$30,000 In debt.

That's where this story starts.

Sure, it ends with passive income and travel photos from Spain and Thailand, but it started by staring at a massive financial hole and thinking, how on earth do we get out of this?

Emma Healy is someone who you might know now from sharing her amazing frugal living and investing insights over at mumsmoney Co nz.

And that comes from cracking the code with her own money.

Gamifying, paying off a mountain of debt so that she could actually stick with it.

Repurposing that system for new goals, to design a new life that includes long term family travel, investing and a plan to retire early with her kids.

What's possible if we just start to just maybe question what?

Why do I think it's so normal to spend as much as I spend?

That was really the start.

And then I started to get quite obsessed with it once that debt was.

Gone, that was when it got interesting.

I'm going to be first generation rich and my kids are going to be the ones that benefit from that.

But I have to figure everything out for myself.

And rather than a life of deprivation, it's allowed her to take her family on a year of amazing travels across Europe, the us South, Southeast Asia.

Liquidating that fund that we liquidated was the way that we got to travel.

We didn't sell a house, so having access to liquid funds is so important.

So welcome to Making Sense.

It's the podcast for people who want financial freedom without giving up their coffee.

I'm Frances Cook, a financial journalist and fellow financial freedom seeker who makes money.

Simple for you today is how slaying your financial monsters can lead to a life that you just never thought possible.

This episode of Making Sense is supported by Odoo, the all in one solution to make running your business smoother and more affordable.

Go to odoo.com that's o-double o.com for more.

Emma, welcome to the podcast.

I feel like I've been following you online for such a long time, so it's a delight to get you in here.

And you started off very different from where you are now.

You started off $30,000 in debt.

So what was that moment like when you thought, this isn't good and I want to make a bit of a change?

I guess I sort of felt like a bit of a stuff up.

I'd moved to Australia, so I was 23 or 24.

I moved to Australia when I was 21 and everyone moves to Australia for the money and I had put myself in a worse financial position by moving to Australia, because I had enjoyed my life so much that I'd got into debt and spent more than I earned.

And when you're living in a country that is not your own, you can't just move back to Mum and Dad's, you know, you got to continue to pay your own bills.

And so there was a moment when I went in to do my tax return, and I did not have enough money to pay my tax bill, and I had to go and get a personal loan to pay for my tax bill.

So after bursting into tears in front of the accountant like an absolute child, I was just in total mess, and I didn't know what to do.

So I had to go to the bank and ask them for a personal loan to pay my tax.

And I actually realized that there was really no reason for me to be spending the way I was or for me to be in the position I was because I was earning okay money, but I was just spending so much more.

And I also wanted to travel.

So I'd moved to Sydney, and I was living with a whole bunch of backpackers of friends who were all traveling Australia, and they could all go and do these amazing trips, and I couldn't afford it because I was just drinking everything I earned and spending it on handbags.

So it was.

Yeah, so there was this time when I was like, okay, if I want to have the life I came here for and to go and experience the world and even just see more of Australia than Bondi, then I needed to get myself, get my stuff together.

And, yeah, so, yeah, I knuckled down and did that.

Which sounds easy, but it was not an easy process.

Isn't that often the way, though?

I feel like so much of this with money is it's things that you say you need to do this, that, and the other.

And it often sounds very simple.

If it was actually that simple to do it, we'd all be fine.

This podcast wouldn't exist.

I'd be doing something else.

It's the doing it and the doing it regularly that's hard, right?

Yeah, absolutely.

I'm actually thankful that I had that period of debt because it triggered everything that came after.

So if I hadn't had all this debt to pay back, I wouldn't have gone and got three jobs.

Like, so I was working an office job, and then I would work at JB hi Fi on late nights and weekends, Saturday and Sunday, and then I'd also do bar work.

What happened is I had, all of a sudden, quite a lot of extra Income coming in, but I was putting all of it.

Well, no, no, not quite all of it, 90% of it into debt reduction.

When I was starting to pay back debt, I couldn't spend any more money, so I had to stop going out, which was really hard because everyone I lived with and, you know, they all still went out partying and I was just like, okay.

So I hung out at the library a lot, in the aisles of the.

In the personal finance aisles, just reading every book I could come across.

Now, this was sort of 2004 to 2005, 2006, so there was not content online, but there were a lot of books and a lot of them were about frugal living and cutting spending.

And I found this amazing book called How I Lived For a Year On a Pound a Day.

