Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of Money with Alpha, where I will bust another money myth. This is number 4. I mean, I'll probably stop calling them myths after this, because there's still so many things that I could talk about. But in terms of the myth-busting, this is probably the last one that I get a lot, which is why I wanted to turn it into an actual myth, because it is one. And that is, 'I'm not good with math, therefore I'm not good with money.' So the two are unrelated for the most part, and I will explain why. But I'll go through, like, the this is the fourth money myth that I've busted. So the first one spoke about money's too complex and overwhelming. And then the second one I talked about how it's, "I'm too old," or, "It's too late, too difficult to invest." And then the last one that I spoke about was that I have to check. Yeah, that I don't have the time, so that was the other one. The time factor is always an issue, that I don't have time to sort out my money. But this one is the, the one I, I probably hear almost the most, which is why I've kind of left it 'til last. But yeah, it's the good old maths and I, mean that I don't do money well, because I can't do maths very well. And I'm like, wow, my goodness. For starters, there's a whole problem with how we teach math as to our children, so I'm already trying to to help my daughter through that mainly because it's not given the right context. There is a lot of theory, and yes, there are things that you have to learn when it comes to maths, and we may or may not get taught this during our schooling. And we probably do get taught all the things that we need to know. However, they're not explained or provided examples of in a way that makes them relatable in our real-world lives. So, you know, we might learn about algebra and we might learn about, you know, the, the power of, but what that isn't explained is that that actually leads to compounding, which is one of the most vital things to understand when it comes to money. So that, that's why I was like, we're not actually given the information and the tools to make it relevant. When we're talking about fractions, you want to know fractions? Get a pizza. Like literally, get a pizza. Cut it up and then there's, there's your fractions. That's why it's important to know. So if you're paying, you know, buying a pizza slice and the pizza costs this amount, and you're paying for two slices, and how much do you need to pay for, like that becomes a lot more relevant than, oh two over six. You're like, "Okay, what does that mean?" One-third. All right. What does... Yeah. How do I, what, what the hell? And two-third, two... One-third is the same as two-sixths? Really? Like this, this is the stuff that I'm, I'm working on with my 10-year-old daughter at the moment. And then, you know, the concept between two-fourths and one-half is just like, things that are, we kind of take for granted, 'cause we probably just learned them, but then how do you apply it to real life and why is it relevant as well? So that's where that whole, like, linkage between maths and money, I was like, you don't have to be good at one to be good at the other. Like, maths was, funnily enough, high school maths was not necessarily my strong suit. But I was good with numbers, which meant I was good with accounting, which meant I was good at that at uni. But that still didn't mean that I actually understood personal finance. So even if you're good with math or numbers, it does not actually necessarily translate to you being good with money. You might be able to do some calculations or understand the concept of compounding when it's explained to you. But again, unless it's actually demonstrated in a way that makes it relatable, it, it's it's almost irrelevant. It's just theory. So there's, there's five things again. Somehow... I write my, my little lists and notes to make sure I, you know, I, I stay on, on track with these, these podcast episodes , I don't go off on too many tangents. And always seem to end up with five, so there's something about the magic of number five. So the five things I'm gonna talk about in relation to myth number four, which is, "I'm not good with math, therefore I'm not good with money," is beliefs, first and foremost. Can't talk about this without talking about the beliefs you have around that. Secondly is the power of using technology . We don't even need to be good with math a lot of the time anymore, because technology will do it for us. We just need to understand what to put in and get out of it. Knowledge, and it's that fundamental, we don't... often have that basic foundational knowledge around money, so the knowledge of math that we learn at school almost becomes unnecessary or irrelevant or not relatable, like I said. The fourth is having clear actions. Again, clarity had to come into this somewhere So clear actions to take, and then consistency. Money is really Like, time, consistency, like doing the thing, like anything you have to take action. Implementation is like the biggest thing. I was literally just having this conversation earlier today, where manifestation is not about like wishful thinking and, "Oh, you know, I'm gonna visualize it and see it, and therefore it will come to me." You still have to do the thing. It, you know, we were, I was also talking with somebody about how when I go to events you know, there's, they there's usually a a raffle assigned to them where it's raising money for something, and inevitably I win something in the raffle. But I had to buy a ticket. If I am sitting there and they are calling or pulling their raffle tickets out of the, the bag or or the box or whatever it happens to be, and I haven't bought a ticket, my ticket number's not gonna get called, because I don't have one. So you still actually have