Being weird with money is the smartest thing you can do, to get financial freedom.

Most of us are following the same money playbook, and it’s not working.

Around 30% of New Zealanders don't have $1,000 in savings, and over 60% couldn't cover a real emergency.

Frances Cook, financial journalist and host of Making Cents, shares exactly how embracing "weird" money habits helped her build financial freedom, and how you can do the same.

In this episode:

• Why the standard approach to money keeps so many of us stuck, and what to do instead
• The hedonic treadmill: the psychology trick that's draining your wallet
• How to figure out what actually makes you happy (it's probably cheaper than you think)
• The secondhand challenge that changed Frances's finances
• Why a cheaper daily life and big one-off experiences beats an expensive lifestyle every time
• How to stop spending on what other people want, and start spending on what YOU want

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Production and video editing by Lana Byrne

Audio engineering by Tash Chittock

Filmed by Fanaticals

Being weird saved my finances.

And being okay with being weird was the biggest thing that helped me get financial freedom.

Because here's the problem.

Normal will constantly pull you towards broke.

There is a system set up with normal, and I'm not trying to get all conspiratorial and weird here, but we just have to look at the facts of how normal usually shakes out for people.

Around 30% of us in New Zealand don't have $1,000 in savings.

Over 60% of us couldn't cover a real emergency.

And yet we're constantly being advertised debt.

We don't get taught about money at school.

Social media is full of status symbols that will not make you happy.

And to break out of that and find what actually makes you happy, you have to embrace weird a little bit.

Because what nobody tells you is that knowing what to do with money is actually often the easy part.

The tactics that get you ahead are pretty simple.

It's a small list.

It's the doing that is hard.

Because to do it, you have to go against a monkey brain that is hardwired for instant gratification and a society filled with advertising that exists specifically to pick your pockets while making you feel great about that.

And I broke out of that by being weird, saying no to things that my friends thought were obvious.

Only buying secondhand for a straight year, moving out of a big city to a smaller one, because that actually made my life better and made it financially better at the same time.

Today, we're getting into all of it.

The money psychology traps that keep you stuck and how you break out of them to live the life that you actually want and what I really did in my own life to create financial freedom.

So welcome to Making Sense.

It's the podcast for people who want financial freedom without giving up their coffee.

I'm Frances Cook, a financial journalist and fellow financial freedom seeker who makes money simple for you.

I want to help as many people as possible reach financial freedom by taking control of their money.

You can help me in that mission two really easy ways.

First, hit subscribe wherever you like to listen.

YouTube, Spotify, Apple, podcasts, or any other podcast player.

Then send this episode to a friend so we can all level up together.

Then the show grows and I can keep giving you the money info that makes a difference for your life.

Okay, back to it.

So let's start by talking about mindset, because I don't know about you, but I find it is one thing to know what I need to be doing and another thing entirely to actually do it.

It might Sound too simple, but it's one of the most important parts of your journey to financial freedom.

You need to know that financial freedom is achievable for you, and then you have to decide if you want it.

There are all sorts of different versions of financial freedom.

That's what makes this more achievable.

But whatever version that you're aiming for, you are aiming for an extraordinary life.

And it's one that's different from the normal path.

It's one that has less stress, more stability, more safety.

But if it was easy, everyone would do it.

You have to be willing to give something.

And that something, when I weighed it up, no brainer, so happy to do it, but you still have to give it.

So I want you to think about what matters to you and what you're willing to do to get there.

And it might be different from what other people do.

That's okay.

We're focused on your best life here.

Do you want the same life as everyone else?

I don't.

I want freedom.

I want independence.

I want to be able to walk away from toxic situations and be the master of my own destiny.

That's my why.

It's something that not many people will achieve, but far, far more of us could have it if we were willing to shrug off normal.

Normal is awful.

So why does it have such a hold on us?

When I focused on why I wanted financial independence and what it meant to me to know that having financial control over myself and meant that other people, they didn't have control over me, well, then my mindset meant that I didn't care, that my friends thought I was a little odd for only buying my clothes from op shops.

