In this episode
Helen Baker, founder of On Your Own Two Feet.
Helen Baker, founder of On Your Own Two Feet, not only explains why it’s important for everyone, especially women, to be financially literate, but provides a pathway to do so. Helen helps to break down barriers that prevent women from controlling their own financial futures, including an introduction to the pillars that everyone needs to be in control of.
This episode was sponsored by Teachers Mutual Bank.
About Helen Baker
Helen Baker is a licenced financial adviser, successful author and founder of On Your Own Two Feet. Her organisation is dedicated to empowering women to gain and retain their financial freedom. She frequently provides practical financial advice to help enable people build and plan for the future. Helen holds two Masters degrees, a Master of Financial Planning and Master of Management (Innovation and Change), as well as a Bachelor of Commerce (Accounting) degree.
Transcript
MAK
A warm welcome to Ed Talks WA. I'm Marie-Anne Keefe, but please call me MAK.
Usually, when this podcast addresses literacy, it's talking about the ability to read and write. But today, we're looking at another kind of literacy, financial literacy.
Financial literacy is the ability to find, understand, and effectively use financial skills that are available to us.
Generally, the level of financial literacy among Australian adults isn't great, but for women, it's even more of an issue.
Today, we are joined by Helen Baker, the founder of ‘On Your Own Two Feet’ and author of ‘On Your Own Two Feet, Steady Steps to Women's Financial Independence’.
She provides a crucial financial advice service that specialises in helping women across Australia gain and retain their financial freedom.
Brad Elborough from our Communications directorate spoke with Helen about her organisation, background and financial literacy.
This episode of Ed Talks WA is proudly sponsored by Teachers Mutual Bank.
Brad Elborough
Helen, thank you so much for your time today.
What an amazing crusade you're on, helping women become financially independent. It's something everyone should be aiming for, not just women.
But before we get into that, we know that you hold two master's degrees, one in financial planning, another in management, innovation and change. You also hold a degree in accounting, but being a financial advisor specializing in helping women isn't where you started nor where you thought you'd end up. Isn't that right?
Helen Baker
Yeah, true. I thought initially I'd be a commercial teacher, teaching business principles or accounting and shorthand, which I'm not even sure exists anymore, but I ended up going down a management accounting style role, which is like troubleshooting and fixing issues.
So that's been a wonderful background to get me to work with organisations like the managers of Robbie Williams and Sia and so on overseas and travel a lot with Wreck and Coleman. So I had a really great career and then came back to Australia and eventually ended up financial planning after I worked as a GM for a financial planning firm and changed everything there and ended up with no job.
So I started financial planning.
Brad Elborough
Did you meet Robbie?
Helen Baker
I did many times. Yeah, he's a good man.
Brad Elborough
So in every sense of the word, you are a teacher now though and you're teaching about financial literacy and it is a term that I believe is quite new.
I used it in front of someone recently and they didn't know what I was talking about. What does that mean?
Can you help us out? What does it mean to be financial literate and generally how do Australian adults go at being financially literate?
Helen Baker
Yeah, it is a bit of a blah, blah kind of word, isn't it?
So I guess for me it's as simple as being on your own two feet and staying there. So making sure that you've got everything in place, I talk about having 5 foundations in place, making sure those are all in place before you go off and do anything so that you don't have to sell things because something underneath was not right.
And then it's adapting to the changes of your goals or your circumstances or legislation even or opportunities and stopping and starting work and so on so on. So I think it's about having the best life that you want to have and finance underpinning it and understanding where you'll be right wrong or where you can avoid a mistake.
Brad Elborough
Yeah absolutely and you talk about the 5 pillars and we won't go into those details but there'll be notes to go along with this podcast for people who do want to get in touch with you and find out what those 5 pillars are.
So you make it sound so simple but clearly it's not. So your focus now is helping women enhance their financial history. You clearly found a need for that to happen.
When did you discover that need and how big is it?
Helen Baker
Yeah I think it's massive, particularly because there are more and more women you know, our generations are used to working and earning an income.
A lot of women in former generations, you know, they were the stay-at-home mums while the husbands worked. So we've got women earning their own money and the financial independence there.
I also found my own experiences when I was a professional seeking advice. I didn't really have good experiences there and I think there's a massive need where women want to talk to women. They want to talk to a female advisor where they feel comfortable, where they feel safe, where they can ask a question that they sometimes think is stupid, but it's not. But they're too afraid to ask in certain other situations because history has sort of shown, and the report that I did in my master's, indicated that women felt like the industry is just about selling and investment and going crazy on Wall Street and so on.
