How I went from clueless to clued up with money

June is a major investing anniversary for me. It’s when I started asking the question “Shouldn’t I be doing something with my savings? And if so …what?”

Well, to be honest, it was more like: “If so … er WHAT?!?! 😰WTF do you do with money except leave it in the bank?”

I had no idea where to start looking or even what to ask. So I turned to a Smart Friend and tried to formulate questions. I boiled it down to “What would you do with savings if you were me and can’t afford to buy a house?”

Smart Friend’s answer didn’t help. He said, “What I would do is: A) focus on growing income, and B) find a tax-efficient way of getting a good chunk of savings into tracker funds.”

At that time, Smart Friend’s answer didn’t help because

A) as a freelancer I didn’t have a boss to ask for a raise, and

B) I didn’t know what tracker funds were or how to choose one even after I’d asked Google.

So thanks Smart Friend, I wrongly thought, but that advice isn’t for people like ME.

People like me, I thought, with a background in teaching English and barely scraping a living as a writer with generally crap pay and inconsistent and unpredictable work, don’t have options when it comes to money. There was a bit more to this email exchange but, suffice to say, I didn’t understand ANY of it.

Luckily, I didn’t just carry on as normal. I went and learned. I discovered a whole world of opportunities to grow money.

And I’ve been putting my money to work and watching it grow ever since. 

In 2022, I created my own courses teaching people like me how to do the same thing. And I’ve helped lots of ELT people, just like us, to put their money to work so it grows for their future. Check some of them out here!