It wasn’t until my late twenties that I realised how important personal finance is. I worked hard, had a good paying job and was in a great financial position. Insert a divorce, the inability to return to my amazing career full time and pretty much having to start from scratch (minus legal bills) with half the income, I kind of became pretty obsessed with personal finance and how to make it all work in my favour.
While I have experience and a fair amount of know how I’m certainly no expert. But these guys are. So I’m sharing some of the financial advice you need to hear from the gurus, the guys and gals who know this shiz inside out and are smart little cookies to boot! No boring financial advice here, these are all people I’ve listened to, taken action because of and actually enjoyed learning from.
1 – Dave Ramsey
You literally could not put a ‘financial guru’s’ round up together without including Dave. He is the godfather of the budgeting industry and has a strong and loyal following. My favourite advice from Dave Ramsey is all about his envelope system. This isn’t exactly a new system, I remember my mum doing a similar thing when we were kids to keep her budget on track. But it’s the way Dave sets it all out that makes a light bulb switch on and you realise how much sense it makes.
So the idea is that instead of always putting everything you purchase on a card, you pay for it in cash. Each week/fortnight/month or whatever pay cycle you have, you take the cash for your expenses and divide it into the appropriate envelopes. You then use this cash for your purchases, giving you the ability to keep track of how much you spend and how much money you have left.
This has been the best thing we have done! We are so much savvier with our money when we can physically see it. Brilliant. Dave also has an awesome budgeting app and a ton of resources available.
2 – Tony Robbins
Excuse me while I just go and fan girl all over Tony Robbins. If you’ve been living under a rock for the last forever and haven’t heard of him, he is pretty much a giant (physically and metaphorically) of the self help world, and if you watched any infomercials in the 90’s you surely saw him at some point.
I digress.
One of the pieces of financial wisdom that Tony shares is to make investments with the least risk for the greatest reward. Let that just sit for a minute. We get so caught up in investing big, buying investment properties, big shares in big companies, cryptocurrencies… but we focus too much on the possible return instead of the likely return.
He can explain it better:
3 – Barefoot Investor – Scott Pape
Scott is an Australian based financial advisor, which is so refreshing to see as so much financial advice is geared towards Americans and we have very different financial requirements (for example we have free healthcare and mandatory superannuation) which make for slightly different advice being given. However, there’s a lot of amazing gems that suit anyone and Scott is such an interesting person to learn from.
One of my favourite things about Scott is his drive to educate about finances. As he outlines in one of his articles, this is an area where society fails young people – we teach them how to get good grades, how to graduate with qualifications, but not how to manage their money when they start earning it.
So his advice is simple – learn how to manage your money.
4 – The Busy Budgeter – Rosemarie
Rosemarie is such a down to earth budgeter and shares her amazing budgeting and financial advice on her website, reaching and educating hundreds of thousands of people every single month. Up until January 2017, she even shared her monthly income reports publically – that’s how dedicated she is to being transparent and helping people.
But it was the advice she gives in an article about the challenges of budgeting that really stuck with me. Again, it’s something I sort of knew and had lived by, but just having someone else say ‘yes it’s okay’ made me realise that it really is okay.
Her advice is that you need to be realistic about your budget. While it’s so easy to just get all full on and decide to budget everything super tight, it’s just not realistic and you’re less likely to stick to it. You don’t have to give everything up, you just have to budget for it.
5 – Denise Duffield-Thomas
To say this woman changed my life is in no way an exaggeration. While I was getting fairly savvy with my personal finances, was rocking the budgeting and felt fairly confident, there was something missing. The one thing that just made it all come together and totally transformed my relationship with money.
My money mindset.
I didn’t even realise you could have a mindset around money until I read her book. And when I started reading her book, I didn’t put it down until I was finished. Thankfully I was on a camping trip at the time and I even ended up going home a day early because I was so motivated to put into practice all the things she explained in her book.
I got home and started decluttering (who knew the ‘things’ you have in your house are related to your money beliefs??) and started working on clearing my money blocks. For real, if there is only one person you follow when it comes to money, Denise is amazing. Because the whole mindset thing was the key to changing all of my money habits.
Personal finance and budgeting doesn’t have to be boring or only for those who feel like they can’t manage their money. Getting savvy with personal finance is smart and will help you build your wealth and build your future.