Why budgets don’t work with Melissa Browne

In this episode I get the pleasure of interviewing one of my dear friends and guru of ‘all things finance’, Melissa Browne – to talk about her new book ‘Budgets Don’t Work, But This One Does’.

If your current budgets or thinking hasn’t been working, this gives you a whole new opportunity to rewrite the script, to roll your sleeves up, to get excited about money.

“Until we make the unconscious conscious, it will direct our life and we’ll call it fate.” Carl Jung

Melissa is an author and serial entrepreneur. She is CEO of an award-winning accounting and advisory firm, CEO of a financial planning business and Director of Business at a long-day preschool – three very different businesses, that all are pushing the boundaries in their fields, questioning what is possible and disrupting their industry, in order to create the best possible results for their communities.

It’s been a lifetime of work, running a accounting firm, mentoring, coaching writing for the Fin review and other Australian institutions, as well as renowned global news platforms around finance, forecasting, shares and everything to do with building wealth, however Melissa wouldn’t have it any other way – she just loves teaching others ‘how to do it!’.

Melissa says ‘there could be 50 different paths to get you to the life that you want to design, but there is also a whole stack of limiting beliefs and inherent ways that you should be operating’. So you know she is very much in alignment with my philosophy that we need to be the CEO of our life as well as our business and take responsibility.

In this episode we talk about:

* discovering financial awareness* why you need financial knowledge and sticking your head in the sand or an online shopping site won’t work* how to recognise limiting patters and build good financial habits. 

Step One – Budgets Don’t Work unless you Know Your ‘Money Story’

The importance of discerning between a ‘pattern’ and ‘right’ decision.

When most people think about budgets, or about designing the life they want, or setting financial goals, they often inherit values based on their parents, peers, or social beliefs. 

When you dig deep there are certain myths of what success looks like and how we truly recognise what great finance is. 

Melissa says ‘I believe that comes from the nurture part of who we are. It starts with our money stories. Often we don’t think to dig out those money stories that we grew up with, or that we’ve inherited from our parents’. 

‘We don’t understand why we’re accumulating and behaving the way that we do. Maybe we grew up with the money story that, for women it might be smart goals, a particular profession and so on, for blokes that might be around status and power and the things you need to have in your life to prove that you have made it to the top’.

This is the first part of recognising that ‘money story’.

A good start is to write down those old stories and ask yourself, what are my beliefs around money?

Without realising it so many people are quoting a shame story.

They’re quoting a story that they just did not expect to be in, especially now with COVID-19 the need to really understand, plan and budget is greater than ever.

It’s being brave enough to own it and to rewrite...