Anna Brading on Breaking the Paycheque to Paycheque Cycle

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Money Gains Podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and we’re back this week with a wicked guest. My guest this week is Anna Brading. She’s a finance content creator and founder of the money mentoring platform Mentora Money. Now we have a wicked chat. This is the 411 of getting your personal finances in shape for 2024. I absolutely love this chat from start to finish. If you’re listening on Spotify or Apple, make sure you hit that follow button, share it with a friend. It really does help the show grow. We really want to help get Britain financially fit as soon as we possibly can. But for now, let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast.

[0:57] Sammie Ellard-King: Anna, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast. How are you doing? You well? I’m doing really well, thank you. And it’s wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me. I’ve been following you on TikTok for ages, and I love your approach to content. And you’re always sitting in a really nice sunny kitchen, and the videos have just delivered in a really nice way. And I, you know, I learn a lot from you over the years. So thank you, first off. I I appreciate that. It’s amazing what a bit of camera trickery can do, making it look sunny in the UK, right? Yeah, 100%. You do some really cool trick actually. You like it’s almost like you move the camera just before you start talking. Is that on purpose or are you just doing that? Oh yeah. Because I mean, I I do a lot of takes. Like, don’t get me wrong, it looks like I don’t probably, but we I think we all do. You can probably relate. Um, but it’s nice to sort of feel like if I think if somebody’s watching, it’s nice to feel like they’re just catching you in the moment rather than it’s all kind of you’ve done six takes already. Um, and it’s and it’s a nice way to kind of make it feel like fresh, a fresh take of the video, starting again. Move the camera, we’re in, off we go. So yeah, it is a little bit of a filming trick.

[2:08] Sammie Ellard-King: It just goes to show that like you don’t have to have like some fancy editing software and suite to really create videos that actually resonate with people. I think I looked today and you had like 170 something thousand followers. So, you know, hats off to you. That’s amazing. Thank you. You’re not doing too badly yourself though, hey. We’ll get in there slowly but surely. Yeah. Um, but you know how it is, it’s a grind. Yes, it is. And I think I think we are gonna probably talk a little bit about side hustles and bits and pieces later on, and I think that is the reality. It it can look a certain way when you see uh content online, but the reality is a lot of time and energy and effort goes into it and thought as well, especially when talking about finances and money, because trust is everything. I think when you’re talking about money, people need to trust what you’re saying, and I think that can make it even harder to film content because you want to make sure you’re getting it right and you want to make sure you’re not um leading people down the wrong path. We want to make sure you’re spot on with what you’re teaching. So I think, yeah, hence the numerous takes often and scripting.

[3:15] Sammie Ellard-King: I’ve I I feel your pain on that one. I think I spent about two hours once recording this video, and only to realise in edit, after putting all the lights and the camera away and everything, and it was like I’ve said 84%, and I meant to say 8%. I’m like, what have I done? I’ve said it the whole video, and it was like purely gutting. Like I still haven’t remade that video to this day, so it’s sitting in the in the in the death box. I don’t think I can bring it back out or bring myself to do it to be honest. The pain, the pain, I feel it. Yeah, I understand. Yeah, yeah, awful. I um I’d love to let the audience know a little bit about yourself though, just to kind of bring us up to speed today. Um, yeah, would you mind giving us the full on one?

[4:04] Anna Brading: Sure. So I started this journey a number of years ago, and I tell people when I talk about my business, which is Mentora Money, which has come on the back of doing things on TikTok. Um, I I started this by accident. This is my accidental business because I went into side hustling, starting my own businesses, because I went on a financial literacy journey. I realised, like a lot of us, that I, you know, I was well educated, got a decent income. Uh we had three small children, and then we just got stuck at an income ceiling and also just felt out of options on what to do with our finances. We were well educated. This is me and my husband, we’ve got a family, but we didn’t know how to handle our money as adults well and effectively for right now because things have changed, haven’t they, over the years? Things now are not the same as my parents’ generation. And I felt under-equipped to handle that as an adult. So I went on my own journey of reading, studying, upskilling in loads of different areas, started side hustles, started businesses, and I was like, this is it. I need to, I need to figure this out because I’m a mum of three. I don’t want to go back to doing a nine to five. That would literally only cover the childcare. It’s not what I want my life to look like. Um, and yeah, like I said, we’d hit an income ceiling. So we were trying to figure it out. And it was after a number of years of getting things actually working, things were starting to move forward. I started trying out a bit of TikToking because I thought, oh, that’ll be fun. For my, I was gonna do it for my businesses that I decided because I was trying to set them up on Instagram and it wasn’t really working. So I thought, oh, I’ll give TikTok a go. That’s just sort of come out and it’s exciting, and I think it could work well for businesses. Gave it a little go, but I thought I won’t use it for my business ones because I might be really bad at it, and that would be detrimental to what I’m trying to do in my businesses. So I’ll talk about something else I’m really passionate about and obviously have got a lot of experience in as well, which was this journey of becoming financially literate and uh upskilling in that area. So I started to talk about that, and literally within three videos, um, things started to take off and people started to connect with what I was talking about. And I realised quite quickly, oh, it wasn’t just me that felt like that. Um, many of us find ourselves stuck as adults living paycheck to paycheck. And the funny thing is, since then, this was pre, this was like 2020. So since then, we’ve had a cost of living crisis, and so it’s got worse. So there are people who were doing okay, they were making a knee, they weren’t thriving necessarily, didn’t have loads of savings, they weren’t investing, but they were doing all right and they were making it work. And now we find ourselves with a whole new wave of people who are feeling stuck. And I think um I just happened to have already started this journey, and so it’s been an absolute joy and privilege to be able to teach some of the stuff I’d learnt along the way. Um, and then I ended up becoming a certified financial education instructor as well because I realised actually this is what I want to do, this is what I love. I think it’s so rewarding, and it’s genuinely life-changing when you get this stuff working, as you know, in your finances, and it it changes, it changes your whole outlook, and it’s amazing to be able to help people with this stuff.

