Financial Automation

Foreign money, where we show you how to pay your home loan off in up to half the time of a normal bank loan. Welcome to the Crown Money Podcast. I'm Jessie Edge and I'm joined by Scott Parry. How you going?

Good. J train, how you doing?

Yeah, good, good. Excited for this Friday morning. It's beautiful and sunny outside and car.

Grass is green and skies are blue. So today's topic, which I think is going to help all of our listeners and I hope one put in this, but I'm very, very bad with organization and making my memory isn't the greatest and I suffer tremendously from my own inefficiencies. And so we're going to go through a few strategies and ideas which I've been using my life to help make my life a little bit easier, a little bit simpler. And that's automation.

Yeah, absolutely. We came out, we stumbled across this amazing quote the other day saying that we as humans make around 35,000 decisions a day. And I think we've all felt it, that real sense of decision fatigue. I know my husband and I can never agree on what takeaway to get. Like it's just this real, it's such a small thing, but it is that fatigue over making decisions and it's so challenging. So what we want to talk about today is what can we automate in our life so that you don't have to make the decision? And the thing is, the more decisions you make, the worse those decisions can become. So we've really got to start thinking, okay, financially obviously, but other aspects of our life as well. What can we do? What can we automate to make our life as simple and as easy and as straightforward as possible.

Done. So first and foremost, I think the easiest option for a lot of people is to actually automate their retirement contributions. Your employee does do this. If you have a salary, your employee is putting that 10 plus percent of your gross salary into your super fund every month or every quarter. That's automated. That's. You have to worry about it, you have to think about it happens. And that's why your super is growing, is because it's automated. And so it's a really good example of how that automation is in flow already. And, and that's not even a part of your bandwidth. Never is your mindset going, oh, I wonder if my superannuation is being contributed to this quarter or this month. That's happening from your employer automatically.

Out of sight, out of mind. It's brilliant. We've often called, we've heard of this called pay yourself first. And so it's about saying your highest priority thing, which is your investments, your superannuation, building wealth. That's what you need to pay first and then everything else comes second. I love that idea.

Yeah, I call it MEST. Everyone's paying the government GST. Why pay yourself 10% me ST you are well worth it and the government not so much. So that's what we're looking at is automating retirement savings. Done. Tick. Congratulations. If you're self employed, you need to be doing this automatically. You need to be setting up a direct debit going from your business account into your super fund. Because I see so many self employed people who had a business for a decade and their super balance is a pittance compared to their friends and family the same age who have been employees. They just neglected to pay themselves first and they're the ones who no longer self employed. But their super balance is hundreds of thousands of dollars less because they didn't do those contributions automatically and they didn't allow compound interest to kick in. So retirement savings down next.

Jump in really quickly there and just add. I always find with self employed people there's an argument to be said for oh no, but I want to spend that money now on my business to build my business. I always think of these automated retirement savings for a self employed person as an insurance policy. It's an insurance policy that if your business doesn't blow up, if something goes wrong, you know you have to close it after a couple of years and move back into the pay world. That's totally okay. You still have that super fund sitting there ticking over earning money for you, building for your retirement. So it's always is as important for a self employed person as anywhere else.

And it's also tax effective. Like your taxable income is less if you put money in the superannuation, which means you pay less tax.

Yeah.

So that there is a really good strategy on what you can be doing for the super. But what we need to be talking about is how do we automate our savings? Okay, so this is not super, I want money now. I don't want to have to wait till I'm 67 or 70 or whatever the government changed their goalpost to, when I can actually access that money. And so how do we automate our savings today? And so there are two ways I'm doing it. Once again, it's not financial advice. I'm just telling what I'm personally doing and what has worked for me. And what is working, working for me. And I am in a position where I don't want to have the bandwidth of having to remember to put money into savings every single month or every single week. I just have so many other things coming at me like everyone else has. We've got family and kids, sports and pickups and drop offs. It's just hectic. And so to automate my savings, what I'm doing is I'm putting in a set amount of money every single week into an app which then invests it for me. And a direct debit is my account. I highly recommend all you guys out there have a direct debit coming out of your account on a weekly, monthly basis. Whatever it is that you feel most comfortable with, whatever amount that you feel comfortable with, it could be even $10. It's not about the actual amount, it's about how frequently you do it that's important. And so I then have these amounts coming out every single week into these two apps. I use one app to invest in gold and silver. There's Bitcoin in there as well. That's called Bamboo and you can download that on your phone. And another app I use is called Raise R A I Z and that invests into the top 100, top 500 stocks in America, the top 200 stocks in Australia, as well as Europe as well as Asia. Just like your super fund is investing in those sort of stocks. And yes, I know that the stock market's going down and then it's going to go up and it's going to go back down, but I know over 10 years that only get the actual average of those stock market returns because of dollar cost averaging in every single week automatically, without me having to think about it or worry about it. I set up once and I'm done.

Yeah. And it's not just about what potential returns you can earn from that particular product or portfolio. It's the fact that you are regularly, like we call it saving. It is investing. Sure. And you're hoping for a good return and it does. It'll matter when you go to sell that portfolio. That's when you're going to actually, you know, cash in on, on what you've saved. But the actual act of regularly saving that money is out of sight, out of mind. You can't spend it. That's how you build well. So it's not just about the returns that you're going to get. It's about the act of saving along the way.

Yeah. And just consistently doing it. That's the secret to anything. Whether it be fitness, whether it be financial. If you're consistently doing something on a regular basis, you're going to get the results. And so don't. I swear this in the last podcast. Don't think about this on a monthly or an annual basis of what's my return on it. Think of this in decades. What's my return after the first 10 years? What's my return after the second 10 years? That's when you can start to get a really good feel for how effective the strategy has been for you.

Yeah, Love it.

Another automated savings option there as well is people have obviously got kids school and education to take care of. And so I have a lot of families saying, scott, how do we save for our kids education? And just once again, automating that from as now, like, as soon as you know that your kids are going to be needing education expenses and they're not getting any cheaper, setting up that automated savings account to go into somewhere different where it's not part of your redraw. It could be going into an offset account, could be going to another savings account, could be going to any of those apps. You could just be buying shares in the bank that you bank with, and rather than putting the money into a savings account at the bank paying 0.01%, you. You can actually just be buying shares in that bank every month or every year based on that amount. And so there's so many different ways to actually automate this, but the direct debit is our friends, and that there takes all the stress out of remembering it. It's another list of things to do on your list of things to do. And I just feel that if you just do nothing but set these up once and it's going to be a weekend of work, and then you can be so much better off financially because that one weekend.

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a great opportunity to talk about the money management program and how it automates things. So, yeah, we jump in.

Designed it like that. Yeah.

The whole point is that it's automated. That was. The whole point on the program was to automate people's finances so you didn't have to think about it. And you knew that if you set it up properly from the beginning, you knew you were going to be financially successful and it was never a concern again. And that's. That takes such a big burden off people's shoulders and that stress I'm having to think about it. So did you want to just chat about the money management program?

Yeah. I mean, so this bunch of coaching system we developed 20 years in the making has, has got phenomenal results, phenomenal results for so many people. And my favorite part of my job is to be able to call someone and say, hey John, Mary, you now no longer have to worry about money ever again because you'll never be able to spend all the money you've accumulated to this day. And what that really does for that families takes all the money stress out. The number one stress of money for people as they age is running out of it. And when you have someone, your financial coach telling you you'll never be able to spend all the money you've got is insanely freeing. And so as a result of that they're like really said, yeah, you can absolutely live for 100 years of age and you never spend all the money you've got. If obviously you don't do anything crazy and just go buy a million dollar plane or a boat or something like that. But just continuing on, you can status there. So that there for people is unbelievably freeing. And that money management system created the debt reduction to pay the house off in eight years or 11 years and allowed them to then put all that cash flow when they're not paying debt down into buying assets which generate passive income streams or capital growth over a decade or two. And so that's what the money mentoring system does is first and foremost pays your house off very quickly, usually half the time than what you're currently tracking for. And then it allows you to use the equity that you've created in your house to invest to buy investment properties or share portfolios or other businesses that generate cash flow and passive income.

That's fun. And I think a big part of that program is, is the automation like we've talked about. Your money is automatically going in there. You've got a set amount to live off and that's all automated. Your bills are coming out automatically. You're everything is just set and forget so that you can just focus on okay, what do I need to spend this week? And that's it. So that's important. And so yeah, being on that automation, is there anything else in our life that we can automate?

You can automate your bills. I'm very big on direct debit. So my bills, my gas, my electricity, my phone bill, my insurances, everything is direct debited. I don't have to worry about it or think about it. You once again, you set up once and you're good. So I recommend automating all your bill payments to be coming out of an account by direct debit.

But I'll add a caveat there that you also need to add a yearly or half yearly calendar reminder to actually review your bills. The number of times we've had clients who have been charged things that they shouldn't have or you know, bills are coming out twice or whatever it may be. So you've got to make sure you're actually there's another automation there adding a calendar reminder to pop up every year. So and just saying review my bills and just spend, you know, two hours going through all your bills, making sure you're with the best provider, asking for discounts if you can, converting to another product provider if you need to, or really looking at do I actually need this service or this product and canceling that bill if you can. So again, automation, Automation, Automation, yeah, really.

Good idea there to go through your subscriptions. I mean they're all automated but sometimes to demise where it is on auto parts. So you don't worry about it, don't think about it, you don't see it and so you forget you're paying it and all of a sudden you do an order. It's like, oh, hang on a second, I'm paying that $11 per month for that service, which I haven't used for six months. And because it's automated I haven't even thought about it. And so that's a really good idea is to every six months minimum or even on an annual basis, just review subscriptions, review your direct debits, just to make sure that everything is set up and you're not paying for stuff that you're no longer using.

Yeah, perfect.

So that's automation. Please implement into your life. We help you do all of that. We help you try and find cheaper gas, electricity, phone broadband deals to reduce your expenses and auto, make your savings, automate your investments, but more importantly, set you up to a position where you're not going to have to ever worry about money anymore. And if we could take the money worry off your shoulders and your partner's shoulders and you can just get back to what you're good at, which is earning money and spending money, then everyone's going to live happily ever after.

Love it. Sounds good to me. Thanks Scott. Looking forward to our next chat.

Take care. Bye.