She just made this book of this challenge that she did to live on one pound a day, other than her rent and her very basic food.

Okay, so rent and food weren't included.

They weren't included.

Basically what it was is she was in a very similar situation to me.

So she was.

When she actually had this epiphany that she was going to stop spending money, she was in the pub and all her friends were going, how are you going to do that?

What about someone's birthday?

How are we going to go on this trip?

Blah, blah, blah.

And she agreed to it on the Saturday night when she was a bit tipsy.

And then she woke up on the Sunday morning going, oh, I can't wait to have a big greasy breakfast down the pub.

And then she went, oh, my God, what have I agreed to?

And she just realised that she had told all her friends that she was gonna do this thing.

And now you've said it publicly, right?

You gotta do it so your ego.

Is attached to it, which is actually probably very smart.

Like, give yourself something to lose.

Exactly.

And so she did this.

And so the whole time, I think I found the book perfect because it was where I was in my life.

You know, maybe someone who was super frugal already might be like, oh, that's, you know, nothing.

But I was not.

And I loved going out and that was my life.

And it was fun.

So she achieved that.

And it was just such a cool book.

And I was just like, wow, what's possible if we just start to just maybe question what we're doing?

We might just go, oh, why am I doing this?

Or why do I think it's so normal to spend as much as I spend?

Or so that was really the start for Me.

And I was like, okay, cool.

I'm really in this debt thing.

And then I started to get quite obsessed with it.

So.

And you've talked about as well how you gamified paying off that debt, which I think is really smart.

Anytime you've got a big goal, like someone could look at $30,000 in debt and just panic and be like, oh, you know what, that's way too hard.

And I'm just going to stick my head in the sand and no, thank you.

And I think that's the big danger.

You know, even if you've got a different kind of goal, like, you're like, I would like to retire early.

And then you run the numbers and you like, I need to invest a million dollars.

I'm never going to make that.

Like, that's insane.

So to break down these bigger goals and gamify them so that you keep going, I just always think that's so smart.

So how did you gamify paying off your debt?

What worked for you?

I used the debt snowball strategy.

So that's when you break down.

So I wasn't looking at the interest rate.

I wasn't going.

The debt avalanche is the smart way to do it.

Technically, you're going to save more money because you're going to pay less interest.

But that did not work for me because obviously it's a psychology thing.

So I had, you know, a small credit card, a store card.

I had sort of a revolving loan, credit loan thing, and then I had a personal loan.

The personal loan was massive.

So that was just like, put that one over there.

We're going to deal with the.

You know, I think the first credit card was $3,000.

So I was like, that's the first thing I'm going to focus on.

I'm just going to pretend these other ones don't exist.

They're small, achievable.

Exactly.

I can do this.

Right?

Exactly.

So I didn't ignore those.

I made the minimum payment on those other debts while I was focused on the small credit card.

And then once that was gone, I used the money that I was spending on that to the next one.

And so that's how it snowballs.

It rolls over the money that you're currently paying off.

The first debt rolls over onto the second.

The snowball gets so big that by the time you get to that big debt at the end, you've got all this extra money going, and it just annihilates that so quickly.

So for me, just.

I saw them as separate amounts.

I didn't see a big pile or I would have just done nothing.

I would have been completely paralyzed by just how terrifying it was.

Another thing I did is I started saving.

So I decided that I would put 10% of everything I.

All of my extra income into savings, because I'd never had savings.

I'd always just worked and spent everything and worked and I knew I could always work because I'm a grafter.

I could always work.

And so that's fine.

Whatever I can earn, as long as I can work, I can afford my life.

But what happened is I couldn't afford anything else.

I couldn't afford.

So friends who were going off backpacking for, you know, six weeks up the east coast of Australia, they're like, do you want to come?

And I was like, nah, can't afford it.

I started to put the $10 a week or 10%.

It sort of started as $10 and then as I earned more, it became sort of 10% into savings just because I'd never had a savings account.

So, yeah, starting to have money for myself.

And then that becomes quite addictive once you've.

If you've never had it, it becomes something you've really quite protective of.

And then, you know, and I started to learn about, you know, earning interest on it, on my money and how my money can make money and, oh, my goodness, interest and compound interest and just brain.

Yeah, brain explosion.

So because I'd sort of started this journey of learning how to live frugally, payback debt.

I feel like there's a natural movement onto how to create wealth, how to make your money work hard, how to make your money make money.

Once you're in it, you can't stop, really.

It's like this world unlocks absolutely where you've been playing life unknowingly on hard mode, for sure.

That's such a good way of putting it right.

And then you start.

It's a little bit harder at first.

As you said, you went out, you got extra jobs, you paid off the debt, and I'm sure that was hard.

But then you start to see the benefits from that.

And then those wins start to stack up.

And all of a sudden that little bit of extra effort, your not having to put in as much extra effort because you don't have as much pulling you back, you've paid off that stuff that's pulling you back, you start pushing ahead and all of a sudden you start to realize, I could play life on easy mode.

Here's all these other tactics.

Is it that moment when the penny drops.

Isn't that like the world just sort of opens up and you're like, oh, hang on.

Yes.

This is one benefit of if you grow up with a family who speak about money.

I like to consider myself, I'm going to be first generation rich and my kids are going to be the ones that benefit from that.

But I have to figure everything out for myself when people, like, they're like, oh, this world exists.

And we, you know, if I tell my kids about how investing works or that they know and they grow up and they know, but I didn't know.

So I did feel like it had been unlocked and I was just like, oh, this is how they do it.

Like, I'd always been interested in how people, you know, live a different life or whatever, but I just never thought it was possible for me.

So to have.

I'd identify that.

Yeah, exactly.

And then it was like, oh, well, that's actually once you start to think about it and start to educate yourself, it's actually possible for everybody on whatever income they're on.

It just depends on how much they spend.

So at what point in your debt payoff journey did you start to realize once this is gone, there's actually all these other avenues and what started to get your interest in other areas?

Obviously, sitting in the personal finance aisle at the library in 2006, that was a real peak boom.

Time and property.

All these books were about property investment.

There's nothing else about shares.

I mean, there might have been one book, but no one read it, like.

And I found a book called 130 Properties in 3.5 Years by Steve McKnight.

So he's an Australian property investor, picked it up and I was like, oh my goodness.

And it was just.

He broke down everything.

Like how we saved the deposit, the cash flow, how much, all these.

And I was like, wow, cool.

So I had been saving or we'd been.

We'd got rid of all our debt and I was like, well, if we just.

If I continue these extra jobs, sorry.

And my husband did.

Took all the overtime he could get.

So working tons of hours and we didn't have kids at this stage, so it's so much easier to get it sorted before you have kids.

Like, I know that it's hard if you don't discover that till after.

But that was a real, like, yeah, that made a huge difference.

So we could just work so many hours a week each and keep our expenses low.

But.

So then I found him and he was Australian, but he'd actually Come to New Zealand to buy cashflow positive properties because the cash flow was so much better in New Zealand.

And I was like, well, I know New Zealand, so I'm going home to buy some houses.

And so, yes, that's when I started being interested in property investment in New Zealand.

Okay, so was this before you'd cleared off all that debt or after?

After.

We had to save a 10% deposit.

So in those days, you know, you had to save cash deposit.

We were earning such great incomes in Sydney.

We lived in a share house, so we had low rent.

We were living completely on one of our incomes and saving the other one.

So we were like, well, we'll just stay here.

Just came back here.

I did a bit of a.

Got my parents to drive me around and went in just like a 24 year old.

Know it all.

Just like walking into a real estate.

Like I know all this about investment, blah, blah, blah.

I had no idea.

Now I think about it, I just die.

Like I imagine what I must have looked like.

But there's kind of a sweet spot in naivety though, right?

There is.

Because I wouldn't have done anything.

I wouldn't do that now.

Like I wouldn't do it now, but I just.

Yeah.

So I think there's definitely.

You get in over your head and then you just frantically.

Doggy paddle.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

You've done it now.

So you've just got to make it works.

And we ended up sort of.

Right now we've sort of bought and sold a few, but we have four properties plus the one we live on now, rental properties, which is now.

My feelings on property aren't the same and I wouldn't start investing in property today.

Hit me with that.

Okay, so you do have investment properties and you're still holding onto them, but if you were to start now, you wouldn't go for investment property.

Tell me I didn't know better.

I think property was all there was to buy shares back in those days was.

I don't even know how you do it.

I honestly have no idea.

It was much harder.

Yeah, I had much higher minimums and it was gatekept.

It was like he needed a financial advisor and there was probably a few percent.

Whereas property just felt like save 10% deposit go to the bank.

These days it's a political football and we've personally lived through.

I feel even we're on a money podcast so I can talk about it, but there's almost.

I have to apologise for being a landlord.

It's sort of like a. Oh God.

You don't want to admit that and you don't want to.

It's not something that's.

I know that.

It's not something that productively moves New Zealand forward and I know buying and selling houses to each other is no way to improve anything for our country.

So I realized that.

So that's one thing I got older and wiser, but also the cash flow and the actual return on investment is not what people think it is.

The maintenance and management fees and all the costs are phenomenal.

Rates and insurance are phenomenal.

The money is just not there when you compare it to.

If you'd put say the same amount of money into a fund, the only benefit, and I guess this is why most people do invest in real estate, is leverage and you can borrow all that money and put none of your own money in and you're using OPM, which back in the 2006, 2007, other people's money was the way to get rich is to use other people's money.

So you were leveraging that.

It doesn't really exist these days unless you are prepared to be much more active.

Property investment does not give me and my family the life we want.

It is not passive income, it is definitely active.

If you're willing to renovate, you're willing to develop, you're willing to flip or even self manage.

But then you've got to also account for your own time because you're buying yourself a job and it's not a very joyful job if you're getting phone calls at 3am or you've got nightmare neighbours or we've dealt with everything because we bought properties that were affordable for us when we were in our 20s, which means they were all lower priced and they're still lower priced.

It's not like we have five properties in Auckland, we have five properties in Christchurch and the west coast of the South Island.

So they are all, you know, sort of under $500,000 but the costs are still high.

So things like, for example, putting a roof on in a $2 million house in Auckland even it's probably the same cost as putting a roof on in a $200,000 house in the west coast.

It's doesn't even.

Maybe it's cheaper here.

I rushed in, it was all I knew and I wanted to be rich.

I wanted to be really rich.

And it's all I knew and I'm still, I'm glad we did it, but I wouldn't do it now and I wouldn't encourage my kids to do it.

Interesting.

And the thing is, like, as you say, the kernels of the world did not exist then.

It was not that you could just go to these online platforms and do five bucks a pop.

It was so, so different.

I have literally talked TO People who 10 years ago went into a broker's office and said, I would like to start investing in funds and got laughed out of there because they only had $10,000.

Oh my goodness.

And I never would have had $10,000.

So I would have just been like, well, just not for me.

That world is not for me.

If kernel or sharesies or whatever, those kinds of platforms existed, then I would have been interested in them.

And I love that for this new generation because they're so savvy.

And it also brings sort of an element of business savvy to our whole country and it raises the education level.

People are reading balance sheets and they're reading their, you know, annual statement.

They are paying attention.

Whereas it used to be, oh, money's for people who aren't like me.

Well, now money's for everybody and it can be for everybody.

So I love that for us.

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Now though, you have put yourself in such a different financial position.

Even if you know you took a tactic that if you were starting again now, you might do it differently, you still put yourself in a totally different financial position.

Are you someone who do you put yourself as part of the financial independence movement?

Where are you at?

I think so.

I think finding the fire movement is what sparked our okay, well, maybe we won't buy property anymore.

There's other ways of doing this.

So about 2015, I think I discovered Mr. Money Moustache.

Oh, love him, love him so good.

And I was like, oh, this is cool, and started to buy smart chairs, which was kind of the only thing you could buy at that stage.

It's just so much easier to do than property.

There's no drama, you know, you just chuck some money in each month and watch it go up and down.

But don't watch it too closely, just ignore it.

Basically.

Yeah.

I think if they had to come along 10 years earlier, it would have been a different story.

But I also don't know if we'd be where we are because we wouldn't have borrowed to buy shares or.

So you can say, oh, I might change the path, but you don't know where those other paths would have led.

No, exactly.

But I tell you what, the path you've been on is pretty good because you also took a considerable chunk of time out, went traveling, you know, you really have done.

I, I always talk about on this pod, that the point of money is not to just have a stack of it and be like, woohoo, I have all of this money and I'm never spending it.

It's about what do you want from life?

And then reverse engineer your money to make that happen.

And I think you're a glorious case of doing that because you, you took this time out and you went traveling.

So tell me about what stage in your journey you were at and how big that traveling was because it looked great.

Yeah.

So I guess we, I'm really open with numbers, so I'm just going to say we have hit our number, our fire number, but it's all in property equity.

Most, sorry, most of it is a property equity.

