She's On The Money - MONEY DIARIES: Recovering from Financial Abuse

Episode Date: September 5, 2021

Happy Monday, and Kia Ora Queens! We have a lovely Money Diarist from across the ditch in New Zealand! She's sharing her journey and money story of recovering from financial abuse by taking up full service sex work. It's a great listen, but as always, if you would like to give this one a miss due to the content nature, we will catch up next week!!!If you or someone you know needs support through financial advice, they can call our friends at 1800 RESPECT, or have a look at their website.If you have a great money diary you'd love to share with us, you can email us at [e-mail] advice shared on She’s on The Money is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances. She’s on The Money exists purely for educational purposes and should not be relied upon to make an investment or financial decision. Victoria Devine is an Authorised Representative of Australia Pacific Funds Management Proprietary Limited ABN 34 132 463 257 - AFSL 339151.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

She's on the money. She's on the money. Hello and welcome to She's on the money, the podcast for millennials who want financial freedom. My name is Toni Lodge and joining me for another Shop Back Money Diary is Victoria Devine. Thank you for joining me. Hello, my love. So today we have a bit of a colourful money diary, which I think you're going to love,

but we'd just like to give a little content warning for anybody that we will be chatting about financial abuse in today's episode. So if that's something that you're not really able to take on at the moment, that's totally fine and we will see you next week. I love that. Well, let's jump straight in. Tony, could you read me out this week's Money Diarist's email? All right, here we go.

Kia ora whānau. I've never had a good role model financially. As soon as I hit 18, I started experiencing financial abuse from my mum. Before the age of 19, my credit score was totally screwed through bills she ran up under my name, and she had me sign a contract with her when I was 15 that she defected on and ended up running up a total of around $8,000 under my name. It took a long time to get her to pay these off and an even longer time to fix my credit score. I'm about to turn 25 and my credit score is officially very good. I've always felt super

out of control and uneducated when it comes to money. Until last year, my method was to buy everything I needed or wanted as soon as I got paid without looking at my bank account until my card declined and I'd spend the next two weeks until payday feeling sick about the thought of money i've started sex work last year and absolutely love it it's given me the ability to get ahead and do the things i need to do for my quality of life i'm finally at the point where i'm ready to tackle how i manage my money i have an amazing opportunity through sex work to change my life and my future and i don't want to follow in my family's footsteps wealth here i come heck yes very cool dying we have our money diarist on the line as always hello money diarist hello how

are you i am so good i'm so grateful that you want to share your story with us to be honest i'm so excited i have a few questions but as always we should ask the official questions first so let's start at the top with what is your attitude towards money um so i'd say that my attitude towards money has like changed a huge amount in like the past like two months um I used to think of it as something that like I had to fight with and something that I had to like you know that was a massive stress for me um especially because I had literally no financial education at all um but nowadays it's I've learned to see it as a tool to get myself where I want to go um and educating myself has been like super empowering when it comes to that I love that

that seems really recent like two months your money story is changing and we are catching you while it's happening how that's why I sent it in I'm so excited all right so next question is what do you do for work and how much money do you earn so I have a day job in retail um which I earn about 17 grand from um a year and then I am a full-service sex worker and I also do sex work online as well I actually don't know how much I earn from sex work because with sex work you get paid in cash and so cash doesn't work for me because cash is just it just disappears and then it's never existed so I literally have no no idea how much I earned for the first year of doing sex work um but there is a huge variance depending on the season um like in in june i made a total of

365 um and then last week i made 800 before tax so it's all over the place it's been very difficult to kind of understand how much i've made and what i've done with my money because i have no idea um but I'm tracking it now and that's what matters important I love that next question is what is currently your big money goal um honestly I don't know so um since I started like following shoes on the money my big money goal was to get an emergency fund um and I was actually lucky enough to receive a payment like a payout for an injury that I have which gave me my entire emergency fund for three months and also I got a new bed which is excellent and so now I really don't know I was thinking about property and literally the only reason I want to buy a

house is so that I can have a dog that's it that was my motivation to my friend literally my partner wanted to buy a house because it was a part of his like goals and things he wanted to do and I just wanted to invest in shares but I lived in a rental and knew that a dog would be you know a bit challenging unless we owned so the reason I was literally so motivated to save for a home deposit was so that I could get a dog and look at me now I'm living my best life I have a dog guys yes you do all right so next question because this is absolutely not about me but if you want to talk more about dogs here for that too next question is do you currently have any investments Oh, yes.

