How Ms Wealthy Started

I'm taking you right back to the beginning of how Ms Wealthy came to be... how I started investing in the stock market, and why Ms Wealthy was launched!

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I've spent the last five years learning from those brilliant minds in money, wealth, and investing. And now I'm part of a group of driven women who are changing the game and taking control. Don't know where to start. I get it, but join me and follow along. As I learn, apply and share the secrets towards more money, more investing and more freedom. My name is Simone Murcia, Huggins, and welcome to ms. Wealthy's kiss my money podcast.

Well, Hey there, gorgeous. Thank you so much for joining me on the very first episode of the kiss, my money podcast. This is a new venture for me, in terms of putting more content out there that I'm hoping will help a whole lot more of you. And it's a way that I can really get my message out there and help you in ways that I haven't been able to in the past. So I kind of wanted to spend the first episode telling you a bit of the backstory of how this came to be, how I became an investor, how money became such a focus in my life, because a lot of people have asked me and honestly, I've probably been pretty reluctant to share the story. If you're like me at all, I am a bit of an introvert and I struggle with talking about myself, but because so many people have asked and I know it will help you I'm going to share it with you.

So if you haven't already guessed, I am Australian. I live in Sydney, Australia. I am born and bred Australian, but I have lived all around the world in different places for periods of time. And I'm an avid traveler. So I do see myself as a human being that belongs to the world rather than any one country anyway. So I wanted to tell you about kind of how I started with kind of money and how I got here to this place, because it hasn't always been this way. I was never someone that loved money and have a, I never had a great relationship with money. And certainly it started very, I guess, in the, in my late teens, when I kind of started getting very, very, very deep in debt and I didn't really understand kind of living within my means. And back then, I think actually it happens a lot now as well, banks were giving out credit cards like they were candy and the credit limits on them were just insane.

And I used it and on nothing in particular, really, I had nothing to show for it, but it did mean that I ended up in a whole heap of debt and I ended up in being, it was close to $20,000. By the time I kind of reached about 20 and it wasn't until then that when it got really bad and I'd maxed out my credit card and I had flown down to Melbourne to see a girlfriend for my birthday. And I realized that I literally couldn't get through the weekend because I had no money left. And that was embarrassing to say the lace, I felt, I felt ashamed really. And that kind of started my journey on getting out of debt, which then led on to becoming an investor. So I'll totally tell you my whole that story and how I got out of debt in another episode.

But for now I wanted to kind of fast forward from that through to how I kind of started investing because becoming an investor with never something that I really had my sights set on. But what happened was once I'd got myself out of debt and it kind of only took me about 18 months, then my partner and I moved to London for about three years, we lived there for about three years. So when I was, I was close to 22 at the time and it was an incredible adventure. I loved it so much. But when we first moved there, I kind of, I, you know, I wasn't in debt anymore. And my boyfriend at the time who is now my husband and I, we were only kind of still beginning to navigate joining our finances. Right. So we'd still had things separately at that point.

And I was kind of traveling like everyone does, particularly when you live in London and really enjoying life. But it did get to the point where I saw my boyfriend, Pete, starting to invest and definitely got a bit jealous. And I also was kind of like, okay, well, I've got out of debt now. So what's the next step? Like where do I go to from here? And I just finished reading rich dad, poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki. And that book was one of definitely the most pivotal books in my life that started to change my mindset around who, okay. I cannot just keep my money in a savings account and expect to end up with a awesome bank account balance by the time I'm ready to retire and that's not going to get me there fast enough. So I started to my mind, started to open up to the concept of investing in the stock market.

And so for me, I was kind of like, okay, well, I definitely can't do it myself. I don't even know what the Dow Jones means. So my plan was to keep saving money and keep using kind of the strategies that I've learned to get out of debt to essentially just save money. And my plan was to give it to a financial planner, right. And they could invest it for me cause I thought, well, surely that's the way that's how other people do it. So that was my plan. I spent a bit of time doing that. It was, I think it was close to maybe six months. And I got to the point where I was ready to start looking at who could invest it for me, but it was a period of time where the world started to essentially crumble around us. And I remember sitting in my bedroom at the time in front of my computer and staring out into it was just honestly, we were kind of living in a bit of a concrete jungle suburb at the time, which London is a little bit of, and it was raining like pouring with rain.

And often it's often the weather there. And if it's not pouring with rain, it's drizzling with rain. And I just remember looking out the window after I had literally just spent the last day or two or even three days watching the news cycle and reading headline after headline, after headline about the economy collapsing and what we didn't know at the time. Well, what the majority of everyone in the world didn't know at the time was it was the start of the global financial crisis, the JFC. So it was the beginning of 2008 and a lot of people were losing money and they were, there were banks that were kind of really starting to struggle. And I just remember kind of sitting there going, is this whale like, is this really happening? I was never kind of tuned into the financial world or financial markets. I mean, obviously you had to be living under a rock to miss the GFC at the time in 2008, and now it still left a bit of a legacy.

I think with a lot of people about, I guess there's fear has been left in the minds of people because they think that, you know, you can lose everything, but I'll talk more about that in a later episode, but essentially I was kind of shocked and really confused about what was going on. How do we'd got here? Just confused about whether this was like reality. Unfortunately it completely was. And the next six months kind of after that became, you know, the worst crash in the last, I can't even remember, I think decade or 20 years. And so I was kind of watching the financial world crumble and just seeing these investment banks completely collapse. And these fund managers lose hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars of client money because they completely overexposed themselves. They didn't manage risk properly and essentially they just didn't do that job properly.

And it just, it dawned on me after spending months, just like always with my job permanently dropped to the ground, thinking I can't give my money to someone else. And that was kind of the epiphany for me, that changed everything. I was fortunate enough that I hadn't yet started investing. I hadn't yet given my money to anyone because when I was ready to that GFC kind of was starting to kick in and watching everything happen. And then watching the aftermath, which was the government bailing out these investment banks, the government bailing out financial services, companies and industry, basically almost the whole industry, but a few companies and just thinking, wow, it was almost rewarding, bad behavior. And I realized that some guy, some middle age to, you know, almost retired guy in a suit sitting behind the McCone desk, probably sitting in some high rise somewhere is not going to care about my money being invested more than he does about making money and the whole crash and the whole aftermath of the government bailing them out really made clear to me that why would they, why would someone else care about my money more than me because they were rewarded for essentially crippling the UCON economy and losing their client's money because they didn't do their job.

And that was really what started for me in terms of realizing that I had to do it myself and I had to go and work it out. And that was what started to me a few months of learning about the stock market, learning about how to do it myself and learning all the terminology and what to do, how to do it. And I tell you, it was, it was some of the most dull and boring content I think I've ever seen out there. And a lot of the market still is focused on really dull and boring, boring content. And, but I persisted and I pushed through and I eventually got to the point where I was ready to properly invest. And, you know, I felt so incredibly proud of myself for being an early twenties woman who worked out how to invest myself.

And it was, it wasn't so much even the act of starting to invest. It was that mental internal shift that happened with me. That was, Oh my God, like I can actually do this. And that was essentially what kicked off what I didn't know at the time for me becoming an investment coach and a money coach for women. So I had been investing for close to about 10 years now, but I've also been trading for about five. So I fell in love with investing so much that I became a stock trader and a lot of people ask me about that. And I, I would definitely do an episode further down the line about trading and the difference between trading and investing. But I will say that it definitely takes more upfront investment in terms of time, energy, and effort. So now I teach women to invest in the stock market, along with a whole host of other things.

I teach women about money, essentially, how to earn more, keep more and make more. And the predominant way is through the stock market. But I also teach in a lot of other different ways. I've been an investor in stock market and real estate and cryptocurrency and a whole heap of other things. And I also have obviously started a business. So that's a whole nother ball game in terms of bringing in money. And, you know, I guess the relationship that I have and watching the relationship that so many other women have as well when it comes to money and earning money and bringing in money in their business. So that was a bit of a fast recap on how ms wealthy came to be. Really when after I had kind of became become a trader and more and more people learned about it, and this is probably going back three, maybe four years now.

So many people started to ask me how they realized that I definitely knew a lot more about the stock market than the average person. Obviously you have to, as a trader. And I began, began being asked, especially by women, how to do it, so how to invest. And that was essentially what threw me into becoming an investment coach and starting this wealthy. So I'm also trained as a coach. And so I've essentially married those two, two things together. Really. I just see myself as a trainer and educator, I see myself as the person who can help you and guide you through it, because my role is for you to take control of your money and for you to take control of your financial future. Because that is what I believe in vehemently will set you up for financial independence and financial freedom.

You can go and give it to someone else. You can go and give it to a financial advisor or planner. And there are definitely some good ones out there who really, really care about their clients and are very, very good at what they do. But you will pay for the privilege in terms of, you know, paying them a commission and you should do because they're spending their time to invest your money. The thing is though, you'll never learn how to do it yourself. You can go and do that, but you just need to know that you're giving up your knowledge in learning how to really take control of your financial future yourself. And like I said, no one else is going to care about your money more than you do. So that's why I'm here. That's why I started ms. Wealthy. That's how I started investing.

I will definitely tell you a lot more about it. And really this podcast is here to talk about investing it's to talk about money it's to normalize money, especially for women. I think that we're in a world now where money is becoming a topic that we're talking more about. And I think that a lot of the discussion around gender pay gap has helped to start that. But one of my passions is to really focus and close the investing gap. And that's part of why I'm so driven and passionate about what I do, because yes, the gender pay gap is alive and kicking, but there's also, what's called an investing gap. Meaning the amount of men that invest compared to the amount of women that invest is significantly higher. So a lot more men invest than women, and it comes down to a lot of factors.

And I'll talk about that in an upcoming episode about why women don't tend to invest as much as men, men, and not just in terms of the amount of money, but also the number of women investing. So there's a lot to talk about and a lot to cover, but I'm really excited. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for being here. And I would love for you to send me a question. You can use the anchor app if you just download it from your phone and you can listen to this podcast and many others from it and send me a voice message. Let me know what's on your mind. Let me know the questions you want answered. Even if it's something I can't answer, hopefully I can at least point you in the right track. And there's really no topic that I don't want to cover when it comes to money, investing and wealth, everything under the sun in that world. And there's a lot to talk about, right? So send me a question I would love to hear from you, and I'd love to hear how I can help you. All right, until the next episode. Thanks for joining me. And I'll see you then.