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Episode 003 · money

Account-ability

Money basics, compound interest, saving versus investing, first payslips, credit scores, buy now pay later — the financial education no one put on the timetable. Part one of two.

In this episode

No one sits a girl down and explains her first payslip. They just hand it to her — tax gone, super gone, PAYG, a tax file number to go and find — and leave her to work out what any of it meant. Nobody came to school to explain it. It wasn't in the maths curriculum either. That gap is the whole episode.

Maya Farah and Emily Barker are the co-founders of Finverity, a Perth financial education company that has been sitting in front of Year 7 to 12 students having the honest money conversations most young women never get. They sit with Maddie to cover the three things everything else rests on — inflation, debasement and compound interest, explained with replica Mona Lisas and a melting ice cube — and then the part that actually lands: you can start investing with fifty cents. Ten dollars a week from age fifteen is around $700,000 by sixty. Saved instead of invested, it's about $45,000.

Plus why budgeting is backwards-looking and what to do instead, the fine print hiding in your savings account, how buy now pay later at fifteen turns up again in your mortgage at thirty, and how to ask a friend for money back without losing the friend.

Chapters

The girls asked

What is the stock market and how is it different to gambling?
I lent my friend money and she hasn't paid me back. How do I ask for it without ruining the friendship?

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