So I'm very excited about this. So I started investing with Sharesies just as like a way to kind of learn how it works. I still don't really understand how it works, but I keep doing it anyway because consistency and longevity. That's what I've been told by you. I'm glad you are taking what I say is gospel. Very important. Well, I mean, what else am I supposed to do? I don't know anything about any of this.

That's probably also why one of your money goals is a dog. Like, I like that. I think that's important. She's taking this quite literally, Tony. No, that's good. Yes, exactly. So I've just started putting a little bit into Sharesies every fortnight. But I've got like my KiwiSaver.

I recently changed it. You can choose how much you contribute to it. So I recently changed it to contribute 10% of my income. So I've got almost 18 grand in there, which is really exciting. Look at you go. Yeah. and then I also recently found out that um when I was a kid I had an investment account set up with my iwi um so that's something that I've just discovered um I knew I knew there was something

there but I didn't know what it was um and it had like 180 put into it like in 2007 and it's just been left alone pretty much and just reinvesting everything on its own ticking away so I've got about two grand in there which I didn't know how good yeah so I've started contributing to that every fortnight as well exciting it looks like you're on top of that I can't wait to see where you are in 12 months you'll turbocharge this out of the water I know I get obsessed with everything and this is a great thing to get obsessed with I love it all right next question is do you currently have any debts um I have about five grand on a student loan um but other than that no debt not a single bit and I'm so proud of myself for that I'm proud of you as well I can see it in your face

as well you're like heck yes no debt yeah i love that all right next question is do you use shop back i don't actually know what shop back is um well if you haven't heard of it shop back is a cash back rewards program that is actually available across australia pacific i know that it is very popular in australia maybe not as much in new zealand but hopefully we can increase the awareness in new zealand so essentially shop back works by giving customers a percentage of their purchase money back each time they make a transaction with its partner merchants through its website so for each transaction that goes through shopback the merchants actually pay a percentage like a referral fee and then shopback shares that referral fee with you which i think

is a pretty good money win because it doesn't cost you anything and all you do is download the app kind of a money win if you are an online shopper yeah easy as but let's move on because i want to know what your best money habit is um so my best money habit now I suppose is educating myself like crazy um yeah so I'm learning as much as I possibly can about literally everything I don't really like I haven't really been doing it long enough to develop those good like cash flow habits for sure um but I am doing my best to learn every single thing that I can and put that into practice um which i'm already seeing the impacts of which is awesome i mean but we will get you there we are going to turbocharge your cash flow system after this you and i are going to have a

chat money daris to you and i but you've already got heaps of investments set up you're organizing your kiwi saver which like is your superannuation over in new zealand and all of those things i mean it sounds like you're on a pretty good track to me i don't think that you sound like you don't know what you're talking about at all well when i sent the email i didn't know what i was talking about but now I've listened to pretty much every single episode and read every single thing that there is and I'm doing my best to teach myself as much as possible that's awesome I love that so much all right on the flip side what is your worst money habit okay so I think it used to be just sticking my head in the sand and ignoring the fact that money existed and just going and

buying what I needed or wanted and then being stressed out about it um I think my worst money habit now is I wouldn't say it's like a bad money habit um but I just do not know how to manage variable income because it is so variable in the sex industry um and that is something that I really do struggle with like when it comes to cash flow because of how variable it is and I think that that's something that a lot of people with variable income struggle with and if you're listening along and you struggle with this as well something that I think is really important to remember is always function off a base income so like what is the least amount of money that you will bring in each and every single month and try and budget around that because if you do that you're going to put