I didn't care when people laughed and asked if I was serious.

When I said I was moving to the cheaper and awesome city of Hamilton, and then when my mum was in TEU and a lot came up just down the road from her, I was able to move there and downsize my living costs even more.

I've got areas of my life that are smaller and cheaper than what people expect.

And they let me funnel my money and effort towards the parts of life that make a difference.

I can still spend on big experiences that make me happy if I want, and I invest a lot.

But many of the regular habits in my life are what other people would consider weird.

And I'm fine with that because I chose my weird and it let me build something bigger.

Now I'm at a point in life where the benefits of this have become kind of obvious and people often ask me for money advice, but there was a period of years where I just looked broke and weird and I had to not care about that first.

I was focused on something bigger and I knew that in time my life would be proof that it was all worth it.

And can I just say, I think that one of the most radical things you can do, and unfortunately this is slightly weird in our current society, is being nice to yourself as you do this.

In fact, maybe this whole thing is about having confidence in yourself and loving yourself a bit more as you're making changes and deciding on your own version of weird and being ready to commit to it.

It's really important to get in there in this mindset.

I just knew I needed to budget, and one of my biggest weaknesses was clothes.

I enjoyed them.

I wanted to find a way to enjoy life while staying on what was a pretty tight budget at that point.

So I decided to only buy secondhand, put up a post about it on my Instagram, and then promptly got in trouble with the Herald, where I worked at the time, for not giving them the exclusive.

Which was hilarious because I truly thought nobody would care.

But turns out people did.

So I wrote about it a few times for them, took some cute pictures of the clothes that I found, and honestly developed a serious secondhand shopping appreciation.

And it's now my go to because when you shop secondhand, you get decent quality for a fraction of the price.

And I don't feel like it's compromise at all.

It is literally the best of both worlds, and I have built up so many little frugal habits like this by just experimenting and seeing what works in my life.

And overall, my life costs just come down without the quality of life going down.

But there's always someone who will judge you, whether it's that you proudly say you found something secondhand, or if you're proudly showing off some fancy bag you spent too much on.

Either way, someone will judge you.

So pick the one that works for you.

Enjoy being weird, because someone will think you're weird whatever you do.

And then there's something else we need to remember, because you need to know that as we make these changes, as you embrace your weird, you're still inevitably going to do some dumb stuff that screws you over.

And from the beginning, I really need you to promise that rather than being mad at yourself for being a dummy.

We just need to get to grips with our monkey brain, appreciate it, and then get it out of the driver's seat.

Because there is wiring that even as you make all the good decisions for your future, the way that we work as humans will simply trip you up.

And the biggest weapon in fighting back against that is just knowing about it.

You know, we talk on this podcast about simple themes like increasing your income, decreasing your spending, and they're really simple ideas.

But we talk about it still so much because so many of us fail at it.

And we fail because it's not that easy to actually put into practice.

And this is partly because the idea of budgeting has become wedded to the idea of loss, of cutting back, of giving up, of having less.

Whereas actually it is giving you control over your life and making sure you are focused on what matters to you.

Now, advertising will try to take advantage of this feeling.

It's you've worked so hard, you deserve this.

That's a really common message in ads, when actually, no, you've worked hard.

So you deserve to keep that reward for yourself, not just unthinkingly hand it straight over to a company.

If you do this right, embrace your weird embrace.

Really think about what matters to you.

You won't lose anything that you want to keep.

You will decide what makes you happy, what gives your life meaning, and then you will stop all of the other meaningless nonsense from getting in the way and crowding that out.

You can have anything you want in life, you just can't have everything at once.

And trying to get that will doom you to failure.

When you're trying to build financial independence, start investing.

Build something real.

It's so much easier to hit those financial goals when your expenses are lower.

To start with, simplifying your life and figuring out what truly makes you happy.

The best place to start.

If you don't figure out what happiness looks like to you, nothing will ever be enough.

You will work harder and harder at jobs you may or may not enjoy, always searching for more.

If you don't stop and think about it first, you will never find that more that you're searching for.

It will be like the end of the rainbow moving away from you as fast as you move towards it.

So if your life costs less, you win twice.

You will be able to save and invest more money towards things like financial freedom goals.

You will also need less money in order to achieve financial freedom, because when your life costs less, you don't need as much money invested in order to create the income that gives you independence from others.

And it also means you just stepped off the hedonic treadmill, which is such a life hack for finding actual happiness.

Quick interruption to say.

If you're enjoying this episode, you'll love the Market Memo, my weekly newsletter where I teach you how to actually invest.

No jargon, no spreadsheets, just real talk about shares and how to make your money work for you.

It's the thing I wish I'd had when I was starting out.

You can sign up for free at Franciscook Co NZ Invest.

That's Franciscook Co NZ Invest.

But don't worry, I'll put the link in the show notes and the description of this podcast.

All right, back to it.

So I said before about how budgeting and cutting back makes you think about having a sad life.

The psychology of this is actually the opposite.

Because cutting back often gives you a happier life.

And it's because of the hedonic treadmill.

The hedonic treadmill is the way that you adapt to to whatever you consider normal so that it is no longer special.

So if you have a big expensive house, you might enjoy it a lot for the first year.

And then the excitement will fade and it will simply become your house.

It will be normal background and you will want something else exciting instead.

And the same goes for anything.

Buying lunch every day, driving a fancy car every day, wearing designer clothes every day.

The fun will wear off.

Sorry.

This will become normal background of your life.

And then you're simply stuck with a higher cost of living that adds precisely nothing to your happiness.

It's just wallpaper that you're paying for.

You end up stuck on a treadmill, always needing more for that same hit.

Worried about losing what you have, but also not actually enjoying it.

Not fun.

Look around you right now.

Everything you own used to be money.

And that money used to be hours of your life that you exchanged at your workplace in order to get the money.

Do you remember buying all of that furniture?

How happy does it make you now?

How long did the happiness last if you replace it with something bigger, brighter, fancier?

How long do you think that next hit of consumer happiness will last?

And this is where embracing being weird works so well.

Because I prefer to cheat the system by having a day to day life that's frugal.

And then I have big blowout expenses like traveling to some fabulous destination I've always wanted to see or going to a stupid expensive concert that I can only afford because the rest of my life is simple.

And why is that tuned system Because I've just stepped off the hedonic treadmill.

You have a day to day life that is simpler because whatever your normal is will just be normal to you.

It can be an expensive normal or a cheap normal and then big one off.

Expenses will surprise and delight you because your brain hasn't had time to turn it into normal yet.

But they're not fully hardwired into your budget.

Sending you broken without even making you happy.

A trip that you look forward to for six months and then enjoy so much while you're there is probably cheaper than living in a house that you can't afford and you don't even use half the rooms.

You can pull back on one offs when you need to or do them in a smarter way.

Organize fun life experiences that don't actually cost that much.

But it's really hard to pull back on a high mortgage payment going out every month.

And you will get used to that housing experience.

So you're getting less from that hard coded in cost.

And there is really no escaping how much we can turn expensive luxury experiences into normal.

I'm sorry but literally running hot water.

You get it every morning.

Kings didn't have that 150 years ago.

Almost all of human history.

It's truly an insane luxury that we take for granted every day.

And there will be something in your life right now that someone else would kill for that you take for granted every day.

That's the hedonic treadmill for you.

It's hardwired into us and we have to consciously pull it under control.

And I mean look, there's a reason that we're wired this way.

It's not all the fault of ads.

Think about it this way.

If prehistoric man chewed on a mammoth leg, sat back, felt happy with himself, never wanting for more, what would have happened?

Eventually he would have been someone else's lunch.

Instead he wanted fire.

He found caves to shelter in.

People eventually built farms, discovered electricity.

We've developed to always want more and to be slightly dissatisfied with life because it pushed us to greater heights as a society.

Which awesome.

But as individuals in the modern world with plenty of more around us, it can ruin us.

We will always want more.

I want you to know that.

