Personal finance in ELT: How to learn what to do with money

As I’ve said many times, there’s not a lot in the way of education, input or training around the topic of financial security, pensions or personal finance in ELT. Money is basically never mentioned. Probably because the pay is generally so dire there’s a lot of vested interest in not bringing the topic up. As there’s no real education on how to handle money at any other stage of our education either, it’s no wonder that most of us in ELT don’t think about what to do with money. 

I’m trying to change that of course by constantly talking about it via this blog, Linked In and interviews on other people’s platforms. Even the odd conference, though I am still waiting to see if my IATEFL proposal will be accepted this year after being rejected for 2023. 

But, anyway, if you’ve somehow come to the conclusion that it’s time to start thinking about what to do with money, or how to save or maybe even invest for your future, where can you start?

Here are the pros and cons of the main ways of learning about money. 

Via a financial advisor

There are two ways to hire a financial advisor. Pay them to manage your money for you or pay them by the hour for their advice. The first one will cost you tens of thousands over your lifetime whether you get good advice or not. 

The second one is much less costly but you need to choose the right person. And you need to understand what they’re telling you so you can decide whether their advice is right for you.

For both types, the biggest thing you want to know is whether they earn commissions for the products they’re suggesting to you. If they do, they should declare that very clearly as it’s not necessarily a problem in and of itself. For example, I recommend products for which I get commissions sometimes but I only do it for things I trust. 

The only way you’ll know if what they recommend is any good or not, or if it’s in your interests or not, is to already understand something about how pensions and investments work. You ESPECIALLY want to know how to look for the fees and understand what impact they will have on how much money you actually make. It really could be thousands and thousands.

I have a taster class based on things I teach on my beginner investing class that specifically teaches you how to understand fees. The 20€ you spend on it will save you a fortune.

One issue I see a lot with people who’ve come to me for 1-2-1 sessions is that they have had financial advice in the past and not realised they were basically dealing with a salesperson. Following their advice, they invested in the recommended products but didn’t understand that these products were linked to insurance. Thanks to the high fees and low returns they have seen almost no profit in years. By contrast, actual investing accounts would have earned them over 20% just in the last year alone. 

So my spidey senses always start tingling when someone tells me they have a product with an insurance company, and even sometimes if it’s a mainstream bank product. But all the alarms go off for me when I hear that someone has made virtually no money on their “investments” since Covid. I see this a lot with clients in Spain, but it’s not only a problem here. Something is wrong if you’ve not made money despite the fact that investing in the global stock market has looked like this since then.

Like a lot of people, when I first started asking myself what I could do about my money, I had no idea about personal finance in ELT. I Googled expat financial advisors and ended up on a free consultation call and vaguely understood that she’d take care of everything. She was “only” going to charge me £750 to set my accounts up and then whatever the management fee was ongoing from then.

Thank God she didn’t charge less actually as I might have got sucked in instead of being scared off by the fee. I’ve saved thousands and thousands over my lifetime by learning how this works and doing the couple of minutes’ work a month it takes me to manage it myself. 

Down the rabbit hole: researching by yourself

This is how I learned about investing and personal finance (in ELT and beyond). I was starting from scratch and had no idea in what order to learn or what was important. I barked up a few wrong trees at first as I looked at trading courses and tried to listen to CNBC daily podcasts on the markets. None of that was necessary as that’s for people who want to learn to be traders. It’s not for people who just want to have their money earning quietly in the background and not risk losing it all. 

There is tons of great content out there. But the problem with researching by yourself is, at first, you don’t know what is good or bad or what’s applicable to you. Even if I tell you how I did that, I’m not sure it will save you much time. I eventually stumbled across a couple of personal finance/investing blogs. Ultimately, I really started to understand by listening to the Invest Like a Boss podcast. I was able to filter their US-based advice through what I’d learned beforehand. But they’re on episode 307 as I write this so that’s quite a lot of filtering to do! Later on, I discovered Money to the Masses in the UK, a podcast that has loads of useful content. But, again, a lot of it. 

Another problem with researching by yourself is not knowing what to actually search for. If you don’t know anything about a topic, it’s quite hard to form the right questions in the first place.

However, it can be done. 

I did it in about 6 months, albeit with a couple of mistakes that cost me. Funnily enough, I found that some of the concepts only became really clear to me when I started creating the material for my course, The No-Stress Money Plan. There’s nothing like having to explain something to other people to make you realise you don’t know it as well as you thought! After over 2 years teaching that and other courses on personal finance in ELT, I know this stuff pretty well and I’m easily on track for doubling my savings since I started investing in 2021.

Learn personal finance in ELT via a course

Learning via a course is basically a timesaver. And if you save time and start investing quicker, you make the money back that you paid for the course because you put your money to work sooner. It’s a lot less work than researching by yourself and will have varying degrees of self-study vs live support. 

There are lots of courses about investing, by which I mean low-cost, low-risk, passive investing not trading or anything speculative. Those things are also called investing and are often what we think of when we hear the word “investing”. But I use the word to mean putting your money in places where it grows steadily. It’s true that you might see fluctuations but in these types of accounts, the aim is to make money over the long term. 

If you want a course aimed at people in ELT and written by someone in ELT (me!) then my 5-week No-Stress Money Plan course might suit you. It’s self-study with 2 live classes a month for as long as you want to keep coming, and a 1-2-1 session so you know exactly what to do next.  

If you’re based in Japan check out Ben Shearon’s Your First Ten Million Yen course. And, for Americans resident in America, I recommend Delyanne Barros’ course Slay the Stockmarket. (Affiliate link which gets you a large discount and me a small commission.)

Get financial coaching for more support

If you want more support, you might want to think about money/financial coaching alongside or instead of a self-study course. This is different from financial advice because it’s not so much about the “what to do with your money” as it is about “how to get unstuck over whatever is stopping you”. 

So much around money is emotional and psychological, not practical. Some people find it hard to save while others find it impossible to spend money and the reasons are hardly ever to do with how much they earn.

Maybe money represents safety and security to you and the thought of even moving it out of your current account is scary. Or money represents freedom and adventures and you can’t stand the thought of tying it up in investments so you want to leave it where you can spend it even if Future You’s freedom will suffer one day. Maybe you feel too much responsibility for savings you’ve inherited to ever touch them. Perhaps you find yourself spending all your money but you’re not sure why or what on. 

Working through all of this is where a coach can really help untangle what’s going on and free you up to put your money to work, to save, and to spend without guilt. While coaching can be a considerable upfront investment as coaches charge anything up to $2500-3000, the results can be life-changing. 

Choosing a coach that’s right for you is going to depend on what kind of approach you like: practical, woo-woo. I tend to be drawn towards practical more than “the universe is abundant” type coaches and that’s the way I work with people too when I do 1-2-1 coaching. Read about my experiences with a financial coach I hired for myself.

One thing that probably makes me different from a lot of money coaches is that I mostly work with people in ELT. That’s my background too since I was a teacher abroad for years and then a materials writer. So I know the mindset that often grows from that and I can help from that perspective. 

If you think that’s the kind of help you might need, check out my 1-2-1 coaching package “Get your finances in shape in 3 easy stages”. Fully-tailored and personalised support to help you work out 1) where you are now 2) where you need or want to be 3) how to get there. 

It includes access to any of my courses or resources that will suit you and your situation. And you get 3 x 1-2-1 sessions plus a final check-in after 4 months. And, just like with my coach, you can ask me questions or give me updates anytime you need during the package period.

Get your finances in shape in 3 easy stages

Personal finance in ELT doesn’t have to be complicated or risky

It’s easy to learn with the right help!