yourself in a position that everything on top of that it's not cream but it's a bonus and we can save and invest with that money while still completely understanding what our fixed costs are and what's coming in and what has to go out. So variable income can be really confusing because some months you feel really rich and some months you're like, oh my gosh, like I have literally no money. And it's actually about changing our mindset so that if we have a month where it is really prosperous and we actually make some extra cash that we didn't think we were going to make, it's not about treating ourselves. It's actually about protecting future us and going, okay, cool. I'm going to put this one aside because I know in a couple of months, there's going to be an

off season and I'm probably going to need that for my electricity bill or to top up my groceries or to pay rent. So it's all about understanding your budget and what fixed costs you actually have and what the base amount of income you need coming in each and every single month is. And then to finish off my rant, my friends, it's about creating an emergency fund that would cover a certain amount of months to make you feel really secure. So if one month you don't actually bring in the income that you thought you would you go it's fine I've got some stuff off to the side that I can pay for my bills with and I think that that's a really good way of functioning but you and I can take this offline but this podcast is not offline this is for everybody having that buffer of your

emergency fund that you've got worth three months so that must help with that so much I've been a freelancer um in audio and I can't do it I'm just not someone that can work on variable income I just I need to know how much is coming in so I can only imagine that having that little buffer is just such a big help yeah it really is um I suffer from chronic migraines so I find like stress makes them much worse and as soon as I had that emergency fund just sitting there I stopped getting migraines every day oh my gosh how powerful literally overnight it was quite um it was really something else and I've never seen more than a thousand dollars in my bank account so seeing seeing three months worth just sitting there is like oh my god I'm safe now yeah and

that's crazy but it's also so powerful to realize the impact that money has not only on your financial health but your physical health and your wellness and your ability to create income in the future like the more financially secure you are the healthier you are in every other aspect of your life and it is crazy and it makes no sense that people don't care about it more from my perspective because it could actually put you in so much more control but we don't prioritize that yeah being stressed out about money leads to me being incapable of actually going out and making more money um so that's a rock in a hard place it really is um so having that emergency fund there has been like such a blessing I love that all right I have so many questions for you but last

question in the list of our questions is if I forced you to give yourself a money grade what would you give yourself um I would probably say about a c plus at the moment um like I'm learning but I haven't done anything yet you know what I mean I feel like you could definitely be a bit more generous with your yeah I think so too what are you doing I mean it's it's been such a short amount of time it's like I understand that I'm the kind of person who like when I get like when I learn about something or I become passionate about something I'll just completely blast it and like be obsessed with it and then I um and then I drop it and I don't want to this is one thing that I don't want to drop and there's one thing I don't want to get bored of um and it's

one of those things that you can actually automate so like it takes the groundwork to set it all up and get your bank accounts in order and understand your kiwi saver or your superannuation and what you're actually trying to create, but we can actually automate all of this once all of those things are set up. So even if you do drop the ball, there's a really great framework for everything to fall back onto. And I think that that's the most important thing because so many people just assume that financial wellness means putting lots of time and energy and effort into it consistently, when in reality, that's not the case. You actually just have to set it up right, create your goals, create your system, and it works long term. It's crazy, but it's true.

I'm sorry. And now that you've been on, she's on the money. I feel like that's just one of those pillars of concrete that you'll be, you'll be financially savvy forever because you've talked to Victoria. I hope so. In fact, I heard that all money diarists just got up a rank immediately, just having been money diarist. So you were a C plus now you're a B plus just purely because you're a money diarist. You know what? I will take it. I will take that. Congratulations. Congratulations. Let's chat a little bit after this break. okay money diarist we are back and your money diary is a lot to swallow like i don't even know where to start i don't know where to break it down she's laughing i don't know why but don't you

don't you actually now i do but we're gonna start at the very start and we are going to ask you about your relationship with your mum because that seems wild to me that as a minor somebody under the age of 18 you could rack up debt in your name and you could end up in such a sticky situation and that your mum put you in that situation so can you talk to me a little bit about how this eventuated and I guess what your relationship with your mum is like now because I'm sure that that is has stuck yeah so um it all kind of started when my parents decided to divorce and mum and I decided to move home to New Zealand from Australia um I think that was kind of the start of a slippery slope for mom she is at the best of times super gullible um like you know

the whole the whole nigerian prince scammers she was all over that when you know through ebay and all of that kind of stuff before we moved back and once we moved back she was very vulnerable i want to say like she met a guy online he flew down to meet her um and then moved down after meeting her once this guy is a well-known scammer with about over a hundred convictions um and so yes um and this isn't even the main scammer um and this isn't even the main story tony we've just uncovered this yes when our money diarist told us before we were recording that her story is a triple threat she wasn't lying um so money diarist how old were you at this point um so when we moved back i was um i just turned 16 and that was when things really started so um the contract that I had signed when

I was 15 I shouldn't have signed it and she shouldn't have let me sign that um and then she met another scammer and it kind of it became very much like she met him in person once um and that was the only time she met him in person and was kind of like in this toxic online relationship for about i want to say about six years um gosh six years in an online relationship with someone super toxic yes she was giving all of her income to him um at certain jobs she was working under the table um so that she could just get like you know not have to worry about tax or anything um yeah and so that really started like she would she sold quite a few assets and then invested all of the money in this guy's business um oh gosh and I she knew straight away that I

was not a fan of this guy um like I have a good reason it sounds like you had the nows to know that maybe that wasn't kosher or maybe it wasn't the right thing even at such a young age I have a very strong intuition and um mum was very much like it you just don't want me to be happy after divorce and your dad um which was like mom that's not it I actually care a lot about you yes exactly um like I could not care less about the divorce to be completely honest um it's better it's better for everyone like nobody in the family was happy especially um like myself and mom we did not want to live in Australia sorry no offense um it's too no that's fine oh my gosh no it's too warm over there for me. Um, I guess the next question is like, how, like, how did you end up signing

something and how was that legally binding at such a young age? What it was, was mom decided she wanted to, um, you know, start this business breeding horses. And I was like, well, you're chronically ill. So if you die, I want that horse. I want that horse. God damn it. So I signed the contract at 15 um but when mum defected on the contract a few years later when it was going through the courts process she said that I that she was representing me in the process and I was not there and she for some reason didn't say hey my daughter was 15 when she signed that um and so by doing that by the time it had already been through the courts I went through the courts about twice um i think honestly a large part of that is because she she might not have just like

thought about the consequences of me being a literal minor when i signed that contract but also i don't know if she thought about protecting me at all in that situation so when she defected on the contract it ended up you know she was in the wrong for sure um yeah of course i spoke to community law and that kind of thing to see if there was anything I could do um yeah and they were like well it's already been through the courts multiple times like they've decided they've made their choice either way so I ended up because mum was working under the table because she wanted to give all of her money to the scammer I ended up being the only one with like a legit job where I pay taxes and all of that stuff so I received a letter to my workplace um being like hey we're

taking this money off of you and um you owe us about six grand um oh my gosh yep so that ended up being garnished for my wages for quite a while um and how much like sorry I don't know how that works in New Zealand um obviously that makes a lot of sense but would they take a hundred percent of your wage when you worked or would they take a percentage or how did that work out So, they initially applied to have them take $100 per week, and the courts went, no, that's too much. And so, they agreed to let them take $50 per week. So, that automatically gets deducted from my paycheck before it even hits my bank account. So, it ended up being $100 a fortnight.

And at this time, I was working part-time, not on a living wage, all of this kind of stuff. So, that was a huge chunk of money for me. money at that point as well especially because you said before like your current like full-time job in retail is what seventeen thousand dollars a year obviously kiwi yeah now nowadays i'm doing i only do my day job part-time but before yeah when i was doing it full-time i was earning about 30 34k a year um which is still not much and a hundred dollars a fortnight is a lot of money to live off because I'm assuming this is a very big assumption here that like your mum wasn't really providing you with any financial support and there was a lot going on with you doing it

on your own like that's not much money to be trying to find your way on your own right exactly um and so it got to the point where every single week I would like every paycheck I would have to hassle my mum to give me the money um and you know it could have been an automatic payment just sort that out um but when she was still in this toxic relationship it led to her not having the money because she was giving it all to this random guy and so there was not a lot of well good healthy communication between us um and she was on very thin ice the only reason she was still in my life was because she owed me money and I was not going to be paying that debt for her because when she did sell um this asset she gave him all of the money um yeah so when she sold her assets

she's probably i would estimate that she gave this guy probably close to a hundred thousand dollars um so like because she was giving this guy all of her money there was um i wanted you know we moved to a new house and i was like can we get some internet set up but she has the worst credit ever so they said no and I had just turned 18 so she was like well if you want the internet you have to go and sign it up for yourself and I'll pay it and I didn't really think twice about it because I was an 18 year old just doing what mum said you're like I just need the internet mum so yeah cool I'll just organize that exactly um and that happened with a couple of different companies so um basically by the time I was 19 my credit score was very bad um and I wasn't able to

get credit for anything which actually in hindsight the amount of things I went to the bank and was like hi can I get a loan for this or that and they were every single time they were like no and I'm actually so glad that my credit was ruined by that point because that meant that I couldn't go and get myself into debt um yeah it's funny how the world works isn't it exactly I would say that I'd probably be I would have gotten like 20k in debt by this point if I was able to just go and get money from the bank whenever that is crazy and so talk to me about how you got out of that debt like what happened once you were out of it like how's your relationship with your mum now because money can make and break relationships completely yeah so um mum at one point she came

clean um she finally managed to you know dump this guy and get away from him and just like cut her losses and you know and just left um and she came to me and she like told me everything that she had done and she was honest with me for the first time in like six years and she had you know she set up an automatic payment all of that stuff so I wasn't having to hassle her for the money um yeah and so we were we were good for a few years um but especially now that I'm like learning about money and education um I didn't know that financial abuse was a thing like I knew that she had done some really messed up stuff to me but I didn't I've never even heard the term financial abuse until I started learning about money I knew it was bad but like she really did

some stuff that a mother should never do to their child um yeah and when I discovered that second investment account through my iwi I found out that she had tried to access that money in 2016 she had gone into that when I was I was an adult by that time but she had gone into it to try and see how much money there was in there and to try and access that money while she was still in this relationship with that scammer and I only found that out very recently and that's just another another thing I don't talk to my mum anymore um even though you know like she paid off all of the debt and she you know cleared everything and she finally got there she is still manipulative and she is still a gaslighter and she still doesn't treat me the way that I deserve to be

treated and I realized that there is nobody else in my life that would even think to treat me badly or to manipulate me or to do anything like that and I realized why on earth would I allow someone to stay in my life if they're going to be treating me like that um yeah and so I went no contact with her she doesn't like that very much she has tried every single thing she can to um to get to me or get to get me to respond and everything um which is just not going to happen because my boundaries are important um and she has that I'm so proud of you money diarist thank you it is it's been a quite a hard road of course but I also for the longest time I didn't really realize how bad it was what she had done I was just kind of like this is a thing that mom did you know um but you don't

know until you know right and it's one of those things that kind of like hits you really hard in the chest when you learn what financial abuse is and this goes for everything beyond financial abuse like especially when people learn about emotional abuse they're like hold up like my mom or my parent or my guardian or the person I was with never hit me so it was an abuse and then they learn that no actually there's a number of different forms they go ah well that's why it felt that way that's what I was going through and at the same time as it being really nice to have a label to put on it it's really upsetting to find out that actually you were going through something really real and you just didn't have the education that you deserved to know what that was and yeah it's