[7:12] Sammie Ellard-King: They say if you can’t do it, teach it. Well, I think it was the other way around. I had to do it, figure it out, and then I started teaching it, and then I’m still figuring it out and teaching it. So I guess it’s a bit of uh bit of both in parallel, I guess. I mean, one of the big things that you said there, it seems like a lot of us get to that point in our lives, and we just kind of go, like, how am I actually going to be making the most out of this next period, this next phase of my life? Like, it seems to be massively important. And it seems like a lot of it comes down to confidence and mindset, and they seem to be the stumbling block for many people when it comes to managing money with yourself. It sounds like you’ve gone through this process. How do you remove these blockets?

[8:02] Anna Brading: Oh, it’s a great question. I think, first of all, the first thing is just acknowledging that they’re there. When I was most frustrated, was when I I honestly believed I was out of options and I didn’t know what to do. I just felt so stuck. I was like, what can I do? Like, we’ve got three small children, we were at an income ceiling between us. It there wasn’t an obvious route, and what I’d been taught was you go to uni, you get a job, and you climb the career ladder. That’s the kind of route I knew. And I was like, I I can’t, I can’t do that. And I’m a creative as well, so I’m like, this is even harder because I can’t be doing this nine to five sitting at a desk looking at a screen thing. Um so I think at that point, I it was when I realised there were more options and it was like a belief shift. It was a belief in my brain, going from other people can other people do this and they seem to be okay. And then I’ve kind of came across people that are doing things differently, and I suddenly believed I could do that too. I suddenly believed like that could be me. What why couldn’t it be me? If this person was just like me a while ago and now they’re over here, I could do that. So I think that’s an example of realising something’s off, and you kind of change your set of beliefs of of what’s possible, and then your trajectory shifts. So I think just I think and often it comes through a point of frustration or a hitting a limit or hitting, you know, your groundhog day and you’ve been doing the same thing over and over and it’s not working. And then it’s that sort of like looking at something, something’s off, something’s blocked here. I don’t know what it is. Let’s try and figure it out. And I think when you start to unpick that, that’s when you can really see some breakthrough. I like to talk about it as like in your your money mindset or just your mindset in general, is like a either it’s a handbrake or it’s an accelerator pedal. And often it’s a bit of both, and you have to work out how can you shift it from being the handbrake on your progress. And we all know this, we’ve all tried to change something, like we’ve got an overspending habit, and we we try and shift that, and it just doesn’t change. You put all the effort in and it’s just stuck. And when you can understand and unpick what’s what’s the blocker there, what’s actually going on, and you can shift that thing, that’s when it can suddenly the progress becomes like an accelerator, and you really start to take off, and you’re like, oh, it’s because of that. Now I know what to do, and it’s it actually works now.

[10:20] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s a really good answer. I I one of the things I like I I found for me, which really helped, was actually just upskilling my knowledge. And often the blockers came for me was just when I really didn’t understand something, and that is obviously, you know, over 50% of the people in a recent study said that they uh don’t feel confident managing money, which which stems down to financial literacy. Literacy means isn’t just a form of knowledge, and so getting yourself the knowledge, starting with the basics, often starts to help you overcome some blockers. And I feel like a lot of it sometimes is around your environment you’ve come from, what your parents pushed on you when you were a kid, you know, what who you surround yourself with and how they react with money, all of these things can become real big influences on your life and often push you in the wrong or right way. What do you feel about that type of thing as well?

[11:17] Anna Brading: I totally agree. I think we’re sponges growing up, and whether or not it’s intentional, you’re absorbing what your parents are teaching. So they might teach you intentionally, they might teach you through their actions and their behaviours, not just your parents or carers, your your siblings, your friends, the circles you’re in. If you are in, you know, you’ve probably experienced this. When you’re around somebody that inspires you, it rubs off and you kind of you can almost meet their level. If someone’s like a little bit ahead of you, you can almost accelerate to them to meet up with them because of the way they are. Um, and so when you surround yourself with people that are inspiring, challenge you, challenge the way you think, challenge your belief systems, it can massively affect you. So that goes right through, I think, from we all know like nature nurture, you your influence right from the day you’re born, but that applies now. So you can, okay, it’s not just let’s have a think about why I think certain things because of when I was a kid or when I was growing up, but also why do I think things now? What soil am I in on the day-to-day? Who am I listening to? Who’s influencing me in the way I think? What podcast am I listening to? And that’s why I think like it’s it is your friends, it is your friendship circle, but it’s also what you’re consuming online, um, who’s speaking into your brain on a daily basis? But these have a massive effect. And I and I’ve kind of narrowed it down to a little thing I call bite, so it’s um for your mindset. So B-I-T-E, beliefs, influences, your thought behaviours. So are you more problem-focused or solution focused, and your experiences? So, what are your experiences with money as well? So it’s not just your beliefs, not just we’ve touched on most of these, your influences, your thought, how you think, but also what happened to you. So it might have been that you made a big mistake when you turned 20. You got some money, it came in, and then you just blew it. You absolutely blew it when you had a large tank of my uh of money. And that experience has now imparted a belief into your mindset, which is now, well, I’m not very good at handling big sums of money, and you might like live with that because of that one experience for a very, very long time, unless you you really address it and think about it. So those experiences too can have a massive influence.

