EE082 – Vicki Wusche

“If you always do what you always did,you will always get what you always got.”

Albert Einstein

“Don’t lower your expectations to meet your performance.Raise your level of performance to meet your expectations. Expect the best of yourself,and then do what is necessary to make it a reality.”

Transcript:

Tony Winyard 0:00
Exceeding expectations Episode 82

Vicki Wusche 0:03
…That distraction creates debt and that debt creates stress and then your stressed and you have to buy more. And this is the clever thing about marketeers, is I make you stressed by putting you into debt so that you’re then more stress you need to buy more stuff. And and that’s how that’s how we’ve created our world…

Tony Winyard 0:26
Welcome to the podcast where we aim to give you ideas on how you can give better experiences to your customers. And this week is no exception. My guest is Vicki Wusche who is an expert on finance and all matters related to that. And there’s some quite stunning information she reveals In this episode, this episode about some things that are going on at the moment with regards to the whole COVID situation where people are been supposedly given money by the government and there’s a lot of people are gonna have some surprises in store, as you’ll find out as the episode unfurls. If you do enjoy this episode, and I think there’s gonna be a lot of people who will get a lot of benefit from this episode, why don’t share this with someone who maybe really needs to hear some of the information that Vicki discloses, please do share it or as well on on your social media pages. Why not leave a review? Subscribe, and I very much hope you find the information in this episode useful to you. exceeding expectations, my guest today, Vicki Wusche. How you doing Vicki?

Vicki Wusche 1:38
Hi, Tony. I’m absolutely fine.

Tony Winyard 1:40
And we don’t have a lot of British guests on this show. It’s good to come back home sometimes and you’re not so far from me because you’re in West London aren’t you?

Vicki Wusche 1:49
Yeah, well, we sort of moved just outside the M25. So we can’t claim to be in London. Now. We’re very close to Windsor. Right. So we’re at the top of the hill and All the houses and everything wasn’t in the way, I would be able to see the castle. But obviously, populations in the way and I can’t see it.

Tony Winyard 2:08
And how is Windsor handling the current madness?

Vicki Wusche 2:12
Mostly All right, you know. And the funny thing is that we live in a street that’s got a butcher’s on it. So when I look out of my office window, I can look across to see the butchers and the lunacy, the queues. Now, it’s like that Christmas, I understand because everybody’s placed their order, and they’re going to go and get their meat. And you have to have the meat on the special day because that’s when you’re gonna have your turkey or whatever. But honestly, you think there was a famine out there the queues stretch for miles and this is, this was before we were doing the team two metre spacing. Now they do two metre spacing, they’re coming because they’re only allowed in one in the shop. So they filling up the carpark they’re going off, they go around the corner and they’re going down towards the other houses. So it’s really it’s quite funny. I just enjoy honestly just go. Really, you need that much meat and you coming up with bags of it. Where are you putting it all? So, yeah, there’s some craziness. But I mean, I think I think a lot of people are being really good. And one of my neighbours is very vulnerable. She’s immunocompromised. So her her son and her husband are fully on lockdown. You know, we’re locked in, got students on the other side, and gave them a knock and step back and asked if they were okay, because they seem to be stuck there. So they’d come from the local university, but they’re fine. They’re, they’re just, you know, I think people are just staying in their little household bubbles. And I think the biggest thing is just when you’re looking at the media and people with and without masks and all of that drama going on, but the rest of it we’re good, we’re good. And you are you fine.

Tony Winyard 3:52
Yeah, I’m absolutely fine. Yeah, I’m coping with this no issues at all. So I’m fine with it. Let’s get into the business side of things, you’re quite a prolific writer for one thing and you’ve got quite a colourful background. So do you want to tell listeners about some of the stuff that you’ve done?

Vicki Wusche 4:12
I think on the fun and the human side, and I’m a mermaid while I obviously this was before we were locked in the houses so obviously it’s cramping my mermaidens style at the moment, but I discovered at the age of 17, scuba diving, and once I stopped doing it in British waters, which were very murky and very cold, and I discovered the warm waters of the world. Oh my gosh, I have I’m just so happy when I’m in the water, me in the water, the sound of my bubbles, and then just looking at the gifts that nature passes you by the weird and wonderful things that are under the water and then we discovered photography as well which, which was awesome. And then in a professional sense once My marriage broke down, I went to university as what we would refer to as a mature student, I’d refer to it as an ancient student, I was 28 when I went to university, I loved learning, oh my gosh, you know, the idea that we could just some point in the day discover something that we never knew. And I think that’s maybe you know, a trait that runs through with the scuba diving, seeing things. I’ve never seen learning skills I’ve never learned before. And then you know, just generally anything that you can learn is just beyond exciting, and then turn that into being a university lecture. And then when I lost my job, I was made redundant, because I’d been government funded. So you know, been through what a lot of people are going through now. And realise that I had skills, thought that I could just carry on doing what I was doing, but realised I needed to look for new market. And I think that’s very pertinent now. So many people have businesses, but your client is going to change or what you did to offer your existing client is going to have to be tweaked. And then finally discovered writing and came to that, probably through a mentor that I had back in maybe 2008. Tom Evans, he said, he’s got a book inside them. And and I held on to that thought. And then finally in 2010, published first of what would be to date five books. But one of the books, for example, has been rewritten four times. Two of the books have been written twice. Yeah. So onto my fifth book. And as you can see, I love to talk. So putting it down and writing it comes fairly easy to me. But it also means that it gives my poor beloved Bob’s ears a rest when if I’m in writing mode, then I’m quieter than when I’m in talking mode.

Tony Winyard 6:59
Have the books been on the same subject or different subjects?

Vicki Wusche 7:04
So the first three books, say from 2010, through to about 2015. Were all about property. So that’s the first three books, they were using other people’s money, how to invest in property, which was really, in reply to lots of people saying to me, oh, you’re okay, you invested in property. That was another thing I did forgot to mention that bit. But yes, I used to invest in property. And, and people would make assumptions about me and my journey, but make an assumption in a way that it was an excuse for them not to be able to do what I did. And I felt that I’m very ordinary. I may be more determined and occasionally more focused than other people. But I am essentially just an ordinary person. And if I could do something, so could you so then I wrote the book to go stop telling me what you You think you know about me and here’s the story, then the second book is not so much what I did, but what I learnt. And that’s called make more money from property from investor thinking to a business mindset. And that’s really how I then again, it’s back to the learning. So, when doing property investing, I then learned about property investing, and I learnt, like, if you could see my hands, I’d be going up a level, you know, I, it’s not just what you do, but what you understand about what you do the insights that you gain, and I really just recognise that property is just another form of business. You know, whether you run a shop, whether you run a coaching business, both of us have been DJs, whether you’re a DJ or anything else, they’re just businesses and so property investing was just another business and so that books teaching people how to make a business from investing in property and then I really got into property for the next generation. So then this is where I went up another level if you like, and started to think about it. What are we doing? You know, an art is what we’re doing with property and society. And this is where I wander off to quite a bit, is what we’re doing making any sense. And the idea that our kids and their kids are going to be so much more mobile with all the technology and be able to live or work from anywhere in the world. I was just speaking to some friends earlier and one daughter is in Russia and some was in France. My daughter’s been in Slovakia. I mean, our kids can be International. Why do they need to be buying a house in the UK to live in when they’re not going to live here. But what our family could do is invest in property so that the income supports the family members to live and do whatever they want. So that was property for the next generation, securing your future. In uncertain times, and then there’s a storybook in the middle of 2015, which is only an E book. And that was called insights from the 22nd century. And that was about a world I imagined in the future. Where ironically, like now, my hope is that we will all come out of it much nicer. So the book is written in the future, with the voice from the future, thanking us in the past for all the things that we did, and we changed. And I might need to go back to that book if we stay locked in for too long and, and look at how I can tweak that story, maybe rewrite it and put it out there for the for the COVID world that we’re in. And then last year, January 2019, I published my fifth book, which is called the wealthy retirement plan, a revolutionary guide for living the rest of your life in style. And I’ve been working on the last couple of weeks, tweaking that material. So instead of it being the wealthy retirement plan, it’s the wealthy future plan because I firmly believe But when we survive the health crisis that we’re going through, we’re then going to have to be prepared to survive the financial crisis that the world is going to face at the other end of it with with everyone shot with everything stopped. We’re going to need to get prepared on an individual level understanding our money, maths becoming more financially intelligent. And that’s what I’m doing at the moment is sharing as much material as I can out there right now to help people get their heads right so that they can then look at their maths, their money and get themselves financially prepared and not incur massive amounts of debt over this lockdown period. That actually they don’t need to if they just thought about their money in a different way. So that’s where I’m at now.

Tony Winyard 11:50
Who is it you’re typically helping?

Vicki Wusche 11:55
Pre the lockdown it would have been more for people. in their mid 40s, to mid 50s, who had got some money, who were probably senior employees or business owners. And what they were looking for is a way to change their lives. They weren’t completely happy with what they’ve got, or they knew that they wanted more. So you know, either side of that sort of thin line. And they had, for whatever reason, either come across me and found me interesting or come across property, and then found me and what they wanted to do was have conversations about could investing in property be the answer to changing their finances so that they were more in control. And sometimes what they thought they wanted to do was give up work. But frequently once we’d spoken, it wasn’t so much that they wanted to give up work, but they wanted to be more in control of their income. And I think from the clients that I’ve spoken to, since The lockdown. They’ve all said that actually how pleased they are that they took these steps before, because they’re in a stronger position now, so whether they are furloughed, which is a British thing that we’ve got at the moment of sending employees home, but on 80% pay funded by the government, or whether they’re still employed or whether they’re running businesses, they know they’ve got alternate streams of income, and they feel a bit more stable than maybe other people do. But now what I’m finding is that people are coming to me, because they’re from all walks of life, and everybody needs to learn about their finances, and from the clients. And I mean, I’ve worked with thousands potentially even spoken to 10s of thousands of people over my career. And I would say 80% of the people I speak to do not have a grip on their own personal finances. 80% of them, that’s a, that’s a huge number of people that are going to work every day, whether for someone else or for themselves in order to make money in order to have stuff. And they’ve got no idea about how much money they need to pay the basics, and they’ve got no idea of how much money they could actually be spending on the non essentials and the luxuries, and they just don’t know where they stand. And then we wonder why we are a globe full of debt. Because that’s, that’s what we are. And it’s the debt potential is going to be massive on the other side. And so we need to protect ourselves as much as we can.