So I was like, well look, if we've got, we've got the number, what's the point of waiting?

You know, we've got this much money and I know we'll have to sell a property and technically to retire early, but we could just take some of the funds we've stashed away and use them.

So I said to my husband, we should just probably go traveling, just use this money.

And you know, and this is, this may be a reason why it's probably good that I'm not fully invested in the share market because it is so liquid and I am a spender.

I like spender.

I need this to be harder to access.

Yeah, right, exactly.

It's hard to just take a brick out of your wall and spend it on a trip, but you can easily withdraw money from your Simplicity fund every month.

So yeah.

So anyway, he was, he was, he loves travel.

So he was like, yep, cool.

We'll do that.

I was like, okay, cool.

We're earning enough money that it can cover our lives in New Zealand, but I also want to travel.

So we didn't quite have enough to travel, like it could have, you know, if we were based somewhere, but it's all the flights and all the in betweens.

So I said, look, we can just take money out of our.

The fund we've saved.

We've realized that we're actually going to have more than we need by the time we get to sort of 55, 60 or whatever.

And we read Die With Zero.

Well, I read Die With Zero.

I'm the one who reads it.

I tell him so.

But there was an example where the author Bill was like, I'm gonna take my mates, all my mates to the bahamas for my 50th birthday.

And it was like millions of dollars.

So that was bonkers, obviously.

But I was like, well, I can't do the Bahamas.

But what if we went to Thailand and we asked your sister to come with us, Dave's sister?

I said, cause she loves Thailand and she was in a financial position, not necessarily to pay for the flights, but she could, she would be able to do accommodation and stuff.

And I was like, maybe we could just pay a little bit to help them come and have this great trip with us.

We helped them out with that and it was such a cool way of using our money.

And I was like, how do we do more of this?

You know, what's the point of bringing it all?

You know, having it all when we're 60 and we don't know if we're gonna have these amazing times anymore, so.

And then part of that Die With Zero book is your memory dividends.

So you live in the rest home in your rocking chair.

You live on your memories and you just play them over and over.

This is apparently what happens.

And they pay a dividend.

So every experience you have pays this memory dividend, if you can remember it, I guess.

And yeah, I was like, I just love that concept, like, that we do things that we'll enjoy remembering later in life and that we actually spend money on those things because they're worth it and they're part of our value system.

So that's sort of where the travel came in.

I was like, okay, we.

We need to go and do this again.

This time we packed up the house, rented it out, put our stuff in storage.

And you were traveling for how long?

13 Months.

Wow.

Yeah, so it was quite.

We stayed in Thailand for six months.

At the end we just rented a house, we got a digital nomad visa to live there and we thought we might stay longer, but we just.

It was really hot.

Yeah, it was so hot.

The kids just didn't go outside.

And I was like, this is not why we come traveling, you know, so they could sit in their rooms and the aircon and the Air Convale was phenomenal.

So yeah, I was like, no, that's, that's not really.

The hot, hot countries aren't for us.

And what, what countries did you get through in that time?

So we went to Australia, Thailand and then we went to Qatar into Spain and then we all, a bunch of our travel mates from America and England, we all did this transatlantic cruise from Spain to the US so there was.

It was 14 days and we had this huge group of us and our friends and the kids, friends on a boat, which was awesome.

And then flew back, we went to the UK and we had Christmas in Ireland with the family and then Spain, Morocco and then Thailand and then back to New Zealand.

What was your favourite?

Spain is always my favourite until the day I die.

Go on.

What makes Spain so special?

Spain is just.

I feel that I wish I knew if I had some ancestry there or something.

I feel like I'm home there.

It's a real family friendly country and you've got, you're going out at night with kids.

At 10 o' clock at night there's kids playing in all the plazas.

Like every pla.

There's a playground on every corner.

It's such a family setup and there's.

It's not quiet.

So something in New Zealand at night in the street.

There's no one on the street.

You know in Spain people are just sitting on their doorsteps having cups of coffee or.

They're everywhere.

People are everywhere.

It's really alive and got such a great cafe culture for like a €10 you could have the most beautiful little like a cortado, which is kind of like an espresso with a tiny bit of milk on top and just amazing.

I would always have two cortados and it was like, yeah, four bucks or something crazy.

I was like, I loved it.

Yeah, the actual best.

I love what you were saying though, before about the inspiration from the book Die with Zero.