[13:31] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, that’s a great answer. I love that. That’s uh one of the things is experience because everyone’s situation is different, it’s so hard. Like people have you can’t just say this is a one-size-fits-all because that just doesn’t work because it literally changes per person, and even the slight fluctuation in that plan um can can really put somebody off. So plans when it comes to managing money for me needs to feel flexible. So, with your people that you work with, like how do you work out a system that actually would work for them? Yeah, I absolutely love that you’ve said that, and that’s why there’s also there’s no room for judgment and shame when it comes to money, there just can’t be. And I see some of this stuff online, even for some gurus, they they can just absolutely come at people and shame them for the where they’re at or where they’ve got to. And you say, Why? Like, how? How can you behave like that? That’s not okay. Because, like you say, we all come from different situations, different backgrounds, nobody’s financial situation and circumstances are exactly the same. No one on planet earth. We’ve all got our own set of stuff, and we all bring different things to the table, and that’s why when I work with people, so I have a um money mentoring platform called Mentora Money, and and that’s the kind of like the main way I work with people more closely, but obviously there’s a bit of interaction on the day-to-day with people online and answering questions and all sorts of things. And if I do lives as well, and so I I do interact with people a lot, talking talking to them about their finances, and one of the things I try to do is try not to be like a search engine in terms of detail. I I I’m not gonna give you today the exact bank account for the best interest rate. You’re probably not gonna find that from me. So other people might. You can go to brilliant websites where you can find this stuff out. I think the thing that really moves the dial is the toolkit. It’s it’s the principles, it’s the levers you can pull to really change and shift your direct trajectory. For example, a principle would be something like have an emergency fund, roughly three to six months worth of living expenses. When you teach somebody that principle and how to build one, that’s where they can go, okay, great, I can grab hold of that and apply that to my situation. So in my situation, that would mean X amount of money. And I think to get started, I could probably go with this much and I can do that, and that feels doable. If I was to say to you, everyone should have 10,000 pounds in savings, doesn’t apply to most people. You know, that’s a very select group of people that that would apply to. So trying to keep out of the exact details and give the toolkit and the and the kind of principles behind what you can do yourself and apply in your own situation.

[17:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Love that. Really love that. Yeah, because it that that’s one thing that I find as well. You know, when when when I do a bit of content, if it does well, the comments section is a really good place to like gauge where people are at. And often you get really angry people from what you’ve said, and you know, they’re rightly so because they’re they’re struggling, I get it. And then you get the people that are more agreeable, then you get the other side, which you know perhaps are like, no, you should change this to the next one. And you you just immediately see that actually across a a spectrum of you know 68 million people, there’s gonna be people with extremely different situations. So it’s why, like saying three to six months worth of expenses is good because someone’s got a 20 grand salary, someone’s got a hundred grand salary, and that’s reflective of where they’re at in their life. But that three to six months worth of expenses is gonna look very different for those people. And when you’ve got like over 33% of the nation with under a grand saved, clearly we’ve got a bit of work to do around savings and emergency funds and building this up. So you mentioned it very briefly there. For me, it’s massively important about emergency funds and then building savings. What’s kind of the steps that you would take someone on there?

[18:16] Anna Brading: I think the first thing is you’ve got to believe in it, right? Like one of the least glamorous things in your personal finances is saving an emergency fund. It is like not sexy in the world. No one likes it. No one likes it. It’s not fun. It’s just this like quiet discipline that you have to undergo that takes a long time. You can’t do it quickly unless you’re absolutely loaded, which most of us aren’t. And you just got to get on with it. And no one says well done at the end, unless you’re part of my membership, and I will give you the biggest high five because I think it’s such an achievement. And it is this is this kind of slow process. So I think, first of all, getting your reason why you’re doing it, that is number one, because otherwise you are very likely to veer off course and spend that money on something much more interesting like handbags. So the first thing you want to do is just give give yourself a reason. So it depends where you’re at on your journey. It could be um, right, get a bit of an emergency fund and then you can clear your debt. So I do recommend people get a bit of an emergent fund at least first before clearing all the debt, just so that if anything else happens uh without one, you’d then have to take on more debt to deal with that new thing that’s just come out of nowhere. So having a bit of savings before trying to clear your debt, obviously making minimum payments, you want to still do that. Um, so it could be for that, which would be very rewarding to clear your debt. It could be that it then gives you the springboard to um start investing because you don’t want to be investing until you’ve got an emergency fund. It might be that you want to start building entrepreneur fund and you want to start a business. Well, again, you don’t want to be taking risks like that if you haven’t got an emergency fund. And realising why you’ve got one in the first place, it’s like this is your get out of jail card, uh free card, sorry, your get out of jail free card. It’s basically saying if anything happens after that point, if you’ve got your emergency fund, if you calculate the numbers, three to six months’ worth of living expenses is gonna get you out of most problems without having to take on any debt at all. There’s not many expenses much bigger than that. When I calculated mine, I was like, oof, okay, that’s gonna take a while to build, but it’s a big number for a reason. And it means, like, since having one of those, since we completed our emergency fund as a family, it has been firstly the biggest stress reliever ever because you’ve suddenly got this backstop that it just feels like most of us, I think we we have like low-level anxiety, some of us high-level anxiety when it comes to our finances, but you don’t often you don’t, if you are making it work, if you are kind of even if you’re paycheck to paycheck, but the numbers do work and you’re not taking on debt, you can have this subconscious level of anxiety of anxiety that you don’t even realise is there until you get an emergency find and suddenly it’s gone, and you’re like, oh my goodness, I didn’t even realise I was so stressed. And now that that’s there, I feel so much better. This is incredible. And that’s what happened to me. Well, as soon as we’d done ours, I was like, oh, like we’ve got options now. We could start a business. My husband could change careers, which he then did after we built our emergency fund. We didn’t know at the time, but he’s changed careers in the last year. And one of the reasons we could do that was because we’ve got an emergency fund. So there was like a whole bunch of like massive benefits to having one. Um, so I think really getting your head into that, realising why you’re doing it is the best place to start before you go on and go on this. I don’t know, it feels like a bit of a pilgrimage, like kind of journey to building your emergency, and then you kind of have to go on this quest, and then um, and then there’s a huge payoff when it’s done. Massive.

