Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of Money with Alpha. Today, I want to talk about why I love talking about money so much. And it's something that's probably grown a little bit over time, because I don't know about you, but when I grew up, you just didn't talk about money. It was one of those taboo topics when you sort of. You got people together, you had guests over you didn't want to really talk about politics or money, and it was just something that was kind of off to the side. My parents didn't talk to me about money. I heard the stress that money put on things, and I heard conversations around money, but I was never. It was never a an active, healthy conversation about what money is, what we do with it. You know, anything about what, how do you manage it? None of that. And it was always just sort of. You learned by either example of what to do or what not to do. But there was. It was all very trial and error. And I think I spent most of my 20s still trying to figure out my relationship with both myself and money. And then by the time I hit my late 30th, I was like, I've got to get my. My act together. Like, what. What is. What is going on? I need to figure this money thing out. And it didn't even necessarily start with that clear a question. It was just, I need to figure out what I'm doing. And then little by little, it kind of got there, and. And the more I got into it and the more I realized the importance of that concept around money. And I'll talk about what I mean by that shortly. But it's so important to actually talk about, ask questions, because there's so many things that we have floating around in our heads. Like, I literally, every single time I give a talk, I get questions. People are just like, oh, I just. I really. I just want to know about this. You're like, how many questions collectively have people got floating around in their minds? And they're just waiting for the right person to ask because either they don't know who to ask or they don't want to ask because they're afraid of what it will make them look like or if there's judgment or shame around it. And it's. It's really unfortunate that's the way it is. I was literally on. I was presenting a workshop today, and before I hit record, the people organizing, I was like, oh, while I've got you, can I just ask this? And then There are a couple of other questions from people who were attending that wasn't related to necessarily the specific content of my presentation. But they were still asking, they wanted to ask some general money questions about, well, what do we do about this? I'm like, I know it's not related to that, but while you, you're here. And I love it. I'm like, yes, ask me, ask me. I love talking about this. And the even the, like, the mindset, the energetic side, I love that too. So there's a couple of, couple of reasons and I, again, I write them down because I like to have a little bit of structure and I ended up with five. I don't know how that always happens, but I seem to always end up with five things. So the five main reasons why I like to talk about money is, first, firstly, money is energy. And energy is all around us and money flows. Energy flows. And I just feel like it's part of so much interconnectedness in our world that I just, I think it's a necessary conversation. Secondly, money helps you get stuff done. Like if you want to do something, money can help make it happen. Like if you need to get somewhere quickly or something's broken and you need to fix it, money is a way to help you do that. You throw enough money at a problem and you can pretty much solve anything. Obviously that's, you know, not every single thing that that's true for, but a lot of things it is. Thirdly, you can help people. It is, it is such a beautiful thing to be able to help others and be able to donate. I'm just started up a fundraiser again for my daughter and I doing a sleep out and it feels really, really good. I mean, we donate ourselves. Like my daughter gives her, give money that she gets as part of her pocket money and then I donate and we ask others and it gives people the opportunity to help. So I love that money can do that too. It gives you choices. It gives you the choice of, you know, do you, you know, you're running late for something. You can take the toll road, pay $5 and get there faster, safer and smoother, more direct. Like, it just, it allows you those kinds of choices. Like I, I make those sort of choices quite a lot. And I talk to people like, oh, you know, I'm gonna save the $30 in parking. And then I'm gonna be like, stressed because I'm running late because I have to catch the train or the train's later. And I'm like, you Know what I'm gonna drive, I'm gonna pay the $30 in parking because then I can get from here to there. I can spend more time with my daughter because I can pick her up. And whatever it happens to be. It gives you the freedom of choice. It allows you to choose where you live, how you live. You can even choice. It allows you the choice of car if you really, if that's an important thing. I mean, for me, a car is a you know, vehicle to get from A to B. I like nice cars, but I'm not going to spend the money on it because it's just not important to me. It's not part of my value system. But it allows me to choose that as well. Not because, like, I have to buy this type of cars because I choose to. And then lastly, legacy. So it allows you the ability to leave something behind financially if you want to, to build something. There's so many ways that money is. It gives us something to talk about and it doesn't have to be something negative. And it's, it's that sort of conversation. Like, if you open up that conversation, and it also gives you a bit of a deeper understanding about what's going on with yourself, what's going on with others. I mean, obviously I have those kinds of conversations with my clients all the time because that's what they come to me for. And it has that deeper connection because there's a level of trust, because there's a level of vulnerability that goes with talking about money. And it, it solidifies that trust. So obviously you can't share these sorts of conversations with every single person