💸 The cost of living crisis is impacting everyone's wallets, our income is not growing, and many households feel the pressure. So how do we continue to fund our lifestyle, pay for our essentials and also build our future funds? How do we balance personal and work life, whether that’s running a business, freelancing or being an employee? Where can we find support?

Speakers:

• Helen Driver (Vestpod)

• Vivi Friedgut

• Bola Sol

• Helen Tabeshfar (JP Morgan Women on the Move)

The importance of financial education

• The key is, you have to plan first. You can never just say it just happened. You have to be very aware of your life, of your surroundings and the opportunities you give yourself.

• A lot of the talk around financial education is very theoretical until it hits home. For example, we've been talking about inflation for a long time. We've been talking about interest rates going up. When people buy their first property, they often don’t factor in a 5% interest rate increase. We had some historic lows, but when it eventually starts to filter through, you might suddenly find that you can’t afford food.

• 75% of students have been worried about money consistently - which is not necessarily related to Covid. Anyone who's got kids or deals with young people, they are simply overwhelmed by chaos at the moment.

• Now is the tap to tap into your skills, especially women. It is also important to tackle imposter syndrome.

• It’s also the time to get into your hustler mentality and do the small things that you can to make a bit of extra income.

Helping women be more confident about their financial futures

• Sponsorship, work with not for profits and helping with networking and general advice are needed across the board.

• Even just knowing some of the things like the ethnicity pay gap, gender pay gap, gap for investments, the gap for pensions — and then understanding what we can do about these issues, is vastly important.

• Practical things like money comparison sites and accounts with no penalty, accounts with no fees and accounts with cash back are also extremely helpful.

• It’s also vital that we normalise the conversation, supporting each other, encouraging each other, being open and honest about where we've made really positive decisions for our finances, where we've made negative ones and learning from each other.

Staying in control

• Have a standing order when you get paid — put a percentage of your income away for yourself. Everybody should also have an emergency fund, so start building one when you can.

• Don’t allow yourself to feel guilty about how you spend or don’t spend your money — be honest with friends if you can’t afford to go to an expensive restaurant or splash out on a luxury holiday.

• How you spend your money is your business and your business alone — it’s okay for you to set boundaries. Don’t upgrade your lifestyle, upgrade your life.

• Demystifying money conversations is crucial. Women at university have less money, access less money, budget better, but don't look at investments because it can often sound scary and risky.

• Often, people don't talk about money until the downturn. However, now is a great time to learn more about money and how to stay in control of your finances.

• Unless you're day trading, sit on your hands and keep going — we should focus on learning from downturns and training ourselves to simple stay on our hands.

• Try to steer clear of triggers, like Instagram, and take yourself off distribution lists for companies that are going to target you and tempt you into spending.