[21:45] Sammie Ellard-King: Love that explanation that is getting clipped up 110% because I I think it’s it’s so important to to try and start people there. Because one of the things you said, and it’s I’m massive on this, is start with why. I must talk about it once a month on my newsletter, and just so every single new person has really known that that’s really where it all begins. Because if you don’t have a why, you are going to land yourself in trouble, and it’s only a matter of time before you do. If you once you land yourself in trouble, if you have a why, you go, oh yeah, and you jump back onto the road, back onto the quest, back onto the pilgrimage, and you really do kind of check yourself in a way. But if you don’t, suddenly you’ve eared off, suddenly you’ve got a new handbag, and you guess what? You pay you pay for it with a brand new credit card, and it’s like and you’re gone again. And you’re going back down to the old you, which is what you said you wouldn’t do. So having a why, and it and a why does is for me, I personally see it as it’s not a it’s not actually a um like I want a PlayStation. That’s not a why. A why is the feeling that the PlayStation will create for you? So for me, it’s time freedom. Yeah, so I’m like time freedom, positivity, and energy. So I build a business which gives me the creativity, the positivity, and the energy that I want. Um, and the time freedom. I need money to do that, so my business needs to make money. So actually, money is the the other side of that thing, but those three things are what I build my life around, and money just happens to be the vehicle which take which gives provides me those three things, it gives me options, as which is one of the things you said, which I love. So, yeah, I I think it’s massively important for people to go through that process, and then and yeah, I I I really loved you did a video about it, it was called Top Line Mentality. It was an it was an absolute banger of a video. What does that mean?

[23:50] Anna Brading: Thank you, appreciate your uh encouragement. Uh top line mentality is okay, one of the biggest shifts in my experience, my personal experience of handling money better was when I went from top line mentality to splitting up my money. When you and everybody’s experienced this, right? You get paid and all of it comes into one account and it sits there and you look at that number and you go, Oh my gosh, I’m loaded. This is amazing. And you kind of do it every month, but you don’t even realise you’re doing it. You look at that number and you’re like, Yes, this is X. I’ve been waiting for two and a half weeks for this moment, and there it is sitting there, and it looks so much. So then you start going, right, paydays come, let’s go. You spend week one, week one was amazing. Week two, you’re like, Oh, hang on a second, this is going down a bit quick. Eek, okay, fine. Week three, you’re like, oh no, I’ve got two weeks left of the month, and this is nearly run out. Beans on toast for dinner, you’re kind of like baked potatoes, and that’s basically all you can manage because you’re thinking I’ve got to make this money last. We’ve all been there, and basically what happens is you can end up right back at zero by the end of the month and it’s all gone. Anyway, one way to fix that is just splitting your money up into categories, into pots. So um, I mean, we’re not talked about if we just like let’s not talk about savings for a second, let’s just talk about the money you’re actually spending in a month. So if you are to uh take that money as soon as it comes in and you’ve got that lump sign on your account and you actually categorize your spending and you split it into different categories, even within your account. So you can get accounts now, banks that have got pots, and I talk about pots all the time. It’s a little bit like the you might have seen like those viral videos of the envelope system where you take cash and you put it into your different spending categories and envelopes. In my life, that would never work as if I’ve got the time to go to the bank and withdraw the cash and then find the envelopes and then like, no, I’ve got three children, that’s not gonna happen. So we use an account that splits your money into pots, and you can actually automate it to happen. So you can have like I recommend like eight to ten categories. You could have food, travel, eating out, uh, whatever it is. I don’t know, your hobby. And you split that money up instantly as soon as it comes in into those pots, and then you can see as you go through the month how much you’ve got for each thing left, and you’re much more likely to make that money last better, um, get you through the months much more consistently, and not have that mad panic and no money to spend on food by week four. So it’s a lot more fun, right?

[26:19] Sammie Ellard-King: So top line mentality is really like you’ve looked at the big figure and gone, yeah, I’m minted, and but you’re in reality, and that’s what we all do, isn’t it? We’re like payday come in, woo, yeah, I’m going out, a splash in the cash, yeah. Who wants around? Like, oh my god, I’ll do that. Like I was the worst for that, literally. And and and you know, that’s how I built up all my debt, and that’s you know, that’s big learning at the end of the day. But I don’t I I watched that video and I thought, oh my god, I can resonate with that so much. Like that feels like me, and I know so many of my friends which live like that, and uh in fact, the majority of us definitely live like that, it becomes a thing. Um, and I I feel like it’s a big cycle to break this kind of living paycheck to paycheck because that’s what you’re doing if you’ve got top line mentality, or indeed, if you don’t have top mentality, often many of us get to the last week of the month and we’re just like, shit, man, like how am I gonna do this? Like, I’m gonna have to dip into my savings, I’m gonna have to perhaps put stuff on the credit card and pay that off, and then suddenly we’re in this cycle. And you said on your website, which I love, which is called the Doom Loop, and that hit me. I’m like, yeah, that is the is the Doom Loop. Like, what steps can we take to get ourselves out of this paycheck to paycheck cycle, which so many of us are stuck in?

[28:48] Anna Brading: Yeah, uh it’s such a doom loop, and you and you do because you because this is the other thing, you work hard for your money, so you do need to you do need to enjoy what you’re earning to some level. And some people think that, okay, well, if I start like managing my money better, I start getting into finances and oh, it’s like admin, boring, budgets just make you realise how broke you are every single month, boring, boring, boring, and then you don’t get to enjoy your money. It’s not that, it’s actually not if you do it right and you do it with purpose and you figure this stuff out well, you are actually building that enjoyment into your budget and into your future because you’re now prioritizing your future as well. You’re you’re you know, putting money to enjoy yourself tomorrow as well as today. So you are much more likely to be able to enjoy your money, which is so important. Because I don’t want anyone listening to think, you know, that really is it. When you start budgeting, it’s just, oh, I’ve just got to be sensible now, and that’s all, you know, everything just goes, all the fun stuff’s gone. Actually, it’s the opposite. It is the opposite if you do it right. And that’s one of the things that I like to kind of one of the reasons I do what I do is because I’m like, no, come on, you’ve got to enjoy what you’re earning, and you’ve got to have a future ahead of you that you’re also looking forward to. So there’s hope. So you’re not just like in that doom loop of like, oh, I’m just stuck here, it’s no options, it’s so annoying. So one of the things that um is just a well-known classic money principle is paying yourself first. And this is another thing that most of us do is when we think about saving, and this is what I used to do, this is so bad, right? When we uh when I first came out of uni and got my first job, so I was a friend, I did a forensic accountancy first of all, which was so interesting, but um never stuck at it because I’m too creative, but it was a really cool job. Um, and what what it was is I got paid all right, actually got paid pretty well for a first job out of uni. And what would happen is uh me and my husband get paid, and basically we just spend it all as you do, and at the end of the month, there’d be nothing left. And my husband was like, you know, he’s a legend, he’s brilliant. And he’s like, you know, we should really start saving. I was like, well, no, we can’t save because we’ve we’ve obviously need it because we’ve spent it. If there was money left, we could save because we don’t obviously don’t need it if we uh I mean, this is a long time ago, please don’t get me wrong, I don’t do this now. But it was like the thing of if we’re spending it and it’s gone, we obviously needed it, so we don’t save. Well, that never works. There’s a uh it’s um Parkinson’s law where it’s like have you heard of Parkinson’s law where it’s like the amount of time you give a task is how long the task will take you to do. I’m paraphrasing that’s not exactly what it is, and there’s a derivative of Parkinson’s law, which you can apply to finance, which is basically like the amount of money you’ve got to spend, you’ll increase your spending until it’s spent. So it’s the two things, you know, it is like if the money’s there, it will be spent because that’s what we do. It’s just human nature. And if you don’t do that, congratulations, you’re an amazing elite human. So one of the ways you can fix that is you can just pay yourself first. It’s incorporate yourself first, which basically means you’re putting money aside first, as soon as you’re paid, before you do anything else. It’s the first thing that goes out. Now, what that percentage is and how much that is is gonna be completely down to how organised you are, how much you’ve crunched the numbers, what you feel excited for, what you feel like you want to do. So I can’t tell you like an exact figure, but a really good starting point is like try 10%, see if 10% works, give that a go. And yes, you are gonna feel it the rest of the month if you do that, because you’ve got less to live off of. But if you put it hand in hand with some really good organised organizational tools and techniques, you can make it work. And if not, let’s talk about side hustles, let’s talk about creative income, let’s talk about ways to increase your income so that you can save that bit first. But the the main principle is doing the saving first, putting it aside, out of sight, out of mind, and then using what’s left for the rest of the month and only that.

[32:48] Sammie Ellard-King: I love that. It’s it’s a habit thing, isn’t it? Like a lot of the time. I think for me, one of the big things is if you can’t, if you’re saving 100 quid and you’re dipping in and you’re taking 50 quid out a month, you’re just gonna keep doing that. If you put 200 quid in, you’re gonna take 100 quid. You’ve made that habit, you’ve said that’s okay to yourself. You have to actually be, it’s a bit of self-control, but actually making a habit where okay, this month I’m only gonna put 25 pounds into my savings, but I’m not gonna touch it. And then next month I’m gonna up it to 30, then I’m 35, 40, 50. Okay, right, I’ve built habit now, and then I can move myself back up to the 100 quid. And guess what? I’m not touching it because I’ve now built that positive, reinforced habit, which is then creating myself a little bit, and I can ease up to that 10% she mentioned there, which I think is a is a great benchmark to start with. A lot of people should be aiming for that 10%, and it’s different again, difference for everyone. Don’t come at us in the comments. Um yeah, so I you mentioned side hustles there. Right now, it’s talk of the town. I’m talking about it a lot. I’ve just put out a new course actually about teaching someone about about how to make money with digital products on online. Um, but one in five of us apparently, according to Aviva, have a full-time side hustle on the go. And that isn’t just you know your online surveys uh occasionally here or there, or you know, the occasional bank switch or something like that. This is full-time side hustles, which they reckon are going to increase um by 2027 up to three in five people in the UK will have a full-time side hustle. I personally think it’s so important. What’s your take on it? And you mentioned it there, creative income.