Tony Winyard 14:37
I guess, certainly in England, I think it’s the same in other countries, there isn’t financial education at school. So a lot of people are just totally unprepared aren’t they?

Yeah. I mean, you can take the whole paranoid route to this of why would people with money want ordinary people like us to know about money because then we wouldn’t take on the debt. Because the interesting thing is that we’re all the oldest days, if you wanted something you saved up for it. And then when people started to accumulate surplus money, they had to put it somewhere to protect them. So we sort of invented banks because you couldn’t have lumps of gold and everything around you. So we created the paper and we put the paper somewhere safe in the bank. And then all this paper was just sitting in the bank or the coin was sitting in the bank. So it was made sense that actually you could make money from that by lending it to other people that had got projects. So then what you found is that people would have a project and they would borrow for a project. They would pay interest on that money, the project would come to fruition, they could pay back the debt, they could pay back the interest, and then they were in a position where they could move forward. But then what started to happen is once you can borrow, you can borrow for all sorts of things. And of course, now people use things like credit cards and personal loans, to have things that they want, not necessarily things that they need. Although some people will be using credit cards stuff they need as well, I understand that. But generally, we are borrowing, because we want stuff that we can’t afford to have now because we haven’t saved up. And so the pendulum has swung completely the other way. And and of course, therein lies the danger of debt.

What do you think the biggest issue is that people don’t understand about money and that whole area?

It’s it’s all there’s so much in in the realms of Financial Intelligence, as you said, we’re not taught it. So it’s everything from understanding the difference between good debt, bad debt, how interest incurs. So one of the things that we’ve got going on and this is very British at the moment, but I’m sure if you’re listening in another country, you will be able to relate this to something that is going on for you. So the government in the UK has offered us something called a mortgage. holiday, which is a ridiculous name, okay? what it actually means is that if you’re in financial difficulty and you have a mortgage on your home, you can get in touch with your lender. And you can say, I’m in difficulty, please can I suspend my payments, and we’re allowed to spend our payments at the moment for three months, and that will probably have to be extended. Because we’ve attached the word holiday to the word mortgage and created this thing called a mortgage holiday. It’s very, very clever, because what it does is give you the impression that you can just take a break. But if you think about it, if I borrowed money from you, Tony, and I agreed to pay it back on a monthly basis or daily basis, or however we agreed it, and then I suspend those payments, you’re not suspending the interest. The interest still is adding up because your mortgages incur interest on a daily basis. So if you don’t pay your mortgage for 90 days, you’ve got 90 days more of it. The cumulative interest is not just, you get charged one pound per day, you get charged one pound on day one, and one pound 10 on day two, and so on, it multiplies. And what people don’t realise, and I actually emailed my own lender, just because people were arguing with me, I wanted to make sure I have my facts. Correct. And I said to her, how have I understood this, if you take a mortgage holiday, it’s not that you’re just going to add three months to my mortgage term at the other end, you’re not going to say, oh, Vicki, you’ve got 10 months left, or 10 years left to pay this mortgage, we’re gonna make it 10 years and three months, because there’ll be 10 years, three months plus interest Anyway, what you’re actually going to do is take that 90 days that I didn’t pay you, and you’re going to make my new monthly payments cost more, because you’re going to want to recoup that money as quickly as possible. So everybody’s mortgages who take a mortgage holiday are going to go up and so whatever you are doing that is being offered by your governments in this specific moment, is really a magnifying glass on our normal everyday finances that we would have been experiencing before COVID 19. But we just never really understood if you take out a debt, there is a loan to be paid, there is interest to be charged. I mean, even when you take out we have things called naught percent credit cards in this country. It’s not naught percent because you’re charged a 5% admin fee, which actually means it’s a credit card that cost you 5% to borrow the money for a year. So it’s a 5% interest, but it’s not not percent. But of course, it’s just the clever language we use. And I think everybody just needs to get smarter at the language. And we’ve even got the COVID example, which is called social distancing. It’s not social distancing. It’s not that I need to become distant from you, Tony socially, is that I need to become distant from you physically. So he called physical distancing, not social distancing. And it’s the way that we use words that causes confusion, in general conversation anyway. And very specifically can be used by people to allow you to slip into routes that they want you to take that don’t necessarily benefit you.

So at the moment, my sense is that a lot of people have no idea of some of the things you just talked about on the whole mortgage thing. So there’s going to be quite a lot of anger when people start to realise this.

