Talking Cents

Another sharemarket topic! (our favourite). In this episode we chat to Morgans Investment Advisor Brooke Gardener about Exchange Traded Funds. Brooke explains to us what ETFs are, how they differ to regular shares, the benefits/costs/risks involved with investing in ETFs and more!

Today we are joined with a special guest, Louise Walsh. Louise is the CEO of ASX listed companies FGG and FGX (known as the Future Generation Companies). If you haven’t heard of these companies before, they provide a way for you to expand your portfolio, have access to a range of great fund managers and instead of paying the usual 1% fees, this money goes towards a range of charities supporting Australian youth mental health and children at risk

Why do we hate losing money more than we like making it? Why will we hold on to an investment that is making a constant loss hoping it will go back up some day when we know we really should exit and put the money to better use somewhere else? Behavioural economics gives insight into why we don’t always act rationally when making these tough financial decisions and to explain it in simple terms we have Kara Child on board! Kara is a Senior Wealth Manager at Pitcher Partners and has studied Behavioural Economics and the psychology of investing.

With the 2019 Federal Election coming up this Saturday (May 18th), we thought it would be a good idea to check back in with politics guru John Slater to talk us through all things relevant to voting on election day. If you need a bit of a refresh (or have no idea) on how the aussie politics system actually works, take a listen to John’s first episode - Episode 8.  Otherwise settle in for 26 minutes or a short blog post where we chat about what you need to think about in the upcoming election, how the voting system works and how your vote counts.

There is a lot to consider when entering the property market, especially for the first time. One of the biggest questions is whether you should buy a home to live in or as an investment property. Today we chat with the lovely Ayda Shabanzadeh about understanding the property market and why we should be interested in entering. We chat about buying a home vs. an investment and what’s going on in the current market. Ayda’s formal title is Co-founder of Grow Group, but she is known for her property and finance expertise, business coaching and public speaking!

Today’s episode might be veering a little from our usual finance theme. But nevertheless it’s about how you can get ahead. You may tell yourself that you are simply not a morning person, but that’s because it takes 21 days to get use to doing something and 66 days for it to become a habit. After 6 months it essentially becomes part of your DNA (and you might even enjoy doing it). Hear from Aaron Birkby, the CEO of Startup Catalyst about why waking up early should become one of your habits and how it can help you be successful in your career and life.

Every one of us has a personal brand (whether you know it or not). When you Google yourself, what shows up? These results are the first impression people will have of you. With platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and other social media sites sharing our information with the world, it’s more important than ever to get our personal brand right. We are joined on this week’s episode by Tracey Mesken, an experienced Marketing & Branding specialist with close to 20 years experience of building both small and large companies’ marketing and digital capabilities. Tracey, a certified practicing marketer is the Head of Marketing for The WorkPac Group, one of Australia’s largest recruitment companies as well as the deputy chair of the Queensland Committee for Australian Marketing Institute (you could say she knows her stuff.)

In Australia, investors or media are constantly talking about negative gearing, but what does it all mean? Roxanne Efimov is our guest on the podcast this week to break down everything to do with Gearing and Capital Gains Tax. In particular we chat about how the possible changes to negative gearing will affect the property market and what it will mean for young people trying to enter! Roxanne is a Manager and Certified Accountant at Pitcher Partners and an all around great gal. Whether you have a strong opinion about negative gearing, not really sure whether it’s useful or have absolutely no idea what those words mean, we are certain you’ll learn something from this ep.

A few episodes ago we spoke to Andrew Davis from Health Insurance Comparison about Private vs. Public health insurance. Check it out here. We decided to have another chat to Andrew as from April 1st this year, there are some important changes being introduced. Every year there is an increase in health insurance premium. However this year, things are a little different. The government have made a number of reforms including the ability for insurers to give discounts for younger people, changes to the way hospital cover works and the removal of some minor services. Join us as we break down these topics!

This episode follows on from our first share market episode (Episode 2 Let’s Chat Shares).  We delve deeper into researching companies, dividends, actually purchasing shares and the difficult part- selling. Thanks goes again to Chris Titley, stockbroker from Morgans who answered all our questions.

Talking Cents is finally back after a long break (of holidaying).  To kick us off we thought it might be refreshing to hear about the financial situation of a real millennial (besides us). In this Episode we ask all the personal questions to Emma Edwards, who runs financial blog The Broke Generation. She explains the reality of dealing with student debt, credit cards, buying a house as well as her best money hacks.

Every Australian has a level of health cover through the Medicare System, but as young adults we ask ourselves whether or not it is a good idea to go private. We are often bombarded with an overload of information and it can be difficult to work out the exact coverages, costs, and value for money between public and private cover. Today we are getting to the bottom of health insurance and what might be the best option for you. Featuring on this episode is Andrew Davis, CEO of Health Insurance Comparison.

In today’s episode, we are talking about something a little different to what we normally cover. We chat with Dr Neil Carrington, the CEO of the national charity ‘ACT For Kids,’ an organisation dedicated to supporting abused and neglected children. Dr Carrington has two roles. He is a CEO but he also does public speaking and all his speaking and consultancy fees go directly to Act for Kids.In the last eight years he has generated over two million dollars directly for this worthy cause. Dr Carrington talks to us about how setting a vision for yourself can really help you lead the life you want and help you get ahead. Talking Cents is all about helping us millennials get ahead. So whilst this isn’t strictly finance related, we hope that you enjoy it!

Do you have Life Insurance or Income protection? Do you know what they are, what they do and whether you need them? We certainly didn’t, so we took a drive down to Advice First to visit Senior Financial Planner and Corporate Benefits Specialist Travis Bailey. Often we think Life Insurance means insurance to protect your life (understandably why). But it actually has a couple of different categories. This includes death cover, total and permanent disability, Trauma and Income protection (unfortunately not the happiest of topics but extremely important nethertheless).

In this episode we are talking all things town planning, zoning and property development. Why is this relevant? Essentially, if you are wanting to buy a house you definitely want to consider what area you should buy in, what potential development could occur and what the council has restricted to that area. So, to teach us all about this we visited Scott Nind, the General Manager of RPS Gold Coast (Talking Cents went on tour).

How our political system works is something many millennials are not 100% certain about. However, it is something that can be very powerful if we all engage in it. To talk us through this, we had a chat with John Slater, who is an absolute expert in politics (he’s worked for members of federal parliament and majored in political science so definitely deserves the title of ‘absolute expert’), So whether you don’t understand why we’ve had so many prime ministers in the last decade, why we have the two houses in Parliament, how our voting system works or why it affects you, have a listen!

We have started a new theme in our podcast called Tech Topics. We are basically looking to chat with different Fintech companies to find out about what they are doing. Whether it’s to do finance generally, improving how tax is done or super etc. We want to know the newest tech initiatives to get us ahead. For our very first Tech Topic Episode, we had a chat to George Lucas, CEO of Australian Fintech company Raiz.   Raiz is a mobile micro investing platform. Essentially it is an app that collects your spare change and invests it in the share market on your behalf. This fractional investing (compared to large minimums when using Commsec for example) can be an awesome way to help millennials reach their financial goals and be introduced to the share market. It can help you invest your money, starting early and investing often. You do also have the option to invest lump sums or recurring investments.

In Episode 4 with Jak we broke down the basics of Super: Why we should care about it now, the difference between each type of fund and the importance of consolidating your super. However superannuation is such a complex yet important topic and we decided there was definitely still more questions to be asked. So we visited Mike Tynan, an Investment Adviser from Morgans Tynan Partners to delve deeper into this topic.

Expanding our savings is something that we all hope to achieve, and budgeting is a great tool to do it. However, the word ‘budget’ can be heavily misinterpreted and misunderstood. To learn more about saving and budgeting techniques we had a chat with Phil Sgangarella, Managing Director and Senior Financial Advisor of FinFit Wealth Solutions.

We all know that superannuation traditionally is quite a boring topic. We can’t access our super for quite a while - so why should we care about it now? Surely, we have better things to worry about. Well, Jak Johnston from Growth Focus, busts this myth for us. We should care about our super. A lot. And the best way to do that is to do some research into your current situation, listen to our chat with Jak and review your circumstances.