[34:36] Anna Brading: Just to clarify, when you say full-time side hustle, does that mean it just it continues? So it’s like it’s not like a survey where you do it once and then you’re done. It’s like it’s always on the go continually. Is that what you mean? Yeah, I believe so. I think it’s more like you work on it continuously, as in like you are actually building something. Um I would have to actually double check that. I will leave a I’ll leave a link to this uh study in the um in the description below. But yeah, I believe it’s something ongoing. Yeah, yeah. Um I find that statistic incredibly exciting, and I’ll tell you why. Um I never thought I’d be doing this today. Like if I was 10 years ago, you you said to me, Oh, me and Sammie are gonna be doing a podcast together because we both now have um these businesses where we teach people about money. Like I would be I would look at you in the face and go, What are you talking about? That is bananas, that’s not gonna happen. But what’s happened is it’s not happened, it’s happened very slowly, and it’s and not like I’m arrived by any means. I’m just saying I love what I do, and I’ve I consider it a great privilege to do what I do. It’s some it’s really, really fun. And I I’ve only got here because I started taking small steps, thinking outside the box, thinking creatively about how to make money. And I’m so glad that I did. And I think there’s positives and negatives to everything, and obviously there’s a lot of negatives with the cost of living squeeze. Lots. Don’t, you know, please don’t say I’m down planning this, playing this in any way, shape, or form. For some people, it’s absolutely horrendous, and we are getting squeezed. Even people that are comfortable are getting squeezed, and obviously for some it’s really, really bad. But sometimes what it can do is it can actually um cause innovation and it can force thinking outside the box because you have to, and sometimes you can kind of go through the motions in life, and then something will happen that causes you to think outside the box. And and I think we’re seeing that right now. And one of the things that is happening is people are having to think outside the box of how money’s made, which I don’t think is a bad thing. I think actually innovation is fantastic, innovation is the future. I think now that we’ve got so when I grew up, right, we didn’t have the internet, that’s how old I am. So up until like my late teens, you had to like dial up to join the internet. Like this is this is the reality that I grew up in. If you wanted to start a business, you can use the house phone. Absolutely. You had to like book in to use the internet when your mum’s not on the phone. And um, if you wanted to start a business back then, you’d have to go and literally do a physical business, so you’d have to like do your lemonade stand on the corner of the street, or you’d have to go and work for someone as an apprentice and start your own business on the back of it, or something like that. We are in a time now more than ever where it is easier than ever to start your own business and actually start making money fairly quickly. And there’s loads of different ways you can do it. And um, Rory Vaden, I heard on a podcast not too long ago, he’s got a thing called PAIDS, P-A-I-D S, where you it’s kind of the ways you can monetise having any kind of following or a platform. But I think it’s actually a really good acronym to remember how to make money in general. I think it’s brilliant, so I use it all the time. So it’s it’s paid, P-A-I-D-S, and you can kind of just kind of work through these and see what kind of piques your interest as to which route you might want to go. So P is a product, uh, A is affiliate, which is you’re not selling your own product, you’re actually promoting somebody else’s product, which for some people is is lovely. If you’ve got sales and marketing skills, you might be like, I’m not creative, I can’t think of something to make or sell, but I could sell someone else’s thing that’s affiliate. You’ve got I for information, so those would be more like the kind of thing you and I do, which is like digital products and information products. Uh, so there isn’t like a you don’t have stock. We we have infinite stock, if you like. You don’t have to actually go buy things and have them in a warehouse, it’s like an infinite amount of digital products. Um, then you have where do we get to D is deals, so things like book deals, brand deals. You’re seeing a lot of this, you know, with creators, the creator economy is booming. And then S would be the easiest one to get started on if you’re thinking about side hustle, which is a service. So you’re swapping your time or a skill for payment. So you might be doing something in your job right now that you’re like, I could do this on the side a little bit, and actually it’s a brilliant skill. People would pay money for this. That’s like the quickest one to get going. So for me, it was tutoring. So I did maths at university and I did a bit of math teaching, and so tutoring maths was just a really easy way to get going and it paid pretty well. Um, and that’s how I got started. That was like my first side hustle. So, all that is to say that I think innovation and thinking outside the box on earning income is brilliant because it leads to really cool stuff, and that’s been my experience. Started small, started tutoring maths, and then little by little I’m now doing things I never dreamed of doing purely because I just followed the rabbit trail, the rabbit hole, um, and started learning enough skilling. So I think it’s great. As long as we don’t, I I one thing I would say is I I don’t like the whole cat the hustle culture mentality. I think it’s really good to work hard, but you the the negative side is I I don’t want people who are are really already working really, really, really hard and struggling to think, oh, I now need to get a side hustle to make ends meet. We have got a problem, which is where really good jobs, people who are working very hard in these jobs that would have historically been paid very well and now not paid well enough. So that is a real thing, and I think I wouldn’t see this as the answer to that problem, but I would say that um if you have got the capacity, innovating in that way to create a business or a side hustle can be a wonderful journey.

[40:48] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, it’s a lovely way of putting it. Like I completely agree with you. I’m not mad on the hustle culture myself, but I do certainly believe that right now with this technology kind of based society that we live in, you’re spending, I would say, upwards of 180 minutes a day mindlessly scrolling or reading news or watching TikTok or doing something right there, that’s your time. And if you if you if you want to argue with me on that, then fair enough. And that’s where I’ll say, look, that’s your time. And if that’s your time to unwind, I get it, but then split that time. If you put 90 minutes instead of 180 minutes a day into something, you’re gonna make some serious dents. Um, and there is plenty of side hustles out there now that you can do with under an hour, and you can make some really good extra cash. Um, and that’s what we’ve developed with um, you know, our Couch to Five Grand course, which is basically learning digital products, and we teach you how to do it on social media with under an hour a day, and it’s totally, totally possible. Um, and so it’s whether you want it or not, right? Because some people are sitting in their jobs, they’re happy with their salary, they’re budgeting well, they’re doing everything right, they’re putting their 20% away, they’re like, Yeah, I’ve got this nailed, but I don’t think you’d be listening to this podcast, and you probably wouldn’t have got this far if listening to us two bang on about money if you were if you were at that point. So I think you know, if you are in this point, you are interested in side hustles. I love that page thing. I’m gonna I’m gonna certainly look into that myself. It’s the first time I’ve heard of it. It’s a really good way because a lot of people say, Well, I am X type of person, this side hustle doesn’t work for me. What have you got for me? And I always find it really difficult to say, Well, have you checked this out? Have you checked this out? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, well, at that point, I don’t know where to send them. So that’s actually a really good way of kind of unpacking it, what type of person you are. Yeah, it’s really cool.

