Vicki Wusche

Tony Winyard 0:00

habits and health Episode 10. Welcome to the podcast where we give you ideas on habits that you can create that will improve your health in some way. And the area of health we're looking at today is stress and the stress that can be incurred by worries about finances and anxieties around that whole area. And my guest is Vicki Whoosh. Shea. And it's a second time on the podcast, she was a guest when the podcast was called exceeding exceeding expectations. And today, she's going to talk about some of the financial worries that many people have over the whole pandemic situation and being furloughed and not being able to work and many self employed people really struggling over the last year or so. So that's coming up very soon. If you do like this episode, please do share it with anyone who you think would really benefit from some of the advice that Vicki shares, please do leave a review for us. And why not subscribe to the podcast while you're on whichever site you download your podcast from? Hope you enjoy this week's show. Hey, it's an elf. My guest today for the second time, Vicki, we show you how you doing?

Vicki Wusche 1:20

Hi, I'm really good. Thank you very much, Tony. And well, it's great seeing and seeing you again

Tony Winyard 1:23

I'm not sure I've actually explained to listeners, I use a platform called Zen caster to you know, I've been using Zencaster since episode one over two and a half years ago. And Zencaster recently added a video element. So although the podcast is still audio only, I now can actually see my guests. And we can actually you know when we're when we're talking so I can see Ricky this time last time, we were just just literally talking over the over the ethernet or whatever,

Vicki Wusche 1:54

it makes a big difference actually being able to see you because I can see you smiling at me, which is lovely. Whereas before I had to remember what you looked like?

Tony Winyard 2:03

And how so just to remind people who may maybe haven't even heard the previous episode, what is it? You do? How do you help people?

Vicki Wusche 2:10

So it is almost like a BC and an AC now is there before COVID and after COVID. So in the old world, what I did was quite simple. I helped people learn about and invest in property. And of course, that all dramatically changed not just because the estate agents close, but because how could you be thinking about investing in property and vital assets and how you can create your wealthy retirement plan when the whole world was just going crazy, literally sort of this time last year. So as I was saying to Tony, just before we started, what I recognised is I was getting so many calls from people who weren't my clients, but were contacts that I had panicking about money. And I realised that actually what I've been doing all the time, is help my clients understand what they think and believe about money, their attitude towards risk, etc. How much money they need, how much money they've got, and how they can make their money work better for them. And that's essentially what I've been doing all the way along. I just never described it that way. Because before, I would excuse me phrasing it this way, but allow you to invest in property with me, I wanted to make sure that you were financially sound that you weren't in debt, and that you also had the skills to make sure that the property investments worked and actually generated a profit for you. So I did a lot of teaching before we haven't got round to the actual property investment stuff. And now that's the bit that I'm focusing on. Because I think making that more public is going to be really helpful to people.

Tony Winyard 3:47

And I think also one of the things about the we're gonna dig into in today's episode is how this relates to health is because what Vicki's talking about here is so causing so much stress, and stress is probably the biggest impact on people's health of anything. So we're going to dig into that and habits around all of that. And so, I mean, just before we started recording you you were talking to me about how incredibly stressed some of your some of the people you were talking to him again.

Vicki Wusche 4:13

Absolutely. I mean, they were since let's say in January last year, they were sensible business owners, you know, they had businesses, they may be heard that something was coming, maybe some of them were starting to doubt most of them weren't. And they were fine. They thought that they were financially secure. And all of a sudden, when this notion, we've never even heard of a thing and how we take this for granted or what version are we now locked down? You know, we had this lockdown, and everything was going to shut and we're gonna have to stay in our houses. Not only were they thinking about how could they actually run their businesses, because if they didn't run their businesses, they weren't going to generate income. But that took them immediately to a dark place. Hold on a second. If I don't run my business, I don't get a wage. I've got all of these other people to pay I won't be able to pay myself and my family are going to starve, I need to sack everybody, I need to close the business. Well, that won't help because then you definitely won't have any money. And so many business owners in the way that they ran their businesses always took this very minimum. And it's accountants that advisors this, take the minimum amount of wages that you can so that you don't have to pay tax, which ethically is wrong. But that you take the minimum wage out of your business, well, then that didn't help when it came to furlough, because 80% of nothing wasn't going to feed your family. And so there were a lot of people who thought that they were successful, thought that they were financially secure, but were actually successful, and financially unstable, because they didn't have sufficient cash reserves. They didn't have alternative streams of income. And that caused massive stress, and it was unnecessary. And so the conversations I had, and the conversations I'm still having over a year later, I'm still working with business owners, saying, Okay, how much do you need? How do you earn it, what other sources we got? Let's comb it all out, and line it all up? And then they go, Oh, okay, I'm alright. Or, oh, okay, I've got a problem in my business, or I've got a problem in my personal finances, I can fix them. And it's that awareness that I would love your readers to get from this, whether they go on and they look at the habits, whether they implement the habits, just be aware that money is a tool that you can learn to use, and you can use it well. And if you do, and it's not about becoming a multimillionaire, but just using your money, well will stop so much stress in your life. That's it. We could end there.