And I like, I don't think any book can be taken as truly the Bible.

Right.

But I think there's always something from it and like then adapt it to your life.

Right.

But I love what you were saying about what you took from Die With Zero.

And I Think there's.

I would recommend that book to anyone, anytime.

I think it's brilliant because it just flips the mindset of exactly what we were talking about before.

You know, your life is for living.

It's for enjoying.

And the idea of those memory dividends when you're in the rest home, when you're at the tail end of your life, maybe moving around is just so much harder.

You are sitting in the rocking chair for physical reasons.

You're not going anywhere anytime soon.

And I don't want to be sitting there with the best nurses money can buy.

I mean, yes, I would like that, too, but I don't want to be spending my money then.

I want to be living off those memories.

I want to be remembering everything I did.

You know, it's like how I was, you know, I was talking to someone the other day about one of my great joys in life now is that I can just go and do things with my kids.

My kids are both obsessed with everything, with wheels and engines.

And they're real.

I didn't raise them this way.

They're just very.

Boys.

Boys.

I was one of those too.

Obsessed.

Yes.

Yes.

I don't know where it came from because I really had to get up to speed on monster trucks fast.

I know a lot now, but it took me a moment.

But we went to the monster truck show when they were here, and my kid had the most parasocial response to seeing tiger shark in person.

I mean, he saw all the other monster trucks doing their loops and was like, yay, clap, clap, clap.

He sees Tiger shark and he's like, waves, Tiger Shark.

Hi.

Oh, my gosh.

And how good is that?

Like, how good does that feel?

And that's like a core memory.

Exactly.

That's your.

That you're gonna.

And he will also have that memory and everyone who witnesses it, who bears witness to you, and it's also the way that they will remember you.

Because it doesn't have to be going and traveling the world.

It can be going to the monster truck show or even just going on a nature walk together or having a picnic or the most basic thing, but it's just spending time together and spending time together when, you know, you're not stressed and you're not, like, constantly not present or you're thinking about something else or you're thinking about, oh, my God, I'm going to pay this bill.

Or grouchy, because you're so stressed because of, you know, the anxiety that comes with not having, you know, enough money to pay the bills affects everything and it affects your mental health and then it affects your children's happiness.

And I love that saying, you're only as happy as your unhappiest child, because.

That's a good one.

It is so true.

Because our kids did not love all of traveling and it was quite stressful for them.

And that was when I was like, oh, I think it might be time to go home, you know, and isn't.

It funny how you can have these big moments where you're like, yes, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit this and it's gonna be amazing.

And then it's like, actually, you know what?

Some of the stuff we had back home is like, really good.

Oh my goodness.

Like, honestly.

But you know that now.

I know that now.

Exactly.

I will never take a good footpath for granted again.

Honestly.

Like, we were the little things, being able to walk on a footpath and not having rubbish everywhere or just.

Yeah, you do.

You definitely do appreciate how amazing this country is and it makes you want to come back and help make it better.

Everyone I met traveling was like, oh, you're from New Zealand.

Why are you traveling?

Why are you here?

Why did you leave?

Like, we only, all of us want to go to New Zealand.

And I'm like, yeah, I know it probably seems like that, doesn't it?

Like, yeah, sometimes I don't know why.

Well, you're based on the west coast now, which is.

That's so my dad's from the west coast and I have some core childhood memories of going to like visit the family there.

So that it's an amazing part of the country.

Cheaper too.

Right.

Was that deliberate?

Yes and no.

Part of our property investment was the first house that I ever bought or we ever bought.

Well, that I told my husband we were going to buy is that was on the west coast.

And so we've owned this property for nearly 20 years.

It's been hard to manage because it's hard to get tradespeople and the maintenance is high.

And when you live far from a property, this is another reason property's not great.

When you don't live around the corner, you can't just go and like unblock your own drains.

You've got to pay someone a travel fee and you've got to pay them professional.

So it gets expensive and it eats into your cash flow.

But so we decided that we wanted to sell this house has to be a self managed, do it ourselves, reno.

So it's like, right, we're just going to move in We've been traveling for a year.

What's.

What's a little bit longer on another.

Adventure from the outside at least.

And, and tell me if I'm putting words in your mouth and if it's different, but it looks like very much a sort of values based spending thing where you're happy to spend money on things that you enjoy that bring value and on other areas you cut right back so that you can do those other things.

Um, so if, I mean, for starters, is that the case?