[42:46] Anna Brading: I I would say that at some point along the line, and this is the bit where it is challenging, you do have to embrace sales and marketing. So, one of the big problems I have with a lot of the stuff online I see at the moment about, oh, I made 50k in my first week of business. Oh, I’m like, no, you didn’t. No, you didn’t. You’ve got 10 years of sales and marketing experience, and then you just took it to your own thing. That’s what you did. And I think that has got to be um, and that’s one of my biggest challenges is I don’t come from that background at all. So I’m having to learn it all on the go, and it’s not easy. So I find it way easier to make products and come up with ideas and make things than I do to market and sell them. And I think that’s something we have to be really upfront and honest about, is the fact that you cannot learn the skills of making stuff without the skills of selling stuff. And I think I would love to see more support and training, and I’m sure you do a great job with the stuff that you do about how to get that out there and how to talk in a way um that doesn’t feel salesy if you’re somebody who finds sales cringy and like, you know, and unnatural. Um so I think there is that side to it as well. And I think for some people that can be a major barrier, it can be a major blocker. And one of the reasons perhaps that they might say, Oh, I it didn’t work for me. Um and that was certainly certainly my experience in the first couple of businesses I tried, that was a massive blocker, it was a huge blocker. Um, because I just didn’t have any experience in that. And I think there are some really good books out there, and there are some amazing people creating content about it. And I think it’s just something to bear in mind that that is it, they go hand in hand together. And if you do want to have a business, you do want to make money on the side, unless you’ve you’re amazing at networking already and and marketing already, you do need to kind of bring that into the mix as well.

[44:44] Sammie Ellard-King: A hundred percent. I mean, um, we had uh Paul on recently, Paul Stapleton, and he was talking about how sales isn’t necessarily always transactional, it’s something that you do on a day-to-day basis. You’re and it’s actually about unlocking certain parts of yourself which you do have inside of you. And there are there is things like soft selling, so soft selling is more conversational based, like we’re having here. And then you might say, Oh, that sounds really good, that course that Sammie mentioned. I might go and check that out. That was a completely soft sell. I’m not asking anyone to go and do it. I’m not like, here’s my exclusive offer, go and buy it now, which is a hard sell. So there’s a there’s a very different way of looking at it, and then actually often soft selling is a good way to get people in because a lot of people can talk and have conversations, and uh that’s what marketing is it’s about a conversation about a problem that you’re solving for someone, and then the solving the issue then leads to the sale, which is where the transaction takes place, and thankfully puts that money in your pocket. Um, when you break it down like that for people, people go, Oh, okay, I can sort of see my little way around that now, and I can get yeah, I can get I can get on board with. That and it’s like okay, cool. So we’re not we’re not banging offers at people, we do do that, but you know, we can we’re just aiming to have a chat with someone and try and make them trust us, and that’s really what we’re aiming to do. Um, one of the things that comes out of side hustles is the money, and what the people then do with that money is for me, this is where the next step of this kind of quest that we’re on, this is where you go from phase one to phase two to phase three, and you start moving up the kind of financial literacy chain and financial freedom chain. Like once you’ve got a bit of money coming in from these side hustles, we need to talk about investing because investing is a big part of that. What’s your take on investing at the moment?

[46:33] Anna Brading: Oh, great question. So I feel like if you are talking about extra money coming in, so I just want to go back to um saving. You know, we talked about pay yourself first, and I was like, well, you could start with this percentage. My reality was we didn’t have I didn’t have that spare. Like we were maxed out when we started our journey, and it was having to think outside the box and create extra income that allowed us to then do it. So it was like boost income first and then siphon off some of that to start doing this journey. So I I think it’s it’s good to mention like if you are stuck at the moment, unable to save, you genuinely think I can’t, I can’t do it. This is a great place to start thinking about create. I call it like creative income before you even get to side hustles and anything. It’s more the stuff you mentioned before, like surveys, renting out a room in your house, uh, selling stuff on vintage. It’s like the creative income isn’t, it’s not your big thing that you’re gonna take to become, you know, take it to Dragon’s Den. You’re not gonna do that. You’re just trying to boost it a little bit with a goal in mind to then siphon off that money for your purpose that you you really want to get to to get you out of the doom loop of the paycheck to paycheck cycle. So that’s kind of one thing to think about. And then I got I’ve I I think of it like this, right? You know, when you go to weddings and they have those champagne towers where they have all the glasses lined up. Never been to one personally. If anyone’s got one coming up, invite me because I actually would like to see one in real life. So you pour the champagne into the top glass, and then it fills up, and then it flows into the next level, and then the next, and then the next, and the next, and it comes down. And I like to think of it like that when you when you’re thinking about creating that income extra. So you you you let your the top glass fill up with the extra income you’re creating, and then eventually it will spill over. So you can take maybe 10% of that and that will spill into the next thing. So you can start the next thing you want to do, and then eventually that will fill up, and then you can start the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Because what because there’s so many routes, and investing is just one of them. So you kind of need to just focus and go, well, I’m gonna do this one first, and then when that’s filled and there’s excess to pour into the next one, I can do the next one and the next one. And you’ve probably had the thing of um, you’ve probably had the quote of millionaires have seven, seven streams of income. Um it’s actually seven types of income. It’s not every millionaire has seven businesses or seven properties, it’s seven types of income, different types of income. And that’s one great way to really boost your future and boost your savings is to use it, your money in different ways. So again, it’s like that champagne tower. Do the first one, then do the next, and then and then don’t rush it. Just when you’re ready, move on to the next one. So investing wouldn’t be top tier in my mind. If you haven’t got an emergency fund, if you haven’t paid off your debt, you’re not ready to start investing, that’s okay. Don’t worry, get your emergency fund built first, get in a really good place, get your foundation foundations really strong, and then you can fill up the next one. And that would be, you know, if you want to, it could be investing. Now, there’s we’ve talked about business already, investing and property. So BIP are the three routes you can like generalize, they’re the three routes you can go down. So again, investing is just one of those three: business, investing, property. So there are three things to explore. And investing is a really, really good one. And you need to be careful with it. You need to do your research, you need to get a good strategy under your belt. But if you do it right, it’s fantastic. And it can take, well, it can take a small amount of savings invested consistently over a number of years, long time, like 10, 15 years plus. It can grow that amount of money exponentially. And there’s not many things in life that can do that. There’s not many places you can put your money in life and see it grow exponentially. Investing that is possible under the right circumstances and in the right conditions. And it is something you could do easily alongside a full-time job and very being a very busy person. And you can learn it. It’s for everybody. It’s not one of these things that’s for the elite or for the financial gurus. It’s something we can all learn and we can all start taking advantage of uh when we’re ready at the right, the right time.