because not everybody is at the same place. To be able to talk about it in this way without judgment or shame or whether it's self judgment or judgment of others and self shame or trying to shame. Like, there's, there's so much around that. And it's just, it should be something that we just discuss what we learn for starters, that we can ask questions and go, oh, I saw you did that. How did you do that? Or you know, without kind of feeling like, well, am I supposed to know how to do that? I don't want to ask because it's rude. How much did you pay for that house? Like, I have to laugh because my, my my grandmother used to just sort of be so much. Oh, you can't, you can't answer. You can't answer. Like, you can't ask that. Like, she would say it in German because she was she was Austrian and that's what she spoke. But I just, I still hear this voice in my head. There's so many things you should and shouldn't do or could and couldn't do because of, you know, convention. And then, you know, as children, like my daughter just blurts questions out, how old are you? Or, you know, how much was that? Or, you know, they don't, there's no filter there. And it's just really refreshing until they start to pick on the societal filters and conventions and all of that. And then I'm just like, oh, no, no, please keep, keep that childlikeness. I'm trying to recapture mine. I'm, you know, in my 40s now and I'm trying to think back to what was I like as a, as a 10 year old or an 8 year old and kind of recapture some of that essence, because I was a very different sort of child to. You know, as you grow up, you have responsibilities and certain things, you know, you, you adapt and you have to change. And that's kind of the, the world we live in and growing up, responsibilities. But trying to recapture that childlikeness and seeing the conversations around money being just that. Like, I've been having conversations with my daughter about money since she was 4 or 5. The conversation for her is incredibly normal. For her, it's not normal to not talk about it, you know, and so now a lot of the times when she has her birthday or Christmas, her requests for presents are now money so that she can go and spend it. And it's so interesting seeing how much more discerning she is when it comes to spending her money on something. And it's really, it's really, really interesting to, to observe and then what she plans to do with it and thinking about not just herself, and obviously she's got kind of bigger plans for, for her money, like the, the fundraiser we're doing at the moment. Last year we raised twelve hundred dollars. This year she's like, mama, I want to raise $10,000. It's like, huh, uh-huh. Okay, great, let's, let's, let's put that goal out there. I have raised just over $10,000 for something previously and it took me about nine months to do it. We have six weeks. So and it was a lot of effort because I put on a lot of events and I did fundraisers and, and raffles and all sorts of things. So yes, I'll be really interesting to, to see how she then wants to put it into action. So having the gold is one thing and then having to actually do something about it is, is the next. But when we, well I'll go through each of those five points I mentioned before just to kind of reiterate the elements of it. And so energy, when you think energy is all around us, we, we are feeling beings. Sometimes we suppress those feelings. We you know, shut down the the intuition or the whatever but we still, they're still there. You know, when you, you meet someone for the first time, you get a feeling generally about them before you know enough information to, to kind of get a sense. But there's generally some sort of feeling that comes and you either click with some people or you don't. The people that you don't click with, sometimes you can learn to appreciate them and understand them a little bit better. But it's, it's an interesting dynamic. So money is a little bit the same. So you kind of, and it's a little bit like you people attract people, life attracts life, money attracts money. And it's, it's just that whole, the lack of money also attracts that same mentality too. So we have to be really be careful about the thoughts and the energy that we're giving to money and the level of importance we're giving it because that will then also impact the people around us and what we attract too. So that's why when you're in a business it's important who you're in the room with. And it's also, you don't know what their money stories are but sometimes you can sense by the way they talk about it and the level of comfort, conversing about it as well. And it's not just about bragging about oh I made, and I hear this so often, I was like somebody says oh you know, I'm a seven figure business. It's like okay, okay, but you might even if your revenue is say $5 million, what, what is being kept as a result of that? People might have million dollar launches but they've spent 950000 on advertising. And then they've got affiliate commissions to give out too. So it's, you know, well what do you keep. And it's not even, you don't even need to justify that to anyone either. Like I don't, I don't feel any to share that. I don't need people to share that with me. That that side of it are numbers in their business. If they're promising certain results, doing certain thing, then, yes, you can show, okay, this is what I did, and this is how I did it, and these are the results I got. And this is the system that I show people how to use. So there's a. It's a time and place for the validation. But ultimately it's an energy exchange. And, you know, you have a service, a skill set, a product, some sort of offering. And the way people show that they understand the value of that is by exchanging it for money. In the old days, it was bartering. Someone would do something. You could buy the services, you could buy the products. Because that became a bit more complex and difficult, especially as we started to go across longer distances. Money became that form of exchange. So it's. It That's. That's literally. And its simplest form, all it is. It's not judging you. The money itself is not, you know, identifying whether you're good or bad with it, judging the decision. Decisions that you make. It's not doing any of that. You are doing that or someone else is doing that. You don't need to take part in that either. So understanding the true essence of what energy is and that money is energy, and it's just, it's a flow, energy flow. So money comes in, money goes out like that. That's you. You can't bring it in and hoard it and expect it never to go out. It will go out. That's just the law of nature and law of energy. It will flow. But then the choices that you make about how it flows and how you manage it when it comes your way, that's the important part. And that's why I love also then talking about the cash flow management, money management side of it, because helping you understand the mindset and the mentality and the physiology and the sort of the nervous system responses around money. And then once you start to bring all of that into alignment and a little bit more balance and understanding, then you can start to actually manage it in a way that it makes it easier to attract it to you. Because when it comes your way, you know that you'll know what to do with it and how to manage it, how to handle it and how to, how to optimize it as well. So it, it increases and it grows as you do as well. This is one of, one of the other things I love talking about money is because of that. Secondly, like I said, to get stuff done, like if something, something is broken, you can fix it. If you're stranded somewhere, you can jump on a. I still remember that story of how Virgin Airlines got started. Richard Branson was with his wife. Some, I can't actually remember the specifics, but they were somewhere and they needed to fly, they needed to get somewhere else, and some reason the flights were canceled or whatever, so they basically pulled all their funds together and got a charter flight. And then he's just like, oh my gosh, I could do this so much better. And so the, the airline concept kind of grew out of that. And I thought, that is so cool. You throw, throw money at something and you can make stuff happen. You can, you know, like, if something's not happening. I was reading or listening to a podcast actually, about Tony Robbins and his, you know, houses for the homeless and feed the homeless and giving people homes and meals. And I've seen a lot of people, there's a lot of charities out there that do similar sorts of things, but money can help solve that problem. Like even just recently, you know, my, My father passed away. And not entirely unexpected, but pretty suddenly the way it happened. So there's just a whole lot of things I wasn't quite prepared for. And even though I'd been managing his money while he was alive, as soon as somebody dies, that money kind of gets frozen. And then I'm sitting there just going, oh, wow. So I still have bills. Like, he still has bills to be paid. How do I pay those now? Like, I have the resources to do that, but if somebody didn't, I was like, it's so easy to fall down that hole from a circumstance that's so sudden that you hadn't anticipated and hadn't, like, worked around. Like, who keeps money sort of set aside so that somebody else can access in case, like, it's, it's just, it's not something that most of us think about, but it's really interesting. And those were the stories I remembered when we did our, our fundraising for the women over 55 who are homeless. Last year, some of the stories would happen just that way. So now I'm personally experiencing it. I was like, oh, my gosh. I see how quickly and easily this happens. If someone passes and they're, they're the one who had access to the money, that money gets frozen while the estate and everything gets sorted. Because it takes a while. Like, I was quite surprised. It takes four to six weeks just to get a death certificate. And until you have that, you can't do anything. Like. And then, then comes the whole probate and will process. And there's all of the estate that has to. So this is like months. People can lose their home in that time if they don't have access to pay rent or pay more or pay anything. They can lose access to a phone if they can't pay the bill. And, you know, I just thought, goodness me, this is why it's so important to have that money, so that you can get stuff done, solve the problems for yourself, for others, you know, and that then leads me on to the helping others so that money can then help others too. So it's, it's, it's now no longer a bad thing or even a good thing. It just becomes the thing that. It facilitates the solving of the problem. So it's, it's not. There's no judgment attached to that. It's just, it's the tool so that helping others is a really big thing. I was, I was actually again, having a conversation with somebody recently about how things shift A bit over time. I remember when I was in my early 20s and I didn't have much spare cash, so I would give my time. So I did mentoring, wish granting I. Fundraising. I did, you know I used to. Photography was a. Was a hobby of mine, so I used to photograph events for free for charities and things. And it was. It was really quite interesting. And I was like, okay, that's what I did. And then that was that phase of life. And then as I got older and I'd built up more financial resources, I then had less time. So I then would now give money instead of time. Now I try and do a little bit of a blend of both if I can. So, like the sleep out of things, like actually doing. I mean, that's not necessarily directly helping someone, but it is indirectly and it's bringing more attention to. To a cause that I feel very passionately about because I, I hear these stories and I look at my mother and I was like, she came from an era where superannuation or retirement savings weren't really much of a thing yet. Shes been quite lucky in how her money situation has sort of turned out, and I've been helping her through that as well. But I hear the stories of some of these women. I was like, that could have just as easily been my mum. And for my daughter, the first thing she thought she heard, like, she thought of and kind of heard as she heard these stories were, well, that could have been my Uma. I was like, yeah, so let's