Tony Winyard 6:53

What do you think it was that people just became so panic there? They were unable to see clearly and see these things that you were able to kind of illustrate for them. But what was it that was making them just?

Vicki Wusche 7:05

Well, I you know, it it's almost like this is this is ordinary to us now. But if you take your mind back to where we were say it at the end of February, beginning of March, we were starting to hear that there was this almost like Hollywood movie about to be launched on the world. I mean, if you'd ever seen the film, contagion contagion for real was coming, which is sort of almost ironic that they've made a movie about it, and none of us are prepared. But we were going to have this, you know, plague upon us. And you know, who was going to live? Who was going to die? So at that point, you're worried? Am I in the health risk? You know, am I too fat, too old to everything? Apparently, I'm the wrong I was the wrong blood group. At one point. I don't know if that's true or not, but you know, and there was so much stuff, starting little low levels of chatter, but then there was also the rule coming in from government that they were going to make us all go to our houses and shut our front doors. So then everything became about a panic, have I got enough food? Do I need to buy another fridge, panic shopping, toilet roll of all the things you can't even eat toilet roll, right? You could just get in the shower and have a wash. What you should have been buying is tins of food. But everybody went for toilet roll. And and that really that toilet roll story came out of Brexit because somebody said somewhere along the line that imports of toilet rolls would be limited by Brexit. So when the plague came, we all went and bought toilet roll this we're buying actual food. You know, it just the world just went crazy. And I think we've got so normalised to this that we forget the crazy. And because everybody was crazy, when everything was crazy, shopping habits were crazy. No longer hugging hugging people was crazy. Not seeing your family being inside, only being allowed outdoors for a one hour walk, you know, everything was crazy. And therefore our approach to money became crazy. It's like a magnifying glass on everything.

Tony Winyard 9:14

So in in the last year, you know, you've been helping so many people and sounds like a common so many people down and helping them to be more kind of rational about their issues are nowhere near the extent that they're making them out to be what what are the main What are sort of habits, you've been helping people we've tried to help them with this and get through all of this?

Vicki Wusche 9:36

Well, I think if we start from the most distressed person and not everybody comes in at this point, they all everybody appears with sort of a different problem. But essentially, it's it's it's mindset, it's math, it's financial resilience, and then it's moving forward. So those are sort of the the four things now mindset is Understanding what your money story is what your attitude to money is. And we can come back to that. The math side of it is, do you know how much money you need on a monthly basis to cover your basics. So enough how much is enough for you to live on. Now, that doesn't mean to say you always have to live to that amount. But right now, if you knew how much was enough to pay your, your rent, your mortgage, your utilities, some food, and if you can do any transport, transport, just the simple things in life insurance and mobile phones, simple things in life, then you would know how much money you needed on a monthly basis, you couldn't maybe feel reassured by that number, or know that you had to act. So understanding the maths of your life, and then get into a point where you sought out the debt. Now, conversation this side A year later, I've been having Well, probably, let's say the last six months is a lot of people, because of the financial position they were found themselves in in March April, got into a lot of debt, because they couldn't respond quickly enough. It was like they were having to turn the equivalent of a titanic away from the iceberg. And they couldn't turn quickly enough. They weren't nimble. And so they had to take on debt to deal with the financial commitments they had. So then step three is making sure that we address all of that any debts are dealt with, and get yourself into a position where you have financial resilience. And that to me means three to six months money in the bank account of your enough the basics, you can build up from that. But if you had the knowledge that you had six months, mortgage rent, gas, electric council tax, everything all sitting in a bank account, but you didn't need to touch that just sat there as a reserve, you could actually just decompress. And that's the financial resilience side of it. And then lastly, for quite a lot of the clients that I'm speaking to now who are further down the line, they're more sorted, is actually looking at the whole picture. So how much money comes in how much money needs to go out? How much money have you got in personal savings? Now, let's look at your business. Where does the money come from? What savings have you got? Is your business COVID secure? Can you function in your business? Whether we're locked down or not locked down? Or are you affected by those, those waves that we're going to go through and probably going to continue to go through? And if that's the case, how can we create additional sources of income to provide that level of security that you need coming in. And that's really the model is in a picture.

Tony Winyard 12:49

And one of the early things you said and that was numbers. And it seems to me that while I'm often amazed how many people really have problems with numbers, even people who are seemingly really educated have a fundamental misunderstanding of numbers systems.

Vicki Wusche 13:05

I think it's because we get too complicated at school, you know, we get into an i don't think that x plus y equals Zed was so much of a problem as when we started to add brackets. And it was actually x plus y in a bracket to the power of two divided by seven equals said to the nth or something, you know, I mean, really, we needed the concept there and who except if you're going to be an architect ever needed to know about causes signs and whether your triangles corners equal to 180 or not. I mean, who cares whether your triangle eats equals 180 degree, you know, we went too far, and what we should have spent a bit more time on. And it's a lot of the conversation I'm having now. And we mentioned clubhouse. So I run a thing on clubhouse called money Mondays at 5pm. And one of the conversations we're gonna have this week is whose responsibility is to teach children about money about finance. And for me, it's it's in the math class, right? It's a straightforward, adding up taking away multiplying, dividing. Now let's just apply adding up and taking away and even dividing if you like, to your pocket money, right. So if you save your pocket money, then you'll have this reserve at the end. And if you want to share you pocket money, this is how you could do it, and start to make that link between money and maths. Instead of what we've done is spent years generations teaching people complex math that they don't need for the ordinary life so that they can't use functional maths, they can't go into a shop and work out that that offer on the catch up is actually more expensive than if you just bought the other size bottle. You know and no, you don't need three bags of oranges. If you only wanted one, and yes, it might seem like it's cheaper, but you're going to throw one in the bin, so it's more expensive. We don't understand that sort of maths. And therefore, when we come to a position like we are now we're we're threatened all around our health, our mindset for a lot of people and mental health has been threatened, our physical health has been threatened, our business lives are being threatened, our families are being threatened, then using maths as a tool to make sense of what's going on is the last thing we can think of. Because we have negative connotations to it that never needed to be there. And that's that's I think, the the issue, she said.

Tony Winyard 15:40

And that's not something that can be easily resolved tone isn't far from

Vicki Wusche 15:45

Well, I think

Tony Winyard 15:46

I mean, well, I what I mean, is for the current generation, so much for the future Gen. No,

Vicki Wusche 15:51

I know I was I was gonna go well, for future generations, we can teach them as adults, we can teach our children now and more of them have been at home. We've got some holidays coming up, let's make sure that all our kids understand basic maths. I mean, some of the maths questions our 11 year old niece was being sent was being answered by eight adults in a work whatsapp group before we could work out what the answers are. I mean, really, do we need that. And I think what we can do now, and that's where the mindset comes in, is recognise that maths is just a tool, right? Whether you liked it at school or not. And obviously, I'm a bit of a math nerd. I loved maths, I found maths quite easy. I sat in the back of the class doing my homework, because I was chapters ahead of the maths teacher, I knew what she was doing. She was working away through the book, she would teach she would do it on the I didn't need to listen to her because I'd read it in the book, I'd answer two questions, or wait till she gets to the end of the class, we do our mini test, I take my answers off in the book. And if I got my answers, right, I'm sorted. And then I would just do all my other homework and not not listen to it, because I found it easy now, not everybody does. And I think you've just got to get back to the basics. How much money How, how much, if you added up all your bills do your bills come to, and I don't mean, including the Disney Channel, and Spotify because those to me are not essential as I mean, the things that will keep you and your family safe and fed and warm. So that's a house with a door on it. And that's heating and lighting and council tax because otherwise they'll come we have to pay the council tax the bins, the bins get paid by the council tax, and then food. And I really even your mobile phones and your insurances are a bit secondary, but we could include those in here. Add those numbers up. That's it some simple adding. Now what we're talking about is not a fear of maths. We're talking about a fear of the answer that maths will give us and I spoke with a client may run a half a million pound business. I still started with exactly the same question I asked everybody. How much money do you do you know, how much money you need on a monthly basis just to cover the basic costs? rent, mortgage, utilities, blah, blah, blah, blah. And they said to me 7000 pounds. Okay.

