kennedy had to say when he said, “You’re happiest in life when you’re making the greatest contribution.”

When you’re worried about money – about being able to pay your bills, being able to cover yourself in an emergency, pay your staff or contractors, pay your taxes – then it’s pretty hard to make any real contribution.

To make a contribution you need to be relaxed enough to be creative.  That is, if you want to be able to tackle bigger problems in the world than just being able to put a roof over your head or keep your creditors at bay.

If you’re busy fighting fires and ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’ – you’re not able to make a contribution to society.   You’re just in survival mode.   And how can you be happy when you’re just in survival mode?

You actually owe it to the world to get your finances in order – right now – so that you can then make a contribution – and be happy.

What contribution do YOU want to make to the world?   If you weren’t always thinking about how you can get ahead – and actually could finally get ahead – what difference would you set out to make?

One of my passions, and something Bright Spenders supports, is to help educate, and therefore empower, women across the globe.   According to the UN Global Goals, if we empower women we have a lower birth rate.  And if we have a lower birth rate, we make far less of an environmental impact and its devastating effects.

How would you love to make a dent in the universe?  What could you contribute to the world that would in turn make you really happy?  

Here’s some great further reading to help you get your finances on track…

Learn about the easiest and best way to budget your money over here.

How to break the ‘living pay-t0-pay cycle’ when you’re in a lot of debt.

The 5 ‘Must Haves’ for Effective Personal Finance

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The post Why Budgeting Makes You Happier appeared first on Bright Spenders.