try and make sure that that doesn't happen to anyone else's mum or grandmother. And that's why she's passionate about it too, and me as well. So that gives us the ability to help. And there's other. Other charities that I, that I support as well. So it's just nice to be able to. To do that. And then the choices factor. Oh, that's a. That's a big one. Where do you want to live? How do you want to live? Do you want a big house? A little house? Do you want to be able to travel? It's, you know, it's interesting actually. My, My daughter experienced business class travel once. I don't quite understand how it happened. I normally book all our flights, but for these, these flights I actually had a travel agent do it. And somehow the return flight ended up being a business class one, even though we paid what I expected to pay for an economy flight. So I'm like, I don't really know what happened there. But anyway, we'll just enjoy it. So at the tender age of, I think she was 8 at the time, got to experience business class internationally. Like, right, okay. I literally did not get to travel business class internationally at. And that's like the. One of the one and only times. And it was for work till I was in my, you know, 30s. So I was like, right, okay. This is, she's, she's seeing a whole different view of normal partly because of the financial situation that my husband and I have managed to create for ourselves. And and now. So when we were flying back from, from Europe and she sees people that, she sees the bit like the different cues and the different lines and all of that, she's like, mama, could we have a flat business class? And I was like, well it's a lot more than economy. And she was trying to. What does economy mean? What does business class mean? I was like, well, to a certain extent there's a level of frivolousness that goes with that, but there's still a choice as to where we spend our money. You know, do we spend it on lots of little things or do we save it up and spend it on something like that? I don't know. We'll see. Time will tell. But but at the, at the very basic level, it also allows you to choose the type of foods that you eat. Like can you afford to pay for organic fruit and vegetables versus whatever's the cheapest thing at the supermarket. Can you afford to grow? Because even though growing your own fruit and vegetables sounds like you're saving money, it actually costs a bit to set it all up and then to run it a little bit as well. So it may not necessarily end up being the cheaper option, but it might end up being the healthier option because then you see what goes into the soil, you know, you, you don't use pesticides, all that kind of stuff. So I, I love my, my little garden, my subsistence farm as I like to call it. So yeah, so, but it allows you those sorts of choices, the type of medical care you can afford. Like when I had, my daughter had private health insurance which covered that and think things like that. So it's, that's, that's the choice factor. So whether you know, the choice for security or for comfort or for growth, like what kind of lifestyle do you want? And it's important to be clear on that because then your money can support it. And that's the thing. Money is the tool that will support the lifestyle that you want. And then the legacy factor is an interesting one too. Some people feel very strongly about not leaving their kids things, wanting them to do it on their own because they had to. And then people, you know, for instance even Warren Buffett, one of the, you know, the greatest investors of all time, built up huge amounts of wealth, none of which he's going to leave to his children. He's like, they can take care of themselves. I would prefer to leave it to people who are less fortunate. But then, you know, we're talking about billions of dollars in his case. And in some, in some people's cases, you know, they might not have had much wealth. I know my, my family, my father came from a very poor background, my mother came from a very, you know, low class, lower class, middle class background as well. And they had to work hard to get what they had. So there's, you know, certain amounts that will, will come to me and then, you know, what does that allow me to then also build on myself and then also help my daughter and then potentially her children. So it's, it's one of those decisions that you have to, to sort of think about what, what it is that you want to do. So I I like the idea of, of the, the legacy aspects of, of money as well. But again, it allows you the choice what you want to do with it. So that's why I love talking about money. So if you have any questions about money, you can do it anonymous, not. Well, I mean, obviously when you ask me, I know who's asking, but I can answer them anonymously in the podcast or I can answer you directly in a dm. But yeah, I love talking about money and I think it's a really important conversation to have and to keep on having and to keep those communication lines open and open them up bigger. Let's, let's, you know, take that, that shame and away from the conversation. Have those conversations with your kids, explain things to them, explain even things that you don't understand, like say them. I don't understand this. You know, there's somebody asked me the other day, oh, what is EFTs? So I started to explain exchange, Mental blank exchange traded funds. And and then there, and so sort of explaining those because those I do understand. But then there was a term that, that I had on one of my slides, NFTs, which is non fungible tokens. And then I had a question, well, what are they I was like, oh, my goodness. I kind of understand a little bit, but there's an element to that that I don't understand because it's so intangible. So I'm. And I'm open about that. So there's. We don't all know everything, so ask questions, because you don't know who knows the answer. And they might even have not just the theoretical answer, but. But practical experience as well. So keep talking about it. Ask questions. And learning is a journey. As we age, we grow, we learn. That's part of life. So on that philosophical note, have a lovely week, and I will catch you next time.