And how many people are in your family? So there's a mother father and an older child come back home. So one in their early 20s. Okay, so let's get into the nitty gritty of this. How much is your mortgage? And their mortgage was two and a half grand. Okay, fine. So then there's four and a half grand a month? And is this how much you're spending? Now while we're in lockdown? Yes. Okay. And I'm going through my head, what on earth? Can you be spending the three of you four and a half grand on? I know, I have a bad seed habit. So mine is gardening. And I add up how much I spend on gardening, which is I'm hoping that it's my future food budget in advance. But let's be honest, I know it's a bit of a bad habit. How much are they spending on Amazon and takeaways and alcohol to spend four and a half grand a month. And so when we started nitty gritty in getting into it, that wasn't their basics, okay. They had included other numbers, there was insurance in there, and their mobiles and things like that. But when you looked at it, they were spending an awful lot of money. Not all things that they shouldn't, this isn't a judgement. But when I asked the next question, how much personal savings do you have? And if you knew how little personal savings they had, bearing in mind, they had a business that turned over half a million and they were spending four and a half grand a month on not a lot really not holidays, not replacing their cars. They had so little savings. The question is Feel you, I have to ask you is do you really need to spend all of that four and a half grand on the stuff that you're spending on? Could you put some of that money into savings and build up your reserve. And that's habit three, that's that financial resilience, they had so little savings, that they couldn't cover more than one month of their personal expenses. So if anything happened, let's say they were walking down a hill, and they both broke both legs, and then they had to stay at home and they couldn't do anything, because they were in pain, and they couldn't work. Now, they've got no money coming in, because they can't run their business, they can't take their wages, they can't keep the business going. They can't survive for more than a month before. They're in really, really dire financial stress. And when I spoke to the woman, she said to me that she was scared to go back and actually look in detail at her finances, because she was scared of the answer. And she was scared of seeing the detail of what she spent on that it was, I'm just making this number up 500 pounds a month on takeaways or something, or 500 pounds a month on food, or, for me 500 pounds a month on seed packets and compost would be awful, you know, to know that you were spending so much money when you didn't have the savings. And so I think that's it. It's not just the fear of maths. But the fear of the answer that the math could give you then becomes the second wave of stress around money.

Tony Winyard 21:33

And that habit that you just sort of touched upon, of actually saving money on a regular basis seems to be in the 21st century is a very different attitudes towards saving than it was, say 50 years ago, or even non?

Vicki Wusche 21:50

Yeah, we've lost it, have we we went through this phase where money was so easy. And really, actually this was before the last recession, this was before 2007, where money was so easy, what we would do is if we wanted something, we would just get a credit card or a loan, it doesn't really matter. And again, this was ignorance about the implications, the mass, how much that interest was costing you, you know, you buy a pair of shoes in a sale at discount, but they're not clear your credit card be charged, you know, 20% in those days on the on the credit card, let it roll for so long, that actually the shoes cost you more than they would have done when they were whole price. If you hadn't bought them in the sale in the first place. our parents and our grandparents would save and buy, save and buy. And somehow the middle generation that we are, has gone into I want it I'm having it, I want it, I'm having it and that's incurred debt, everybody I speak to, has got at least two to six credit cards loaded with debt. Now, just to put this in perspective, when I was in my active property buying phase, I had 10 credit cards with debt on all at naught percent. And in those days, naught percent actually meant naught percent because they didn't charge the admin fees. So I really had got free money, and I use that money, and I offset it on my mortgage, and I use that money to then pay deposits on properties. So it was, you know, I went off down like some deep end of working out how to make money work for me. And now, there's a way to still do that. I know. And I'm not giving financial advice, I'm not a financial adviser. But when you look at a naught percent card is not not percent because there's an admin fee. And if we make the math nice and say the admin fee is 4%, then you're actually paying 4% for that money. So that's as if you took out a loan for 4%. So it's the same thing. The difference is that if you spread that out over two years, then that's the equivalent of 2% per annum interest rate. Whereas if you took out a bank loan for 4%, and that lasted you five years, you're paying 4% every year. But if you take out a court, now, don't go taking out a naught percent credit card at 4% over two years, which would be lovely. If you're then not going to work out how you pay that money back. So then what you have to do is take out and this is where dividing comes in. You take out however much you borrow. Let's make them so nice and say 2400 pounds, and divide that by 24. Because there are 24 months in a year. And as long as you pay off 100 pounds a month, you could have 2400 pounds to solve something that is incurring debt for you now, clear that debt but costs you money, how to percent money, the value, the cost of the money is 2% and pay that back 100 pounds a month, and in two years from now be completely debt free. So those are some of the conversation now. like half your listeners, I'm sorry, at that point, if you track your numbers, I'm sure your lead, your listeners will have dropped off, come back, come back, it's fine. The point is, it's just adding up taking away and a bit of division. And you could be debt free. And more importantly, not only could you be debt free by understanding how much is enough and building up your financial resilience, but you could then get to the next stage where you have much more than enough. And you're in a position where not only have you got savings in your personal account, you understand where the matters in your business, or you understand actually where the money comes for your employer. Because I think employees need to understand that if they want to keep their jobs, they need to understand how their business, the business that they work in makes money and how they can help that business make money because that's how they get their wages paid. But you could then start thinking about how you can invest in other streams of income, cash flow, not necessarily going into crypto or stock trading or anything but something that generates another stream of income for you. And that could be selling your knowledge, it could be having a business on the side, it could be investing in property. And then you're at the point where you can feel comfortable, you know what you need, you've got what you need in the bank, you've got more than what you need. Now you can turn your attention to maybe helping other people in the community giving back.

