What Long Term Impact Will the Pandemic Have On Our Finances, with Emma Maslin
🎙 Emma Maslin is a money coach and mentor who helps people understand their emotional connection with money to help build positive habits and a healthy money mindset. Emma is a passionate believer that financial health and well-being is not a luxury just for the wealthy: it is a basic need for all.
💸 Emma’s specialty is to equip people with both the right money mindset and the practical guidance and tools to achieve financial freedom.
💥 In today’s episode of The Wallet:
1️⃣ Emma shares how emotional spending might work as we return to the high street, and how we can recognise our triggers and take a pause before making impulsive decisions.
2️⃣I was also curious to find out what Emma thinks about the ‘collective global trauma’ (as reported by behavioural finance expert Neil Bage in an article published last month) that we’ve experienced in the last 12 months of the pandemic, and how this trauma will impact our financial decisions and attitude to risk.
3️⃣ Since investing has become more mainstream and trendy during the pandemic, Emma also offers tips to new investors to help them understand their emotions around investing and how to build a long-term investment strategy.
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You can listen (40 min) and subscribe here:
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1. LEARN ‘ON THE JOB’
Have you read up on and researched personal finance advice, only to never really act on it?
Do you sometimes feel that your emotions dictate your financial decisions?
Do you put others before yourself?
“We like to learn, we like to have all of our ducks in a row — but actually sometimes with our finances we just need to dive in and learn on the job.”
According to money coach Emma Maslin, all of the above and more are just some of the common issues women face when it comes to money management. Emma is passionate about getting more people to build positive money habits and a healthy money mindset. Having previously worked as a chartered accountant in corporate finance, Emma was no stranger to financial jargon and the importance of financial literacy. It wasn’t until she was on maternity leave, however, that she came to realise that a lot of people in her life knew about all the things they should be doing for their financial wellbeing, but simply didn’t put anything said knowledge into practice. Inspired by this, Emma decided to embark on her coaching journey. Today, she helps people understand their emotional connection to money, unlocking their full potential for growing wealth. It’s these emotional blocks and subconscious fears, Emma says, that often prevent us from taking the necessary steps toward better money management.
Emma predominantly works with women and has noticed first-hand the widening pensions gap, which in part exists because women often take time off to look after their children. This makes it all the more important for women to think about long-term wealth as early as possible. The second challenge that Emma has observed in her work is that women are often reluctant to get started with managing their money due to a lack of confidence. Another challenge that Emma highlights is the negative debt cycle that a lot of people seem to be locked in. All of these issues and more, however, are very closely linked to our money mindsets, and while unlocking our beliefs around money might take some work, it’s wholly worth the commitment.
2.RECOGNISE THE EMOTIONS BEHIND YOUR ATTITUDE TO MONEY
The pandemic has played a huge role in shifting our relationship with money and our money mindsets. Everything from how we save, spend, invest and order our financial priorities has shifted, and people have experienced this to various different degrees. While some have found saving more money, others, who were laid off or perhaps forced to reduce their work hours, have had to do the opposite and use up their savings and go into debt. For those who managed to save, there is undeniably a lot of pent of demand for wanting to go out, feel free, and spend their money. This was more clear than ever on April 12th, the first day that shops reopened post-lockdown, where sprawling queues outside shops demonstrated just how much some people were keen to get back to spending. Emma points out that most of these behaviours — from queuing outside shops to engaging in high-risk day trading — are all underpinned by our emotions.
‘I often compare emotional spending to emotional eating,’ Emma says. ‘It’s usually never about the act itself — it’s about the why? Why are you behaving in that way, what need does it satisfy?’. Often, we need to go back all the way to our childhood and the conditioning we received as children to really get to the root of these behaviours. It might be, for example, that an emotional spender as an adult didn’t receive the attention they needed from a parent as a young child. Spending, then, can be what we turn to to get that dopamine hit — it makes you feel good, so you end up using it as an emotional crutch.
It’s equally important to recognise other external factors that might have conditioned you to think that you’re not good at managing money, or that investing is something that’s beyond your reach. For example, financial products are usually targeted at men. Women are spoken to from a completely different way to men, which exacerbates women feeling that they are inferior to men when it comes to personal finance. Of course, this couldn’t be further from the truth, but it takes a lot of ‘unlearning’ for us to really understand why we feel the way we do about money and our ability to manage it successfully.
3. PRIORITISE YOURSELF AND YOUR NEEDS
Women often put others before their own needs. Emma calls this the ‘nurturer archetype’ — someone who is always willing to lend a hand and give generously and unselfishly. As a result, women tend to downgrade the importance of their financial needs and goals, which especially rings true when women become mothers. However, it’s important that women recognise how these behaviours impact them in the present and will impact their future wealth, too. This requires a level of awareness and consciousness around your attitude to money. One exercise that Emma recommends doing is asking yourself, ‘if money were my best friend, how would they feel?’. If you continuously ignore money, it will start ignoring us back. Finally, to take those necessary first steps, Emma recommends you join a like-minded community of people who are experiencing similar things to you. It is, after all, far less scary and intimidating to learn and do things in a group, rather than alone!
RESOURCES:
You can follow and connect with Emma at:
Twitter: @MoneyWhisperer_
Website: themoneywhisperer.com
Other resources: