My story and the journey that’s led to creating ‘She’s Worth It’.
PLEASE NOTE: This is not financial advice. The information in this blog post is for educational purposes only.
In early 2020, I returned to New Zealand with just my child and a suitcase. I had no money and no real plan except that I was going to be staying with my parents until I could get ‘back on my feet’.
When I had first left my marriage, my only goal at that time had been for both of us to get out safely. I couldn’t have imagined how hard it was going to be to rebuild our lives, nor could I have planned anything – I just didn’t have the mental capacity to do anything except to go through the motions.
But I had a child that needed me to be strong, that needed stability and that was what I focused on initially while I tried to figure out what I was going to do.
One day, probably in the first week that we’d come back, I remember going through my mum’s spare change jar trying to put just enough money together to buy myself a coffee. Everyone else was at work and I thought it would do us good to get out of the house, get some fresh air and do something normal like having a coffee in a café.
When I went to order my drink however, I was dismayed to discover that I was 10 cents short. As I apologised to the barista, I was overcome with such a deep sense of shame that it brought tears to my eyes. Thankfully, a nice man stepped in and stumped me the 10 cents, and I allowed myself to accept his kind gesture even though I felt so embarrassed.
Sitting in the café, sipping my coffee, smiling at my toddler, and trying to pretend on the outside that everything was okay, I knew that I was going to have work out a way to improve our situation.
I couldn’t think straight. My confidence was at an all-time low, and my self-esteem was nowhere to be seen. I had found some free counselling sessions at a local church, and my counsellor advised me that I had all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
It was such a lonely experience. No one around me seemed to understand what I’d been through and was still going through.
The financial reality for New Zealand’s women
Here in New Zealand, when it comes to money, us women already face many disadvantages. According to research from Te Ara Ahunga Ora Retirement Commission:
On average women’s financial literacy is significantly lower than that of men
Women experience pay inequity in the labour market and tend to be the family members who take time out of the workforce to care for children or older relatives, meaning they retirement with less
Financial capability messaging is not typically designed for women
Women bore the brunt of the COVID-19 crisis with higher rates of job loss than men
And the big one… women are disproportionally impacted financially by divorce and domestic violence.
The thing that I need to emphasise regarding this final point is the additional psychological trauma that women have to deal with, all the while trying grapple with financial concerns when we’re already coming from a disadvantaged starting point.
When you break it down like that, it’s easy to see why so many of us are struggling.
Getting curious about the solutions
Nine months after landing in New Zealand, my daughter and I were renting a small one-bedroom place. It felt good, it felt safe, it felt like progress.
I was still on the benefit. It was just enough to cover rent, utilities, and food. I didn’t have a car at first (I was later able to borrow one from my sister) and so we walked everywhere. In five months’ time, my child was going to be three and I was going to be expected to find at least a part-time job.
I’d always been terrible with money. I’d either spend my entire paycheck or dip into whatever meagre savings I’d managed to put aside until it was gone. I left money management and control with my ex-husband because I believed that I was just hopeless with it.
I honestly thought that people were rich because they earned more money, their family was rich or that they were just good at saving. The truth is, I’d never been taught how to manage money, and that lack of knowledge was my biggest problem.
I had started Googling how to budget. With my benefit income from WINZ, I was able to allocate money to rent, to food, to the utilities to ensure I wasn’t coming up short. This was a good first step and certainly the first time that I’d ever budgeted in my life.
I must have been doing enough budgeting information searches online for Facebook to dish up an ad from an organisation called ‘Keep the Change’. It was promoting a webinar entitled “How to save $10,000 in a year” and it cost around $60 to attend.
Now, $60 was a huge amount of money for me – it was around my weekly food budget at the time – but I had managed to put aside a little bit of money when I was staying at my parents’ and intuitively, this felt like a good thing to invest in.
It was the catalyst in my journey to financial independence.
I calculated my net worth – that is all the assets I had minus all the debt.
· Student loan was $35k.
· I owed WINZ money for the rental deposit that I’d have to start paying back once I was working.
· Plus the money I owed my parents for the flights I’d bought to get back home to New Zealand.
It was a depressing negative $39,000. That felt like a big hole to dig myself out of. It was scary but it also motivated me to take action.
No one was coming to save me. I didn’t want to be the broke, single mum stereotype. I was still trying to forge ahead with life while trying to heal from PTSD.
I decided to implement a financial plan while I was still on the benefit, give myself that five months to learn to manage my money, take care of my mental health, and put myself in a good position to find a job once my child turned three.
Hitting $0
In July of 2023, I hit a huge personal milestone in my financial recovery. My personal net worth crossed the $0 mark. I shared this achievement with the Keep the Change Facebook community and I was blown away by the comments. Luke then shared my post anonymously on his public social media channels and the comments sections also blew up.
This recognition set in motion an idea that perhaps my struggle would help inspire and guide other women who are in a similar situation. It’s an idea that unfortunately I sat on for nine months until now.
Fast forward to today… four years later my net worth is a positive $30,000. I have a three-month emergency fund, I have investments in shares and Kiwisaver, and so does my child. Probably best of all, I’ll be completely debt-free this year.
My journey to financial independence hasn’t been as fast as some other people that you see on the internet. I’m a single mum, I had a big amount of debt to clear, and I was doing it all while recovering from trauma. I didn’t have it in me to be side-hustling and grinding every day of the week.
I’ve started ‘She’s Worth It’ because I want it to be the kind of resource that I would have loved to have come across when I was just starting out on my path of healing and toward financial independence.
I know what it’s like to want better for your situation while also dealing with the mental health issues that come from divorce, financial abuse, and domestic violence.
When I began this journey with money, ultimately what I was searching for was to regain a sense of control, stability and independence. I didn’t realise just how transformative it can be to every aspect of your life.
Although the amount of money that we have in the bank doesn’t inherently reflect our worth, mastering money and deciding that you deserve a better life can hugely impact how much you value yourself. At the start, you may feel broken, discarded, unloved, but you are still ‘worth’ so much. You are worth investing the time and energy it takes to increase your learning.
I have no regrets now in going through the things that I’ve experienced because if through starting ‘She’s Worth It’ I can help just one other woman to regain her financial independence in the way that I have, everything would have been worth it.
Am I rich? No, not yet. Am I fully healed? Of course not (I believe that our healing and learning’s never done) but I have lessons I can share and lessons I’m yet to learn, that may be helpful and applicable to another woman’s life.
If you think that ‘She’s Worth It’ might be a useful resource for you, consider signing up to the newsletter – I’m hoping that over time it will just keep getting bigger and better until we’ve created a community of women that supports each other through the most difficult times in our life, and raises each other up. I want to provide free financial education resources for any women who need it.
If there are any particular issues that you’re struggling with in your journey, please send me a message and I’ll try to help or address it on this platform. Likewise, if you have any tips or hints for the ‘She’s Worth It’ community contact me so I can share them.
Thank you for being here.
