How To Save Money For The Things You Want With Urenna Okonkwo
Many of us have never been taught how to manage our money, this includes how to budget and how to plan for the future, but also how to save in the short term for the things we really want.
My guest today is Urenna Okonkwo who started her career as a financial advisor helping wealthy clients to manage their money. Today she is the CEO and founder of Cashmere - an app that is helping young, aspirational consumers learn how to save through setting up a virtual piggy bank, enabling them to make guilt-free luxury purchases and to help them to save for the lifestyles they desire.
Cashmere is empowering consumers to manage their finances by making considered purchases, turning them away from fast fashion and instant gratification, and developing their saving skills through planning.
It was fantastic to hear about Urenna’s incredible journey from working in finance to becoming a female entrepreneur in the e-commerce and Fintech space. In today’s episode, she shares some of the challenges she has faced in launching Cashmere, and her experience in gaining funding for the platform as a young black female.
We also take a look at the future of saving, with some of the innovative solutions that are on the horizon and discuss the power of collaborative saving.
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You can listen (43 min) and subscribe here:
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1. you deserve to treat yourself
Do you dream of buying an expensive handbag or splurging out on a holiday, but have no idea how to save up?
Have you ever found yourself feeling like luxury items are out of your reach because of your budget?
Are you guilty of using your credit card to spend money you don’t really have, on things you really want?
“Something may be a £1,000, yes that’s a lot of money — but when you actually break it down, if you save up £100 pounds for 10 months, you’ll have that £1,000 in cash — and then you can buy the item, without thinking that you have to take out a loan or use a BNPL scheme, which just adds more debt to your financial portfolio.”
If so, you’re not alone. We’re all human, and being financial literate doesn’t mean you shouldn’t treat yourself. Sure, it’s important to save for long-term goals, like your first home or retirement, but you need to enjoy your life, too. That being said, there’s a way to save up for those much desired, expensive items wisely, without getting into crippling debt. This is why Urenna Okonkwo set up Cashmere — to help you experience the luxury lifestyle you desire even if you’re on a budget.
Urenna used to work as a financial planner, advising high net worth individuals on how to reach their short-term and long-term financial objectives. She managed multi-million portfolios and advised her clients on how to best allocate their money. Inspired by the work that she did, she decided to use her experience to start helping regular people (aka — not just millionaires!) achieve their goals.
She is a strong believer that with the right approach, modern trend-focused millennials can save towards and purchase luxury-fashion guilt-free and without having to dip into their personal savings. The key, she says, is learning how to save for the things we want, which is precisely what Cashmere does.
2. SPOT, SAVE, INDULGE
Cashmere is a social savings and luxury e-commerce platform. When you sign up, you can browse products on the platform (Cashmere is partnered with various retailers, from FarFetch to Harrods), and add whatever item you choose to your wish list. Cashmere also sends you personal recommendations of what to save for based on your personal taste and budget. Once you’ve added the item you want to your wish list, you set up your automated Cashmere wallet and watch your savings grow. You can also track how far you are till you reach your goal on your personalised dashboard.
Once you’ve reached your savings goal, you’ll get a notification via the app, which is when you can place your order and treat yourself to the luxury piece(s) you’ve been waiting to buy!
Using an app like Cashmere makes the process of saving for something more fun and encouraging, as opposed to simply using your regular bank account to do so. The integrated experience and the slickness of the app is especially appealing to millennial consumers.
Learning to save for short-term goals also helps consumers to eventually translate those skills and knowledge into saving for longer-term goals, like pensions or a property deposit. After all, saving for short-term goals and long-term goals is interlinked, as both require similar skills and discipline. That’s exactly why Urenna also hosts personal finance workshops — to help Cashmere users go beyond learning how to save for luxury items.
Urenna notes that she is particularly excited about new developments in tech, namely PSD2 and Open Banking, to help leverage data that banks have on their customers in order to create better experiences for users. For example, Urenna is keen to be able to integrate affordability checks into the Cashmere user experience, which would enable for the app to suggest, based on the user’s disposable income and spending habits, a reasonable amount of money they can save into their Cashmere wallet every month. It’s also important that users learn how to save money in other aspects of their lives to make room for saving up for the things they want. This, again, is something that innovation in tech can eventually help achieve. Collaborative saving is another innovation that Cashmere hopes to embrace. It may be a new concept, but Urenna believes it has the power to encourage better saving habits, especially among the younger generations. It works by making finances more social by letting users all partake in saving the same amount each month. Our competitive nature as human beings means that we’ll be more incentivised to save, as we don’t want to be the odd one out. It’s also more fun to save as a group, especially for shared experiences, and it helps to be able to see how everyone is getting on with their goals.
When it comes to sustainability, Urenna stresses that it’s central to her mission and that she’s seeing increased demand among Cashmere users to include more sustainable brands on the platform. She does, however, think we’re a long way from being fully sustainable as consumers. Regardless, investing in higher-quality, more expensive items tends to mean they last longer, and are therefore far better for the planet than fast fashion.
3. lessons from entrepreneurship
When asked about her entrepreneurial journey, Urenna shared several useful tips:
Try to self-fund where you can. Before actively going out to seek funding, it’s helpful to try and self-fund for a bit. This helps teach you to manage your money better — when you have limited resources, you start to get more clever about money.
Build your network and talk about your business. Talk about your business every chance you get — this will help you find investors. Put yourself out there and talk to as many people about your idea as you can.
Be resilient. White male founders find it easier to find investors and have a better chance of landing better opportunities because of their backgrounds and networks. However, that doesn’t mean that if you’re a woman or from an ethnic minority background that you shouldn’t be persistent to reach your goals!
Over-preparing helps. It’s frustrating that as women we have to over-prepare, but that’s unfortunately the nature of the game. It helps to really communicate that you’re the best person for the job in every meeting.
Identify investors that relate to you. Urenna mostly has women investors, because they can relate to the problem, and they can relate to her. This makes the work all that much easier!
Learn from your rejections. Don’t take rejection personally but try to listen to feedback— it will help you improve.
Understand how to frame your business. This helps you be “VC-backable” — you need to know how to show that there is big potential for you (and them) to make money.
Accept that things take time. Get out of the mentality that things will happen fast — they don’t! The sooner you accept this, the easier the process will be.
RESOURCES:
You can follow and connect with Urenna at:
Twitter: @urennalexa
Instagram: @urennao
Website: cashmereapp.co.uk
Urenna shared these companies in this episode: