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Show notes
Who are we and why are we doing this?
Martha and Alex are real life friends and former finance professionals who think the public conversation about money needs to become more honest about how our emotions can override our intentions when it comes to our decisions. We think the current prevailing view of personal finance creates unhelpful levels of shame and guilt in many people. We hope we can start a more honest conversation about how most people experience financial decisions, so we can all learn to do better together.
Martha and Alex introduce themselves
Martha trained as an IFA and almost immediately quit to work in the non-profit sector, teaching money skills and promoting free advice services and affordable credit. Alex completed an economics degree and trained as a chartered accountant then immediately stopped to work freelance in content and comms for campaigns, marketing, web services, data visualization, digital policy and, lately, books.
Having these qualifications doesn’t mean we are perfect at managing our own finances and we think that it’s time for honest conversations about money that acknowledge that being imperfect is normal.
Why are we doing this?
We don’t like the way that much of the financial public conversation about money assumes everyone is rational and ignores the fundamental psychological traits and other emotional blocks that stop people carrying out the actions they know rationally are in their best interests.
We want people to feel less alone with their irrational financial actions (and inactions) and step away from the blame game that can make engaging with the topic of personal finance so difficult for people. Instead we seek to look for solutions that actual work for our all too human natures.
Our money issues
Alex struggles to justify spending money on herself and can end up underspending with some negative consequences.
Martha can tend to overspend and lose track of the small expenses that add up fast.
We also talk about some of the poor financial choices we’ve seen in our fellow finance professionals. (We’re not describing any particular individual or organisation here. Don’t @ us, ok.)
Future episodes
Some specific topics and some general issues/themes:
Why making a new year’s resolution to stick to a strict budget probably won’t work.
Self-care and money.
Taking on too much at once a.k.a. ego depletion.
Interviews with other people who have insights into this topic. Especially people whose backgrounds are different from Alex’s and Martha’s. (N.B. This didn’t actually happen this first series, but we are on it for series 2!)
Mental accounting and how we categorise different types of income and outgoings in our in our heads and how that can sometimes trip us up.