Tony Winyard 26:35

And as you were speaking, it made me realise because earlier on, I said that, you know, the stress caused by financial worries, is a huge factor in many, many conditions that we get afflicted with. But it's not even just a suddenly dawned on me. One of the biggest causes of relationship problems is finances. It's stressed caused by finances as well.

Vicki Wusche 26:59

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think I literally was last night, just as you do scrolling. And I've got no reference for this sort of tool. But I think they said something like, one in nearly one in two marriages fail. And of those a quarter are due to financial reasons. You know, that's so sad, isn't it? And it's not necessary. And certainly within this framework of understanding your money story, you need to understand where your partner comes from. I remember speaking to a couple, and what he described as rich was what she described as wealthy. And what she described as rich was what he described as wealthy. So when they spoke, they weren't even, they were using the same words, but they had different meanings for them. understanding whether your partner is someone who thinks money grows on trees, or your partner is someone who thinks that money is scarce. And it worried about money all the time. You know, Bob and I have completely different risk profiles, attitudes towards money, he is always looking at how much does that cost, whereas for me, I look at how much does the time cost. So he will search for a bargain. And he might spend three hours searching for a bargain and save us 10 quid, and I'm going, but that's three hours of your time. Now, I over 20 years come to realise that he enjoys doing that. So let him do it. And if we make 10 pounds saving, then that's great. That's, that's his pleasure. He likes the investigation, he likes to think that he's got a bargain. It's a bit like being able to barter or negotiate. You can't normally do that with a web site. So the only way you can do it with a web site is to look at other websites, and then find your deal. So if you've got someone in the family that loves to find a deal, let them find a deal. That's great. That saves you money. But recognise that that is a skill that your family needs. They're not just being mean, because for me, it was like, Why do we always have to have taste those beans? Why can't we have Heinz beans? And it was because tescos beans were cheaper. We now eat tescos beans, quite frankly, they're all right. You know, you can, you can adjust your taste is it's not about lack. It's not about greed. It's not about not having enough. It's about the mindset and communicating. And also, like one family I spoke to and I'll refer to them as a family. So it's it's more anonymized. This person was in the family, the one that has to make the money. Their partner was sick, they had a child. And at the end of it all the pressure was on this person to generate the money for the family. And when we had the conversation, and they finally and it took three phone calls before they were honest, in the end, fully honest, they've been telling me beds, but then they really felt like they could dig out the dirt and tell me all of that Truth, they were in tears, they were so stressed, they hadn't told the partner the position they were in. And even though I could find solutions for them to solve the problem, immediately, they would have to come clean with the partner about the situation they were in. And they didn't feel that they could do that. And so then I had to play a role of supporting them to find a second way, a different way of solving their problems. And they know now that it is completely achievable, that they can, and this is so sad, hide their embarrassment, hide their embarrassment, but during lockdown when everybody was struggling, their business was struggling. And in order to keep up the provider role for the family, they had to take on debt, but now they're struggling to surface because they can't talk to one another. And that's sad. And that's that's, that's very sad.

Tony Winyard 31:02

So you've mentioned, you've given suggestions for some habits that people can take on board for for different things. Now you were talking about saving and so on? Does anything else come to mind in terms of kind of habits that would help people in these situations in any size around finances?

Vicki Wusche 31:25

Well, I think I think the most fundamental that every family just needs to know is how much are your basic bills added up? Know that your family needs 1500 2500 or 3500? whatever the number is a month? And then look at how that money comes into your family? Is there one or two people generating that? And do you have enough, are you at a point where your income equals your expenses, or even that your income exceeds your expenses, if you're in that position, great, then start focusing on your savings. But if you're not, if you're in a position, where your income is less than your savings, that is unsustainable, that is never going to get any better, you then have to look in detail at your expenses and what you can save. And quite frankly, even if your income exceeded your expenses, and you haven't done this in a while, you should just write down everything that you spend and look, do we really need that, we realise that we were paying, I think, another 10 pounds a month for the Disney Channel, something like that. And it was just so that when my granddaughter came over, if we didn't want to go out, we could watch a Disney movie. Well, we've got a couple of movies that we saved over Christmas, she's quite happy to watch the same things over and over again, she's just four. And there are so many like cartoons that we could get for free. We're not for free. Netflix isn't free, but effectively on Netflix. So we then had a conversation with sky TV, and we got the whole package down to less than we've been paying for yes, we gave up on the Disney Channel. But actually what we also saved on was Netflix because sky give you Netflix, we were paying for it separately. So all of a sudden, we saved, you know, umpteen pounds a month on our family sharing Netflix that we didn't need, we say 15 quid on that we save 10 quid on this. And we're 25 pounds better off now that 25 pounds could be the bit that makes the difference. You know that over a year is hundreds of pounds. And if you can do that in a couple of areas of your life, that could be the bit that makes the difference.

Tony Winyard 33:39

I think something you just touched upon a couple of minutes ago, early on in that what you just said were that if people were to sort of make a list of their expenses, and earlier in the episode, you mentioned about that that lady who was scared to look what she was spending because she didn't want to know. And I it seems to me that that is an issue with a number of people where they don't reason they're not listing down what their expenses are, because they're horrified what they're gonna say.

Vicki Wusche 34:05

Oh, totally. But so you're stressed about money, right? I'm suggesting that you write down and look what you spend on and you don't want to do that because you're scared see what you spend on. So you're going to go another month, being stressed about money, because you don't want to see what you spend on it. It's an insanity loop. And, or, dare I say cowardly, because at the end of it, if you as an individual are stressed unless you are a single person with no brothers and sisters and no parents, living alone in a house or by yourself with no friends, your stress will be affecting other people. So if you're in a relationship, and you're not prepared to end this conversation needs to be with the whole family. I'm not just saying hey mom, or Hey, Dad, look at your spending habits. I'm saying, mom, dad, and kids. All of you How many children do you hear going around the shops going? Mum? Can I have this mum? Can I have that Dad, can I have this deck? Can I have that because they don't understand. They've been brought up. A lot of them pre the whole drama of lockdown and COVID and financial woes with they can have anything they want. Because we were in that mindset in 2019. And before. And if you teach them now and you didn't have to teach them about the I don't know the stress you're in, you don't have to maybe share the gory details of the debt you're in if you want to keep that private outside of the family. But you can certainly say to them, we add up how much we spend. And we look at how much we spend. Because when mom and dad or mom or dad or or any combination of that goes to work, they bring in wages, we have to pay these bills. And it's only when we paid these bills, that we then got the money to pay for other things. And this is the point where I think maybe to share my money story. So I mentioned on clubhouse that I run this money Mondays. And in the conversation we had last week, I shared a story from my background, how when I was on benefits, and maybe that's something useful for your people to know that I've been on benefits. I've added up how much I spend on a monthly basis on a weekly basis because I couldn't afford to just waste money. I've also been close to repossession on the house, which is why my daughter's born on the day she's born in July because of the stress of money actually gave me preeclampsia, which is high blood pressure in pregnancy that can damage the health of the baby. So she had to be brought early. You know Money, money and stress. It's it affects your life. When I picked my daughter's up from school, the ice cream man sat outside those gates. And he was there because he knew the kids were going to come out of school see the ice cream man say to their parents can have an ice cream, brilliant sales and marketing. And quite frankly, it's a metaphor for every piece of marketing in our lives. They all do it. Anybody who wants to sell anything, puts it front and centre and makes us believe we want it or makes our kids tell us that we want it and we have to buy it. Otherwise you're a bad parent. The cheapest ice lolly or ice cream or anything was 50 P. And it was a lemonade lolly in a silvery packet. And I had two daughters can't buy one one. And they can't share a lolly. So that's a pound. Every day that was going to be a pound that's five pounds a week that's 20 pounds a month. And 20 pounds a month was 10% of my entire financial resources for the month, which had to pay the rent had to pay the food had to pay the electricity had to pay our ticket on the train. And I couldn't afford that money. So every day walking to school, I was thinking what can What can I come up with for the children today. And I fell on a few little things like how school I was positioned myself so that the

the band was actually behind them. So I was staring at the band. So they looked at me. So it's very important. The position the hands I held, whose hand I held and who held whose hand so that we walked in a line. And I'm looking at the ice cream shop. I'm looking at van, I'm looking at the children, the children are looking at me they're not looking at him. And then all the birds and if they said anything it was I've got to have some distraction techniques. What questions have I got stored up, because I had to stop us spending that pound. And then little monkey if that wasn't good enough, he would come around ring his bell in evening. So if you hadn't got you coming out of school at six o'clock, he was coming around reviens bell. The last thing any parent wants to ever give their child is sugar just before bed. I taught my children that the ice cream van was the bedtime bell. And it was the council who came round and rang the bell to help mommies and daddies know that their children needed to be going to bed. And that if we didn't get our children to bed when the ice cream Bell came, then we will get in trouble. We don't want that do we and I was a single parent and my kids were in bed by half past six every night of the week because the bedtime bell rang, which meant the curtains were shut and they didn't see was the ice cream van again. And that that was because I needed to manage the money. But my daughters do not have negative beliefs about money. They don't believe money is scarce. They thought we were rich. And the reason they thought we were rich was because I saved up in order that we can have a holiday that we could go to the zoo that we could go to Chessington because of the tricks that I was playing in the background and then as they got older, I was honest with them, obviously we moved house and then there was an ice cream van went by with a bell and you know they tend to have fairly similar bells and they guy. Oh, that's funny that ice cream band plays the same song as the bedtime bell. And then because I had to own up that it was never really a bedtime, but it was always an ice cream man. And mommy had told you a white lie for our own goods that, you know, talk to your children about money. And they won't be so stressful going around the supermarkets.

Tony Winyard 40:21

And also, yeah, going back to where we started the episode that's educating them as well. So I know that the generation in schools now will be much better suited or much better equipped to handle a future pandemic. And whenever I don't, then we're handling it now.

Vicki Wusche 40:41

And I mean, think simple things like, you know, do you give your children pocket money? Do they have to earn it? Or do you just give it to them, my daughter's had to earn it. So one daughter liked the money, they would there's like a two year gap between them. One daughter, like the money went out and got herself a job, the other daughter was too young to get a job, but she would quite like ironing. So she would do the ironing for me. And that's how she would earn her money. So you know, they learn, then if they want something, they could do something and they could earn money for it. And then when they done something and they earn money for it, they then got the money, they can then choose how they want to spend it. So then one of them wanted to go travelling. And they were quite comfortable doing the ironing. So they didn't feel that they needed to go and get a job. And I said no, if you want to go travelling, you're gonna have to work out how much money you need. So we worked out on an Excel spreadsheet, how much the price the flight, how many nights you were going to stay away three months how you're going to pay for that accommodation? They were going to go to South Africa. So they're going to take a bounce pass, how much is the bus ticket? How much do you need for food, and we had all of these budgets of everything. And then worked out how much money they needed. And what I said was I will match fund you. So you go out and you earn half of it. And I'll support you and I'll give you the other half, they had a job the following Saturday. And not only did they then go to South Africa for three months, but because they then budgeted so well, while they were out there, and then got a job that provided them with accommodation and saved on their money. They stayed out there for six months. And they've then gone on and use that same technique to fund them to go to university. So these are the skills that we could be giving our children

Tony Winyard 42:21

in it's funny, as you said that it reminded me that my mum did exactly the same to moon, it is only just come back as you were saying that because I my when I was at senior school, there was a ski trip. And I really wanted to go on a ski trip. And at the time, I was doing a milk round, you know, helping the milkman deliver milk? And she said, Okay, well, what is the price of the trip? I'll pay for half as long as you raise the other half. And so I did it by that milk round and the tips that I was getting, and so on. And yeah, I'd completely forgotten all about

Vicki Wusche 42:50

that. And it'd be really interesting if before the ski trip, what were you doing with your milk money? Your wage records? Of course, which is your passion? Yes, of course. So you would have been buying the records. But now you saw something you wanted?

Unknown Speaker 43:06

Were you

Vicki Wusche 43:09

phrases, were you denied your music, because you wanted to go on your ski trip, or did you see that actually, there was a priority that was temporarily bigger than your music, that you were going to stop buying your records, spend the money on the ski trip and then after the ski trip, you could go back to spending on your records again,

Tony Winyard 43:32

I was able to he just made me work harder and milk round. So I could earn additional money and I could be do things that would help me get tips from from my customers nice. And so I was able to do both, I could save money for the ski trip, but still buy records as well.

Vicki Wusche 43:51

You know, and this is this is why you're such an entrepreneurial man. And, and you know, this is see this money story that you're telling me now, your money story about the ice cream, so your milk ban. And not just that you were denied the records, but the you did extra to earn more money because of something that you wanted. That's the money story. Now that will also have laid a little line in your psyche that says, If I want something, I just work a bit harder or a bit smarter, or give more value. If we speak in business talk if I give a bit more value, then I can have I can have one in my case, it would be my lolly and eat it your case it would be I can have my records and my ski trip. You know, it's brilliant. And everybody will have money stories, you know will be so great is it out of this. people listening to this if they could send you their money stories, it would be just amazing to to hear the stories that people can share. You've got a Facebook group.

Tony Winyard 44:58

Well and it's funnily enough The Facebook group is just about to be revamped. And we're going to be making a big effort over the next few weeks. And by the time this episode goes out, it should be in full flow, where I'm really going to be encouraging much more conversation and community in the group. So by the time this, this will be going out on the 25th of April, yeah, I definitely encourage anyone listening to this to come on, come into the Facebook group for a start if you're not a member, and do share your stories around what Vicki just said.

Vicki Wusche 45:28

And I think one of the things that we've agreed out of this is that I'm going to write up these notes, because obviously, I probably scared a few people with the math talk and everything else. But it's very simple, I'm going to write up these habits, I'm going to, you know, just give you the headline give you the Y give you what you need to do. If you want I can even share the Excel spreadsheet that people can use. And you'll be able to put the PDF and spreadsheet all in your Facebook group if you want for people. That would be fantastic. They can download those resources. Well, I mean, my passion here is that there is good debt, there is bad debt. And the thing is that when I see adverts on the underground, in those old days, when I used to get on a train and go somewhere, there were adverts that you could take out a loan and the loan was 4,328%, equivalent, you know, payday loans, all of this sort of stuff. absolutely appalling to prey on people that were in such dire situations when all it is, is a conversation about maths.

Tony Winyard 46:32

And yeah, something else that's funny is I've, up until a couple of weeks ago, I had a very foolish misunderstanding that this whole depth thing is something that's just happened in recent times, like in the last 50 years a web. And last few days, I've been reading a book about Cicero, you know, in Roman times, and frequently they keep coming back to the moneylenders and how many problems the moneylenders were causes, then it was 2000 years ago.

Vicki Wusche 47:00

It's always been there. And that's the irony is we think all of this is the same. And, you know, we bash on about the landlords, for example, that their money grabbing and everything else. But But who did you think were the Lords of the manor? And then there were the serfs that work, the serfs that worked on the farms and everything else. They would tenant farmers, there was the same patent is all there in history. Everything is there for us to hit even COVID is there for us in history with the, you know, the flu pandemics and everything else that went through is we're just repeating history about, the thing is you have to learn from it. You've got to learn from it.

Tony Winyard 47:39

Yeah, absolutely. Well, if people want to find out more about you, and how you help people, where where's the best places for them to look?

Vicki Wusche 47:46

Well, I think probably the easiest thing is if you can spell my name, you can find me. So obviously, it'll be in the show notes. But it's Vicky vi ck AI. And my surname is washi Wu SP he. So you can go to my website, which is picual shea.com. There are resources there, there are online audits there, etc. You can Google my books on Amazon, there are books about property investing. But there's also the more recent book, which is called the wealthy retirement plan, which don't be put off that is about retirement, it's actually about these money habits that you need to be thinking about and how you can, if you start thinking about how you want to spend your time, you'll be better at managing your money, because it'll all make sense for you. And then, of course, come and make friends on Facebook. If you're very busy. Come and make friends on LinkedIn. There's loads of websites. So videos on YouTube, Instagram, and of course, now the new big thing is clubhouse. So you can come and find me on clubhouse as well. So any social media platform, if the longest you spell my name right, you'll find me.

Tony Winyard 48:53

And finally, we kind of touched upon books, you know, I mean, you've written a number of books. But is there a book that sticks in your mind at the moment that is just fascinated you for whatever reason that you would maybe like to tell people about?

Vicki Wusche 49:06

Sure. For me, it would be the Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, and I read this probably 20 years ago. And it's the story of a man on a journey. And along the way, he is taught or shown how to see the opportunities that are around him, just by looking at things differently. And I have saved that as my lesson from the book, that there are opportunities all around us, maybe this podcast is an opportunity for you to look at money differently. And to just remove all the stress, create a few good habits and in 12 months from now, you'll have your financial resilience and you'll be creating new income streams and your family will be delighted and happy and maybe we'll even be able to have holidays and you can easily have From savings rather than from debt, so the self esteem prophecy is about recognising when there are, first of all recognising that there are opportunities out there, and then recognising when one of those opportunities comes to you, so that you can act on it. And hopefully, this podcast is that opportunity coming to you now.

Tony Winyard 50:22

Hopefully that is the case. And, Vicki, thank you for your time and for your immense wisdom that you just shared with everyone. Because, as you say, this, this could make a monumental difference to some people's lives if they take action on it. So hopefully they will.

Vicki Wusche 50:36

Yeah, definitely. Thank you.

Tony Winyard 50:39

Thank you very. Next week on episode 11, of habits and health, my guests, I'm Mary Renzel MD, and Ali Hively. And they're, they combine her expertise in the field of dynamic brain function. Mary is a new immunologist, board certified in neurology, and integrative integrative medicine. While Ali holds a master's degree in education and curriculum. And she helps to she helps the patients implement the stuff that Mary talks about. So they've, they've combined now expertise, they've, they've both experts in very different areas. And it's quite a unique combination. And we're going to dig into that a lot more in next week's episode. If you know anyone who would get some real benefit from some of the advice that Vicki shared with us, please do share this episode with them. why not subscribe to the podcast so you receive it every Tuesday when it comes out. And please do leave a review for us. It really helps people who were looking around the new podcast to listen to if they can get an idea of the flavour and what other people think about a podcast. So please do leave a review. If you're not sure how sure how to leave a review for a podcast. If you go to Tony winyard.com slash podcast, you'll see a link there with a tip to a page that shows you step by step with images, how you can actually leave a podcast. hope you have a fantastic week. See you next week.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai