Bonus Blog: Money Diary
For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be featuring some of our favourite money stories on our blog, so you can have a sneak peek at the spending habits of total strangers, and learn how they overcame their financial hurdles. Here’s Anna’s story.
Anna is a 35-year-old woman who worked in sales and marketing before being made redundant this year.
Before losing her job, Anna was earning a very comfortable $90K a year, which was complemented by commissions and other, non-specified allowances.
Her story starts around 15 years ago, when she moved to Sydney at the age of 20 – for readers outside of Australia, Sydney is a ludicrously expensive city.
Rent, even though she was living in a not-so glamorous share house, was still incredibly expensive.
To make ends meet, Anna was approved for a credit card as well as a handful of personal loans, and found herself wanting to make the most of living in an incredible new city, no matter the cost.
Instead of putting her hard earned money away and saving it, she was lured by the temptation to keep up with her mates and would spend money frivolously on adventurous nights out and on material items she knew didn’t actually validate her worth as a person.
Despite knowing that, she couldn’t stop spending.
We call this FOMO-spending at She’s on the Money. It’s spending beyond our means simply because we don’t want to miss out on what everyone else is doing.
While it’s absolutely okay to enjoy our money indulgently every now and then, if we give into FOMO too regularly, it can dramatically jeopardise our financial future.
Retrospectively, Anna says FOMO was the compulsion responsible for her financial struggles and that it’s a habit that haunted her long after those first few years in Sydney.
As she climbed the career ladder and started earning more, Anna found she was still unable to get ahead as the cumulative expense of her debt repayments, rent and living costs were just too much to get a handle on.
Ten years later, Anna found that she was still in a large amount of debt and made the clever move to consolidate her credit cards into personal loans, but critically, she chose not to close her cards ‘just in case’.
Unfortunately instead of reserving those cards for the emergencies as she intended, Anna found herself using them to fund gifts or expensive nights out.
Despite her best intentions, it didn’t take long before she was using the cards again regularly.
So what was Anna’s turning point?
When she found herself in $20,000 of debt for her car, had $15,000 owing on her credit cards as well as a consolidated loan for the same amount, Anna knew something had to give.
The constant need to prioritise debt payments meant living off an incredibly restrictive budget and having to say no to her friends and to the things she’d always loved doing.
Life became exhausting and eventually, Anna knew she couldn’t live that way anymore.
Fortunately, WISR came into her life at the right time and helped her get back on her feet and moving forward.
“There was a really easy online application process, it took less than five minutes – I was approved within 24 hours and the money was in my account 24 hours later. Everything is now consolidated and I have one debt which is with WISR and it is now so much easier to manage. The round-up app is fantastic. You install it on your phone and over the course of a month, it tracks your spending across whichever bank accounts you nominate. I still have a sizeable debt to pay, but now it could be paid off by the end of the year.”
Today, with the stress of her overwhelming debts all but behind her, Anna is saving for a home and for a stress-free lifestyle coloured with travel and everyday luxuries like nice dinners and weekends away. Though fear of missing out is something she continues to deal with, Anna now uses a budget and has a much firmer grip on her finances.
**Name changed for privacy reasons.