How do you think about your finances if you's someone who has a budget and a strict plan for your money, or do you cross your fingers and hope for the best? Maybe' splurging one day and then denying yourself the next, or maybe your finances are feeling just a little bit neglected. I mean, let's face it, money management books are not something that's going to appeal to everybody, and some of us need this information presented in a more palatable format.
So this is where Victoria Divine has found her audience. She's the founder of Melbourne based financial advisory startup Zella Wealth, but she now spends most of her week making podcasts and managing a huge online community and creating content that helps people learn more about money and how to manage it better. Victoria's She's on the Money podcast gets over one million downloads every month and she's built a Facebook
community of over one hundred and seventy thousand members. So how does a financial advisor approach her own finances and how should we deal with money when it comes to relationships? And what are Victoria's tips for making budgeting easier and not so much of a drag? I'm doctor Ramantha Imba. I'm an organizational psychologist and the founder of behavioral science consultancy invent Him, and this is how I work, a show about how to help you do your best work.
Victoria has done an amazing job of building a huge community of people who want to feel more empowered around money. And I mean, so many people and brands talk about building a community, but it's easier said than done. So I wanted to know how did Victoria build a community of nearly two hundred thousand people who come to her to learn more about money.
I think everybody thinks I have this crazy cool strategy for building communities, when in reality it was kind of an accident and that sounds terrible, but in retrospect it makes sense.
But at the time, I just wanted to start a Facebook group.
So She's on the Money started as a workshop that I was running in my business Zella as I'm a financial advisor, and I'd go out to corporate offices and law firms and stuff like that to give this talk to women about super an investment and taking.
Care of their insurances.
And I found that people loved talking about it, and it was one of the first times that'd had this conversation in depth in a really open way. And after these talks, I'd always get email follow ups of other questions, and the questions were so good, but they were so repetitive from talk to talk, so I'd always find the
same things happening. And so I was like, great, what I'm going to do is create a Facebook group and people can ask the question and then like see what other people are responding, and I can respond publicly there to create kind of just a group chat really, because I didn't know how to create a group chat with the ability to like search anyway, created this Facebook group and it started growing with the people that were in my workshops, and then it started growing with people that
I didn't know, and I remember being like, wow, where are they coming from? Like I don't I don't know who these people are. And then people started messaging me saying, oh, thanks so much for accepting me into your group, Like my friend did your workshop and said I should join this group because it's such good conversation. And I was like wow, okay, like what do you guys want from me?
So I started creating weekly content, so I do like a Wednesday conversation and like some kind of activity that my community could do, and some people engaged and some people didn't. But it essentially just started out as a Facebook group that I was doing on the side of my quote professional job because I was so passionate about just talking about money with women and people who genuinely
wanted to learn more. And I remember I got to the stage where I had seventeen hundred people in the group and I was like, Wow, this is so many people. And at the time, I just couldn't fathom how many people that was. I was like, I couldn't even see all these clients in one year, like what Anyway, From there, I asked them what they wanted and they said, Victoria, we would love for you to do YouTube, like start a YouTube channel and do video.
And I just wasn't confident enough.
So a podcast was actually the compromise of me not wanting to do video, and so I started this podcast with the help of two friends who already had a podcast, and it.
Kind of grew from there.
Originally I thought that I'd do only twelve episodes, which was our first season. And when we wrapped up the first season and on episode twelve, you'll hear me go, oh, this is the end, like, thanks so much, guys. It was kind of as though they were offended I would stop. And so so we worked in the background for a few months about how to get the podcast back up and running and what I should do because obviously, like I wasn't producing it in a way that was sustainable
long term. And so we got it back up and running and now, yeah, we're at the point where we have one hundred and seventy thousand people in our Facebook group and about one point one million listeners a month, which is crazy.
That is absolutely mental. And so how do you go from seventeen hundred people, which at the time was super exciting to one hundred and seventy thousand.
Like it still is.
It's wild, that's mental, Like, what were some of the things that you've deliberately done along the way that retrospectively you can go, ah, yeah, that was something that really helped me build that community and grow it.
To be honest, I think it was my naivety in a way, because I didn't start it as a business. I started it as a platform for people to connect, and it was coming from a place of love and a really honest, open space where I could have a conversation with someone and they didn't feel like I was trying to sell them something, which I know a lot
of people start communities, and I've seen it. I've seen it before on Facebook where people start Facebook groups with the intention of selling something to them or it's for a business, and I think people see straight through that.
Nowadays, what else have you done that's led to like a step change in growth of building that community.
So one thing that I think has been really integral is obviously, at seventeen hundred people, I could manage it myself. I absolutely could jump on, you know, twice a day get back to everybody's questions because they weren't that many
in reality. Whereas now with one hundred and seventy thousand people, we do have a full time community manager and her job is to literally go through all of the dms and every single post in our community needs to have approval, so nothing gets posted without us going is that a constructive conversation for this space?
Yes?
Or no?
Is it going to put anybody at risk?
No?
Great, it can be posted, and so I think that that has genuinely been integral to our growth, but also to making sure it is the space that we need and then furthering that, our community is always, always, always about giving more than we receive. So it's always been how can we best serve the community? And we ask we ask that question on a daily basis to the team, like this topic's happening, you know, we're talking about zubernuation.
How can we best educate? How can we best serve them with the tools and resources that they deserve to
get this done? And I think that that has always been at the forefront, and when it comes to community management and community building, that's what helps it grow because when we look at the way the community has grown, and Facebook's incredible on the back end with the analytics you can produce, most of the community has grown from organically from people adding their friends, not them finding us on the podcast and then going and joining us, which is really interesting.
What size was the community when you made the decision to hire a full time community manager.
I think we were at just under one hundred thousand people in the group, So it was this year, it was in February, I believe.
Wow, I want to know, kind of like pre community manager, like social media is a huge part of what you're doing in both on Facebook and Instagram and you know, via promoting the podcast. And I find social media as a funny one because it can obviously be really unproductive for a lot of people and be a huge source of distraction. Yet it's a huge part of your business.
So I want to know what's your relationship personally with social media, like in terms of interacting with it, consuming but also switching off.
I've got to be honest with you here.
For a while, it was negative, and I don't mean negative in that I was having a negative time. I was just all consuming, like managing the Facebook group, and because I'm so passionate about it and I genuinely feel like I have this massive responsibility to my community, it
was always at the front of my mind. It was the thing I'd wake up at five am in the morning, not because I'm an early riser, but because I'd be stressing about it to check messages and see what was going on, to make sure that no one had been.
Nasty or rude.
And I just feel like it used to be all consuming, and it kind of got to a point where my partner would always say, Victoria, can we just have dinner without the phone? And you know, I don't want to be that person, and it's not something that I ever set out to be. But it wasn't me going, oh, I'm so addicted to Instagram. I'm just scrolling. It was actually my underlying need or I just felt like I owed them an explanation. I felt like they owed them content.
And I still feel that way. But now I have a team around me. I'm not so active on social media, and something that has really helped us is obviously a team. But that's you know, I'm really grateful for that and being able to afford that. But scheduling content has also been really powerful. So now we work at about two weeks in advance depending on our content, and everything gets scheduled.
So all of our posts go into a scheduling tool for Instagram so that I don't have to you know, on the fly, I think of content and go, oh my gosh, I haven't posted today. What should I post it? I want it to be educational. I actually have a day a month where I sit down and create a whole heap of content, and then we usually just plan it for two weeks in advance, and I have a
backlog of stuff that if I'm not feeling creative. I can pop something up, but I guess that has been really integral because it was all consuming and impacting my mental health and getting to a point where it was stressing me out being away from my phone, and I think having the support but also having a partner who drew the line in the sand and was like, right, this needs to calm down, because even though you are doing well and you're serving your community and adding so
much value, at what cost.
You mentioned that you'll spend one day a week now thinking about social media content and planning that where are you going for inspiration? Like what does that day look like for you?
So it's a culmination.
So we do this once a month and it's kind of the social media day, and throughout the entire month, I'll be screenshotting things that inspire me, or screenshotting articles or saving things or emailing them to myself, and then I spend most of the morning of that day pulling together all of the content that I've either saved on my phone or my emails or resources that I wanted
to go back. I'm very good our team. Our team uses a platform called Slack to communicate with each other, and we have a thread in Slack for social content ideas, so if anyone on the team has a good idea, we'll chuck it in the social thread. And then we go back on one day as a team and we essentially have a content creating day where we go great, like, what does this look like? How are we going to pull that together? What's the text on that post?
What's this? What's that? How does it add value?
And once we have about thirty ish posts, we pop them into the scheduling tool not to be scheduled straight away, and then we think about our content for that month and what's going to be on the podcast and what guests are we talking to or is there something topical like is the budget happening? Should we be talking about what is going on in that? And if so, does that require an Instagram story? And if it does, is
it a story? Is it a static post? Is it a big We are very good in Cheese on the Money at using carousel posts because I feel like it gets more information out there, and so for us, it's talking about what type of content there is and then creating it. Whereas I I think if you start from creating content going oh my gosh, I need an Instagram post but have no structure. That can be really challenging. And so I think something that we do is just making sure that.
It meets our criteria.
So when we say we have thirty posts, we break it down from those thirty so I'll be like, okay, cool, I want ten educational posts, I want ten posts about our community, and I want ten posts about the podcast. And then we go from there. And I think if you can work out what your framework of content is, it makes one creating the content a lot easier, but it helps me understand where I can add extra value instead of having to think of every single post in isolation.
If that makes sense, it does.
And what tools are you using to schedule the posts and design the posts?
So I use a company called sched Social sked social for scheduling content. You know, none of them are super reliable if we're honest, and we all have our teething issues. But for me, I like Scared because you can also schedule Instagram stories and you can tag all of your partners. And something that is really important to me is honesty and transparency. And if we are working with another partner, I want to be able to tag that partner right away, not go back and do it later, because a lot
of the other platforms don't have that capability. And I like it because you can see a preview of your feed, so you can kind of move posts around and make sure that you're not posting all peach images one week and the feed looks a little bit strange. And then, to be honest, we just use Canva. Like Canva is so good. We have the paid version of it, but in all honesty, we could get away with not having the paid version and do it all on the free,
free version of Canva. But we've uploaded all of our brand kits and how we work in Canvas, so if one of my team want to create a static post, they can jump in and know what the fonts are in the formats and just really create ate it because we've come up with a number of different templates that work really well.
How about for the podcast, So your podcast She's on the Money, and I know that you do several podcasts, now.
Yeah, but let's talk about She's on the Money.
Let's talk about She's on the Money. That's had over four and a half million downloads and my corrector has that number has gone way up.
Since I've last it has increased.
But I do try and not focus too much on the downloads. I know that sounds silly, but you know, the second you start talking about the downloads, it doesn't feel as intimate and to me it doesn't feel as community centric as I want.
It to be.
But yeah, at the moment, we are doing about one to one point one million downloads a month.
That's amazing, and you're releasing so cool, that's very cool, Like it sounds cool brag about that. Now you're releasing about every second day, which is insane. How do you decide on the content for the podcast?
So we do three episodes a week on She's on the Money, and there's a very clear struck to what we do. So there's Money Diaries, and we have Money Diary Monday, and that is structured in a way where we get interviews and we talk about it and then we have a chat with that money diarist about their situation. The structure of it is very similar every single time
because I always ask the same questions. But then the flexibility in that episode comes at the back end where we actually have a bit of a deep dive with that money direst and go, my gosh, how did you save x amount? Or what happened when your husband became disabled and how how did you deal with that financially?
And there's always such interesting stories on there. The thing we are really grateful for, and to be honest, not as good at as we should be, is forward planning a heap of that content, because that content's what we call evergreen, and it wouldn't matter if it was recorded this week or next week. We can actually kind of bank a few of those up. So that's something my
team are working on. The second episode that we do each week is on Wednesday, and we call that internally Wednesday Deep Dives, and we talk about one specific topic. So we'll talk about zuperanuation, or we might talk about micro investing, or we might talk about you know, insurances, or more recently, we actually spoke about you know, the federal budget because that was a because that was something that we'd actually you know, had on in the media.
And we also do topics that we think our community will value, like last week we did a topic on imposter syndrome because I genuinely feel like that impacts our community and their ability to generate wealth, and so we deep dive on that and my co host and I talk about one particular topic. We usually drag in a number of questions from our community, and those topics are picked in a way that is usually quite responsive to
the community. So we have a really big spreadsheet that everybody in the team can you know, add to and see, and we put all our ideas on there, and we have a couple of times, maybe every second month, we do a bit of a brainstorming session for a few hours in one of our meeting rooms and talk about,
all right, what's a community talking about? How much content have we got, what topics do we need to revisit, like what's going on in the media, what should we be talking about when it comes to money, And we brainstorm all of these ideas. But before we pick each topic each week, we go back to the community and work out what's topical and go from there.
And then on.
Fridays we do a Friday Drinks episode, and that is all about celebrating our community and their money wins and confessions and starting to make conversation about money more real. So we talk on the Wednesday episode about a specific topic, but on the Friday episode. It's genuine conversation about Oh
my gosh, I did this this week. It was a bit naughty when it comes to money, but it's all about making money conversations more prevalent, and we hope that that carries through to the weekend when all of our community are probably out having brunch and I want them to say, oh my gosh, did you hear that money win or that confession on cheese on the money, and then they can talk about money more openly.
Hey, there, it's nearly time for a quick break, but before we do that, I'd love it if you could hit pause and leave a review for how I work wherever you're listening to this show. Okay, we will be back after the break, where we will be hearing about Victoria's rather unusual approach to goal setting. Now I want
to shift gears and talk about goals. I know that you think a lot about goals in terms of finance, but I want to know in terms of life and career goals, like, what is your approach to thinking head for the next twelve months, three years, five years, What does that look like for you?
Oh my gosh, I really dislike this question because I think everybody thinks I'm so planned and structured and you know, formatted, But in reality, like you said to me five or six years ago, Hey, Victoria, do you think you'll even start a podcast? The answer would be an astounding no. It wouldn't be something that I was interested in or
even think was possible. So in She's on the Money and Zella, my business is I'm more likely to set six month goals, so I often write them down and have them on my desk consistently, But it's more so I'm consistently checking in with myself and feeling like I'm achieving stuff on the way, as opposed to all right, in five years I want to be here, because if I'm being honest, I have no idea where I want to be in five years, and I still don't really know who I want to be when I grow up.
That's very refreshing, Like what does a six month goal look like for you? Like, what's something that's currently sitting on your desk.
So one of them that we've just achieved is releasing an investment platform, which has been a little bit of a longer road because I've been doing a whole heap of research into that but I even have smaller goals like being in certain publications or you know, meeting certain people or networking or being on a certain podcast that I go, oh, that would be so cool if I could achieve XYZ. And I think that that, for me, is a little bit more motivating because to me, they are markers of success, not.
By metric by Oh yeah, I did get.
An article in the Australian Financial Review, and for someone who's a financial advisor, that's kind of like the Holy Gray al right, And for me, I was so excited about that. But I'm not a metrics driven person. So if you said, okay, well take your podcast from ex listeners per month to why listeners per month, I'd be like, oh, like, that's not like that doesn't feel gratifying.
What's your philosophy when it comes to thinking about and managing your own finances?
Oh my gosh, do as I say, not as I do?
Is that that not at all tell me about us?
So my partner and I we bought a house into last year and we finally put our finances together, and I think that that was something that really surprised people because they assumed I would be all over that. But it actually took me a while to get to the point where I wanted to share finances with my partner. As a type a business owner, I guess it would be very safe to assume that I'm somewhat controlling when it comes to money, and I just didn't want to
feel like i'd lost that. And so for me, when it comes to money, I'm really conservative when it comes to investing. I do genuinely believe that the best types of investments are boring, and I'm not someone who is ever going to dabble in things like cryptocurrency or you know, bitcoin, which is very popular at the moment. I'm not buying IPO stocks. I'm not someone who is buying the trendy
stocks at the moment, like Apple or Tesla. I'm definitely more of a boring, well diversified type of person, and I guess that's why I'm so passionate about talking about it on the podcast, because I don't want people to take risk. I just want people to get good advice that will set them up for their financial futures. And I've made a lot of financial mistakes along my journey.
I would say like I've been in personal debt I've you know, lived paycheck to paycheck, and I feel really really grateful that I now have the privilege of not being that person. But I think to not be that person, I had to go through that and experience it so that I knew how important it was for me and my journey when it.
