Hello, my name's Santasha Nabananga Bamblet. I'm a proud yr
the Order KERNI Whoalbury and a waddery woman. And before we get started on She's on the Money podcast, I would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of which this podcast is recorded on a wondery country, acknowledging the elders, the ancestors and the next generation coming through as this podcast is about connecting, empowering, knowledge sharing and the storytelling of you to make a difference for today and lasting impact for tomorrow.
Let's get into it. She's on the Money. She's on the Money.
Hello, and welcome to She's on the Money podcast for millennials who want financial freedom and who love girl Math. No, we do not, I personally you love girl math, love girl Math.
We canceling girl Math. Carry on?
Okay, Well, we'll see by the end of the episode. My name, of course is Beckside and with me is Victoria Divine.
Yes, I guess that's as a spoiler of the show. Today we are talking about girl math, but in a different way.
My friend Ah.
Obviously, after the break, we will tell you about how to flip the script and make girl math work for you and your investment goals. But hmmm, let's start at to start, Beck.
Let's do it.
So for the uninitiated, what is girl math?
Girl math?
It started as a TikTok trend actually, and it is a little strategy for justifying your larger or unnecessary purchases. Beck love it so at its core from my perspective, because we all have opinions, doesn't mean I need to see them. But at its called girl math is a send up of the patriarchal stereotype that wove don't understand how money works, can't be trusted with it, Beck, which obviously is going to rub me the absolute wrong way from the shit go. But sometimes jokes can work to
reinforce stereotypes. And I guess that's why it rubs me the wrong way because at.
It's collbec girl math is sexist, has all get out.
Boy math doesn't exist because it's not actually funny, Like it's true. You know, I said, ha hah, my husband justifies his golf habit by boymthing it away. You'd be like, what that doesn't make sense, But girl mouth it's funny because women we're useless at money right, were dum dumbs.
Obviously, as a culture.
We just accept that men's decisions are inherently valid and reasonable. So therefore boymouth it just isn't funny, it's not comedy, effec. But the phenomenon of girl mouth really does tell you a lot about the interplay between.
Gender, money, and emotions.
And I think that that is a really good episode for a podcast. So I took the girl math trend off TikTok and I popped it in to your ears my friends, and I thank you for it personally, and I'm sure I think it'll be fun because we've got opinions, beck, I, can you give us some examples of girl math? Okay, So if you've got cash back for something, Beck, So you.
Broke a CRISP fifty.
Dollars pineapple and they gave you a twenty dollar note pack, that cash back free money.
Lots of people see it that way.
If I paid with my credit card and then someone gave me cash for their share, I basically made money. If my favorite stores got to twenty percent discount, Lululemon, cough it up, I'm losing money, Beck if I don't buy what I want, because like that's an opportunity since me checks out if something costs three hundred and forty five dollars, beck, we round it down to three hundred dollars when telling our partners.
Currently, all sounds right up my alley.
That's girl math.
Yes's the crux of it, my friend, I really really enjoy.
This, and I think I'm going to really enjoy this episode.
If it's spicy. It is not even spicy.
It's me just being mad because I'm like, sit down, Yeah, that's fair. So how does the patriarchy play out when it comes to what women earn and how we spend in our perceptions around managing money?
All right, so let's start off with the cold hard facts. Australia's national gender pay gap right now as of today is thirteen percent steep. As of May twenty twenty three, the full time adult weekly ordinary time earnings across all industries and all occupations was nineteen hundred and thirty eight dollars and thirty cents back for men and sixteen hundred and eighty six dollars for women. So for every dollar on average that a man earns, a woman earns eighty
seven cents. That is equivalent to two hundred and fifty two dollars thirty less each and every single week that women earning comparison to men over the course of the year. That adds up to thirteen thousand, one hundred and nineteen dollars and sixty cents. And if I extrapolate that out, and let's pretend hypothetically, if you had an additional two hundred and fifty two dollars thirty each and every single week back to invest you'd be more than a million dollars better off in retirement.
Wow wow wow wow wow.