Vicki Wusche 20:36
Well, I hope there isn’t anger. I do hope there isn’t anger because that’s not going to help anybody I just want people to learn. And what there is, is ignorance and what there needs to be is knowledge. And, and just that you know what, there’s a little bit of me that goes well, if we understood this all the way along surely that’s a bit of excuse me saying it like this, but common sense But if you don’t think about money in the way maybe that I do, maybe I’m an outlier in the way that I think about money, I’m not emotionally attached to it. I see it as a tool. I see it as something that we need to pay attention to because it can help us or it can hinder us. In the past, you know when if I take myself back to being in my early 20s I had the most amazing shoe collection, I would go out at the weekends and our favourite place to go was down to Brighton. We would wander in the lanes and if we weren’t in Brighton we we wandering around in Camden. And when we moved house, just stuff that I have, you know, we had two lorry loads, I mean giant lorry loads full of stuff. And then it was like where did all of this come from? I only had this little house and we got two giant lorry loads of stuff out there. And all that stuff wrapped. present time that I spent working to earn the money to buy stuff that I didn’t even remember I had, because they’ve been in the back of cupboards for so long. And I mean, now as a girl, yes, you do need a lot of pair of shoes. I understand that. But I mean, did I need that many pairs of shoes, some that I just kept, because they look pretty and I would never wear them, you know, I’d got I got silly with stuff. So, you know, there’s a lot of things that we can learn about what’s really of importance to us. And I think that’s the biggest thing that I hope is going to come out here I want to get across the Financial Intelligence message and the fact that we need to learn more, we need to be learning about all sorts of things. But what I really hope that we’re all going to come out of this knowing is what matters to us. Because when you understand what matters to you, that’s what you focus on. And I hope that we’re all going to come out of this, knowing how important our families are. And so for many parents who’ve been called to On the wheel of working, and now been in a position where they can’t work, maybe some family groups are going to start to make different decisions about the way they go back to work in the future. They’re going to have been entrepreneurial in this time and created maybe new online businesses, new ways of saving and spending and investing their money so that they don’t have to work as hard as they used to do or travel as far as they used to. So they can spend more time with those people that matter doing those things that matter to them. And that doesn’t involve buying crap that you’re just going to stick at the back of the cupboard and forget about or, you know, designer, I’m still getting adverts on my phone for designer stuff and I’m thinking in a time of crisis. Are you really thinking about the brand of shoe or the brand of handbags that you’ve got?

Tony Winyard 23:53
It’s a distraction, though, isn’t it?

Vicki Wusche 23:54
Yeah, but that distraction creates debt, and that debt creates stress and then your stressed so then you have to buy more. And this is the clever thing about marketeers, I make you stressed by putting you into debt so that you’re then more stressed. So you need to buy more stuff. And that’s how we’ve created our world.

Tony Winyard 24:18
I sense that the people who are in most need of your help are probably the ones that aren’t coming to you.

Vicki Wusche 24:24
Yeah, well, I mean, that’s, that’s always the way with with so many things because you know, those people that know will get in touch those people that didn’t know hear this, and then think, oh, Crikey, I do need to know about that. We’ll get in touch. But it’ll be the people that aren’t even listening to the podcasts. That may be the ones and and that in a way is the thing that I can do now. So while I’m locked in and I said to you before we came on air my daughter Charlie’s just come back from Slovakia so we are hardcore home for two weeks in case she got injured. acted on her route home. Because prior to that, we’ve been very locked down in our own little bubble and we knew we were okay. As much as you can. And so while I’m home, the thing that I can do is write my emails in my articles and get them out there on the social media and get them out there to my database and do it as a as a blog as an article as a video as a as an audio. You know, just share the message and hope that people who are hearing it if you need it or don’t need it, you can get in touch but also that your share it to others. So if they hear it, they can get in touch.

Tony Winyard 25:43
This show is more about helping people with ideas how they can exceed their customers expectations, but from what you’ve been telling me, the way you help people is you help them exceed their own expectations?

Vicki Wusche 25:55
Yeah, I think that’s a lovely way of putting it and particularly if I think back to examples before COVID, you know, people as I said to you would come to me often thinking that they wanted to give up work. But when we spoke about their finances and the way that they were running their lives and what was important to them, actually, what they wanted to do was spend more time with their children more time with their families more time doing those things that matter. And of course, that’s how I now know what I know. Because I know what I know, because this is my experience of working with so many clients, they’ve shown me this. And, and, and that, I think, is the joy that I get from working. Yes, of course, clients pay me but there’s all sorts of things that you can do to be paid. But what I love is that insight, so you call this exceeding expectations, and I think that that’s like my understanding of the word insight or the light bulb moment, you know, when let’s say it’s you so you and I have conversation and you say to me Vicki, this is my presenting problem. And then we go through my conversational process. And at the end of it, what we work out is that she, it’s something else. And I don’t tell you that. I asked the questions, and then you turn around to me at some point in the conversation, and it often is preceded by the word. Oh, you know what, you know, and it’s, it’s that moment when you get clarity about, Oh, geez, that’s what it is, you know, I knew, actually and then you go, I knew I knew that. But it’s, it’s often it’s, it’s in the back of our heads because money is part of our survival mechanism. In the old days, we were looking for Sabre tooth tigers and you know, poisonous food. And now hopefully we’re paying attention when we cross the road and looking for cars, or we’re worrying about whether we’ve got enough money because money provides your shelter, money provides your food and then money goes on to provide other things for you. And so money is a survival mechanism and it sits there in the back of our heads in our unconscious. And our unconscious will be doing its job to protect us. So what it will do is if it feels that you’re stressed, when you see the bills come in, then it will, you know, give you a mechanism so that you can ignore them. It’ll divert your attention elsewhere, because it’s only doing the best it can based on the information that it’s got at the very base level. And what you need to do is train your mind to go. No, I like knowing where my money is. I like taking responsibility for my money. And I just wish we all did this. But as you said, right, back early on, we don’t teach this in school. I remember a college teaching on an NBA IQ level one to a bunches of 16 year olds, and doing a class on on money and mass and there was no resources because obviously this wasn’t something that was actually in the curriculum, but I brought my own check from home. And, you know, obviously with the kids, you got to make sure that you cover out your, your bank account SOC code and all of that stuff, and blew up pictures and printed them out and showed them this was a check, and then asked them all to fill in a check to learn how to fill in checks. And this is the credit card. And this is what that means. And you know, and one of the things that I’ve been doing with my son in law is creating a programme to teach kids about that as well so that we can get some of that education into school.

