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, the podcast for millennials who want financial freedom. Welcome back to another one of our Shop Back Money diaries, where I get to sit down each and every single week with one of our She's on the Money community members and talk about their money story, their approach to cash and everything in between. This week I got a message and it went like this. I grew up in a poor migrant
family and we always struggled to make ends meet. My parents migrated from China and Malaysia and neither had the opportunity to finish high school. My sister and I were the only Asians at my school, and I only ever had hand me down clothes, With my parents unable to afford all of the normal things that kids around me had access to. My mum's family lived without electricity and hot water in rural China, and I really do feel
the strain of bridging these different worlds working now. I feel like I want to leave the opposite to the life I grew up with, but it does make me feel guilty for my parents who still live in the past. Money Diarist, welcome to the show. What a story.
Thank you so much for having me.
Oh my gosh, of course, money Darist, I'm really excited to learn more about your money story, So let's start there. Can you tell us a little bit more about your money story?
Well, I feel like for me it was a very like love hate relationship. I really loved how you know money can buy you a lot of things? Can you know can travel with it? I guess you need it
for everyday life. But on the other hand, I also felt like it brought a lot of unhappiness as well, like especially when I was growing up, like I felt we didn't have a lot of money, and so there was a lot of experiences or things that other kids seemed to have and were able to do, but I felt because we didn't have the money for it, just
felt like it was holding me back a bit. So I guess having that attitude towards money, I kind of hated it, but also wanted more of it as well, So I really wanted to earn a lot of money. So I feel like I always swing between like saving up money and not being willing to spend it, and then I'll go to like the spending like binges almost, So.
That is a beautiful place to start. I want to know what do you currently do for work and how much money do you earn.
I'm working in a hospital as a pharmacist, and I've just recently started a new job, so I think my current salary is about ninety one thousand. But we do also have to do overtime, which is not counted in that we're rostered on for weekends and public holidays, so they will just be counted as like extra overtime on top of it.
Are the overtime rates good or something that you see as a bit of a burden because you get less time.
I think they're okay, I'm actually really bad. I don't check the pacelips. I think I did do one public holiday, but I think it might be one and a half or two. I think I would prefer not to work if possible, but it is I guess expected that we do do the weekends and the public holidays, so it's just extra.
That makes absolute, especially if you're in a hospital. They don't just shut for public holidays. All right, I want to know. Next question I've got for you is what's currently your big money goal. What are you working towards.
I think in the future, like my current goal, I guess would be to get on top of my mortgage. Only just recently bought a house back in August. It was a bit of like a last minute kind of thing because my rent was going up by one hundred a week, so I was like, oh, maybe I should just buy my own place. So it would be really good to sort of get on top of the repayments.
But it's a bit hard with all the interest rates going up, so I can't really put as much money towards towards it as I wanted to, because that needs a lot of renovations. But long time, it would be nice to get like a proper house with like three bedrooms maybe and to have like a yard with a dog. Because at the moment I've bought a unit, so that would be the dream house. But yeah, I think that long term it would be nice to just have like a proper house.
I love that you're financial goal included a dog. I ten out of ten can absolutely approve of this.
I just don't think it's nice to have a dog in a unit with no backyard.
So, yeah, they do get bored, I promise you that. All right. I want to know next, do you have any investments? If so, what are they.
Yeah, so a couple of years ago, my friends and I started investing in stocks. It was pro pre COVID and yeah, so I've been slowly trying to work myself into like trying to put some money aside every couple of months, about one thousand every month, so I think at the moment it's about sixteen thousand. Unfortunately, some of my shares didn't do so well, so I kind of sold them and lost a lot of a few thousand from that.
Oh my gosh, what made you sell them? If they were down.
I think the company was just not doing very well, and I was just worried that they were going to like liquidize or like they were gonna shut down. So I was like, Oh, I might get out of it before like the come zero.
