Nicolette Mashile on financial lessons she learnt from women in her life

TV presenter and author Nicolette Mashile, who is popularly known as the Financial Fitness Bunny, has shared the greatest financial lessons she's learnt from women in her life.

Engaging TshisaLIVE in a young Q&A session, the host of SABC2’s Sanlam Moola Money family game show reflected on the lessons from her mother and how she's run with the wisdom and never looked back.

Women are often in charge of how money is spent in the household What are some of the financial lessons you learnt from the women in your life?

From my mother, I learnt how to make a small amount go far and how to make sure needs are taken care of. With a very low budget she made the household run smoothly. So for me, the biggest lesson was that even though you have a small budget, you can make it go a long way.

My biggest lesson was to not let my living expenses overwhelm me because often when we budget, we budget for the fixed predictable costs that we know will come every month. So I started putting more effort into managing the non-predictable costs.

What is your ultimate personal finance tip?

You can’t spend all that you make, but at the same time you can’t reduce until you eat your fingertips. You’ve got to learn to make more, so let’s move from being a consumer-managing society to a production-managing society. You can’t eat less cake, you’ve got to bake more cake but while you’re doing that you’ve got to manage it and that’s the most important lesson.

How do you ensure you give people useful but not patronising advice about how to save or invest when times are hard and the economy is not doing well?

The most important thing is to have empathy and remember that not everyone is where you are financially — from a mindset perspective, resource perspective, and a potential perspective. It’s important to make sure that in an economy like SA’s, where there’s so much inequality from a financial perspective, you have empathy to understand that when you tell people to save and invest, it’s with good intention and it’s never to belittle or offend.

I also think story telling is magic. If you tell people your stories, they can relate to it. People can find relatability in a story that doesn’t even look like theirs. I’ve always tried to do storytelling. If you watch my videos, you can tell when I’m speaking on a subject that I’ve learnt versus speaking on a subject that I’ve experienced.

How has your experience been on the Sanlam Moola Money game show?

My experience on the Sanlam Moola Money game show is always thrilling. I enjoy people and it’s even better when people are learning when I’m around them. There are two elements to the show: There’s realising how much or how little you know about personal finance and then there’s the competitive side and for me it’s always a great opportunity to have those small moments of talking to people and understanding their sentiment around personal finance management and how they feel about it and being able to spot opportunities in terms of information gaps.

So I was quickly able to see throughout the show which areas of finance people are really struggling with and which areas we’ve done an incredible amount of teaching. For me the show is almost like a research project that gives me incredible insight.

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