Tony Winyard 29:30
Something that you touched upon early on in this episode was retirement. And I know you think of the word retirement quite differently than most people do.

Yeah, we’ve had many conversations about this as well. We so I think when a lot of people think every time and they think of it in the definition of what our grandparents and our parents did, it’s, you get to a certain age, whether you want to be at that age or not. So some people want to retire early. Some people want to retire late, some people never want to retire. But the way the rules go at the moment you get to this birthday. And if you’re employed, your employer is going to go around and say, you know, yesterday you were doing this amazing job for me. But now it’s your birthday. Go home, I don’t want to see you ever again. And I’m not going to pay you anymore and people are tossed out onto the scrapheap whether they are a value to anyone or not. And that’s applied so many negative emotions around the word retirement. And I know business owners, they’ll turn around and say the words, I never want to retire. Now this is another one of those things where it’s about exceeding their expectation because when you dig behind that, I never want to retire. What you mean is you never want to be without purpose. You never want to be without status. Maybe you never want to be doing not doing something of value. So you want to have a purpose in your life. You want to be doing something of value. It doesn’t mean that you want to carry on working five days a week in your business at the same pace that you did now. And so when I suggested in the book is what if we look to our time, again, back to being based on what’s important to us. So what’s important to you, and I know having spoken to you, you’ve got a daughter, obviously, you’ve got your health passions. So let’s build around that. So you’ve got family, and you’ve got health, that’s really important to you. Now, in order for you to have a healthy life and enjoy time with your family. You do need money. We can’t get away from that. But how can you generate enough money and this word enough is important enough money so that you can have the quality time with your family and create a lifestyle that has the health components that you want. So being able to buy the quality food that you like, being able to have the time to go for runs that you want to and anything else that you want to do from a health perspective. And if you start to look at it that way around what’s what’s it important to me and what matters to me. What you can actually do is you can break that down into math. So then I could say to you, right, so how much money do you need to pay for your mortgage or your rent? How much money do you need to pay for your utilities and your insurance. And those are the the essentials that sit at the top, then let’s look at your food. Let’s not put clothes in for a minute. Let’s not put in gym membership and all of that other stuff and birthday presents. Let’s look at the essentials. Now. The Essentials, they just enough for you to have a roof over your head to eat your food and to be safe and to be warm. those fundamentals. How much money is that? And for a lot of people that can be as I’ve got one client, because they’ve already paid off their mortgage. They actually only need about 1000 pounds a month, because all they’re having to do is pay for food and utilities and insurance. But then I have other clients you’ve got young children and so you know You do have to put in some things for young children, like if you’ve got babies, nappies are fairly essential. And if you’ve got young children, then you know, a certain amount of clothes for them is essential. Because they keep growing, whereas we tend to not to grow quite as much with a bit of luck. So you’ll have a different number. And it might be as much as two and a half or 3000 pounds a month, depending on the cost of your mortgage and the utility bills and everything else that you have. But once you know that number, then you can work out well actually, you know what, we’ve had all of this upheavals through this virus that was enforced on us, as a husband and wife or a mother and father couple, we can have enough money by just one of us working or two of us working half time. So what if, what if I work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Wednesday, and you work Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and we can or will all have Wednesday off or whatever you do will overlap. And if you’re a single person What if you realise that you only actually need to work a four day week, you don’t need to work a five day week. Now, that’s just to be enough. But you might choose just to have enough for maybe six months to say, I just would like to enjoy some of this time for us together. Or what you might say is, alright, so I know that Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday pays all my bills and thursday friday money is actually the money that pays for our holidays and our fun and, and pays for us to have the horse or the kids new bike, or the gym membership or whatever else that you you want in your life, the non essentials and the luxuries. So you just know more about why you’re doing what you’re doing when I go to work, and I don’t have this time with the ones that I love and the things that are most important to me, that I’m earning that money because I value the things that I’m going to do with that money. I’m not Just going to fritter that money away on stuff that I don’t need. I’m going to do different things. And what I also have suggested in the book is that maybe what we’ll find is if you are in the fortunate position where maybe with four days a week, you can not only cover your essential costs enough money, but you’ve got more than enough money to pay for your non essentials, you might even have much more than enough money to pay for your essentials, your non essentials and your luxuries. And maybe you choose not to work one day a week, you could take your time. And what if you took your knowledge and your skills and experience and went out into the community and helped others? Or maybe what you did was you worked on a project where you transferred your knowledge as an older person, to younger people, maybe you went into schools and taught them about money or taught them about, I don’t know creating your own vegetable gardens or anything. There’s so many different things that we could do with our time once we take back control of Money and that that’s the underlying unclear expectation that people are asking for that, that then I can help them identify Really?

How is what you do different from, say a financial advisor?

That’s interesting because I don’t want to knock financial advisors, you know, they’re highly trained, they’re highly qualified. And I haven’t been through. I haven’t been through the regulatory flank framework. So I’m not allowed to give financial advice I just asked questions. But I think that what happens here is, there are a few, and they are let me call them maybe more enlightened financial advisors where they’re not really financial advisors. What they’re helping you to do is to plan your life. And they may go through these questions with you. But there are a lot of financial advisors that are part of maybe corporates or companies. So really, they’re often in Please, maybe, and, and what they’re looking at doing is, oh, Tony, you’ve got, you know, 10,000 20,000 100,000 pounds to invest. If I put that money over here, I will make this level of commission. And so they’re not always driven. By supporting you to achieve your goals. It’s the same thing with estate agents. There are plenty of estate agents out there that will tell you that your house is worth a fortune so that you’re signed with them. But what they haven’t listened to you is say, I really want to sell my house quickly. And I want to sell my house quickly because I need to move closer to my elderly parents or I want to move closer to my children and grandchildren. And then they give you a finger. That’s going to get them the signed contract and therefore secure them. The Commission down the line they’re not really looking at, well if I put it on for 5000 pounds less, it would have sold two months ago and you would have been happy So we’re we’re often working with people that have got maybe a sound awful thing to say but ulterior motives. And that can happen the same with mentors with training companies, you know, in the world, but I move in between personal development, business, mentoring, property mentoring, there are so many stories of people out there. And really their only goal is to get you to give them their money for their course. And it’s not about whether you succeed or not. I mean, I looked at an email that came through to me today, it was some spam and someone getting everybody to come on to the inverted commas free webinar that you know, is going to send you on to horse at the other end. Because actually, if you read between the lines, these people had a business model that would have been hit very hard, even in these early couple of weeks of the virus, and so they have been very clever and identified another source of income but Their cleverness in identifying another source of incomes means that they’re going to take money from other people that potentially shouldn’t be spending their money because they don’t really have it to spend, and not spend it with people that can’t guarantee that they have their best interests at heart and really want to help them succeed. So, yeah, it’s difficult.

You’ve got a couple of tips that could probably be pretty useful for people at the moment?

Yeah, I think it sort of summarises what we’ve been talking about really, Tony, and I think I would just say to all of you, number one, sit down with those that matter to you most and if you’re lucky to be in a household with them, include your children include your parents. And once you get down to it, all the hustle and bustle has been stripped away. What do you value most? And when you understand what’s most important to you, and it’s perfectly okay, I mean, I would say to you what’s really important to me And probably even more now is I still want to have holidays at the other end of this I can’t wait to have holidays. And the holiday for me is not so much about lying on a beach doing nothing. But it’s back as a city that that opportunity to go to new places to learn new things and I want to see more of UK but I also want to be more of the world. So it’s okay. If what you value is travel and new things and new holidays. Just get it out in the open and and if there is a classic four of you in the family, go round each of you 1234 what is it that that you value most? If you’re on your own and you live with housemates have this as a conversation one evening all together, it’d be really interesting to see what each of you thinks about and when you start to have this exploration into yourself about what’s important to you, which I do believe is going to be different this week next week and the week after than it was In January and February for you, and I think potentially, as we move deeper into this crisis, you may find that even some of the things that you think you value today, actually are less valuable in a couple of weeks time, that’s okay. But once you know what’s important to you, then you can start to understand how you can create a financial plan that will support you to live that life. And that’s, that’s one big insight there, and then do the maths. And I think in the show notes, you’re going to share with people, links to some of my websites and my material. If I can help in any way, you know, read my emails, download the resources that I have, all the emails, all the articles, all the resources, the scorecard is all for free. It’s it’s there, it was free before the virus and it’s there for you now. And then the second thing I really want you to understand, no matter what country you are in now, your government is borrowing and it’s boring for two reasons. We It needs to save its people, us. It needs to make sure that we can stay in our homes that we can be fed. Because if people are malnourished, then they’re going to get sick. And if people are outside their homes, then they’re going to, you know, perish anyway. So their fundamental job is to save their own countries, their own people. So they’re borrowing money for that reason. But they’re also boring another level of money, which is to keep the economy going for as much as possible, because when we come out the other end of this, many countries will have been shot. I mean, not even in wartime, did we do this, that countries will have been shot economies will have stopped. And we lived in 2019 in a society that was based on the movement of money going around and people lending money to other people in order to accumulate debt and pay interest and blah, blah, blah. And that’s just how we work. The money had to move and now it’s stopped And the reason it has to move is because at the end of it you make profit. So either you earn a wage and you pay your wages, you pay tax through your wages, or you run a business and you make profit and you pay taxes. And those taxes are governed, gathered by the government and then fed back out to pay the dustman turn the lights on, keep the council’s running pay for the police pay for your health service pay for everything. And all of that is going to be shrinking now. And not only is the income to the government shrinking now, the debt the government is accruing is exponential. I mean, billions and billions of pounds of borrowing that has to come from somewhere and then it has to be paid back. And so what you understand now about your own finances is crucial because we are going to face potentially years decades of increased taxes or parity, while the government has to work out how to repay all of this, our only hope is that if all of this money has been borrowed from the World Bank, which is this, you know, imagine a world bank, that if everybody is borrowed from the World Bank and the World Bank goes, You know what countries, I’m going to reduce all your debt by 50%, then we may have a chance to heal and grow a lot quicker. But I wonder whether they’ll do that. But in the meantime, if they don’t do that, and the money has to be repaid, we need to get the economy up and running. You need to in the, in the words of this webinar, you need to exceed your own expectations. You need to stand up and be the most brilliant you you possibly can now because every one of us needs you. And you need every one of us to do our best to not take on debt that we don’t need because that’s going to burden us not to take from the government when you don’t need it. I mean, I’ve I’ve heard people talking about how they’re angry that they can’t get, you know, this 80% tax, but actually, they’ve got loads, they don’t need it now only take from the government, the handouts that you need when you need them. Okay, we don’t need to panic shop on that, because that will save not only you incurring debt, but that will reduce the debt your governments incur. And then we can all put our backs into it. We can all get the economy going. We can all find new ways of doing things and it doesn’t have to be going back to being our polluting consumers world. Maybe we’re going to change the world. For the better at the end of it. I’m sounding a bit preachy, like and I don’t know where I went off to then Tony, sorry. But hey, we can do this is I think the general message, it’ll be good.