[50:42] Sammie Ellard-King: I love that take on it though. You’re you’re so right. Like it is, it can be so overwhelming for people when they just kind of get into this financial literacy world and they’re here investing property side hustles. Oh my god, pay myself first, oh my god, emergency fund, like debt, credit, three-bank-account system, 1p challenge. Like, just chill, man. Like, do one thing and do it well and then move on. I’m doing that right now. Right now, I’m at a part of your BIP thing. I’m investing barely anything at the moment. Most of my money is going back into my business because I’m focusing on growth in my business because then that’ll pay me back. And then suddenly the investing comes along. We we’ve got uh you know our house now, which we’re happy with, and also we’re paying down our mortgage, we’re building that up, we might remortgage and get an investment property when the time’s right, not right now because it’s too bloody expensive. But like this is two, these are all options that we’ve created for ourselves. But we’re doing I’m doing one thing at a time and doing it well, and then setting it up and almost automating that part of it, and then so it’s like just I’m happy with it, that SOP or whatever that you know, it’s all done, and then we can move on and focus on another area and grow that. And I I love your take on that because it’s so important. Don’t get overwhelmed by this, just just take things in easily at a time. Um so do you invest yourself? And are you happy talking about that?

[52:03] Anna Brading: Yeah, it’s it’s something that I I’m I’m with you on your your take on it as well of reinvesting profits into a business. I have prioritized my business because that’s the thing that’s well, the thing with business is if when it works, you can get your the returns are crazy compared to like long-term investing. So if it if it does work, you can do very, very well. You can make a full-time income plus on a business that’s working well. So that in itself is a great investment. So my priority has been my business. Started investing a while ago a little bit, mainly to learn the ropes and just know that I could do it because I was like, I don’t want this to be this thing that I’ve not done and I can’t do, and it’s only for these people. It’s like, no, I’m I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna go through the motions of setting up the accounts, doing that right, getting my tax wrapper account, and and working out where I want to put the money. And I think you know, I I would recommend like investigating all the steps to anybody because I think it’s so interesting and it’s so empowering when you realise, oh, it’s just the number of steps, it’s not this big scary thing. Um, there’s a thing as well of of just maxing your pension first and making sure that if you’ve got employer match, just to make sure that that is you’ve explored that route first before because you can, you know, essentially it’s like free money if if your employer matches your contribution, um, which when you’re doing DIY vesting yourself separately, you can’t necessarily get that kind of match. So it’s something to think about too. Um, yeah, so my investment journey is slow and I’m not expecting a lot until I’ve got, like I say, that waterfall, kind of that that champagne tower. My the plan is to always be taking that pay yourself first money and always be putting that aside from every income stream that I get. You’re always putting money aside, putting money aside. And so that will grow as my uh take home grows. So I guess it’s just yeah, it’s a slow, it’s a long game, but it’s just growth. It’s not my priority. Yeah, it’s not it’s not number one for me, and that’s okay.

[54:09] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, no, absolutely. I love that answer. It’s it’s totally cool. A lot of uh, you know, we’ve had some fantastic people come on here and they say, I don’t even invest, I literally just invest in my business because it pays me better. I’m like, grey. Yeah, you know, that’s brilliant. Like that’s it’s you know, it it it’s a byproduct of uh of your money, it’s an option for your money. I love that. And I I absolutely love this chat. Like we’ve we’ve um sorry we’ve kept you a little bit longer, but I had to ask you those questions because uh you’ve absolutely smashed us. I um I’m really looking forward to getting this one out. So um yeah, if you wouldn’t mind letting everybody know where they can come say hi or perhaps sign up. Sure. So if you’ve enjoyed listening to this chat, I mean this has been so fun. Thanks for having me. I’ve really enjoyed your questions. Um come and find me over on Instagram. I’m Mentora Money on Instagram. On TikTok, I’m currently at the time of recording money for millennials, but that’s likely to change as well because it’s last year was the whole year of launching the uh money mentoring platform and changing things over. Because basically, I don’t just speak to millennials as I found out. I thought it would just be millennials. It turns out it’s a lot more people than millennials. So I had to be inclusive of that. So um you can find me there, Mentora Money or Money for Millennials. And um, if you’re interested and you want to know more about my money mentoring platform, you are one of those people who’s thinking I am so overwhelmed, like we talked about with all the different things I should be doing. Where’s my first place to start? Just pop me a DM on Instagram and we can chat further. That’s the best thing to do, or give me an email at Anna at mentoramoney.com.

[55:44] Sammie Ellard-King: Lovely. All right, brilliant. Well, we’ll include all of those links in the show notes below for anyone’s interested in contacting Anna. But yeah, I had a look at your website and the membership looks great. So um, yeah, definitely encourage people to go and check you out. So thanks very much. Thank you.