So it's a massive, massive need and growing.
Brad Elborough
So there would be women out there who wouldn't even know that they need help, right? And there's the extremes and the WA government over here has released information and a campaign around understanding coercive control. But it's not just about those that are in a vulnerable position as far as domestic violence or who find themselves at the end of an ugly divorce, is it?
We are talking about them, but not entirely those people.
Helen Baker
Definitely, it's everybody and I think, the perception is that to have a financial adviser you need to be wealthy. And the argument is actually everybody needs financial advice to make themselves wealthier.
The earlier that you start and start addressing these things, the better chance that you have of becoming more wealthy.
So what we want to do is have all women actioning and putting their best foot forward and building themselves as early as they can because when it comes to investing time as your friend, when you start to run out of time to build, like a lot of people will say, ‘oh, I wish I met you 5 years ago or 10 years ago. I wish I knew that’.
But the other side of the coin is we have some massive issues in society, like what you're saying about coercive control, which people are still understanding what does that terminology mean. But over the years, I used to see women coming in who had been through a separation or a divorce and they'd already signed on the dotted line.
So there was, you couldn't fix mistakes they'd made. Whereas now what I'm saying is read the book on the divorce one or get advice before you sign on the dotted line to avoid a mistake. But it's actually for all women, whether they're married, whether they're single, whether they're going through divorce, whether they're widowed, understand your finances and use whatever situation you've got to expand and make it bigger than it is.
Brad Elborough
Absolutely.
So this journey should start very early, as you just mentioned.
We see the Barefoot Investor write books for parents to help their kids. This is something that parents should have on their radar to help children with at an early age, it's not done in school so it's something that parents should take some responsibility in helping their kids understand. Is that right?
Helen Baker
I think so because you go back again, most people didn't have the complexity of superannuation. You know, if you had to be really rich to have an investment property. You know, these are things that are common, insurances and so on.
So there's a piece where, particularly as women, we're trying to look out for our mums and our grandparents to make sure they're looking after themselves otherwise, they're the issues that we have today where 40,000 women are living out of cars in Australia. And when I talk about that overseas, they go ‘in Australia?’ Like, they can't believe it. And, you know, we have some issues around that. We have people having to multi-generational living because of issues around somebody hasn't been able to get ahead far enough.
So I think again the earlier we start, yes, teaching kids is important as well because again, with the removal of cash there's a disconnect for kids around ‘am I saving, am I spending?’ It's just tap and go with these cards. So former generations are used to managing cash and seeing it dissipate if you spend it but these are the kind of things, but it's complex as well, like the super, like the insurances, the things that we've been talking about as well.
Brad Elborough
You talk about multi-generational households, which is becoming commonly talked about now, particularly with the price of real estate.
But 40,000 women in Australia living in a car, don't worry about people overseas, anyone listening to this podcast needs to be blown away and almost embarrassed by that figure.
Helen Baker
Yeah, it's quite horrific. And the sad, really sad part is the majority of these women are over 65, like 70, 80-year-old women who, you know have done all their life looked after people and you know, given themselves and then when it comes to their sort of area of life, they've been just left. And it's just horrific.
Brad Elborough
And there would be some cases where the next generation would contact you to be able to help those that have helped them.
So I'm sure there's some, and we've talked about the people living in cars.
Can you give us a few examples of who you're dealing with, what situations people are in and how bad it does get for people?
Helen Baker
Yeah. So for a lot of the advisors, when we're working with people, we are working with people who you know, sort of have an income or they're retired and they have assets behind them.
So for people who are going through a divorce or have been widowed or something like that, like the forgotten women, if you look up the forgotten women, they have stories of about 10 people they don't tell you their names but they give you the scenarios. And some of them they're just common things that happen where you know, people had a business, they didn't put money away in super, the business has gone bust, they don't have anything, they're living in their car and caravan but happy and just grey nomading around Australia. But then they have a car accident and everything's written off and like, you know left with nothing and you can't survive on the pension because it's just not enough money.
The income at the pension is say, $29,000 a year, and that's without rent or mortgages. So if you've got those still commitments, that's really a problem because they are saying that to live now in Australia in retirement you need a minimum of $50,000 to $52,000 a year. So you're already $20,000-something behind the 8 ball. So we have to have super, we have to have something else to prop us up and we really do not need to be committing to debt or rent on top of that because this is where the problem lies.
Brad Elborough
This is a perfect segue into ‘On Your Own Two Feet’. It's an amazing service aiming at providing financial literacy for women and it's your creation. It's for women looking for help or for those listening who might know someone like you've spoken about, the next generation or a friend.
What can women expect and how can they engage with you?
Helen Baker
Right. So obviously there's not a lot of us so when we get a lot of inquiries we do look for other people to help out as well. But the easiest thing to do is, what I've tried to do is build levels, so you know if you don't have the money or you just want to scratch the surface you can Google, you'll find I've written articles and have done for probably about 8 years every month.
So there's things out there to bring compters. There's the books that get you into a bit more of a specific detail and everyone tells me it's really easy to read because let's face it, finance is pretty boring. So I tried to do it in a way that's interesting and that you can relate and you can understand and it's not a novel, so you can hop all over the book to whatever interests you.
The other one then is obviously getting a consultation. Generally, most advisors do free consults so you can get an initial meeting and get some perspective. And then you can establish an ongoing relationship with an advisor if you need to. And, you know, if we're part of that journey, then great but you know whoever you can click with to make sure you take action. The key is we often absorb a lot of information but we don't take the action steps and then we put our head in the sand thinking ‘oh I can't do anything’ but the reality is there is generally always something you can do and the faster you get moving the better otherwise you start to run out of time.
Brad Elborough
Every long journey starts with one step doesn't it?
Helen Baker
True exactly. It's a good one.
Brad Elborough
Now I have googled you and you appear on tv shows, radio shows, magazines and things all over the place so you are spreading the word and people should be thankful that you are. And you all you touched on it, you talked about books but there is one book ‘On Your Own Two Feet: Steady Steps to Women’s Financial Independence’. This would be, having a look at it, a great place for people who might not want to reach out and talk to someone but at least want to get a little bit more information about what their journey should look like. I just want to talk about how that book came about and if there are any other resources that you recommend people wanting to start getting help should look for?
Helen Baker
Yeah, the reason that it came about actually was I just, from seeing so many people, I just thought the same questions often come up in this, like that 5 foundation test in 16 years, no one has ever passed the test.
There's always something to fix to start with, which is good, you know, it's just things that we don't know, we don't know. And so that's sort of where it came from was like, how can I get the message out? And I'm not buying a Porsche with the money, the money we use helps support women that need charity, that need some sort of helping hand. At the moment, we're building sport in Vanuatu and loads of different things for women so that we can keep lifting women up.
So that was the purpose of it. Get the message out. Something that you can gift somebody for birthday, Mother's Day, International Women's Day, Christmas, when you don't know what to buy them. Because the cost of the book will be replaced by an abundance by making others aware of what they need to do and by avoiding a mistake, I think so yeah.
Brad Elborough
Helen, are we buying the book online or through bookstores?
Helen Baker
Yeah, you can buy them directly through our website on yourowntwofeet.com.au, but you can buy them through bookstores and the audio version is coming out shortly as well.
So plenty of opportunity to find, you know, some people don't like books, they walk and listen, so it will be available shortly as well.
Brad Elborough
Helen Baker, you found yourself a niche, but you found the niche because there's clearly a need in the service that you are creating and I'm sure there are thousands of people who would thank you for what you've been able to provide them.
What you are letting people know is not just information that would help women and there are also men, I'm sure, who would find it very useful because finance doesn't really benefit one sex over the other.
Helen Baker
Yeah and can I just say on that point that the guys, some of the people that I know have, ‘oh, Helen, you know, like this is against men’. I said, you know what? It is so not. And if you're dating somebody, you want them to be dating you because they love you not because you think they're after your money, and also if you don't want your mother-in-law to come and live with you, maybe you should buy it for your mother-in-law.
Brad Elborough
What a great incentive.
Right, Helen Baker, I can't thank you enough for your time today and I'm sure the people listening now would like to thank you down the track.
If you want to get started on your own two feet, look for the book or Google and look for Helen's website.
Thank you very much for your time today.
Helen Baker
Thank you and thank you to all the listeners. All the best.
MAK
This podcast has been recorded on Whdjuk Noongar land. We pay respect to the traditional owners and to elders past, present, and future.
Thank you to our guest Helen Baker and to Teachers Mutual Bank for sponsoring this episode.
Notes
Learn more about the 5 pillars here.
Access Helen’s website.
You can read more about her books online.
Membership eligibility applies to join the Bank. All applications for credit are subject to our responsible lending criteria. Fees and charges apply. You can find our Consumer Lending terms and conditions and Credit Card terms and conditions available online or from any of our offices. Any advice offered is general financial advice only, and it doesn’t take into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Teachers Mutual Bank is a division of Teachers Mutual Bank Limited ABN 30 087 650 459 AFSL/Australian Credit Licence 238981.