The simple technique that could revolutionise your relationship with money – The Prosperity Project

Kiwis are not renowned for wanting to talk about money, but what if the key instead lay in talking to your money?

For Rachel Davies, it was the moment that changed everything – as she realised how poorly she treated it. “I spend you, I go on massive binges. I refuse to look at my bank account… I would never do that to a person, why am I doing that to money?” she told Nadine Higgins on The Prosperity Project podcast.

It might sound unusual, but it’s not a gimmick.

“Because I had trained as a therapist, I was like ... you talk to me as if I’m money, which is a classical therapy technique. We did that exercise and a whole lot of light bulbs went off,” she says.

For Davies and Angela Meyer, co-founders of Hi Money and authors of Money, Money, Money, that simple exercise put something important into sharp relief – most of us aren’t bad with money, we just have a complicated relationship with it.

For Meyer, her money conversation revealed she had a belief that somehow, everything would just turn out okay in the end. “And actually our research shows that 30% of people think that either the lotto gods are going to come and sprinkle money or you’re going to win some sort of prize,” she says.

Your relationship with money can be costly, especially for women, who already face other financial barriers such as the wage gap and the “pink tax”.

Meyer says while it’s not a literal tax, it’s a substantial cost. “There was a really interesting study out of New York and they were actually able to measure the pink tax and it came out at US$188,000 [$319,000] over a woman’s lifetime.”

Neither woman ended up working with finances in a traditional way.

Davies spent decades as a film-maker, “wandering the world, doing whatever I wanted”, but when she came home, she realised she had no KiwiSaver and was on track for financial insecurity in retirement.

For Meyer, when her creative agency landed an Australian Superannuation contract, the financial facts facing women astounded her. “That’s when I sort of discovered that… women are retiring into poverty… and as a card-carrying feminist, I was so outraged.”

They’ve both now taken the reins of their finances, and relish helping other women do the same by changing their relationship with money.

“Eighty per cent of everything is feelings, not facts… money’s exactly the same,” Davies says

Watch or listen to the full episode of The Prosperity Project for more.

The Prosperity Project is hosted by Nadine Higgins, an experienced broadcaster and financial adviser.

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