Secondly, what will you spend money on?

What won't you spend money on?

So, yes, it's 100% the case.

I won't spend money on clothes.

Not much money on clothes.

I used to spend money, a lot of money on handbags and thousands of dollars worth of handbags.

I don't know why handbags are such a thing.

Right.

Whereas now I don't even use one at all ever.

I know.

No longer.

We don't spend money on cars.

So we've got one car that $9,000, and that'll.

We'll drive that till it dies.

So we don't really spend money on our house, but we spend money on health and travel and we try to eat good food.

And living somewhere remote means it's more expensive to do that, but it's important.

And we also, we don't have fast food, so that just doesn't exist, which is actually really.

I don't miss McDonald's at all, but I am really far from McDonald's, so we can't really just.

And there's no Uber Eats.

It's really, really good for your budget.

And your waistline means anything you eat, you have to cook.

So after everything that you've sort of trial and errored, what are some of your essentials these days for getting ahead with your money, your essential tactics?

People need to live in the house that they can tolerate living in that cost them the least amount of money.

I think people spend a lot of money on buying a house.

And so, you know, you might get a mortgage approved for, say, 800,000.

Doesn't mean you have to spend 800,000.

You could still be quite happy in the $500,000 home.

And you can eventually make it feel as comfortable as the $800,000 home if you live in it for 20 years and slowly do it up.

There's almost a feeling amongst some people that you should buy the best house that you can afford when you get your first home, because houses will never be as cheap as they're going to be.

Today there's that.

That idea.

And I don't think that's not true in 2021.

Exactly, exactly.

That is not true.

But it is a narrative that is often just repeated.

And so I think that's dangerous.

I think people have to stop thinking of their house as an investment.

It is not.

It is somewhere to live, but it is not an investment and it's not smart to put any money into it.

I think also probably because I'm not an Aucklander, I can say to many people who are Aucklanders that there is life outside of Auckland.

And in Christchurch, for example, we have so many people moving to Christchurch because it's more affordable.

We think that the prices have got crazy high now.

But Aucklanders are like, what a bargain.

And.

But there are also other places in the south island, not necessarily the west coast, although that's great too.

If there's no reason for you to live in Auckland, if you don't earn this massive amount of money and maybe if you don't have the family ties, that there is other ways to make money and live affordable life in New Zealand, because I feel like it's sort of Auckland, Queenstown and the rest of New Zealand, those are sort of.

It's hard to have tactics that work in both places because a lot of people are like, how do you have such cheap rent or mortgages or whatever?

And every time they're from Auckland, every.

And I'm like, the south island exists.

And it's beautiful, it's amazing.

And life isn't any smaller for living there.

Like, maybe just even look around, check, seek, see if there's a role that might pay you almost the same amount of money.

Or maybe it pays you less, but your living costs are so much lower.

Yeah, yeah.

And you still invest now as well.

So you're still doing the building wealth part, but you're focused on the share market these days.

Yes.

Yeah.

How core is that to your strategy?

I mean, when we're looking.

Because we often talk about, like, sort of invest more or spend less or earn more.

Like, where do you rank those sorts of strategies for you now at your stage in the journey?

I don't think we could spend less.

The only things we could do now are earn more and invest more.

I feel like there's a bit of a frugal movement and people sort of feel like it's almost like a badge to be super frugal.

And it's not really.

Because, honestly, you just need to earn more money.

You're gonna do so much better trying to earn $500 more a week or whatever than saving $10 on something.

You know, it's great to be frugal and to instill habits that are frugal.

But personally, it's all about growing for us now.

It's definitely about growing our money and making sure our money works hard for us.

I like to think of every little dollar I have as one of my little employees going out to work.

And so I do think very much of my money as each.

Every dollar counts.

That's really helpful when it comes to investing.

It was also really helpful when we're saving for traveling, because I was sort of sending these little messages to my husband like, oh, we've saved, you know, an extra $3, which is two tacos in Mexico.

And just trying to get that idea of a dollar actually makes a difference.

But, yeah, so I think that the share market vast is really core.

And liquidating that fund that we liquidated was the way that we got to travel.

We didn't sell a house.

So having access to liquid funds is so important.

Definitely the way that I would want to structure my money in the future.

It just gives you so many more options.

That's the core way that we plan to invest in the future.

And I would like to have sort of 50% of our wealth in the share market or in funds.