I need to know more about this. How did you pick the companies? Are we talking like small caps where the company's like really small and it was a bit of a punt a. Were we talking about big companies that maybe you were a bit anxious about. I need to know.
It was more like my friends or bought it and then they were telling me, oh, you should get on it. It's going up. And then when I bought it, it went down by over like maybe fifty percent. Yeah, it's not a blue chip, so it's I think it was a pharmaceutical company. But then I was just like, this is not looking good. This company is like prices up, it's like going down. So I just kept monitoring for the longest time, hoping you'll go up, but it just
kept going down. So I was like, I'm just gonna cut my losses and not be so risky.
Sometimes you have to do that in the investment world. But that's why I wanted a little bit more clarification because I was like, is this anxiety or is this maybe a small company that you've invested in with the hope of a really high upturn, And it sounds like that might have been it. So I want to know if you had your time again, would you still invest in them or what would you have picked instead?
If I could turn back time, I would have instead invested in something more stable and long term instead of thinking that I could get, you know, short term gains with my shares.
So you got bitten because you wanted to get rich quick. I love that.
Yeah, it's not bad. I did that a lot at the start, and then in the end I realized you have to pay capital gains tax, and then I was just like, I'm not doing that anymore. I'm just gonna invest for long term and get the dividends from that, yeah, or reinvest. So some of them I choose to reinvest the dimonands. Most of them I just get the dibenands.
Yeah.
Oh my gosh. So you've changed your investment strategy so you're a bit more stable, am I? Right?
Yeah, I just don't have time to like check it all the time.
It is a full time job.
Yeah. On a side note, one of my friends actually she tried to leave pharmacy. She was from UNI, but she went into selling stocks full time for a while and I was just so the rest of that that tried to do it, but I couldn't.
Oh my gosh, wild. I feel like, although pharmacists are smart, that's a completely different ballgame.
It is really different, all right.
I want to know you mentioned before a mortgage. Do you have any debts? If so, what are they and how much?
Yeah? So I only just bought the house in August, so it was it was four and forty K. And as a pharmacist, you get I think some banks offer loan mortgage insurance.
If you pay, you get your LMI waved.
Yeah, you get your LMI waves. So I only paid ten percent for the house.
Deposit money win. That's not the only industry that gets that. Like doctors, some different healthcare professionals and like lawyers and stuff all have access to that. So if you haven't spoken to a broker about it, I definitely would because it's a great opportunity to one save l am I, but two only have to come up with ten percent of the deposit. Instead of a twenty percent, which is a money win for everyone.
It is they accidentally put the LMI on my account at.
The end on your loan.
No.
I was like, no, I agreed to this bank because there was no LMI.
So cheeky. How did you rectify that?
Oh? I just had to call the mortgage broker, and the mortgage broker like fixed it. And I was like, thank goodness, that would be an extra twenty thousand to pay if I had to pay l AM.
I yeah, no, thank you. So you've got a mortgage, it's four hundred and forty thousand dollars. You came up with a ten percent deposit you bought in August. Do you have any other debt?
Yeah?
I do still have a really big heck step. Unfortunately, pharmacists actually don't earn a lot at the start. When I graduated, I think my starting salary as an intern was move about twenty one dollars an hour, which is probably gonna surprise a lot of people. So I didn't actually start paying off my hex.
I am surprised. I thought it would be heaps more than that.
This was back in maybe two thousand and sixteen or fifteen, so I think they've might have changed it since then, but it was pretty bad pay for a pharmacist in the community, so it's quite low.
So yeah, wow, So tell me about the career trajectory of a pharmacist. So you started as an intern and you were earning twenty one dollars an hour, and now we know that you earn about ninety one thousand dollars plus overtime and weekends and stuff like that. But what are you expecting to earn in the future. What does that look like?