Comes to budgeting and managing our cash flow. What are some of your favorite apps that you use or recommend to your clients to kind of keep things, you know, simple and finn.
I guess, oh my gosh, there are so many of them when it comes to budgeting. Though, before I tell you what my favorite apps are, I think understanding what a budget is is really important because there seems to be this idea that a budget is all about restricting what you are spending. It's all about saying, Okay, so I need a budget because I spend too much on groceries each week and I'm now going to cap it
at one hundred dollars. So budgets make you feel restricted if you're not looking at them from an abundance mindset. So budget from the she's on the money perspective is much more about just really deeply understanding where your money goes and how it comes into your account and then how it leaves your account, and not so much around restricting exactly what the amounts should be, but rather looking at your account going Okay, I am a couple and I have two kids, and yeah, we spend three hundred
dollars a week on groceries. Does that provide value to us? And if the answer is no, then cool, cut back your groceries and you know, be a bit more savvy there. But for a massive foodie like myself, I wouldn't want someone to cut my grocery budget. I'd want them to cut something else out before you tell me I can't have my fancy stuff. And I think that everybody is
different in that way. So when you start to look budgeting, it's actually making sure that your values are in line with the income coming in and going out of your account. And there are lots of different ways to manage it. So I've written a budget and cash flow course and I do that because or I've done that because I didn't feel like anything truly took you on the journey of understanding your money story, understanding what's coming in and going out, and creating a banking.
Structure that really works.
And I feel like it goes beyond what you could say budgeting apps do because it literally tells you, Okay, this is what you spend, These are the bank accounts I want you to have, and this is how I want you to manage it for success. Whereas a lot of my community also love apps like Pocketbook and we Money,
and you know there are a million out there. It's just about what you actually value and what you want to track because some of these apps connect directly with your bank accounts and do data feeding, and some people aren't comfortable with that, so some people want to manually put it all into a spreadsheet. And to be honest, there's no right or wrong when it comes to budgeting as long as you are paying attention to it.
If someone's just wanting to get started, and I love that explanation of a kind of a reframe of what a budget is. Like, what's a good go to app that's simple to get started if someone wants to, Yeah, I guess we'll get more insight into where the money's going to me.
It's actually the smart Money Gove budgeting tool that you can download. I just feel like it's a free spreadsheet that you can fill in and get a good insight into what you're spending and saving. I'm not the most tech savvy person. There are lots of apps out there, but I feel like when it comes to money, you actually need to go back to basics and not rely on technology too much to tell you what percentage you're
spending and reality. One of the most powerful things I find that my community is able to do is what I call a bank account audit, which is definitely as sexy as it sounds, and that's.
When you print off. Yes, print off.
Not not do it online. I actually want you to hold the paper in your hands and have two different colors of highlighters, so printing off your bank statements from the last three months and then highlighting your discretionary costs and then highlighting your non discretionary costs. So these are the things that you don't really need to be spending money on and just having a good look at, well, where is my money going?
Fantastic and Victoria. My final question for you for people that want to get more involved in what you're doing in the She's on the Money community or get hold of your new book as well, what is the best way for people to.
Do that oh so many ways. We as you mentioned before, we're all over the internet. We spam ourselves across Instagram. You can find us as She's on the Money. AUS can find us on Facebook and in our group or on our page.
You know.
You can find me on my personal Instagram which is Victoria Underscore Divine. And my book, which I'm so genuinely excited about because i feel like I'm going to reach more people and have more of a positive impact on the financial literacy rates in Australia is excitingly going to be in all large retailers online or all large retailers across the country in store, but also from all of the online retailers like book Toopia, which is so.
Fun, amazing, amazing, Victoria. It's quite inspiring what you have achieved and packed into your short amount of time so far on this planet. I'm very inspired. So thank you so much for coming on the show.
You are so kind, Thank you, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed having a chat with you.
Hey there, that is it for today's show. If you are enjoying how I work and my role as a host, you might want to follow me on social media. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just search for my name, Amantha Imba. I'm on Twitter at Amantha and I'm also on Instagram at Amantha I. How I Work is produced by Inventing with production support from Dead Set Studios. The producer for this episode was Jenna Koda, and thank you to Martin Nimba who did the audio mix and makes
everything sound better than it would have otherwise. See you next time.