 Welcome everybody. My name is Maya Fisher-French. I'm a personal finance journalist and you may have seen me on ETV or ENCA where I have my show Money Matters, but I also write on personal finance across various publications and also my own website, Maya Money. And I've been doing this for 16 years and helping people really take control of their finances. So I'm really excited to be chatting to you guys today because I know most of you are listening in because you're looking to buy your first property. And there's one thing you've got to get right when you're buying your first property is getting your money in order. And I know the theme of this event is your space, your rules, what is also your money. And your money needs some rules in order to become robust and ready to become a property owner. I get asked quite frequently, how do I achieve financial freedom? How do I achieve those goals that I want to be dead free or to buy my first home or to retire comfortably? And I think people are hoping that there's a quick fix to it. There isn't. But the positive side of it is that if you take control and you put a plan in place, you will achieve your goals. There's absolutely no doubt. But when anybody asks me this question, I'm always reminded of a conversation I had with a woman recently. I had just done a presentation, a money workshop, and she came to me afterwards and she said to me, you know, Maya, I lost 20 kilograms and everybody comes to me and says, how did you achieve that? How did you do it? What did you do? And she says, I start then say to them, while I went to a dietitian, I was given a eating plan, I stuck to the eating plan, I cut out the sweets and the chocolates and the carbohydrates and I exercised more. And she said to me, Maya, as I start telling them all this, their eyes glaze over, because that's actually not what they wanted to hear. What they wanted to hear was, here's the magic tablet to swallow it and the weight will magically disappear. And I feel sometimes that people feel the same way about money. They say they want financial freedom, but they're not really prepared to put in the effort to get there. So I'm going to give you some hacks that I believe if you follow, it's not complicated. If you follow this, just like the dietitians plan or the exercise plan, if you follow it, you will lose the 20 kilograms or in financial terms, you will reach your goals, whatever those goals may be. And the positive and sort of good news I want to share with you is I've tested this out many times and it is very, very possible to achieve your goals even within a period as short as six months. And I want to share with you a little bit of a story about money makeover. So money makeover is a program that I run in conjunction with City Press, one of our sponsors, EBSA. I'm going to just quickly see if I can share my screen with you and show you my, this is what we run. And these are some of our candidates over the last few years. As I said, this is our fourth year, 2020 was our fourth year of running it. And what I've found is, so maybe we need to give you a little bit of a background to money makeover. We take six people and we put them through a financial boot camp. And within six months, you cannot believe the goals these people have achieved. If you want to follow that, you can go to City Press Money Makeover on Facebook. But if you want to hear their stories, but it is actually absolutely incredible what these people can achieve in six months. The goals that they have, the amount of short-term debt that they pay off, the deposit for the home that they wanted, whatever financial issue they have, they're basically able to solve it within six months by following a basic plan. So I'm going to give you now the hacks that we share with our money makeover candidates. And the first step is, if you're wanting to achieve your goals, is to know what those goals are. Write them down. Whether that goal is paying off debt, saving towards your child's education, retirement, buying your first home, write it down. And then plan around that. So for example, if you're wanting to own property, do your homework. What does it mean? How much can you afford to buy for? What are the implications in terms of your running costs of that property? What do you need to do to get there to be financially fit to achieve that? If it's paying off debt, how much debt is it? How much extra can you pay towards that debt in order to achieve that goal? If it's retirement, what do I need in retirement? Go out, find out the information and really have a little tangible plan or at least a goal in place that you want to achieve. It's extremely important to write this down. We all think, in our heads, we've got all these goals and plans, but it's actually only when you put it down on paper and you understand what it is you're trying to achieve is it something that you can eventually implement. So that's the first step. The first hack is to go and actually write your goals down. But not just, I want to retire comfortably. What does that mean? What's the number? What's the figure? Start really identifying what that goal means. Then, and I know this is going to sound a little bit boring, but you're going to have to start finding out where your money goes every month. And that's a budget or a spending plan. So, you know, this is what we do with all our moneymaker over candidates because what I found, and as I said, within four years, I have seen this repeated every single year that no one is different. When they are asked to apply for the moneymaker challenge, we get lots of applications in and people have to submit their budget, you know, what it costs them to live every month, what their income is. Then once we whittle it down, we have our six candidates, we then actually go and we look at that they then have to do a proper budget where they go back over their last three months, bank statements, credit card statements, store card statements, and they capture what they are actually spending. Not once ever has a candidate submitted a budget that they thought they were spending that matched the reality. In every single case, they were spending more than they thought they were. And I can promise you that if you're sitting with credit card debt or any debt and you just don't understand why or don't know how to make ends meet all of those things, it's because you actually don't know where your money goes. So I want you to go and take three months of spending in the past, find out your