Okay, when you put it like that exactly, and if I really wanted to extrapolate it out over the course of your lifetime, it's more than six million dollars. So that's six million reasons why we need to care a lot more about the gender pay gap, because that's cooked. You know what you can do with six million dollars?
What can you do?
I can't even tell you because there's just endless amounts of things that you could do with that level of freedom up absolutely exactly. So we know from our community that women have lower financial self efficacy, so the belief in their own abilities compared to men, and that's why she's on The money exists and yet women, you know what we do. We control eighty percent of the consumer spend globally. Wow, so we control the money, but we don't get to make it.
What the heck? And true?
That seems very interesting, Well the heck and I hate it.
I do hate that. Actually, I see what you're saying. I can see where the arroage is coming from. Now, V, let's go for a really quick break and ready, Oh my god, I know, I know, but I decided we will have a look at how to flip the script and make girl Math work for your investment goals.
I'm ready, let's go.
Let's go. OKAYV, we are back.
And I'm very excited about this because it's now time to flip the script.
It is, if it even is possible, how can we make girl math work for us?
All Right? So obviously I'm a bit salty because I feel like all these videos are just I don't know, you see it, and they're like, oh, I girl math my way into this expensive bikini for this holiday that I'm going on, and if I buy it now, like I'm not spending the money on my holiday, and like I could wear it after my holiday and you just go, I know that you will have a better time, you know,
feeling good about yourself on the holiday. But we don't need to actually flush the idea of making sound financial decisions down the toilet, Like, Beck, let's just say you're going on a holiday and you really want to buy a bikini.
It's two hundred bucks.
Why don't you just make that decision in a financially responsible way, like let's have a look at your by can you afford it? And you're like, go, yeah, it can be. They go, great, well, you don't need to justify it. You don't need to actually go, oh well, actually, ABC and D adds up. So therefore, this bikini technically only costs me a dollar, Like there's a lot to it. And obviously girl math is a combination of three different principles.
So the first is cost per war, which we've talked about before, because I think that everybody in general should be more conscious about what they're purchasing, Like you're wearing a real cool brown T shirt today, but like I'm sure when you bought it you were like, oh, I'm probably going to get a heap of wear out of this, Like it's the same as the dress I'm wearing today. I'm like, great, Like it's stretchy, it works, it's comfortable. I'm going to purchase these because it's going to get
a lot of wear. I think we should all have that cap on when making purchases because it's just the financially responsible way to do it. But this concept of cost per wear, that is the cost of an item divided by how many times you use it. Obviously lower is the cost of wear, but girl Math kind of takes it to the next level. So, like, you know, if you're buying a tote bag, obviously you can use
it for lots of different things. But I think that it justifies unnecessary purchases when we put it into the girl Math I guess phrase right, or into the girl Math realm, because you go, okay, well maybe you did need a tote bag and if that's the case, well let's justify it and buy one that aligns to your budget and your needs and how often you're going to
use it. And maybe back you don't buy the bright red one because you can get less aware out of it, like you might not take it to work is often because it doesn't match your outfit.
Maybe a more neutral option would work.
Yeah, but like if you need to buy the tote, it should be in your budget, Like it shouldn't be like justified as basically being free because I'm going to use it so often, do you know what I mean?
Like, yeah, see, we are smarter than this.
The second of the three economic principles that I guess make up girl Mouth is sunk cost.
So sunk cost fallacy.
It means that the money that's been spent can't ever be recovered. So basically, if it's left my account, I've spent it, it's gone. So like if you've got to funnd Beck on the brown top because you decided you no longer liked it, and they paid it out in cash, you're like, that's free money, free money, Like that's a really bad terminology. Obviously, if you get that money back, it probably should just go back into your bank account. But instead you'll go, oh my gosh, I'm going to
use this for drinks on Friday nights. It's free money, and I've got it in cash and I've already spent it.
Does that make sense?
That makes sense. That sounds very.
Close to home.