We don't own shares directly, just ETFs, before I technically call us, like, properly, actually early retired, just because it's just so much easier to draw money out every week.

If someone is listening to this and thinks, this sounds really nice, you know, quite a family, focused life.

There's travel in there.

There's obviously a lot of financial stability in there.

There's options.

If someone is listening to this and thinking, I would like to build what she's built, what do you think are the core tactics they need to embrace optimizing their spending?

Not necessarily that it's gonna be the thing that changes everything, but it makes people sit down and question, okay, well, we're spending this money on this.

Do we need to.

What else could that $12 a month go to?

What else could.

You know, all these small amounts that we leak.

Cause we all have money leaks.

I have them.

Obviously not perfect.

Also, it sort of starts a chain reaction of events because then you're like, oh, well, now I could also optimize this other thing.

And then I've realized, well, I, you know, I've saved $80 from cutting subscriptions.

Well, maybe if I went to my boss and said, you know, I'm willing to do this extra work.

Can you give me a ten grand a year pay rise?

You know, and so all of these things, they start to compound once you start to think.

So you just have to start the process.

And I think the easiest way to start it, and I think I've heard you mention, is just start with your, with your spending.

You can control it right then and there.

It's such a quick, easy win.

And so many other things will take time, right?

And that's great.

And those longer term things can build up and be really big.

If you give yourself a quick win, you're gonna be like, damn, I nailed this.

Give yourself that, but give yourself a win, right?

Give yourself a win and don't waste the win.

So if you're saving 12 bucks a month on something, instantly set up a transfer for $12 to go into an investment.

Cause you've just don't that money, then you're not gonna miss it and set a huge goal.

I feel like without a goal, we couldn't have done any, we wouldn't have done any of it.

We've just been like, oh, well, what's the point?

You know, with a big, big goal to, you know, retire early or to travel the world with our kids.

That gets you through the absolute crappiest grind times because obviously it sounds all lovely sitting here, but you know, it was so exhausting.

We're absolutely knackered all the time.

You know, you're fighting and you're grumpy and you're tired and you don't want to do it and you don't want to go to work every day and it sucks.

Like a lot of the time it sucks.

You know, it's not pleasant.

And so you've got to have a goal to get you through that because.

And the goal should be like massive.

You know, think bigger than you think you're gonna.

Is it a big, hairy, audacious goal?

Yes, because it's.

You will be able to achieve it, but you've got to be able to get through those hard times.

Something that excites you.

Right?

Something that excites you.

Exactly.

Not something that you just think, oh, I should do that.

No, something that you really want to do.

And it doesn't have to be.

Exactly, exactly.

Doesn't have to be what you think you should do.

What is it that you actually want?

What actually sets your soul on fire and makes you feel really good, you know, the idea to me is things that people can't take from me.

You know, I Like that I can walk away from any situation.

I built that faster than I thought I could.

I've got other goals now, but first off, it was I want F you money.

Yep, absolutely.

FU money is like essential.

Yeah.

And the mental health benefits from having F you money, you just remove all this anguish.

I'm all about removing the stress, you know, like decision fatigue or anything that makes you feel sad or confused or anxious.

If there's a way that your money can remove that from you, you know, it's so worth doing.

And FU money is a great place to start.

So once you optimize expenses, get that emergency fund and then get your three to six months of.

And then, I mean, honestly, once you've got that, it's like, what can't you do?

You can do anything.

And if you have that goal that actually lights a fire under you.

Like the idea of nobody being able to tell me what to do makes me go, yes, like, amazing.

Absolutely lights me up.

Because I'm a stroppy socks.

That's just how that is.

And so, you know, that genuinely makes me willing to say, no, I'm not gonna do that thing because I'm building this other thing and it feels so worth it.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Oh, I love this so much.

Oh, I'm feeling really, like hopped up and inspired now.

If people want to hear more from you and your brilliant tips because you put out heaps of content about what you're up to and what's working, where can people find you?

I blog.

Very old fashioned to say that at mumsmoney Co nz.

Or they could just Google me.

Mumsmoney nz and on Facebook as well.

Emma Healy, it has been an absolute delight having you on the podcast.

Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you.

Now, if this episode was helpful to you, send it to a friend.

We can all feel a bit inspired and level off our money together.

Until next time, have a great day.

This podcast can only give you general information about how things work in most situations.

It's not individual financial advice.

If you're after that, a financial advisor is always the best bet.