So I think it like when you go to hospital. I think it is like a big pay rise for me anyway from the community. So you have different grade levels. So depending on which hospital you go to, if you're an intern, you'll start off with the lowest wage and then each year you do go up and pay about a dollar or two, so it'll be like grade one,
year two or three. So at the moment, I'm a grade two, year three, and it does go up I think until year six, and then to try to go to grade three where you get another pay rise, you maybe have to like apply for a more senior role or do like masters or some sort of research to sort of earn your way up. So yeah, it can be hard to go up though, unless you do do extra studies and stuff like that.
Yeah. Wow, it's something I had never thought about for good reason, I've never worked in pharmacy, but it's so interesting to learn about. All Right, next question I have for you. I feel like this one is something that we all know about which is a bit of a win, and that is shot back. Do you use it? If so? How? Yeah?
I definitely use it, and I think I just checked. It says I've saved like one hundred and seventy seven dollars, So I was like, wow, I love using shot back.
One hundred and seventy seven dollars. That is good. What have you been buying?
I buy a lot of things, and I think that's yeah. I was gonna say, like, for the next question.
Let's do it or I don't want to know. What is your best money?
Have it?
I feel like, in a way, the way that I was brought up by my parents was that you have to save life every single dollar every way that you can, so like always buying things on sale, like in the supermarket, and like using coupons and vouches. But now it's like a lot of that song on like apps and stuff. So I have like so many apps on my phone just to try to save money, like all the petrol apps. And there's something called Live and Pay. Live and Pay.
It's sort of like having cash back but on like restaurants like oh wow, Yes, I use that all the time. And I refer friends to that app and you get referral bonuses. So I've had like I think one hundred and forty dollars from referrals from too friends.
Oh my gosh, money ween.
It is because it's like free money and you're gonna buy that food anyway, might as well get money back from it, like you get like ten percent back.
Yeah, love.
Yeah, I have a lot of different things like that should try and save money. And also the credit card. I know credit cards might seem bad. I always buy the ones that have you know, bonus points and you know sometimes like they give you vouchers as well if you sign up for a year. So I use that to like get flights back to go back home to visit my family. And yeah, I'll always pay it off as soon as I can. I don't wait till the end of the month. Whenever I have money, I just pay off the credit cards.
So you just transfer it straight away. I feel like there are a number of ways to use credit cards really responsibly. Feel like there's this idea in the community that I am a thousand percent against them, and I am if you are irresponsible with money, but it sounds like you're not and you're just using it to get all of the rewards in the bonuses, which I mean, I can't blame you if you're smart with it in saying that I'm not smart with it, so I don't trust myself with it, and I won't be doing it,
but I'm impressed that you do. I don't know.
I have spent a lot of money this month trying to say, like buy things for the renovations next month in my unit, and I just feel like I've been spending a lot so not good.
All right, let's flip the narrative, then, what is your worst money have it?
I have this thing where like sometimes I have trouble sleeping at night, and I always play with my phone and I start buying things online, which is really bad. So I have been known to like buy like a soda stream once when I was feeling really like unwell, so I don't know why. I don't even drink soda, but I bought a soda stream online. And the other day I bought a massage, like something to put on your chair for a massage.
Oh, like a chair massage.
Yeah, I just bought it because I couldn't sleep, so I just have my phone and I just bought it online.
Like this is a really good idea. So you're good at impulse purchasing.
Yeah, it's not good.
Let's ask the last question before we get to a really quick break. I want to know what grade would you give your money habits if I forced you to give yourself a grade.
I feel like it would be a C minus. A C minus just because I don't feel like I budget. Like I used to be really good, Like I used to have this app called pocket Expenses, and I was really diligent, like keeping all my receipts and like putting an on through that app and then working out how much money I spend. But these days, because I have the credit card, I feel like I just spend and spend and I don't even know what comes out. And I feel like that's why I need to start bludgeting,
so that I know where my money goes. Yeah, that's why I feel like it's C minus smart.
I feel like maybe that credit card isn't as financially savvy as you might have originally thought it was. But let's talk about that after this quick break. All right, money diarist, we are back and you have a super interesting money story. I want to hear a little bit more about it from your perspective. When you wrote into us and you were talking, you said that you grew up in a poor migrant family and you always struggled
to make ends meet. What does that mean and how has that, I guess impacted you growing up having parents that are both from China and Malaysia. Like you said before that you travel back to see your family a lot. Like what type of financial pressures are on you now as an adult as well? I just have so many questions.
So my parents live interstate, so they're not overseas. Still expensive, yes it is, but yeah, I moved over to where I'm now for work. When we were growing up. I have actually two siblings for older sister and a younger brother. So when they first moved to Australia, we didn't actually have our own house. So my parents and my sister.
We were living with my grandparents and also my uncle, so it was like a shared house, I guess, and unfortunately my mom had to cook for everyone, so I think she got really sick as well because she was just really stressed. So she was working looking after two kids and then cooking for like my grandparents and my uncle. I can't really remember a lot of that, but my mom always tells me how hard it was. She had I think a lot of health conditions because of all
the stress. And it was only later when my grandparents helped them to buy their first house, like they had half of the house, so it wasn't even our house. So yeah, I just kind of like grew up in an environment where don't really expect pocket money. It was more so like if family members gave us money, we were to have money. And it was a lot of
you know, we couldn't afford new school clothes. It was always like we had cousins and older cousins and they would always give us their clothes and even though it didn't fit. They were a lot bigger and taller than us. We couldn't afford like, you know, proper new clothes. So my mom would try to buy us clothes that looked like the school uniform, but it wasn't really. She'd just do the same color and we'll just try to like
pretend it is the school uniform. One thing that really stood out to me, I think was in high school, both my sister and I we hosted exchange students from Japan, so we had this sort of sister program between Japan and my high school. So there's also a chance for us to go to Japan, and I really wanted to go. I was really keen to learn Japanese and I was studying Japanese in high school too, but unfortunately my parents said, oh, we don't have enough money. We can't afford to send
you there. And then I just remember being really angry. I was really angry with my parents, and my sister sat me down and was like, you can't be angry, Like, this is the money that our parents earned. They're allowed to spend it, you know, however they want. And yeah, I remember like they bought a new TV not long after, and I was just really angry about that. I was like, oh,
so you rather like have a TV? And then yeah, I just felt like it affected me because I felt like there's a lot of things I felt I was missing out on. I felt like that was maybe one of them.
Do you think that that anger came from maybe not fully comprehending their circumstances, Like was money discussed growing up or was it just something that you knew you didn't have enough of but it wasn't really a popular topic of conversation in your home.
Well, my mom and dad, like I guess they always complain if they felt like we were wasting money. They didn't really know much. I think their education in terms of like stocks and stuff wasn't that good, so like they didn't have knowledge about how to invest or anything. And I only my dad was actually working. My mom's ever really had a proper job where she gets any like super or any thing. It was always you know,
cash only sort of work that she did. Like it was a lot of like helping out with like family at like making dumplings or cleaning the hotels, so none of that. She didn't know how to you know, invest the money or anything. It was always about trying to save money, so like trying to cut back on cost, like turning off the lights when you walk out the room,
not taking long showers. You know, like everything was sort of about like, you know, you know how to reduce money, but you don't know how to Like we didn't have much knowledge about how to save money or things like that. So I just felt like, yeah, financially, I've never been really good at like money until I was older, and then you know, I started learning about what super is and like stocks and stuff. It was all from friends and like podcasts like this.
So oh, I love that I've been a part of it. But I want to know at what part in your I guess journey or what part in your life did you realize wow, like I can actually earn a fair bit of money, because at the end of the day, ninety one thousand dollars is a lot of money to be earning, especially when you contrast it with the family that you have overseas and the money that your parents were able to earn. Like, at what point were you like, oh my gosh, like I have a very comfortable wage.
How do you feel about that? What does that look like for you?
To be honest, I still feel like really anxious about money, Like I still feel like I don't earn it off, or maybe I'm just not good at money because I even though it is a lot of money. I don't know if other people feel this way when you first start working. Like when I started working as soon as I graduated high school and went to start UNI, I felt like I was earning a lot at the start, just doing like a part time job in a cafe.
But as I sort of like went into full time work and I was slowly growing up, I always feel like I don't earn enough. And I don't know if this is just the way that I've been brought up. I just still feel like it's never enough, and I don't know if other people feel this way. I just feel like, even though the money might be going up, I just feel like I'm never have enough money or I'm not saving enough.
I always feel like that that is usually a very good indicator that you need a better cash flow system. My love so that you feel super in control of it and you know you're working towards your goals and you know that what you're doing at the moment is good enough. Because I feel like that really ends up impacting your confidence. Do you feel like that that is a part of your story as well? Like hearing you talk about it like, oh, I just don't feel like
it's good enough. And before you raided yourself as CNUS, but in August you bought a house and you've got like sixteen thousand dollars invested. I feel like you are definitely on the right path and having no personal debt, Like you are not in a bad situation. But you seem to be quite self critical, if I do say so without knowing you too deeply.
At this point, I was, yeah, thinking about that. Like a few years ago, I did actually want to get into medicine because I felt like maybe that would be something that would earn me more money. So I did try doing like the medical exams a few times, like it's called gamsat, but unfortunately I just didn't get in. And you know, sometimes I do feel like if I was brought up in you know, like a more wealthy family, like, would that have meant that I could increase my chance
of getting to medicine. I felt like I would. Maybe I wasn't smart enough, or because I went to a public school, maybe that's why I couldn't get into medicine and I had to do pharmacy instead. Because yeah, I know it's bad, but I do sometimes compare myself to one of my cousins who comes from a wealthy family. Both parents are lawyers, and they she just got into
medicine straight out of high school. And I just felt like the way that we were both cousins, but we grew up in such different worlds, And I just don't know if that actually affects how, you know, how confident I am and like, you know what I achieve in life?
A bit of a like a bit of a deep question.
Yeah, I don't know.
No, It's interesting to have that conversation because I think, looking at you, I'm so impressed. I'm just like, oh my gosh, she's a pharmacist in a hospital. She has this really great income, like ninety one grand. She's bought a house, like you must be really good at saving to be able to, you know, as you said before, on a whim by a house because your rent was going up like that is epic. To have given yourself the financial freedom to be able to not only afford that,
but be able to seize that opportunity. And then to say, oh, yeah, I invest in stocks like I might have made a few mistakes, but also I've got a really good amount of savings and your saving or investing, sorry, about one thousand dollars a month. To me, all of this sounds so impressive, but I guess I guess the thing I'm really getting out of this Money Diary is that from the outside looking in, that might be the case, but that doesn't mean that on the inside that's how it feels.
And I think that there are probably a lot of people in our community that would compare themselves to you and be like, oh my gosh, money Diarist is doing so well. I wish I could X y Z because often the grass is always greener in a way, and I think that we forget to water our own sometimes. I want to know a little bit about your mum and dad's family. They're still overseas, They're still you know, living in a very different world to you. How does that impact you now? Do you see the family often?
Do you talk to them like? Is there a bridge between those two worlds?
