Welcome to the Money Mechanics Podcast. I'm very excited to be bringing you this brand new podcast. My name is Sarah Poynton. I'm an investor, a business owner and a money educator. And everything that this podcast is about is about normalizing the conversation that is happening around money. Money matters, right? It matters to all of us. Society that we're growing up in money is a big stressor. It's something that we all need. It's something that we all go out to work and earn, and it's something that none of us are talking about and that just doesn't make any sense to me. In 2015 I was in about 60,000 pounds of debt, mostly credit card debt, and I'd managed to get myself in that mess over around a six, seven year period. I left home when I was 17, and no one had taught me about money at school. Nobody had taught me about money at home. In fact, a lot of the conversations that was having around money were people with money were greedy. Money doesn't grow on trees. There's all this like negative conversation around money. And you guys will have totally heard this yourselves. You'll have gone through life hearing people talk really negatively about people having money. You know, someone drives past in a nice flash Ferrari, and everyone goes, Oh, he's a wanker. Well, actually, what if he just made really good financial decisions? What if he invested really well? What if he just didn't ever waste his money? Maybe that's why that person's been successful. Maybe that's why they've got money as society and families and, you know, low and middle income households, typically, we're brainwashed to believe that people with money are a negative thing, and it's greedy to want to have more money. It's greedy to have money. If we have money, we're going to become an arsehole. And it just isn't true, right? The reason that I've started this podcast because I want to normalize that conversation, and I want to bring to the table some of those tough conversations around money, specifically to help you just go get bit more comfortable, to help you to understand it better, and ultimately to help you have more money. I left home at 17, and after that, I learned very quickly that you have to grow up when you leave home and you live on your own, right. But I wasn't old enough at that point for credit cards, because I wasn't 18 yet when I turned 18, when I started to go to university, and I started to live this super adult life. That's when it all started to go wrong for me. I was doing the typical student thing, so I got my student loan, and I also got a grant to support my accommodation, and I had all the banks like throwing credit cards at me and so on. And I spent everything, everything I was available to me. I spent the lot. No one explained to me that when you put money on a credit card, you're basically taking out a loan. And I wish someone had sat me down beforehand and explained that to me. Now, a lot of you watching this, you'll be like, well, Sarah, surely you just knew that, because that's like, basic shit. I didn't, and there'll be lots of you watching this, you'll think I also didn't know that. I didn't realize that what happens with debt with credit card companies is they give you real low interest rates, like 0% really low kind of engagement rates. They get you into debt. You spend all that money you haven't got a facility to pay it back, because you haven't got enough money coming in to do it, and then they change your interest rate, and that's exactly what happened to me. So, you know, I had a lovely time at university. I'm not gonna lie. There was a lot of fun, there was a lot of parties, there was a lot of festival tickets, there was a lot of Jack Daniels, but no one had ever sat me down and said all that money that I was blasting on my credit card, actually, I had to pay it back at some point. I kind of just thought that 0% would last forever, right? I left university, and I was not in a great financial situation, and I did all the things that most of us do. I got a job, worked my way up the career ladder, I started to increase my income. It just weren't enough, right? I was still had more money going out in interest than I was getting in pay rises. I was also still spending more than I had because my money habits were poor. It doesn't matter how much money you earn. You could be earning 100 grand a year, but spending 200 grand a year, you'll not have any money, right? You can't out earn a spending problem. And I, when I was much younger, had a spending problem. I was spending too much money. I was spending it on shit that I didn't need often to impress people that I didn't even like, and I was running away from my life by partying and all these things I wasn't making good choices. When I got to my 20s, I started a business. So 2012 it was I started my first business, and my first. Has taught me every way not to run a business. Basically, I didn't realize about cash flow, I didn't realize about budgeting, I didn't realize about forecasting financials, I didn't realize about tax. And again, you might be listening to this and watching this, thinking, Well, hold on, why didn't you know that? Why are you starting a business and not knowing this stuff? I was young, I was learning and I was trying to figure