Five minutes with Victoria Vivente
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Financial expert Victoria Vivente knows a thing or two about healing your relationship with your money (and yourself).
Currently working as a vulnerability specialist in banking, she’s the creator of the bad.bitch.money blog, works to boost financial literacy and to break down the stigma and shame that surrounds being ‘bad’ with money. Her new book, Know Your Worth, does just that and is out now from Affirm Press.
A lot of us think about ‘being good with money’ as being restrained and sticking to a budget, but your holistic approach to money (ie looking at your approach to relationships and friends, admin, your wardrobe, your work) seems very fresh. How did you come to it?
As a financial counsellor and coach, I would work with people from all walks of life. While the financial challenges were all different, the pattern that became clear was the money situation was almost always a symptom of a bigger life concern.
Our money is never an isolated issue, it affects what else is happening in our lives, and what’s happening in our lives affects our money. Unless we talk about all those life factors at the same time, changes we are trying to make to habits or money management will be hard to maintain, because we’re trying to approach it from a logical, almost mathematical style, instead of a behavioural, holistic style. Trying to ‘treat’ money as an isolated problem doesn’t work, because it is just one part of our lives.
There are lots of varied reflections and scenarios in the book — how important is it for people coming to grips with their own money relationship to see what happens for others?
It was really important to me to have as many case studies and first-person stories from clients as possible for two reasons. Firstly, it can feel very isolating when we have issues with money. It’s very easy to believe that we are the only person struggling with our relationship to it, or that everyone around us seems to have things far more ‘sorted out’ than we do. I wanted to show people just how many other people are still in the ‘messy middle’ of working on their money, rather than just highlighting success stories. It’s easier to put ourselves in the shoes of others who have made progress than it is to try and put ourselves in the shoes of success if it feels out of reach for us.
The second reason was that if we are a person who has had a good relationship with money, it can be confusing or frustrating when people around us seem to make financial or spending decisions that make no sense. The different stories help highlight the factors that may have impacted those people, and why often there is much more to the story under the surface of what can seem like deliberate self-sabotaging.
The ‘treat fund’ — definitely what we like to hear about when talking money. Please, tell us more!
We love the treat fund! It’s important in a healthy relationship to money that we actually give ourselves money to spend. This can feel counter-intuitive, if we’re trying hard to save or pay down debt. However, if we don’t give ourselves enough money to spend without guilt, we end up either blowing our progress on a big spend, or letting non-essentials slip into our daily transactions which affects not only our financial progress, but our confidence progress too. If we allow ourselves money to spend, especially if we can make it an amount that feels generous, what tends to happen is it removes the deprivation from our mind… and we often end up spending less than we were spending when we didn’t have it in the first place.
We love the idea of talking straight with mates about money — how do your people respond when you ask whether it’s a ‘boujee or budget’ night out?
While it can be a bit uncomfortable at first, once we start asking ‘how are we going budget-wise, do we feel like staying in, or going out?’, it becomes easier for everyone to start being open about how our money is going when it comes to making plans. This is a great question if we’re trying to work our way up to being honest about what we can afford, as it makes it more discussion based.
It can be downright scary to say that we can’t afford (or don’t want to prioritise) particular things that our friends invite us to. What people tell me is that when they do feel confident enough to be the person in their friend group that starts being vulnerable in this way, it opens the door for other people to do the same, and everyone wins.
Which links with: why do we find it so hard to talk about money? Is it Australian? Is it generational? Is it changing?
In Australia, financial literacy is not something built into the school curriculum. Unless we grow up with influences and resources that give us these skills elsewhere in our lives, we get to young adulthood and all of a sudden it seems like everyone around us already knows what to do, and we’re just muddling through trying to do our best, not realising that there are actually many people around us doing the same. Money is still a very taboo topic, even between close friends and couples!
When you layer this with other factors such as our experience with money growing up and the way adults around us spoke about and spent money around us, our culture, our early relationships, whether we worked at a young age, our early money mistakes, to name a few, it’s no wonder it’s hard to talk about money.
While it’s changing in some ways, for example, there is a huge range of resources to suit every style of learning now with social media and the internet, it is still challenging to find the right resources to learn the skills because there’s so much available – finding the right place to start is often the hardest part.
Apart from reading your excellent book or following you on social media, what are the top three / first things people should do to get their relationship with money in order?
- If you have unmanageable debt and/or are struggling to manage your daily living expenses, the best thing you can do is speak to a free and confidential financial counsellor, who can talk through all your options with you in a completely non-judgemental way. You can call the National Debt Helpline on 1800 007 007, or go to ndh.org.au.
- Start slowly. Nothing will burn out your motivation and confidence faster than trying to overhaul all your spending, saving, and management strategies at once. Start with something that actually excites you, like deciding what your treat fund is going to be called (make it something good), and how much you’ll be giving yourself. Maybe it will be that you want to pay down a small debt you’ve had for years and you’ve finally had enough. Whatever it is, try and focus not on doing what you think is the ‘best’ thing to do, but rather on something that you’ll actually enjoy implementing first.
- Go easy on yourself. Having a good relationship with money is about learning, not solving. You didn’t get to where you are now in your money journey overnight, you are reflecting and improving on years of internal thoughts and behaviours. It’s going to take time, and it probably won’t happen in a straight line, and that’s okay.
What do you like to read/listen to/watch when you’re not looking at money? Any recommendations for our readers?
I love to read, and I also listen to a lot of audiobooks while I’m doing life admin such as cleaning the house, walking to the post office, or going to work. A couple of recent favourites are What You Are Looking For Is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama and A Wreck of Seabirds by Karleah Olsen.
Two non-fiction books I always recommend for people on their money journey are Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman and Die With Zero by Bill Perkins. Both talk more about life than money, and they provide great context for not forgetting to live our lives while we’re improving our relationship with money.
