Picture the person who has stood in a shop, spotted a big yellow sale sign, and felt their hand reach for their purse before their brain could speak.
Or the one who can tell you their mortgage rate to two decimal places, but has no idea where last month’s pay actually went.
If that sounds like you, you are in good company, and no, you’re not just “bad with money”.
After more than twenty years working alongside Australians and their finances, the most useful thing I have learned is this: before any budget, it helps enormously to know yourself. We send people into adult life — into mortgages, superannuation and debt — with almost no instruction. Less than half of Australian adults can correctly answer five basic financial-literacy questions.
We named the business Yenom (money spelled backwards) because the work begins with reflection. Are you a spender or a saver? A risk-taker, or someone who still has the first dollar they ever earned? There isn’t a ‘wrong’; but knowing which one you are lets you build sensible walls where you need them. I am my own best example: I will spend whatever sits in my account, so I keep one account just for spending and tuck the rest away. I have learned to protect myself from myself.
The tool I recommend to everyone costs nothing: a spending diary. Write down everything you spend for two weeks, although a month is better, then look at it honestly. How much was need, and how much was want? How much was planned, and how much was the sale sign talking? My favourite test for anything marked down is simple: would I have paid full price for this? If the answer is no, it was never really a bargain.
This is where people expect me to tell them to give up their coffee. I won’t. A seven-dollar cup twice a day adds up to around $5,000 a year — but if that coffee is your daily dose of community and joy, keep it. I only ask that you know it is there. When you are trying to find $5,000 for a car or a home deposit, the money is usually already in your week: the takeaways, the impulse buys, the forgotten subscriptions. A diary simply shows you where it went — and lets you choose.
None of this has to be done alone, and good help need not cost a thing. There are free, judgement-free resources for anyone ready to start; and for employers who want to take their team’s financial wellbeing seriously, plain-English education can now be brought to the people who need it, where they already are.
Money is not a test you can fail. It is simply something worth understanding — and understanding is always within reach. You are not behind because you fell short; most of us were never handed the map. And it is never too late to start reading it.
Yenom is building a free money app, and we would love your help to shape it. Tell us what you would want from it at yenommoney.com/tell-us, or sign up to try the beta at yenommoney.com/beta. No sales pitch, no catch — just practical tools built around what real people actually need.