bank statements, your store cards. Now, normally I say the last three months, but because of COVID, I'd really like you to go back to January and do your January February March budget because that's going to be a lot more realistic about the life that you that you actually were living. COVID has been kind of a little bit of a strange bubble for us. Find out where your money's been going and how it's been spent. It will shock you. It will surprise you. It will give you some aha moments. Then I want you to actually compare that to what you did during COVID because during COVID, you know, we still had to pay for the necessities, the essentials. Government literally told us what was essential. Okay, I made a debate whether wine was essential or not, but they told us it wasn't apparently. So you'll now know what essential is and you'll have a very clear idea. What are the things that you were actually able to live without? Those luxuries as additional expenses, the eating out, the impulse buying and the impact that that may have had on your spending. For many of you who travel to work, but transport, whether that's via taxis or cars, fuel and if you're now having to work from home, you're going to find that there's actually a little bit of extra cash in your budget every month that you can really start to use to allocate towards those goals. So it's a very, very important thing to do now is to really, really understand where is your money going? Remember, you have a goal. Probably if you're listening to this, your goal is to buy your first home. So spend the time and energy understanding where your money is currently going. Then I want you to go and buy a little notebook. Take a little notebook and start writing down everything you're spending in real time. So as you go to the shops, whatever you're doing, write it down. If you buy a purchase online, write it down. Going back to that story I told you about the woman who lost 20 kilograms, whenever you go to a dietitian, any of us out there who have done diets will know this, they tell you to write down everything you're eating. And the reason for that is we do so many things unconsciously. If at the end of the day or even at the end of the week, I said, what did you eat during the week? You'll forget about the chocolate and the extra this and the extra piece of fruit that you had. But when you have forced to write it down, it makes you very, very aware of your eating. And it's exactly the same with your spending. When you start writing it down, you're going to have those are hard moments that a hard moment may be, boy, I didn't realize I was spending so much on a cups of coffee. Or as I discovered once the amount of milkshakes I was buying my kids every week. And you start thinking, I have this goal. Is this how I really want to be spending my money? And I want to share with you a fantastic anecdote from moneymaker, from our last year's moneymaker, actually, one of our candidates in Mabachu. So when we, you know, when we went through her budget, we discovered that she was spending 2000 Rand a month, 2000 Rand a month on KFC breakfasts. She was horrified, absolutely horrified. She didn't know she was spending money on those breakfasts. Well, as much, you know, if you'd asked her, she said, oh, you know, a couple of hundred here and there, she didn't realize how much it added up to because what was happening was that every morning she'd wake up, rush to get ready, get the kids to school, get to work like so many of us do every day. And she'd stop at KFC for that caffeine kick for a cup of coffee, but she hadn't eaten breakfast because she'd been in such a rush. So she'd quickly add in something to eat as well. And she hadn't was not aware of what that was doing to her financially. And that is what keeping tabs on your spending is really, really going to do for you as well. It's going to make you a lot more aware of that unconscious spending because it's that unconscious spending that is actually the one that's pushing us beyond our budgets. Now you're in a position, you have an understanding of how you've spent. You've got a real time idea of where your money is going and the decisions you're making about your money. Now you're going to start looking for ways to cut back to find that extra cash to find those goals. And this is something called just one thing. I'm going to share my screen with you again. So just one thing is about not depriving yourself. So just one thing is not about depriving yourself. It's about saying in all these luxuries that I enjoy, can I cut back just a little bit on some of them? So it's not about saying I will never ever go out for dinner again, or I will never do this, or I'll never do that. It's about saying what if I do just one less thing a week or one less thing a month? So if you have a look at this example, what if you smoked one less box of cigarettes per week? And just by the way, if you really want to save money, give up smoking, it's extremely expensive and will put a lot of money in your pocket, but it will also save you on life premiums. So there you are. That's very quick way to save money. But I'm not asking you to give up all your cigarettes if you don't want to. Just smoking, cutting back a little bit, eating out one less takeaway a month, buying one less coffee a week, your data consumption may be spending 10 minutes less on Instagram every day. It can probably put quite a bit of money in your pocket. Pack a lunch once a week, rather than always buying the pie and cook. It'd be also very much better for your health, drinking one less beer a week. In my case, it's usually wine. Perhaps once in a while, do your own nails instead of going for manicure. And what you will see here is that just by taking one little thing out of here, a little bit there, you land up saving yourself a thousand grand a month. So whenever people say to me, I don't have money to save, well, actually, it's sitting there in your spending. It's just about what you're trying to achieve. And we're not asking for massive sacrifices. We're saying just find those little bits and things that you can cut back on. And another really, really great way to find a bit of extra cash is a side hustle. This year in Money Maker, we had three of our candidates who had a side hustle. One was selling essential oils. Another was selling some beauty products. And a third one actually during lockdown made a built on. But you may have a skill or there may be a product that you're selling on the side as a side business. And what it's very, very important to do if you have a little bit of extra money, and I'm not talking about starting a financial empire and saying just finding that little bit of side hustle that can find you that extra 500,000, maybe 2000 random month to help you reach your goals. So now you're in a situation where you found a little bit of cash from your budget, maybe you've got a side hustle you can add to it. Now the next step, the next hack is to make sure that money is earmarked for your goals. So say for example, you cancel DSTV, that seems to be the favorite one at the moment. Sorry, DSTV. So I've saved myself 900 grand. But what have you done? Is it just landing up in your normal day to day budget and getting blown on takeaway pizzas instead? You need to immediately allocate that 900 grand immediately, whether that is an extra payment into your debt, into your home loan, it could be an extra payment towards your kids education or into tax reinvestment, you immediately allocate it. It's the same with those just one things. If it's 80 grand, 100 grand, whatever that amount is, immediately allocated towards your goals. Don't just leave it to be spent on something else. And I promise you, if you do that, if you find that little bit of extra money and you allocate it towards a goal, you will achieve your goals. Nono, one of our candidates from this year did exactly that. And she paid off her credit card and her evolving loan within the six month period. And she said to me, Maya, I can't believe I did this. She said, I didn't have a salary increase. I don't have a bonus. There wasn't anything special that happened. I just took my lazy money, that unconscious spending, the coffees here, eating out there. And instead, I allocated it to my debt repayments. And within six months, her debts were paid. So really, it is about, again, having that budget, having that conscious idea about where you're able to find that money, and then giving that money a home, telling it where to go, so that it achieves your goals. I promise you, if you start following that process, your finances are going to change. You're just going to start to see the impact really, really quickly. And to end off, considering that this is a property expo and many of you are looking at saving for your own space, your own home, I wanted to give one last hack about how to prepare yourself to be a homeowner. I want you to live as a homeowner before you become a homeowner. And what I mean by that is go and find out what home ownership actually costs. It's not just about the mortgage. There's a lot more that goes into home ownership other than the mortgage. And I want to share with you another slide, which really highlights some of the additional expenses that I think many of us are not always aware of. So the cost of buying a home, first of all, this is just, for example, on a two million rand sectional title property, you have massive amount of transaction costs. There are bond registration costs and property transfer costs that are really, really significant. And this is over and above the amount that you would need to put down for deposit. So as I said in the beginning, it's very important when you're setting a goal to buy a home to actually understand the cost implications. Now, if you own the property, these are kind of bills you can expect to pay over and above your mortgage. You've got building insurance, household insurance, rates, levies, water, electricity, maintenance. Oh, and just by the way, I've noticed I haven't adjusted this for the rate cut. So don't fall off your chair on the mortgage repairments. It'll actually be lower. But I would actually advise that you try and look at being able to pay in at least 10% more than your current, than the mortgage would be expected. It will give you a little bit of a buffer. So, but if you have a look at all of those additional costs, there's a lot more to earning a home than simply the mortgage. And you need to be prepared for that. And you need to start creating a budget specifically for that. So once you understand what this homeowner budget is going to look like, start applying it. So maybe you're renting at the moment or you're living at home, work out how much more it's going to cost you to own a home by having done all of those things. As I said, it's not just the mortgage, it's all the other costs that are going to come with it. So work out how much more you need to be able to find in your budget to cope as a homeowner. And then start living like that now. Take that amount of money that you're going to need extra and start saving it, putting it into a 32-day notice, putting it away and learning to live on that amount of money that you will have once you're a homeowner or the less money you're going to have because you got all those additional expenses. By doing this, you achieve two things. The first is that you, as I said, you're preparing yourself to become a homeowner. And at the same time, and by preparing yourself to be a homeowner, you're able to work out whether or not you can afford to move into your own home without making the transaction, getting yourself into financial difficulty. You will know beforehand and you may realise that actually you're not ready for it yet and you need to wait a little bit longer. Very, very important to stress test your budget before you make that big commitment. And the second thing that you're doing is you're building up a deposit, both for those transaction fees, but also as a deposit to put down when you become to buy the house. And now you come to the bank and you say to the bank, look at me, I've stress tested my budget. I have lived as a homeowner for the last six months a year, however long you've done it. And I've got a deposit to put down. The bank's going to love you. The bank is probably going to give you a much better interest rate because they can see that you're somebody who can manage your finances. They'll see that you're someone who will be able to cope with the repayments. But not only that, you've put a deposit down, which means the bank is taking less risk than they would if you took a full mortgage. So that's really, really a win-win situation and a great hack for somebody who wants to be a first-time homeowner. Anyway, I hope that these tips have been valuable to you and that they're going to motivate you to take the first step towards your new financial freedom. But I'm really looking forward to engaging with you and to answering your questions.