So I should explain that my dad's family is mostly in Australia, so they moved here first, and then it's my mom's family that's still in China, so all of the family's in China. To be honest, I haven't actually seen my mom's side of the family for so long, so it's probably been a good eight years. I reckon when my sister got married. I think we went to China then, But yeah, every time I went when I was a younger kid, I always felt like we had
it so good in Australia. So even though I felt like in Australia we were not doing very well, we're really poor, but when we went to China, I actually felt like I was really privileged, to be honest, Like they don't even have flushing toilets in China. Everything's like a hole in the ground well in my grandparents' house. And yeah, back then, they didn't even have a shower, so you had to boil water and then just shower in a bucket. And yeah, it was just really different,
like the lifestyle there. I felt it was very rural. But I feel like my mom grew up very happy though, so she's very good with like not having much and you know, like cooking everything from scratch and stuff like that. I guess she's very used to it. For me, it was very different. I can kind of see why she's always saving money and she's you know, like eating food that might be off and I would like refuse to eat it because I just feel like it's past his
due date, like it's not safe. But she would be just like, oh no, it's fine, just cut it off. And I guess that just comes from a someone who's you know, experienced even worse, Like she came from a place that was even worse than how it was when she moved to Australia. So for her, like Australia was really really good, even though they started with like, you know,
minimal income, like just doing odd jobs. Yeah, I think I might have mentioned before, like she's taken us to a few jobs when we were younger, so we used to follow her to like the hotel for cleaning and sometimes she's so's clothes for people, and yeah, just doing dumplings and cleaning houses. So she worked really hard, which is yeah, very admirable.
So I love that. And how are your parents today, Obviously it's been a while since you were young and it's schooled and a bit grumpy at them for not being able to go on exchange. How are they doing now?
Well, I think my dad's actually semi retired, so I don't think if I talked much about my dad, but he Yeah, he did a lot of odd jobs and when he came to Australia as well. I think he worked in my uncle's restaurant for a bit, and then he was picking apples for a bit, and then finally he did a tape course and it went into gardening.
I think he got a job as a gardener and a disability hospital, and then they didn't need that many gardeners, so they ended up putting him inside the hospital as a sort of like a I don't know, a nursing assistant. So yeah, he was there for thirty years, which is a really long time.
It's a government job, so yeah, we love government jobs and the benefits they attract.
I think back then it was really good. Now I'm working in government, but it's not as good. I feel like they don't offer full time contracts. Everything is like one year contract or so, yeah, unfortunately it's not as stable as before, but it used to be really good. So he got offered a package a couple of years ago, so he took the package and now he's not working,
so he's at the time of retirement yet either. So they're kind of like in a limbo, which is kind of makes me worried because I'm like, what if they run out of money? They do do your like a little bit of letterboxing, like you know, advertising, like junk vowels into boxes. Yeah, we used to do that. We used to help them, and I used to hate it because they made us go and like walk around and deliver junk fowl at nighttime. I used to hate it, but they still do it to this day.
So it's a good way to get cash in the door. And I think the thing I admire especially about my grant families is just their work ethic. Like I feel like there's no such thing as being too good for a job or you know, putting in the time, energy and effort, Like it's just honestly so admirable. And I know that as a young kid, you're probably like this sucks, but I'm sure that it has instilled in you a beautiful work ethic as well, which obviously makes sense given
you are a pharmacist today, Like that is epic. But I'm sure, absolutely certain that they would be so proud of you and who you've become to I hope, so, oh, I know, so I feel like.
I have it a lot better. But yeah, I do feel like I should be more grateful for like having you know, education in Australia and you know, because they never got the opportunity to do any like, not even to finish high school.
Yeah wow.
Yeah.
Unfortunately they're not working. Both of them aren't working full time. They just do the letter boxing at the moment and just they're hanging out for retirement. So I think it's a couple of years away until my dad can get access to a super. Unfortunately, my mom didn't actually have a super because she's never had like a proper job,
so I hope that I can support her in the future. Unfortunately, I live into States, so I don't know if she wants to move over with me, but they do have their house down.
So it's sweet that you want to though. I love that. It is honestly so sweet that you're like, I hope I can help her. I don't even know if she wants to live with me, but I would love that. It's literally the best. Oh my gosh, money direst Unfortunately, that is all we have time today, so thank you
so much for joining us. I feel like this chat has been really wholesome and really eye opening, and I just want you to be more proud of yourself and what you've achieved, and stop comparing yourself because they think that you're doing an epic job.
Thank you, thanks for having me.
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