No one is born good with money, but everyone can learn to be good with money.
Ever feel like you never have enough money?
That you’re constantly fighting with your partner about how much one of you is spending?
That every time you think you’re getting ahead, an unexpected payment takes you back to square one?
That this is not the life you dreamed of – stuck on a hamster wheel of living paycheck to paycheck?
You know you need to manage your money better – that what you’re doing (or not doing) is just not working.
But…
You don’t know how or where to start. You can’t see what you could give up and still enjoy life.
It’s not like you’re spending weekends eating caviar on your private yacht. You’re just spending on normal, everyday stuff.
What are you going to do? Give up nice dinners and live on canned tuna? No.
You don’t have to. Not when you work with me. Here’s why…
- You’re not on a budget. You have a spending plan.
Going without your morning coffee and other easily Googled advice to just ‘cut back’ simply doesn’t work.
On the other hand, having a spending plan lets you spend your money on what’s really important to you, guilt-free. - I take out the guesswork.
My clients always say, “Just tell me what I can spend and I’ll stick to it.” It’s not that you have zero discipline. It’s that you’re spending blindly – without a plan. If all you know is that you’re spending too much, the opposite would be to “just spend less”. That never works.
I’ll help you set up an easy system to put you in control of your money by taking out the guesswork, making your money automatically go where it should and letting you spend guilt-free on the things you love. - You can become money smart.
Good news: you don’t have to be smart to be rich. Or lucky. Or have the will power of a super hero.
You just need to have a strong enough reason to become money smart. Something or someone that means enough to you that you’ll always find the time, energy and money to change your money story. What’s your reason to become money smart? How will changing your money story change your life?
My story is proof.
Hi, by the way. I’m David.
Here are three things most people are surprised to hear about me:
- I was a Jump master in the army.
- Being financially stable didn’t make me happy.
- I married a shopaholic.
Before I get into my military background and how my wife and I have overcome our financial differences, let me tell you about my finances.
I was blessed with a grandfather who taught his son (my father) the principles of good money management, who in turn taught me these principles. And it’s really very simple – in fact, I can tell you the principles right now because they’re no big secret:
- Pay yourself first from your earnings – put a portion of each paycheck into a savings account before divvying the rest out to cover expenses.
- Live on less than you earn.
- Find smart ways to make your money work for you.
Following these principles, I’ve never had any debt and I was able to purchase my first piece of land at the age of 27 (after three years in the army and completing two Masters degrees). I had it all –a job I loved as a financial advisor and a bright future.
But I wasn’t happy. I felt like something was missing. I wanted more.
So at the age of 30, I left Israel to find IT, whatever IT was. As I had investments in Israel, I only had $1200 cash to go on this adventure. I decided it would be a great opportunity to test whether the principles of good money management would work again. So with only $1200 in my pocket, I flew to Australia – a country on the other side of the world where I didn’t speak the language and I knew one person. With limited language skills, I started working as a locksmith to earn a living.
Honestly, it's one of the hardest things l've ever done.
Imagine for a moment, leaving everything and everyone you’ve known for an unknown land where you don’t speak the language and have to start from scratch again. At 30. There were days when I asked myself, “Did I make the right decision?”
Here’s where my army training comes into play…
Life in the army teaches you useful skills, traits and habits very quickly. While you can learn these elsewhere, you have to learn fast in the army to survive.
I was a Jumpmaster in the army. For those who don’t know, a Jumpmaster is the expert who teaches and trains soldiers to become paratroopers (those guys that jump from airplanes). Paratroopers know that when the light goes green, there is no turning back. It’s time to leap into the sky without a second’s hesitation.
The light turned green the moment I made the decision to come to Australia. I had to commit to moving forward. Moving forward means picking yourself up when you fall down. It means finding a way over, around or under any obstacle in front of you. Moving forward is a mindset.
Running for miles in the desert with bags of sand, being woken up repeatedly in the middle of the night to run laps in the freezing cold and other such situations taught me to push through mental and physical barriers, to be tough and tenacious when pushed out of my comfort zone.
With this mindset I was able to learn English (with an Israeli accent) and gain the Australian qualifications to become a financial advisor in this amazing country. And that’s when I realised what had been missing from my life – growth.
And then I fell in love with a shopaholic.
You know that phrase, “Be careful what you wish for?” Once I became aware that I loved growing, I sought it out. One of the ways I did this was to start salsa dancing again. And that’s where I met my future wife, Teri.
When I first met Teri, there was a $35,000 credit card debt that she kept adding to, was still paying off her education loan, had no savings, had no idea where her money was going, and was living from paycheck to paycheck. Teri knew that she should be managing her money better –spending less, saving more and living within her means –but her debt had grown to the point where she just didn’t know where or how to start. She had the knowledge but she didn’t take action on it. Making the necessary changes seem too big and too hard. It was easier not to face the facts.
But running away from her problem had only increased the size of the problem and the distance from the solution.
I developed a spending plan for Teri so she could still enjoy what was important to her while paying off her credit card debt. After 12 months, she had paid off all her debt and was still happily sticking to her spending plan.
But that wasn’t the end.
Once we started a relationship together, we not only had to deal with our own personalities, we also had to deal with our money personalities.
Now imagine me – someone who’s learnt the importance of saving, investing for the future and knows where all their money is going – in a relationship with a spender. It wasn’t long before we both realised there was a clash of money personalities. There were arguments and tears over money matters and how we handled money individually (that the other person had a problem with).
And that’s when I realised that just fixing the result – getting rid of Teri’s debt – never solves the problem. You have to get to the source of the problem – in this case, our individual financial beliefs and approaches to money – our money personality.
Learning about our own and each other’s money personality helped us to understand each other better and have constructive conversations about money rather than playing the blame game. We could start to see each other’s money personality as a strength instead of a weakness. This was the start of us achieving financial harmony in our home instead of becoming another divorce statistic.
Remember, money isn’t everything. It’s only a tool that can make your life better or worse – depending on whether you control it or it controls you.
What can you learn from my story?
The most important ingredients to changing anything in our lives are to decide and to take action. Knowing something isn’t enough.
In the army you often have to make quick and decisive decisions, often without all the information and time to create the perfect plan. You learn to be decisive and adjust later on. You learn to just get started and not let your fear or uncertainty hold you back.
You know that saying, “knowledge is power”? That’s a lie. Knowledge is only power if you take action. Otherwise knowledge is only potential power.
Now, you have to make the decision yourself, but I can help you take action to get where you want.
That’s how you’ll finally be able to:
- Get rid of debt
- Know where all you money goes
- Enjoy financial peace and harmony at home
- Enjoy peace of mind about your financial future
- Teach your children how to be good with money.