The number 1 investment you can make for wealth

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast audio

Everyone wants to know the best investment to build wealth, and no, in my opinion, it’s not crypto, it’s not shares, and it’s not property either. In today’s episode, I’m sharing what I truly believe is the number one investment you can make for long-term wealth creation, and it’s probably not what you think.

Stick around because once you understand this, every other investment decision you make will feel clearer, calmer, and a whole lot more intentional.

Just a quick note before we dive in. Everything I share on this podcast is general in nature and does not take your personal circumstances into account. I’m not a licensed financial advisor, and nothing you hear on this podcast should be taken as personalized, financial, business, taxation or investment advice.

Before you make any financial decisions, please seek guidance from your accountant or a qualified licensed financial advisor who understands your specific situation.

So I believe the best investment you can make is in your financial education.

And when I say education, I don’t mean go and get a commerce or an economics degree.

What I mean is learning what different investments actually are and how money flows through your life. Another unsexy thing that I really believe everyone who’s interested in wealth creation really needs to know about is how systems and structures support wealth.

Because here’s what I’m seeing in local Facebook groups and Facebook groups that I’m in, people are saying,

I’m looking for a financial planner. I’m looking for a financial advisor, and everyone just wants to jump straight into what do I need to invest in without actually understanding how money works.

Jumping straight to wanting to go down the investment path without truly understanding like, why am I doing this and what exactly do these various asset classes or investment strategies actually mean?

 And here’s the problem with that.

What happens is that a lot of times when it comes to investing in various different things, people end up seeing, oh my gosh, that person made a ton of money off crypto.

Or, this is the new way to be borrowing more and more money to be leveraging your wealth creation, but without truly understanding what’s going on and how money really works.

People can often end up like following the hype, panic, buying, panic selling, or copying someone else’s strategy that doesn’t actually suit their life.

Before you start investing, you really should start educating yourself and getting the basic financial management processes in place. Because a lot of times, like I said, people are jumping to the do I go down the route of property or shares? And it’s like, how much are you actually putting aside and is that gonna be sustainable based on your current lifestyle and your current income?

Now I’m gonna be talking more about this. If you are listening and you already know that financial education is an area that you need to invest in, I want to share a little bit about the Intentional Money membership because doors are now open to the Intentional Money Membership.

And the cool thing is if you jump in now as one of the founding members, you actually get access to the early bird pricing, which is 79 Australian dollars a month. The price will be increasing up to $99 a month, but if you jump on in now you get access to the early bird pricing. I’ll be sharing more about what exactly the membership entails later in the episode.

But I wanted to drop that in right here because if you are already thinking I need help with this, where do I actually get started? The membership might be a fantastic place for you to get started.

Coming back to the episode, talking about what’s the best place to invest your money.

People often think when they’re getting started on their wealth creation journey, should I invest in property or shares?

And in my opinion, and probably that of most good financial planners, the answer is that depends. And I get that might annoy you and if it does annoy you well, that’s the point, just jumping in and blindly investing looks like buying something because your friend did and made a lot of money or jumping in and taking an investment strategy because you saw someone on TikTok who said to do that without really understanding the equation of risk versus return.

Because real investors know every asset class has pros and cons, and by asset class, things that you are buying to create an income or to increase in value over time.

And they all have pros and cons. There’s advantages to buying property and there’s advantages to investing in shares.

Here’s the thing, risk itself isn’t bad. The reality is there’s risk in everything. But unknown risk is where a lot of people come unstuck, especially when they’re early on in their journey. So every investment sits somewhere on the risk return spectrum. If you invest in a really low risk product, like putting cash into a low interest bank account, it’s not very risky.

But obviously the return of that isn’t gonna be as high as investing in something that is a riskier investment like property or shares.

When you invest in something that is a higher risk, you do have a higher potential return, but the trade off for that is usually that there’s more volatility. More uncertainty around what that looks like. Let me share an example.

Cryptocurrency, for example, I know a lot of people who’ve made a ton of money off crypto, and equally, I know a lot of people that have lost a lot of money in crypto because of the volatility of this asset class currently.

When you invest in your financial education, what you are doing is choosing risk intentionally, and what that means is that there might be some things that you are willing to accept a higher risk in. You say, yes, I accept that it’s riskier to invest in that, but I am, I’m here for that potential higher return.

What that means is that you are really intentional about the way that you are investing. You’re saying, okay, I’m aware of that, and I’m aware that means that there’s more uncertainty with this investment.

And what that means is that when there is volatility. When the real estate market is wobbling, when the share market crashes, it’s easier for you to stick to your plan because you came into it with intention. You said, I was aware that this might happen, and I don’t need to panic sell because I’m aware that this is what this asset class potentially can do.

What we see with uneducated investors is that they confuse short-term noise with long-term outcomes.

And even long-term investors, even a lot of wealthy people can panic when they’re a short-term noise. My brother’s actually an investment banker and he helps a lot of high net worth people to manage their asset  portfolios, and he said it’s incredible how many

really wealthy people still panic when there’s short term noise or a market crash going on, and he has to remind ’em, Hey, remember we spoke about this. The risk versus your return here. Investing without understanding risk is like driving a Ferrari without knowing where the brakes are. You taken off. And you don’t really know how to slow down.

Here’s what I believe, wealth isn’t built by willpower. It’s built by systems. The unsexy wealth multiplier. I spoke about this in an earlier episode of the podcast.

All those things that you put in place, like having automated savings, doing those regular money check-ins, [00:10:00] having your regular money meetings, having clear buckets for spending, saving and investing, having your money plan.