to do something in order to get the, the return or the something back. So you're not going to make money investing if you don't invest . So you actually have to, like, put money in and, and invest. And that, that part, if you can do it and gain some momentum and and get the consistency going, then you will see results. You will get some momentum, and then that momentum builds your confidence, and then you can just do it a lot, and then, then you're like, "Oh, it's easy." I remember when I first started this podcast, I started out going, "Oh my gosh. How do I even, like, do a podcast? What microphone do I, do I need? Do I, what, what sort of video do I..." Like at the time I was just doing audio, so that even, wasn't even a question yet. But I was like, "Well, what do we do?" And then I'm like, "Hosting. Okay." When I found out I then had to have a host, which I didn't even know to start with, and I found that part out-So, well, which one do I go with? 'Cause there's so many to choose from. And then I did all this research, found the one, and then I found out that was actually a good one. I was like, "Oh, well, that's great. I made a good choice." If I didn't, I could always change if I wanted to or I could keep it and see how I go. So there was that, and then the posting, and then... And, and now it's just like clockwork because I've been doing it for years. So I'm... It was a skill that I'd had no idea about, and I learned it. And I used the technology and I changed my beliefs around it. I took action and I'm doing it consistently. So this is even the same, the same flow to bust this myth around math and money. So I'll, I'll go through each of them. So the first one I said was about beliefs. The first belief is that you're not good with math, so therefore you're not good with money. That itself is a belief, and it could even be a story. Like, you may even have to look around you and go, "I'm actually not that bad with money." It might just be the investing piece I need a little bit of help with, or I need a bit more knowledge, or I'm just disorganized so I might need to be a bit more organized. Like, I'm kind of... It's a little bit like... I had a boss years ago who his desk was an absolute mess, but he knew where everything was. If I asked him for something, he'd be like, "Oh, that, that's, that's in this pile." And I looked at that and going, "This is just, like, my worst nightmare." Just the mental clutter of looking at the physical clutter is too much for me. So sometimes it's just not having the structure and the, the organization to go with it. And that's got nothing to do with not being good with math. Absolutely nothing. That's a totally different problem. That's a Marie Kondo problem and getting yourself decluttered and organized. Which is interesting because when I first started doing what I'm doing, I actually called it financial decluttering because I was like, there's just, there's, there's a lot of clutter when it comes to money. Mental clutter primarily, but then just, you know, we have bills necessarily and then they all come electronically and then we have direct debits and then we have subscriptions and da-da-da-da, and there was just... It was a lot. So I was like, "You actually have to declutter it." I kind of moved beyond that because I ended up doing more than just the decluttering. But that was, that was where I'd started. So the first one is the belief. So why do you even believe that? Were you even not good at math in school? Like, were you? If you look back just even ask, ask yourself the question, if you look back and you got, like, a B even, you'd be like, "That's not bad," just 'cause you didn't get an A or even an... Like, my grandmother was always like, "Oh, you didn't get an A+." I was like, "But I got an A. Isn't that good enough? Or even a B, isn't that fine?" Like, "I'm still doing the thing. You're not failing, at least." So... And even if you were, it really depends on the situation and the context and what's going on at the time. So, but this not being good, and then how do you even measure that? "I'm not good with math." What's, what's the measure? Says who? Did somebody tell you that or was it sometimes easier? And I'm gonna be really brutally honest here. Was it really the thing, the math, or are you kind of using that as, like, you perceive yourself to be not good with money, therefore you're blaming math because this is something you've heard and you think you've got to be good with math to be good with money? Then you might not actually be bad at math, but you also might not even be bad at money. Like what on what measure are you measuring this? It's not like there's some test or some yardstick or some benchmark that we've all gotta meet in order to define ourselves as being good at money. And this is why I, I really... You know, the labels are, are useful to a point, but when we start limiting ourselves because of them, we put ourselves in our own cage of constraint. That is where I start to have a problem. I was like, just because it's there and you said it or you think it or you believe it doesn't mean it's actually true. So let's... Time to challenge those beliefs. Look back and go, whose belief that you're not good with math is that? And is it... does it even really matter? 