Deepen your bones so that you can take that power back and stop reaching for something you'll never have.

We have to understand the hedonic treadmill and take control of it.

So I think this idea of being good with money is often actually about working out what you want from life.

Most of us can have some of what we want.

Very few of us can have all of what we want.

And if that's the case, we need to decide what what we want out of life and then decide what we're willing to give to get that.

Everything starts with the goal.

That's what will motivate you to give up what you need to give up in order to get the things you actually want.

And I mentioned the hedonic treadmill because interestingly, it can help you create a less expensive life on your own terms.

The treadmill works both ways.

Whatever you have soon becomes normal.

So a big house and expensive car will soon feel normal and boring to you.

But a smaller house and riding a bike will also soon be normal and not impact your day to day happiness at all.

As long as your basic needs are met.

A more expensive lifestyle does nothing.

This is exactly why I use the hack of a cheaper daily life with bigger experiences sprinkled through it.

Science baby.

I'm using psychology to hack my life and it is absolutely working.

When you throw the hedonic treadmill into reverse, you see that losing things temporarily will make you sad.

Temporarily.

But then you adapt and go back to your baseline level of happiness.

You will soon adapt to living in a smaller house.

You will learn where the best thrift shops are but good secondhand threads.

And you will then be able to save and invest for more because your day to day costs are lower.

Now I'm not suggesting that money won't make you happier.

The whole reason we're doing this is because sorting out your money can give you options in life that you wouldn't otherwise have.

It's just that having more money won't automatically make you happier.

It's all about how you use the money and what it contributes to your life.

That's why it's important that you stay conscious of what you're doing and why.

So understanding the hedonic treadmill is key because the researchers who've looked into it now know exactly what we actually can buy to create happiness one off experiences so that you don't have time to treat them as normal.

Buying back time, such as hiring a cleaner because you don't enjoy cleaning, who does?

Giving to others.

All of these are ways to spend money that often cause a lasting boost to happiness.

Although it still matters how and why you do these things.

But buying more stuff is what is proven to definitely not increase your happiness.

So there you go.

You can keep cheating the system and hacking your brain once you understand this concept.

When you take part of the savings from your smaller life.

And you spend them on going to Paris for three weeks, eating pastries and drinking wine and taking in the architecture.

There's not enough time for the joy to wear off.

Unlike the Parisians who live there, you'll be in a state of wonder and savoring every moment.

And then you come home to your enjoyable, normal, cheap life to continue saving and investing, building something, always with a little bit of savings trickling into your fun account for your next big blowout.

This is never about depriving yourself.

I actually feel like I live a more luxe life now compared to before I started my money journey.

Tricking the hedonic treadmill means you can save money without giving up the things that are important to you.

This is why I say be weird.

But really what I mean is have the confidence to do what matters to you instead of what matters to other people.

Because dumb things sneak into our spending all the time.

And a big reason for that is because we're surrounded by people making different choices from us.

That's not going to change.

Our wiring, which did well for thousands of years to save us from saber toothed tigers, can really hurt us when it comes to modern living.

Us mammals aren't born with terrific survival skills.

Instead, we're social animals who learn to do by watching others.

When we see other people do something that they enjoy, we're wired to think that we will also enjoy that thing and to want it.

That's why you might find yourself craving travel to exotic locations and then find it an empty, homesick experience when you get there.

I mean, look, Instagram influencers have carved entire careers out of this.

It's instinctive.

But the good thing is, once you know it's happening, it's easier to control, save up and travel if that's what you want.

But just check in with yourself first.

Is it what you want?

Not just what you've seen others do?

Maybe test the waters first by doing a cheaper version and seeing how you feel.

It doesn't even have to be things or people.

This craving for what other people have can also mean wanting the respect or attention they're given.

This can be another factor that keeps people in jobs that they actually hate.

They can't give up the respect it affords them from people who aren't having to slog through that job every day.

Or even just the respect they hope they'll get.

Just like other people have before them if they stick with it long enough.

Now, this is called extrinsic motivation.