it's a challenging position to be in but it sounds like you are in the better position now my friend exactly and like my well-being is my priority and I've always since I moved out I've always felt like I have no safety net I can't call mum up and ask for help or yeah anything like that for anything really um and I've always felt very like independent um but then I do see you know especially with COVID people getting all the support from their family and it is kind of hard to know that I am my only safety net um yeah there's nobody else that I can fall back on if I'm in trouble but I guess after everything that you've been through and probably this is maybe the first time that you've ever thought about all of the horrible things that you've been through but

also reflecting on the amazing things you've done since does that make you feel really proud of yourself that you've gone through all of this you know these situations with your family who were supposed to be able to rely on that you've gone through something that most people couldn't even comprehend and look at you now you know like you live in your own flat you're doing everything that you want to do you've got this amazing emergency fund you're contributing more than you need to to your superannuation to make sure that your future is taken care of like think about all the amazing things that you've done just through empowering yourself with knowledge I mean you should just be so proud of yourself like does that feel amazing it honestly does um when I like

checked my credit score and it finally said very good and that was yay that was something I was really really proud of like I I mean I didn't really have a choice but to do nothing um and I'm so glad that I didn't have a choice but to just not make any dumb money decisions because that has really set me up I am really proud of myself for getting to where I am and I've always been a very independent person and I can only rely on myself but like I feel a lot safer now having this education is really empowering of course and it sounds like it just sounds like you're so emotionally intelligent beyond your years like it just sounds like you know when you meet somebody and you're like you're an old soul like you've been here before like I genuinely

think when you meet someone you're like wow you are so intelligent and so emotionally switched on the emotional intelligence and awareness that's just the trauma um it's it's just the trauma but it has really worked out in my favor I'm I am who I am because of what I've been through and I really do not want to follow in the footsteps of my family like you know mum's attitude towards money is horrendous but you know dad for example has never been good with money either um and we never had conversations about money those conversations about money didn't happen at all like i was thinking about my money story but i can't remember any time when money has been spoken about in a way that is factual it's more emotionally driven based on my parents um and at the end of the day

money can be such a useful tool to get where you want to go and I actually do have the power to get myself there I really didn't expect to you know like especially growing up and you know the housing crisis and everything like owning property I've I never thought I would be able to do that and I mean it's still not like a huge goal for me but the stability and security is important to me um and I found that I also don't really know how to set goals because I've never had the option like some people say oh my gosh I will teach you I have got you um like some people I'll see like my peers just like save up and go to France and stuff like that and I'm like that's astonishing to me because that's never been an option like I've never known how to save for something big

so I'm still kind of learning that I can save up and go somewhere or I can save up and do a thing um I'm not quite used to that yet but you are well on your way and this has been such an amazing money diary for us to be able to share because I'm sure that there's people that can relate to that of having you know not a great relationship with with money through their through their childhood and now getting to a place where they're able to look to the future and actually feel excited about it so thank you so much for sharing your story with us because honestly it's it's really amazing to know that you came through the other side and you're like just at the beginning of this amazing life I've got a long way to go for sure yeah you're so welcome oh my gosh it's

so special learning about other people's money diaries and money journeys it feels pervy but you do feel like you've learned a bit and you can take away something from somebody else's money diary that you can apply to another situation and it yeah it's so special to me that we get to share these stories and without you wanting to share them we don't get to so thank you you are so welcome thank you so much but as always just before we head off we'd like to acknowledge and pay respect to australia's aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples they're the traditional custodians of the lands the waterways and the skies all across australia we thank you for sharing and for caring for the land on which we are able to learn.

We pay our respects to Elders past and present and we share our friendship and our kindness. The advice shared on She's on the Money is general in nature and does not consider your individual circumstances. She's on the Money exists purely for educational purposes and should not be relied upon to make any investment or financial decision. And we promise Victoria Devine is an authorised representative of Australia Pacific Funds Management,

Proprietary Limited, ABN 34132463257, AFSL 339151. And we'll see you next week for another Money Diary, friends. Bye.