And I was like the herd concept is prospective costs, so that basically translates to future costs that might be avoided if you take action today. Okay, so the girl math example there is if a coat I want is sixty five percent off over summer, because that sometimes happens, buying it means that I avoid the future cost of waiting until winter when it's back to full price. So that's quite smart, yes, But people are justifying purchasing things just because they're cheap. Hey, oh my gosh, I'll wear
this in winter. But then when winter rolls around, you're like, that's not in fashion. I'm not gonna wear that. I just picked that up because it was a good brand and because was cheap and full stop, end of story, that's it. But like, you're not actually saving yourself any money.
Yes, it might even be spending more because by the time winter comes around again, you've got a whole different set of little.
Exactly like you might not be into brown T shirts anymore.
There.
So I think it's again going back to this idea that women aren't smart at money, when we are. At the end of the day, everyone can understand money. It's literally just a language. You haven't learnt yet if you don't get it, Like you speak perfectly fluent English, Beck, But do you know what? There are millions of people around the world who can't speak English who are learning English currently, And you wouldn't expect them to pick up my shoes on the money book yesterday and go, oh,
I totally am able to read this. Yes, they would start with the basics of Hi, my name's Beck.
How are you like? Do you know what I mean? When you're learning a new language? Where do you start from the top?
Baby?
But you like to.
Start with how to count from one to ten? You start with hello, You start with sick phrases, You start with how to order a coffee in a different language. You don't start with fully understanding what an ETF is and the difference between an ETF and a managed fun Do you sure? Because that would be overwhelming and ridiculous. But somehow we put this pressure on ourselves to fully understand that when you don't even know how to run a banking and cash flow system for yourself.
Sure, So, like, push all of that off the table. Women are not done with money. We just haven't been taught.
Exactly right, Fee, I like that really?
So angry.
Yeah, that was a real bike drop moment.
Oh thanks, So how to pick up the mic again? We're not done this podcast?
Sure actually does people back up?
Don't drop that.
How can we flip the script on girl Math and make it genuinely work for us to support our investment goal?
Genius or I think it's genius. But if you can budget for a late you best believe that. The entire time I was in the US, I was drinking my iced oat milk pumpkin spice latte every single day and I basically girl Math my way there. I'm like, it's a little treaty treat because I deserve it, right, tot, Yes, it's the thing in Australia. I knew you were gonna ask you because Starbucks is here and they do do
the pumpkin spice range. I don't know if it's shop now it's November, because it only was like, you know, kind of full kind of Halloween.
But it's really good.
But if you can go on Math your way and you can budget for a latte, you can budget to invest. Yes, if you can afford to buy a shakeaway coffee, I promise you can afford to invest and you can become a passive investor.
You don't have to be super active.
You don't have to be a share trader at your computer till all hours of the night.
My friend, that's good. Snow, Actually, so explain this to me. What is passive investing really sexy?
Sit down? Are you ready?
I'm ready. It's this concept where you invest consistently but you don't have to actively manage your investments. Yes, I know it's mainly how I invest when I'm not being a little bit spicy, but it's picking an investment that might be an ETF for a managed fund, or something that you don't have to actively manage because someone else is doing it on your Bhe great, ten out of ten.
But the idea would be that each and every single month you would just dump a certain amount into an investment and it just goes straight in there and does its thing and creates your wealth. And if you have decided to reinvest your dividends, you would have ticked a box to say, dividend reinvestment plan, please tick, which is coming on shares is actually which is very very exciting,
but you would tick that box. The money that your money makes would then be reinvested to make more money and you don't have to do anything.
You just get sent a little report.
Come accounting time, come, you know, end of financial year, and your accountant's like, oh, can I have that report that your shared trading platform gave you? And you're like, you, no worries, So it's just in my emails. Wow, I'm an investor.
Now there you go.
I'm a big dog.
Can we learn anything from cost per wear calculation?