You're motivated by what others think and never mind how it makes you feel internally.

The problem is that the more you're motivated by extrinsic factors, that's factors outside of yourself like other people's respect or status, the more likely you are to be depressed.

Playing an instrument for the joy of it or the joy of becoming better will make you happy.

Forcing yourself to do it because ads have told you it will bring happiness or your friends always seem to admire musicians is a recipe for disaster.

I'm not kidding.

It is shown to trigger depression.

Doing something for external factors like this because frankly, it also often does not work.

And understanding this, being ready to be clear on what does and doesn't make you happy is an amazing budgeting tool.

Helps you cull what you don't care about and keep what you do.

Money is nothing but a tool to make our lives happier.

And the last thing I want is for you to have a killer budget.

Miles of investments, the healthiest emergency fund you've ever seen, and none of the creature comforts that actually make your life sparkle.

You can exchange a life of mindless consumerism for a life of mindless frugality really easily.

That's not what we're trying to do here.

We're trying to build a happy, secure life.

We just happen to be using money to do it.

Look, I buy a stupid amount of fancy cheese.

I discovered one recently that has truffle oil rippled through it.

You would not believe how much of that cheese I eat.

Life changingly good.

I'm not giving up dumb fancy cheese.

It is heavenly.

But at one point in my life I would happily walk to work for an hour each way, listening to my favorite podcasts and not pay for petrol.

I have kids now, so I don't have quite as much time anymore.

But at that point I had more time than money, so it worked out.

And I'm still the queen of secondhand clothes.

Secondhand anything.

The circular economy.

Such a life hack for getting better quality things at a better price.

It's mostly about knowing yourself.

What do you need?

What makes you happy?

What brings value to your life and what doesn't?

Whatever version of financial freedom you're chasing, let's be honest, it's pretty different from the way most people live their lives.

But then how do you most people live their lives?

Normal is spending hours in traffic, going to work at a job that pays for that car in the petrol, which pays for the fancy work clothes which you need to work there, which also pays for the big house that you never get to spend time in because you're always at work.

Normal is not having $1,000 in savings to cover even a small bad event.

The stats vary, but around 30% of New Zealanders don't have $1,000 in savings and over 60% don't have $10,000 on hand for a big emergency like losing the job that has you sitting in all of that traffic.

Normal sucks.

Changing to embrace your weird, Live life on your terms and build something real.

There are hard moments in that, sure, but it doesn't suck.

Not for one moment.

See if you can find other ways to do the things that you're currently paying for.

Do you need that gym membership or can you cancel it and do workouts using YouTube or go for a run outside?

Could you start meeting friends at each other's houses?

Take turns hosting potluck dinners?

Could you sell your car and take public transport or walk places instead?

Look at everything in your life.

How can you do it for free?

Or at least cheaper?

Doesn't have to be forever.

You can do sprints, cutting back to bare minimum for a week to see what you miss.

If you can live really frugally for even a year or two, you'll set yourself up with the fitness to run a money marathon, even if you run it at a slower pace.

Some things you won't want to bring back into your life.

Great, now your life is cheaper.

Some things you will want to bring back because you've worked out their things that you actually truly enjoy.

And you'll now be able to afford those things that you actually want because you've cut the spend, cut the debt, and built up your nest egg.

I did this hardcore for only a couple of years and it entirely set me up for the financial freedom that I have now.

I couldn't be here without it.

Some of it I kept, some of it I haven't.

As I've grown my financial freedom, I've had the ability to add some things back in that cost more but make life easier.

Like a bigger car now that I have a family.

But I still live in a way cheaper area and I do workouts at home from YouTube and I don't care and my life is so good for that.

I built a life that is probably weird to some people and it's totally on my terms and it gave me financial freedom.

Take the time to find your weird and use it to build something.

Anyway, that's my rambling thoughts for today.

If they helped you, send this episode to a friend so we can all level up with money together.

Until next time.

Have a great day.

This podcast can only give you general information about how things work in most situations.

It's not individual financial advice.

If you're after that, a financial advisor is always the best bet.