'Cause if you... This is... I mean, high school may have been 20 or 30 years ago. Like, does it even matter what grade you got in high school now? No. Money is a completely different thing. So I'm gonna try and dial it down because I feel like I'm, like, preaching and teaching and I don't wanna do that. I want this to be more conversational and more... And a more of an enjoyable thing to listen to. So I will take a breath and try and calm down a little bit, 'cause as you can see, I get very passionate about this. So that belief is most likely false, and it's also a myth in relation to linking math and money. And the next one that I wanna talk about, which is technology. ... partly the reason. I mean, we've had calculators for years. Our phones are calculators these days as well. If we want to understand something, we can just use you can go into AI to help you calculate stuff. It'll help you organize data. It'll help you do all sorts of things. So the math part, you don't need to be a math genius. You don't need to understand all of the, you know, algebra or whatever else that you think you need to. Literally, you just need to understand compounding and the compounding equations, I don't even do those. I go to like in, in my case, like the moneysmart.gov.au website. They literally have a simple compound calculator. If I want to know the impact of something over time, like at the moment one of my godchildren is turning 18 and the gift I give my godchildren when they turn 18 is $500 in a micro-investing account. Part of that gift as well is also a little bit of an education piece around money and understanding the value or the, the power of compounding. And so, I go to this, this website and go to the calculator and I show them. I was like, "Check this out. Look at this. If you put this amount in here and you compound it at this rate, this is what you could have in this many, many years." And they're like, "Oh my God." They get blown away by it 'cause it's like even though it's sort of really only $500 now, if you keep adding to it, even if you don't touch it, and this and this happens over time, this is where it will go. Like, and that's not even taking returns into account. That's just purely taking the base $500 and calculating it on that. That's not even taking whatever dividends or capital growth comes into that over time. So it's, it's, yeah, it's really, really powerful so... And you can use technology to help you calculate that. You don't have to do that yourself. So you don't even need to understand the underlying formula behind it. It's there. Understanding the formula is not gonna change the result. You're still gonna just plunk the data in there and the calculator will give you the result, and you're like, "Okay, cool. Now I have the information I need to be able to move forward." And that's the important part, the information to move forward and take action. So that knowledge then becomes the next one. Once you have that knowledge or the information that you need, quite often we stay stuck because one of two things, we're either not clear on what it is that we're doing or we don't have enough information in order to do it. Sometimes we actually need the information in order to gain a bit of clarity, or we need the clarity to get more information 'cause we now know what we're searching for. So those two things are really, really important. So that knowledge and the clarity, they kind of, they're, they're a bit of an iterative thing as well because which one comes first? Is it the cart or the horse? You know, you're like, well, you kind of need one and you need both. Which order do they come in? Sometimes you need a little bit of clarity or it might even be you're like, I have no idea what I want or how I want to get there. So you're like, okay, well let's just learn a little bit about the money thing, or let's learn a little bit about investing or understand how to organize my money, learn a little bit about that. And then as I'm doing that, you start to go, "Oh, okay, well the life I actually want is this." Or, "I don't want that, but I know that I want this but not that." You know, you can start to iterate it and then pair it with the knowledge and the information that's growing in your mind and the growth that you're experiencing and then they come together and poof, the two together become amazing. Once you have that clarity and the knowledge, mm, magic can happen. But with that knowledge and that clarity, you also have to take action. So once you have all of that, you can just sit inside that. And I, I always used to joke with my mom. She loved, like, gathering information. It's like, "Right, so what are you gonna do with all that information now?" I'm very much a doer focused and she's very much a, you know a wisdom, you know, gathering knowledge focus. And she's like, "Oh, I'll use it one day." It's like, "Okay, cool. That's, that's fair enough." But if it's specific to money and you have goals and things that you want to achieve and you've got clarity around that, then you need to take some action. And then you need to, once you've done that, and it doesn't even have to be big. It can be micro-action to start with, like I said with this micro-investing account for my one of my godchildren. I was like, you know, you can just do little bits and as you start to understand that, then you can do a bit more, and then you can do a bit more, and then you might expand beyond micro-investing and do, like, regular investing. You can even use technology to automate that. Like, I have an automatic deduction that happens every single month. I've set out where I want it to go inside the investing platform that I use and it just comes straight out of my bank account, it goes in there, I get notified a few days before it comes out so I make sure, 'cause I, I have my money sort of in... I optimize my cash flow to make sure I'm earning as much interest as possible, so I have to make sure that stuff's in my transaction account in time for when this money comes out. But a part... And sometimes it's just a matter of leaving some stuff there so I don't move at all 'cause I, I move money once a month. So I just leave that amount there and it's just, you know, it's a habit. And then that just happens and it just ticks along and then I, I get my quarterly, you know, email to say, "Oh, your statement's there." Or I see money coming into my account. I'm like, "Oh. Wow. There's..." Some I have, the dividends are reinvested, others I actually get. And I was like, "Oh. Cool. All right. Well, I must be getting a, a statement coming soon to tell me, you know, what's been going on." And then I look and go, "Oh. That looks very nice." It's getting healthier, it's getting bigger. The momentum makes you feel good about yourself. And that's where that consistency piece comes in. If you can't do it manually, which I probably suggest not because a lot of us aren't disciplined enough to do it that way or, you know, we don't set aside the time, automate it. These auto-investing... So our technology that we have now between micro-investing and doing ETFs where you can invest smaller amounts and you can automate that investing, you can automate saving. Like, it's so much easier now. But we've got this idea in our head that it's hard which is why the first myth was about things are complex and overwhelming and they don't need to be. And we can invest and it's not too late and you can build and grow and you don't even need to spend the time on it because the...You can automate it, so there's no time suck either. And then the being good at the math part also becomes then completely irrelevant because you've automated all, so the time factor's gone. You've, you know, you've built the knowledge. You know, you still do need to understand what you're doing and be clear on why you're doing it and what you're building towards but then you the consistency can be automated through technology. And that consistency's important, because there's no point doing it one month and then never again. Little by little by little. I mean, it's better that you do it one month than not at all. Which is why when I set this up or help my godchildren set this up, I set I helped them with the original setup. And I was like, "The one stipulation to this gift is that you do not touch it." Obviously there's, you know, there are probably going to be life circumstances that potentially might mean that they need to down the track. But to begin with, don't touch it. I would highly recommend you add to it. But at the very least, don't touch it. So and that's where, you know, understanding that power of consistency and compounding, but at least it's there doing some work. And it's money working for you, not you working for money as well. That's the part that becomes really, really important. And so, you know, obviously, you know, we do work for money, whether it's in our own businesses or in a job, and even if we are in a business that has a lot of passive income that comes through, like we don't have to, like, direct time for money, we're still doing some work. And there's, you know, I can't think of many businesses where you would actually have literally nothing to do but just let the money roll in. That's not realistic, for the most part. But you can certainly leverage and scale and build a business that brings in more money than your time effort is actually required to. But there's still some work involved. Whereas with investing, it's pretty much just your money working for you. So that's the important mindset shift to really think of think about and understand those two differentiations between money working for you and you working for money. But that myth around the math part, yes, there's numbers, and when you're tracking your numbers, you know, there's metrics and things that you look at. You don't have to understand how it's calculated. You just have to look at the number and understand the number itself, which is the knowledge piece. But you don't have to understand what a price to earnings ratio is or what a dividend yield is. You don't need to understand... no, you don't understand. You don't need to know how to calculate those. You just need to understand the concept and what it is and whether it's good or not, and you can compare that to others. Like for instance, a good dividend yield would be about 4, 5%. And ordinary one's probably around 1% and under. But that's knowledge that you can learn that. And then once you learn it, that's it. You know it. It's not like it's complex. You don't have to understand the formula to calculate it. You see what I mean? Like, the math part is not really the important bit. It's the knowledge that's important, and you can simplify that and then use technology to help you automate it, and then you gain that clarity as well to make sure that you're taking the right action. So that was myth number four, that you don't have to be good with maths in order to be good with money, or that whole, "I'm not good at math, so therefore I can't be good at money." No. let's put that one completely aside. Let's bust that one entirely. Challenge your beliefs on it. Use technology to help you if you need to, especially with the calculation side of things, 'cause you don't need to do this yourself anymore. And not that we probably ever really did, but now especially we don't need to. Especially with AI. Build your knowledge in the areas that you need to, gain clarity over what it is that you want, and then the knowledge and all the information and the clarity will go back and forth as you grow and evolve, and then stay consistent with the actions that you're taking because of the clarity that you've got. It really can be that simple. So with that, I will let you ponder and think about it and encourage you to challenge those beliefs and to take some action in relation to money in the next week, before you listen to this podcast again. If you would like any accountability, tell me what action you want to take and I will ask you once you have told me that you want the timeframe, and I will come back and check. in the nicest possible way. So have a lovely week, and I will catch you again next episode.