I mean yeah, you could calculate the cost per war and then you could calculate compound interest. So like if you invested a dollar today, obviously it's not that sexy to think about because you're like, eh, tomorrow, i'll check. But what would that look like if you invested a dollar today and then when you retire, how much is
that dollar going to be worth? Because we know and I've said this example a million times on the podcast, and I keep reiterating it because I actually want just one example to stick in people's heads where they go, oh, that one makes sense as opposed to giving six million others where in the moment you go, that makes sense. But you can't tell your friend at brunch and look smarter. So if you started at the age of twenty one, which none of us are anymore. And to be honest,
we're in a cost of living crisis. So this is all aspirational. So Beck, I'm not putting pressure on you to find five hundred bucks each and every single month because that's cooked, right, but it's a good example to
help you understand how to create wealth. Right. So if you took five hundred dollars each in every single month from the time that you were twenty one years old, and you invested that in the share market, if you have invested it with an average rate of return of seven and a half percent, by the time you retire, you'll have an additional one point two million dollars in your investment portfolio.
That's very success.
It could be completely passive, like you could just transfer it out and not think about it for a really long time. Yeah, but when it comes to cost per wear, look how much additional money you're getting because if you'd saved that money, like if you'd saved five hundred dollars each and every single month instead of investing it, Beck, you'd only have two hundred and forty thousand dollars over the same period of time. That's a million dollars worth of free money.
That's some girl math.
That's some girl math. That's the girl math. We're talking about. How money is girl math.
If you think that the money in your wallet is free money because it's not in your bank account, my friend, let me show you real free money, not just the money that you earned and then you.
Spent legitimate money.
Put your money over here.
You will end up with a million dollars more than what you would have if you hadn't done it.
Wow, I kind of want a piece of that.
I gotta say, I'm going to get you investing. Honestly, I'm going to give it another six months and then you'll have an investment portfolio and it's going to be the sexiest.
Thing in the entire world.
Thank you, Val, I'm very excited about it. Okay, So here's one that resonates with me. You did speak before about prospective costs and the idea of hitting up sales now to save money in the future.
Again, like, it's not the worst idea, is it.
Yeah, that's kind of like what I do.
I think we need to just keep our heads screwed on when it comes to spending, right, So, all of that. Wieling dealing and hunting for a bargain has some similarities to I guess portfolio theory, like how many times I don't know if you've done this, but like, let's pretend there's a dress I want to buy.
It's really expensive. It's five hundred dollar dress.
You best believe I am gonna try the dress on be like yep, okay, I really really want this, but I'm not spending five hundred dollars on it. I'm going to go home and going to google it. You're going to see when it came out, don't we reckon? It's going to go on sale soon. I'm not sure. I'm going to see what other retailers have it. Do they have like a price match or a guarantee or something? Are they cheaper? Once I found it at a price
point that I want to buy it at. You best believe I'm going to be going on shot back and I'm going to be making sure I get my cash back. O. Yes, believe that I'm going to make sure that I have just it with my flybys if I can to get some extra points, right, Like how smart are we when it comes to purchasing dresses. But then we're like, oh, I don't even know what to do when it comes to an investment portfolio. Sure, Like it's because you've never
done it. Do you know it's just as easy, Like it is just as easy to go online and understand what an ETF gets up to and how it works, and go, oh, how am I going to get the best return for my money? It's all there in plain English. I promise you just have to start looking for it. But you're gonna think it's overwhelming because you've never looked for it, right, Like, do you remember the day you discovered the iconic dot com dot a? You You were like,
what the heck can? I didn't even know this website existed? And now it was like their.
Mecca for clothes.
Yes, very truck.
I remember the days when I had to like look for clothes individually on individual retailers' websites. Like the world is changing, my friends, And I guess there is a method of choosing investments to maximize expected returns and minimize risk without it being overwhelming. I promise it's not too hard. But you can evaluate every single purchase and how it
contributes to like your shopping portfolio. You could say, so if you're a girl math shopper, you could essentially become like a shopping portfolio manager.
I just don't see why you couldn't.
Yes, you've already got those skills analyzing it and going all right, well if I plug this shop back thing in here and do this, and if I wait for this particular day, there's going to be a sale or there's going to be an increased amount of shop back cash rewards, Like we're smart. Yeah, you are so savvy. Yeah, if you can do that, my friend, you can pick an ETF totally.
That is a transferable skill. That's really one hundred percent.
But we've talked about before the ways that micro investing platforms make it easier to invest. What are some things that platforms are currently doing.
Honestly, there's six million things that different investing portfolios are doing. I've said before that I like micro investing platforms because they kind of like the gateway drug of the investing world, right, Like they're the one that you feel most comfortable taking for the first time, and you go, all right, well, that's not too bad. All my friends are doing it.
It's all managed for you, like you can see the ebbs and the flows of the market, Like you don't have to put up a massive amount of money to begin with. I obviously think that micro investing, and I've said this before, it's not for long term. Like from my perspective, micro investing is to get foot in the water and see what's going on and get comfortable with
it and start to understand the market. But my understanding would be that you would then graduate to a larger platform, sure, because it's going to be the platform that you ultimately create wealth on. And up until this point, there hasn't been many share trading platforms that have enabled you to use small amounts of money to invest for the first time.
It's kind of like they were like the Gateway because you could invest with like five or ten dollars, whereas bigger platforms would go, oh, we'll beck the minimum investment amounts five hundred and you'd be like, well, I don't want to put my life savings on a platform when I haven't even dipped my toe in the water in
this investing world, Like what the heck? So micro investing platforms kind of were that bridging the gap, But now other shared trading platforms are kind of catching up, going, hey, our consumers really want that micro investing platform experience without having to change platforms later. And that's where a platform like shares is coming because they do all of that. And I'm not just plugging shares Is because I work with them. I'm literally looking at it going, hey, here's
a really great option if this is what you're looking for. Sure, So there's lots of different things. Obviously, shares Is enable you to invest with a really low amount of money. They want to give the same opportunity that someone with five million dollars has to someone with five dollars to create wealth, and I think that that is a beautiful strategy. But they're implementing things like automatic dividend reinvestment plans, which we think is really sexy. They have roundups, which a
lot of microinvesting platforms do. The two most popular micro investing platforms in our community are Raise and Spaceship. We have done episodes on this, so please go back and listen to that because I'm not going to get into the semantics of the two different investing platforms, but essentially, Rais invests in different risk profiles and alignance and ETF to you whereas Spaceship is more of a managed fund.
If that's not making any sense, I did a whole episode on what micro investing platforms do, how they work, and how they're structured. But there's just lots of different options, and I think that if you can start investing with a small amount of money, you can use something like a roundup. So beck, every time you buy a coffee, it might be like, let's pretend you're not buying it England are, so it's not six dollars fifty seven dollars. Right,
Let's pretend your coffee with six dollars fifty this morning. Sure, every time your bank saw that transaction of six dollars fifty on your phone, it would automatically round that purchase off to seven dollars and invest fifty cents for you. So you're consistently investing with your everyday purchases, but you don't really feel it because like, what's fifty cents when you're already spending six dollars fifty.
That's a good idea.
So like is coincidental investing? Yes, also automating. So if you can automate your investments and go all right, well, I can't be trusted.
Let's be honest.
I'm Victoria, Like, I have to have everything automated, otherwise it doesn't work. So I have to make sure that each and every single month and I'm investing, it's just direct debited from my account. I've set up an auto transfer that my investment amount goes straight into my investment account. But it's every single month. And if that feels like a little bit too much, then go all right, Well,
I don't want to do it every month. They want to do it every week, or maybe do a lower amount than what you can and top it up every month. But I think everyone can actually go map their way to wealth, and you know, microinvesting platforms and share trading investing platforms are actually really helpful nowadays and not nearly as terrifying as they used to be. I promise, Like their user interfaces just makes sense. You don't even need a computer anymore. You can do it all via your
phone with a beautiful app. Like I just think that if my friends, you can strategize to justify a dress that you're gonna wear once, you can absolutely strategize to be an investor.
A men sis, I love that. I want a great place to leave it for today.
I think that's a good place to leave it, because otherwise I'm going to start another feminist rant, and you want that from me today.
I kind of want that, but we will save that for off, Mike.
We will all right, have the most beautiful week, my friends.
We will see you on Friday. Bye, guys.
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