So what systems do, is that they help remove emotion from money decisions. If the transfer’s in place, it just happens. I found that my husband and I are having our regular money meetings. It’s removed a lot of emotion from the money decisions because we are doing it all the time. We’re not suddenly coming into look at our money when it’s in a crisis situation.

We are regularly checking in, and so it feels a lot less emotional because we’re looking all the time.

If you were diving in to look at your money when you feel motivated. It’s gonna be really challenging because as we know, we’re all humans. We have times where we feel really motivated to work on our money or our health or whatever it might be. And then there’s other times where we just can’t be bothered.

And so the goal isn’t to try and build motivation. It’s to have the system where this is just your default behavior.

This works in any era of your life that you’re wanting to create change. If I just went to the gym on the days where I felt hugely motivated, it wouldn’t happen. So I’ve just got my system in place.

Yep, it’s training day. Off we go. Rich people don’t make better decisions. They actually just make fewer decisions because their systems are doing it for them. Now, I wanna talk about the elephant in the room here because I said the number one investment you can make is in your education, and this is not what I mean, I do not mean that you need to spend all of your money on doing courses about learning about money or going and doing a uni degree or anything like that.

I’m not saying it’s the number one investment that you should put all of your money there. Do not go and spend all of your money on learning. What I’m just saying is that before you start investing, I believe that your education should come first because then when you are investing, you become strategic about it, and your education can look like a whole range of things.

It can look like reading more, listening to podcasts, asking successful people how they’ve built their wealths.

It can really just be investing to work with someone to really understand your own numbers,

because knowledge is so powerful.

And there’s one other thing that I want to talk about that I truly believe will be a game changer when it comes to changing your relationship with money.

And it’s that accountability is really transformative. Working inside a program with a mentor or a coach really helps you to stay consistent, avoid emotional decisions, and to really help you to zoom out when you are feeling stuck.

A lot of people fail because no one is holding them to the plan they said they wanted. And maybe this resonates because maybe you’ve set yourself a budget in the past, and then when it actually comes to implementation, you’re not sticking to it. No one is actually holding you to the plan that you’ve said you wanted to stick to.

So here’s what this all means for you. If you were early in your wealth journey, before you dive on in and race off and put your money in some sort of asset class, really prioritize your learning first. And maybe you already started investing. Maybe you’ve already got an investment property or you’ve bought gold or something like that.

But what I wanna you to ask yourself at the moment is, do I really understand why I’m invested this way?

I wanna make sure that you truly understand that you’re being intentional with your investments.

So I wanna talk to you a little bit more about the Intentional Money membership because if money for you now feels stressful, overwhelming, a little bit foreign, maybe it feels shameful? Maybe you feel like I should be further ahead? And you wanna get to the point where money feels calm and organized. Maybe you wanna have confidence in your money cash flow and get rid of the guilt when you spend on the things that you love. Maybe you wanna have trust in yourself and you wanna have people around you who are celebrating, Hey.

Good for you. You’re getting ahead. You’re starting to build wealth and have that money clarity. And you wanna have relief and pride when you see your numbers instead of guilt and shame and anxiety. That’s exactly why I created the Intentional Money membership.

So here’s what’s inside. There’s four weeks. It’s a four week cycle, and on week one there’s a live money training. So inside this training, there’s a focus topic, which is really about helping you to go from confused to being clear. So some examples of things that we’ll cover Inside the live money training, you might learn how to confidently start your investment strategy.

You might learn how to build a budget that doesn’t feel restrictive. Then week two is a hot seat and q and a. So this is where you actually get real life money, questions answered, and you get personalized support, either from myself or from an expert in our money team. Then in week three, we have a guest expert session.

So in these sessions I’m bringing in some trusted experts in different fields. So someone might be coming in to talk about insurance, superannuation tax, right through to the psychology of managing your money. This is where you can actually ask questions from an expert and get really dive deep into a high impact topic.

That’s gonna have a huge change in the way that you look at your finances. And then week four, this is what I spoke about earlier, week four is your money challenge and accountability week. So we don’t have a formal call that week. This week is all about implementation. So what you’ll do, you’ll get an action plan for the month to take small, powerful actions that are gonna create real results.

So an example of this might be, go and negotiate one bill. And yes, I’ll give you the tools to do that or set up your savings bucket. And this will also be the week that you do a check-in with your accountability buddy. So when you join the membership, you actually get matched up with someone who’s going to keep you on track to the money goals that you set for yourself.

So here’s what you get inside. You get the three live sessions, you get the monthly money challenges, you get matched with an accountability buddy. And you get the simple tools and templates you need to use when you are going through and like setting up your budget. And I know one of the questions that people are gonna ask, what if I can’t make the live calls?

There are full replays of everything so that you can work through at your own place. You’ll get direct access to me and the coaching team during the Q&A sessions, and of course you’ll get those guest experts as well. Inside the membership, there’s no jargon, no shame and no confusing finance bro speak. It’s just practical, warm, real talk about money. So doors have officially opened, and if this is speaking to you, now is the time to jump on in so that you can access that early bird pricing.

You can find out more about the membership in the show notes for today’s episode, and I’d love for you to jump on in so that I can help you start to build the wealth and the life that you dream of. Thank you so much for tuning in to today’s episode of The Intentional Money Podcast and hopefully I’ll see you inside the Intentional Money Membership.

Have a great week.

* Transcript created by AI – may contain errors or omissions from original podcast