it out that on top of my already really fucking terrible money management skills, meant that by 2015 I was 60 grand in debt. I had a failing business. I had a struggling kind of personal relationship with money. Everything just felt super messy. So the reason that I am I'm doing this podcast now, and the reason why I wrote my book Money Mechanics and released that last year is because actually, with some very simple changes in my behaviors, I would have turned out with a very different situation. If someone sat me down when I was 17, and I left home and explained to me that credit cards cost money, and when you pay when you don't pay them back, it impacts your credit file, and it impacts your ability to get lending in the future, and it impacts your stress levels and your emotional levels and all those things. If someone had actually explained that to me, I might not have completely listened as a 17 year old, but at least I'd have been aware most people are leaving school not aware of this stuff. Many of you watching and listening to this, you will have gone through the same situation. So I spent my 20s with an attitude of just fuck it, stick it on a credit card. It was always things that I didn't really need. It was always things that I probably could have gone without. And that left me in a situation where financially I was buckled. 2015 came around. I've got a failing business. I just got married. Every decision that we were making or not making, actually, all came back to we'd love to do that, but we've got no money. And it was in 2015 I decided that I actually just wasn't going to live that life. I wasn't going to live a life where, when the post came, I was frightened of the bills. You know, I distinctly remember brown envelopes were always a problem for me, right? Because brown envelopes was always council tax, or the HMRC, or, you know, one of the like, important bodies wanting money from me, and I hated it. I was scared of brown envelopes. How ridiculous is that? Because I didn't have enough money, even though I worked hard, even though I earned, actually a pretty good wage, I just didn't understand money, how it works, how to engineer your money to make it work for you. And that is what had got me into, the problem that I'd got into. So some of the key things that you're going to get out of this podcast are predominantly what you can be doing differently to make your money make more sense. We're going to talk about money mindset. We're going to talk about how to recover from debt. We're going to talk about the different tactics that you can use to put your money to work better. We're going to talk about how you can get started with a 10 hour like you don't actually need to be rich to start investing. Investing is what will make you rich. Ultimately. We're going to talk about all the things that I wish that I'd been taught when I was at school. We're going to talk about all the things that are taught to people that have got loads of money from when they're a kid, for low and middle income households, people that are just, you know, normal folk. We're not talking about this stuff. We're not taught about compound interest. We're not talking about investments. We're not talk about any of this stuff. And what that means is we continue to earn money and earn money and earn money until the day that we die, often never having enough of it. In the podcast, we're going to talk about some of the uncomfortable parts of money. We're also going to talk about some of the super fun, super sexy parts of money, and everything in between. The whole point of this podcast is to just help you get more comfortable. With your conversations around money, understanding your money how it's working for you or against you, so that you can go ahead and make the changes that you need to make, so that money makes more sense. In order for your money to make more sense, though. You have to be quite disciplined in your approach. You have to be intentional. You have to choose to change. You have to do something different to what you've been doing. So you can learn about how to recover from debt. I can help you. I can bring all of those things to the table, and we can talk about it loads. But if you don't do anything different, then actually nothing's going to change. So I'm going to bring everything I've got as part of this podcast, and what I hope is that you'll learn things that you'll be able to actively go away and implement, even if you're starting with a tenor, even if you're starting from a place of 60,000 pound debt, like I was, what we're going to be doing is talking about those things that you can actually. Do tangibly, little and often, little and often, so that your money makes more sense. Welcome to the Money Mechanics Podcast. I'm super excited to be bringing you this series, and I need you guys to make sure you subscribe to the channel over on YouTube. Give us a like so that we're spreading the word a bit better. And if you're listening to this on audio only, then just follow this podcast, add it to your Spotify playlist, or however you're listening, and show us a bit of love on there so that we can spread the word as well. Thanks very much for tuning in, and I look forward to sharing this with you. Applause.