Chapter 1: What are the emotional challenges women face regarding money?
Kia ora, I'm Nadine Higgins and welcome to The Prosperity Project. The stats for women when it comes to money are still pretty dire. We earn less, we negotiate less, retire with less, and arguably stress more about money. But what if it's all in our minds? And I don't say that to gaslight you, but rather to spotlight the power of your money psychology.
Angela Meyer and Rachel Davies are the founders of High Money and the authors of the book Money, Money, Money. And they are with us on The Prosperity Project today. Kia ora korua. So nice to have you on the Prosperity Project. I don't know if you get this sense, but I get a real sense that people go, this women and money thing, it's all equal now, right?
Chapter 2: How does the pink tax affect women's financial wellbeing?
Like a bit of an income gap, but you know, you've got all the opportunities that men have now, right? But that's just not true, is it? Ah, no.
No, it's really not true. We did a lot of research for our book and we discovered some rather alarming statistics. Mainly, the one that really sort of stood out for me was around the pink tax, which is not actually a real tax, but it's the cost really of being a woman.
And there was a really interesting study out of New York, and they were actually able to measure the pink tax, and it came out at US$188,000 over a woman's lifetime.
Yeah, that's like a quarter of a million dollars for pink razors, pink T-shirts, more expensive haircuts, all the other lady stuff.
And that's before you even think about what we could have done with that money if you'd used it somewhere else, invested it.
Well, yeah. And we, you know, we also have the gender retirement gap in New Zealand, which is sitting at 25%. And, you know, in the course of writing the book, we were like, well, if we didn't pay the pink tax, that would pretty much fix everything. our gender retirement gap. So no, things are not, nothing is, you know, all is not well, actually, in lady land in terms of our financial wellbeing.
And we also, you probably know that stat about 80% of New Zealand women rate their financial wellbeing as low or very low. And we also did some research called Rich in Context. And this is looking at the socio-cultural determinants of financial wellbeing. And only, and this is across Australia and New Zealand, all genders, and only 29% of the people, our sample, were financially well.
And women make up a very small percentage of that. And those that were financially well tended to be white Australians who were older.
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Chapter 3: What therapy-style exercise can help improve your money mindset?
And in couples. And in couples.
Right. So if you are young, single and an ethnic minority and female, are you on a hiding to nothing? Is there anything positive out there in lady land, which I love, that we can take some heart in?
I guess that's why we wrote this book. Like, you know, for me, my wake-up was, like, finding out that women were much more likely to retire into poverty. And I had thought, like you said before, like, I was like, I thought we sorted that out ages ago. Like, it was going to be okay, but...
We wrote this book because we wanted to get women upset and angry enough to take care of their financial well-being and do everything they could to get clear about money and grow their wealth and not retire into poverty. We want more money in the hands of more women.
So the next feminist wave is financial, is it? I genuinely think it is. You know, I've spent probably the last 20 years of my life working in gender equity in various different forms. And for me, it always comes back to, do you have enough money? Because that means you can, you have choices, you can leave a bad situation. Yep. And... You can buy yourself time if you need it.
You can buy yourself time.
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Chapter 4: How do beliefs about money influence financial outcomes?
I mean, just to say that there are some really good stats in there as well. You know, like we are probably the most wealthy we've ever been in the history.
Oh, there's the great wealth transfer that's happening. Do you know about that?
Yeah, the Great Wealth Transfer, you know, $84 trillion is going to be transferred into the hands of women. Something that was really interesting was that female millionaires in Australia are growing at 5.7% more than men. So it's not that, you know, and also women don't have a universal experience. You know, we are all really different.
But when you look at kind of across the board, things are not great. There is a lot of things that need to really change and systemic change needs to happen. But we also, on the other hand, see that, you know, more money is coming into women's hands with the Great Wealth Transfer and, you know,
Certainly younger generations are much more, I suppose, they're talking about money more, they're much more engaged with their financial lives. But yeah, I do think that the next feminist wave is financial. Yeah.
I wish I was 21 again for solely that reason because I would make so many different decisions. Not because I wish I was 21 again for any other reason. Just for the compounding. Yeah, exactly. Decisions that you make that compound over time. Yeah.
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Chapter 5: Why is it important for women to talk about money openly?
Yeah.
Before we talk a little bit more about the psychology itself, I would love to hear a little bit more about how you got here. Because as I understand it, you've both had creative careers. And yet here you are running an organization based on finances, writing a book about finances. So what was that arc for you, Rachel?
I'd been overseas. I'd been living in America for like eight or 10 years and I had to come home because my mum was terminal. So I was like, okay. So I get back to New Zealand and I was a filmmaker for like 20 years and then I was roaming around, you know, the world doing whatever I wanted and, yeah. I didn't even have a KiwiSaver.
I was like 48 years old and I've got a dying mother and I'm working with Ange and Ange is working for looking, doing a campaign for Super Super. And she's like, do you know that we're all a lot more likely to retire into poverty? And I was like, I can see how that's going to happen to me. Like I can actually, that's the path that I'm on. Like I haven't, I've just been,
just been having a really fun time and making art, which pays quite poorly. Yeah. And so I was like, yeah. I hear you. You've got a husband in the arts and making films.
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Chapter 6: What role does risk play in women's financial decisions?
Yeah, exactly. It's terrible. So I was like, I need to sort this out right now, you know, and it can't be that hard. And so Ange and I would have these big talks like, what should we be investing in? Or is it, can we budget our way out of this? What is it? And because I had trained as a therapist one day and the frustration of this is like, let's just do some therapy on it.
Like, Ange, you pretend to be money. I'll pretend to be money. You talk to me as if I'm money, which is a sort of a classical therapy sort of technique. And we did that exercise and a whole lot of light bulbs went off. When Ange was money and I talked to money, I realised that I would never treat a person like that. I was like, I spend you. I go on massive binges.
I refuse to look at my bank account because I feel ashamed of what I spent and all the things.
Use and abuse.
Yeah. Like it's like a friend that I like, we partied really hard, but I didn't call him for like months. Yeah, I ghosted them.
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Chapter 7: How can couples navigate differing money psychologies?
And then I wanted something again. And I said, I would never do that to a person. Why am I doing that to money? Like what would happen if I treated money with a bit of respect? Like, And from that moment, like it was a four-minute exercise, everything was completely different. I was like, oh, it's the psychology. It's how I feel about money. It's not that I can't budget.
I mean, when you work in the arts, you have to be really clever at that stuff. It's how I'm thinking and feeling about it and getting clear. So all I did just got clear about what I was doing. Everything changed. Like I started to read investing books. Which I had never done or never wanted to do. I couldn't get enough.
Which is such an about face. Yeah. From like wandering the world, footloose and fancy free.
Yeah.
Chapter 8: What practical steps can women take to improve their financial situation?
Yeah. To like learning all the finance stuff I could and building a portfolio and calculating my net worth and like tracking all my expenses and like all the stuff that you're meant to do, I started to do. Yeah, it was great.
What about you? and you were the one who said, hey, look at this stat. So what led you there?
Yeah, so similar to Rachel, I had worked my degrees in theatre and film. It's show pony stage life, you know. Yeah, and running a dance troupe and all of this kind of stuff. And also I think in the arts, there was a perception that you don't want to sell out as well. And so I definitely had internalised some of that.
and um and you know similarly had had a fantastic time you know had gone sailing across the world with the baby and you know all of this wonderful kind of things but for me um you know my background was my my family didn't come from a lot of money and my father had been bankrupt a couple of times and so even thinking about money was quite painful and I'd sort of had this idea that um
Somehow it would magically turn out. And actually our research shows that 30% of people think that either the lotto gods are going to come and sprinkle money or you're going to win some sort of prize. And I think in the arts, you know, you do have this kind of like, I've just got to work really hard. I'll just write that book. I'll make that film. And it will kind of magically happen.
And I was running an agency with another friend and we got this big job in Australia for a big superannuation company over there. And we'd sort of, I don't want to say we blagged it, but you're doing a pitch and you're like, yeah, we can do this. And then we got the job and I was like, I don't actually know really a lot about this. And so I had to school up really, really quickly.
And that's when I sort of discovered that there's this 25% of women are retiring into poverty. And you know, as a card carrying feminist, I was so outraged. Like the rage is the thing that got me. And I was like, this cannot happen. We cannot be letting women retire into poverty after this lifetime of caregiving. Like where is the fairness in that?
And so I often think about, you know, coming at the finance world, you know, now I work in finance and I think about a lot of the skills that we have from the creative arts and to bring that into the financial world. And as Rach said, you know, using therapeutic tools or kind of just reframing it.
And, you know, I always felt that I wasn't good at numbers, but you don't have to be good at numbers to be good with money. And so it's been a really interesting journey. And my experience of the financial world has been that they're actually really open to thinking about things differently and going ā okay, well, how can we better connect with our customers or our clients?
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