We’ll just changing tact, slightly. One of the things that we were talking about before; I know you’ve had some experiences where your own expectations have been exceeded?

Vicki Wusche 46:01
Simple simple things like, just as a funny we went down It was literally one of the last things we did before our government said that’s it, you’re not allowed out anymore and shall restaurants and everything. And we’ve got a little Italian restaurant in our village caucus Bari. And the joy of moving here is not just that we’re close to my grandchildren, which is amazing, and that we’ve got new neighbours and everything else, but that we can go out of our house and we can literally walk not in five minutes down the road and be in the high street and get to the shops. And we were out for a meal and we were just chatting about the old days as you do. And my father was Italian. And so as a child, when we used to go out for meals, we would go to Italian restaurants. And my favourite meal was something called chicken Melanie’s saying now there’s a veal version of this but we used to just have the cheaper chicken version And it’s basically taking a chicken breast, bashing it with a hammer and then covering it in both crumbs frying it off and serving it with a portion of spaghetti into Marja sources, but getting there all the time. And it just evokes a smile. It reminds me of my dad, he’s no longer with us. It reminds me of my childhood in simpler times. And we were chatting and and the restaurant management said, Oh, yeah, no, I love that. And he was saying, oh, he puts pistachios in his chrome and everything else. I was going Oh, no, that’s great. And my son in law 10 rancid Yeah, I love it too. Anyway, conversation dribbled out. He poured the water. The he walked away and then he came back and obviously what he’s done is he’s gone into the kitchen and spoken to the the chef there and he turned around to the chef then obviously got the okay came back to the table to us and said, it’s not on the menu, but I can Make the chicken melon easy for you if you want, and he cooked, where he didn’t cook, he got a chef to cook for us. Oh my gosh, my mouth waters, my face is grinning so much just that the memory of that. And the fact that that was also, like the last thing we did going out families got some extra special memory too. And I can’t wait for us to come out of this and to be able to go back there and order it again. But that man exceeded our expectations. He heard what we wanted. And and he found a way to make it happen. And I think that if we can all do that if we can all exceed one another’s expectations whether that’s going out with your mask on whether that’s saying I mean I say thank you to my postman every day. Say thank you to a postman, I used to say thank you to the postman unless he actually knocked on the door and handed me something but you know if I see my postman now, I say thank you. Do you ever used to say thank you to the people at the checkout, you know, those people that are actually risking their lives so that we can still get our food or I can get your your veggies delivered, you know, the delivery driver, and let’s just say thank you more, let’s exceed the expectations of others. And like, like the restaurant manager exceeded mine for me.

Tony Winyard 49:20
What he essentially really did was show flexibility and just by showing flexibility you can help people, you can give, you can really surpass what people have expected.

Vicki Wusche 49:31
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we’re going to need that more. You know, I’ve spoken on a number of podcasts. It is interesting how the podcast titles have got an extra meaning now that we’re in this situation and you know, I know you’ve been running exceeding expectations for a good while now. And it probably had a different feeling to it. Then when I heard the word because I thought it was about you know, customer service and and i know You’re about pricing and all that sort of stuff. But now for me when I hear you have an expectation, sorry, and a podcast about exceeding expectations, it feels to me like this is something that we can all do. And maybe it’s something that we should all try and do going forward not trying because you can’t try. Maybe this is something that we all would like to choose to do going forward is wherever you can exceed the expectations of the people you meet, Be kind, be selfless, be grateful, be appreciative. And then maybe all of that love can just come out I’m off again on.

Tony Winyard 50:42
I usually ask people at this point, what does the phrase exceedig expectations mean to you? Did you just sum it up there or is there anything else you would say?

Vicki Wusche 50:51
No, I think I probably also came in about earlier I said something about insights. You know, when we were talking about working with my clients. For me; you’re using the words exceed expectations. And I would have said, you might have said, Oh, you client exceeded their own expectations. And I would have said, because it would have been my language, then I would have said, My client got an insight. And so is there a correlation between an insight and exceeding an expectation? And I think it worked in the business sense. But I think what I just said now about that made it I’m not very good on my grammar. So did that make it an adjective and now I want it to be a verb, something like that. I’m wandering out into very thin ice, I can hear it cracking as I speak. But I’m saying now, exceeding expectations can not only be that definition, but it can also be a verb, to exceed expectations and, and how you exceed expectations could be by being grateful by being kind by being sensitive by being appreciative. You know, that could be the verbal definition of

Tony Winyard 52:05
People are probably going to want to find out more about you and how they can find the products you mentioned. I know you have the Scorecard… Well, do you want to explain what the Scorecard is that you have?

Vicki Wusche 52:14
Okay, so the Scorecard was something that I created as part of that fifth book, the wealthy retirement plan. And the idea is that it was based on the five principles of living a wealthy life, which are getting clear about you want so clarity control, understanding the resources you have, learning how to leverage them, and then looking at the legacy that you want to leave. And then, with all of this that’s hit, it suddenly dawned on me that I sort of, if only I had called the book, the wealthy future plan, and revolutionary guide to living the rest of your life in style, then it would have matched exactly right now. So if you just change the word retirement for future and the scorecard used to be called the The readiness to retire wealthy scorecard and I’ve literally edited the page in the last day and called it the readiness to survive wealthy scorecard. Because this is about our financial survival. This is about creating a wealthy future financial plan. And what wealthy means is bringing together the things that you value time with your family. You know, it could be travel, it could be other stuff, but you know what really matters to you. And then looking at the finances that are going to enable you to live that life. So the scorecard still works. So it takes you through, I think it’s something like 30 questions, you know, less than 10 minutes, and it produces a personalised report and a personalised scorecard that gives you things to do, depending on your score, what you can do under each of those five principles to make sure that you’re preparing yourself as well as you can for work. The financial future and that scorecards, free as in you don’t have to pay for it, it will ask you to give your email. If you don’t give your email, you’re not going to get your report. So it’s worth doing that. And if you don’t want to get emails from me after you’ve got your scorecard report, that’s absolutely fine. Either don’t open them. And eventually I will delete you off my list, or just unsubscribe, but don’t Mark me as spam because I wasn’t being spammy. I was just being nice by sharing the scorecard. So just just unsubscribe. That’s fine if you don’t want to stay in touch.

Tony Winyard 54:32
Where do they find this list?

Vicki Wusche 54:33
That’s on the website, and I guess you’ll put the link in the show notes. But the most important thing is to be able to spell my name and if you can spell my name, you can find me anyway. So I’m Vicki, and my surname is Wusche. So my website is www.VickiWusche.com and then if you go to /scorecard, all one word. Then you’ll find the Scorecard. If you go to www.VickiWusche.com/wealthyResources then you’ll be able to access some spreadsheets and other stuff that I’ve created there. And then if you want to find me on social media, just search for Vicki Wusche. I am the only one.

Tony Winyard 55:18
And if they want to find your books, is it best to look on your site or Amazon?

Vicki Wusche 55:22
I think Amazon’s the easiest because then you’ve got the choice between getting the physical book or getting the Kindle. And certainly, the wealthy retirement plan. The Kindles are ridiculous, like £1.99 or something. So it’s a bargain to just pick up as a Kindle.

Tony Winyard 55:41
And just before we finish Vicki, you’ve got a couple of quotations?

Vicki Wusche 55:47
Yeah, I have. And I think the thing for me is that these two sort of went really quite nicely together for me. So the first one is Albert Einstein, and I’m sure people You will have heard this, but it’s: If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got”. And I think that that, to me is always like a battle cry now, do we want what we had? Or would we like something better. And if we want something better, something more something different for ourselves or for the world in the future, then we need to do something different. We can’t go back to always doing what we always did. And then the other one that works really nicely for me and I thought really tied in with your exceeding expectations, but it’s already on my website anyway, was: “Don’t lower your expectations to meet your performance, raise your level of performance to meet your expectations, expect the best of yourself, and then do what is necessary to make it a reality.” And I love that. I wish we can just change that to raise your level of performance to exceed your own espectations. So we’ve changed it that way around. And that’s Ralph Marston an American author.

Tony Winyard 57:08
Hopefully, people’s eyes will have been opened and ears opened and maybe hoping for some follow up action will take place from some of the great information you shared. Thank you for that.

Vicki Wusche 57:22
Totally. My pleasure. And thank you for inviting me on Tony. It’s been really great talking to you. Thank you.

Tony Winyard 57:32
Next week is Episode 83. And we have on England football’s most capped ever player, Darren Harris. You might be thinking, I know a lot about football I’ve never heard of Darren Harris, well, what I didn’t mention is he actually is England’s most ever capped footballer for blind football. Darren has had a pretty extraordinary life when he tells some some really amazing stories. So we’re going to find out a lot more about Darren Harris in next week’s episode of exceeding expectations. Hope you enjoyed the show. Please do share it with someone who really needs to hear some of the financial information that Vicki disclosed. leave a review, subscribe and I hope you have a good week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai