No Experience Needed!

[00:00:41] Hello and welcome to your In Good Company, a podcast for like minded people who want to learn to make smart investment decisions. Our aim is to break down the world of finance and investing so we can all feel more comfortable and confident to join the conversation, educate ourselves and make more informed and empowering financial decisions. [00:01:00][18.9]

Speaker 2: [00:01:01] We have two friends who have recently started our investment journeys. We are not experts, but after gaining a little bit of experience, we realized that investing really can be for anyone. [00:01:09][8.4]

Speaker 1: [00:01:10] If we can do it, you can do it the truth. [00:01:13][2.5]

Speaker 2: [00:01:13] And after speaking with friends, we know that there is demand out there for people like yourself to learn more about investing way along with an amazing range of experts, are going to help kickstart your investment journey. I'm Maddy and I'm Sophie and you're in a good company. [00:01:26][12.7]

Maddy Guest: [00:01:28] Before we start today's episode, we would like to acknowledge and pay respects to the wonderful people of the Kulin nation who are the traditional owners of this land. We pay our deepest respect to the elders past and present and to the next generation who we hope to create a different future for. [00:01:43][14.8]

Maddy Guest: [00:01:43] So Maddy when we've been speaking to a lot of our friends recently, a lot of things have been popping up around investing mainly, you know, their fears of why they're not putting their money and into investing and what they really want to learn. And I think there are a lot of, you know, common concerns and topics that have been brought up. [00:01:59][15.9]

Sophie Dicker: [00:01:59] Yeah, I completely agree. Investing can seem really intimidating. And so we've at some of our friends who haven't started investing yet to really get an idea about why they haven't jumped into the markets before and find out some of the things that they most want to learn about. [00:02:13][13.7]

[00:02:16] I want to learn about how to keep the best brokerage. My biggest fear is that I won't invest in companies that I'm morally and ethically aligned to. My biggest fear about investing is losing the money I worked so hard to save. I think I have two big fears investing. The first is because I have no background in finance and I have a limited amount of savings. Then any money that I potentially lose through poor investments is significant at this point in my life. I haven't invested before because I thought I needed a lot of savings to start in terms of finance. The things I'd really love to learn about would be spreading your risk and investing. I feel like we hear a lot thrown about, about giving up your risk between shares, property and, say, term deposits. But I don't actually have an understanding of how to go about doing that. So I would love to learn what a good investment looks like, where to find one and what all the numbers mean around, you know, what they're worth and how much the return itself would be having invested before, because I've got no idea how or where to do it. My biggest fear about investing is that I will lose money. Basically, I want to learn more about dividend reinvestment plans and how they work. I haven't invested before because there's too much I don't know about the investment world and I don't want to risk losing my money. I want to learn how to start my own investment portfolio with the limited funds I have. My biggest fear about investing is losing money that I can't afford. I haven't invested before because I just don't know how to. [00:03:46][90.2]

Maddy Guest: [00:03:49] I can definitely relate to some of these. One of our friends was talking about dividend reinvestment and I actually have no idea how to do that. So I can't wait to cover that in an episode. [00:03:56][7.8]

Sophie Dicker: [00:03:57] Yeah, I too, actually, I'm looking forward to that episode. I think all of these thoughts are super valid and definitely very common. So hopefully we can cover these over the series and really start to answer some of those questions. [00:04:09][11.5]

Sophie Dicker: [00:04:10] So I think this leads us perfectly into what these podcast series is going to be about and what people should expect when they're listening. So can you give us a little bit of a rundown of what's to come? [00:04:21][11.0]

Maddy Guest: [00:04:22] I certainly can say for you, [00:04:23][1.8]

Sophie Dicker: [00:04:26] we always formal let's have like you're interviewing me so and [00:04:31][5.4]

Maddy Guest: [00:04:32] so throughout this series, we are going to be jumping into our own investment stories and really digesting some of the lessons that we took away from starting out ourselves. So if you are thinking about purchasing your first stock or getting into the stock market any time soon, then hopefully there is a way, some really useful conversations for you to sort of take on board by then. Going to be speaking with a newbie investor who is going to talk to us all about her savings habits and really talk us through. She's ready to really jump into financial markets and get investing, and this is going to be super exciting because we are going to follow this community member all the way through. We're going to touch base with her later on in a series to see how she's going, what she's learned, what challenges she's sort of faced in, any outstanding questions she still has. So we'll really be able to go on the journey with Chloe there. Then we'll jump in to talking with a whole range of experts to really get some education about where and how to actually get started. [00:05:31][59.0]

Sophie Dicker: [00:05:33] Yeah, then I think after that, after we've set everyone up with the basics and you delve into the basics ourselves a little more, we're going to go into some broader topics that we think might be of interest to you, that definitely of interest to us, such as understanding maybe the psychological side of investing, how to invest in sustainable companies and broadening our understanding of equity markets in general. And to be honest, as the episodes go along, we'll be listening to you and getting episodes out there about things that you know, you want to learn more about and what we want to learn more about, which I think is one of the best things about podcasts is the current and up to dating can be malleable to what people want. [00:06:07][34.4]

Maddy Guest: [00:06:08] Podcast of the people are. Did I steal that from the copyright? No, we're not happy with podcasting [00:06:17][9.4]

Maddy Guest: [00:06:20] throughout all of the topics. We're going to be simplifying all the jargon terms. We do not want to be talking anything complicated. So we're going to be speaking in a really plain, understandable language if we're going to be digesting current news stories or market trends, things that are going on in the world at the moment and really trying to give you a really well rounded picture of investing [00:06:40][20.0]

Sophie Dicker: [00:06:40] so that this is your second interview style question for the day. Why are we here? What are we wanting to change? In essence, what's this platform going to be used for? [00:06:49][8.8]

Maddy Guest: [00:06:50] Great question. So if you think time. Yeah. So, look, we are really here because when we started out investing, we felt like we didn't really have many people to turn to ask silly questions and sort of, I guess, discuss our progress as we went along. And we really want to create a community where people and I guess families in particular because I think that, you know, families, in particular, are less likely to talk about money and to talk about investing. So we really want to create that community. And I guess that dialog to really start is conversation among more about friends. We found sort of this lack of conversation and lack of, I guess, you know, maybe knowledge about investing, kind of frustrating because from our experience, investing has been so empowering and it's really exciting, [00:07:38][48.5]

Sophie Dicker: [00:07:39] like so exciting. [00:07:40][0.6]

Sophie Dicker: [00:07:40] You know, you put a bit of money in the stock market and it goes up and it's like, oh, my gosh. Like, you know, it's it's really awesome. So, you know, we have found this whole experience of sort of getting into the stock market and starting investing to be really exciting and empowering. So I guess we want to help others, too, to get involved as well. [00:08:00][19.5]

Maddy Guest: [00:08:00] Yeah, I think as well, when we looked into the facts a little bit after a bit of frustration about the fact that we didn't have a lot of people to speak with about money, was that there really is a gender investment gap. This I mean, there's a lot of gender gaps that exist in society still today, but the gender investment gap is one that's hardly spoken about. I mean, it may be a bit more nowadays and it is coming through a lot more. But only 10 percent of all active online investors in Australia are women. And considering we have to worry about other gaps like the pay gap, then we really should be putting more focus on growing our wealth through other avenues. [00:08:36][35.8]

Sophie Dicker: [00:08:37] I think something that's really important here is like a lot of people aren't motivated by money. Like, you know, for us, we work in the industry. We hear that. And that sort of might be enough for us to think, OK, I want to I want to make that better. So I'm going to actively involved myself to help improve that. And so, you know, I want to be one of those eight percent. But for the people who aren't motivated by money, you know, I think you have to really sort of flip it and think about things a little bit differently. You know, if you have a cause you're really passionate about, investing can help to grow your wealth so that in the future, you know, you can donate more money to that cause, you know, by financially empowering yourself, you can do more with your money. And I think maybe that's another way to think about it and sort of motivate yourself to really take this plunge. [00:09:20][43.3]

Maddy Guest: [00:09:21] Yeah. And even on that, you can invest in companies that are doing, for example, something good for the planet. You're giving them money to try and grow their business. But yeah, I guess we've landed on a podcast because it's one of the best ways to start a dialog. Conversation is so many times that I've gone home to my housemates after my walk home from work being like, oh, I just listen to like, what do you think of it so true? It happens all the time. So hopefully we can start a little bit of dialog between you and your friends, you and your family, whoever you want to speak to miss you, that you can speak to us here. [00:09:48][27.3]

Sophie Dicker: [00:09:48] Yes, please, Victor. Right? Yeah. Yeah. I feel like I'm constantly forwarding, you know, my friends and my housemates, my family, this podcast being like, listen to this so we can Debrett. It's just such a great way to sort of start a conversation and be able to continue topics that you care about if you're interested in with your friends. So, yeah, love, love that. And hope we can recreate that for you and your family and friends. We are going to take a quick break for our sponsors, but we will be right back to share all of the details about how we first started investing, what we actually bought, and our biggest takeaways from the experience. [00:10:24][35.4]

Maddy Guest: [00:10:25] So I guess I went a little bit more about you. And I think a great place to start with that for a podcast like this is to talk about your investment journey and how it's been so far, some of the lessons you could take away, some of your mistakes. [00:10:36][11.0]

Sophie Dicker: [00:10:37] Yes. So my investment journey began in sort of probably the last year of my uni degree. My mom gave me the book, The Barefoot Investor, which is such a classic. But I remember writing the section on compound interest, which we'll delve into in future episodes. So if that means nothing to you, do not stress. But I just remember writing this section and being like, oh my gosh, I need to start investing. And I needed to have probably done it yesterday. But that's OK. Today is fun. Today is good enough, is good enough. So and you know, even for someone who had just spent four years studying finance, you know, it still seemed pretty intimidating because I think it's a classic case of, you know, you learn all the theory, but you don't learn how it really applies to you and how you can do more of yourself. You do [00:11:24][47.3]

Maddy Guest: [00:11:25] math at school, but they don't teach you how to do tax returns. [00:11:27][2.0]

Sophie Dicker: [00:11:27] Exactly right. Same thing with a finance degree anyway. So I actually looked into getting someone to manage my money for me because, you know, I just didn't know what to do. I didn't want to do it by myself. [00:11:37][10.5]

Maddy Guest: [00:11:38] And that's an expensive option. [00:11:39][1.3]

Maddy Guest: [00:11:39] It really is. You you have to pay fees if you want someone to manage your money for you anyway. Fortunately, my younger brother sort of popped up at this point and he probably had a little bit more confidence. And I didn't sort of just said, now we'll just do our own research and, you know, we can do it on our own. So I followed along and I guess the rest was history, but we invested for the first time, probably not at the best time in hindsight, but it was about two weeks before the stock market crashed due to Corbitt. Oh, wow. So basically, if that means nothing to the stock market had been going up, the prices of sort of general stocks have been going up for a very long time. I think it was maybe even decades [00:12:23][43.4]

Sophie Dicker: [00:12:24] since the pretty much the GFC. Yes. [00:12:25][1.6]

Maddy Guest: [00:12:26] And in 2009. So prices in general, you know, really high. And we sort of investing for the first time at that peak. And then when covid hit and the whole world went crazy and, you know, we didn't know if companies were going to be going bankrupt. People were having to work from home. Companies were closing all over the place. Everyone sort of rushed to pull their money out of the stock market because, you know, you don't want to be invested in the company that's going to go bankrupt. There was so much uncertainty and it wasn't something that we had ever experienced before. So basically, the stock market went down really quickly just after I'd put money in for the first time. [00:13:02][35.9]

Sophie Dicker: [00:13:02] But you didn't actually lose any money, right? Because you didn't sell anything you've held onto them. [00:13:07][5.0]

Maddy Guest: [00:13:08] Exactly right. So I guess a great lesson to learn is that you only actually lose money if you sell out of the stock and you realize those losses. So what both my brother and I did was we held onto those stocks and eventually they did come back up pretty quickly, actually, which was awesome. And, you know, we stuck to our strategy, which was investing at pretty regular intervals and managed to sort of put more money in or grit our teeth when, you know, things are a bit scary. But we managed to continue to put more money in as the stock market gradually came back up, which was great. [00:13:40][32.3]

Sophie Dicker: [00:13:41] So even though you had a bit of a blimp with covid overall up now. [00:13:45][3.9]

Maddy Guest: [00:13:45] Yeah, so we are. And I think it really did talk to sort of the fact that we kept going with our plan, which was to invest sort of pretty consistently over the next few months. And, you know, not everything I think from memory is up from last time I looked. But, you know, overall, we've made money in the stock market, which is a net positive. Yeah, net positive, which is awesome. So what about you? Well, how did you get into the stock market? [00:14:09][23.3]

Sophie Dicker: [00:14:09] Well, I guess my store did start a couple of years ago, mainly because my partner pushed me into investing. Humanist friends had been doing it for a couple of years and he just obviously had raped a lot of the benefits. [00:14:21][11.4]

Maddy Guest: [00:14:21] And isn't it so funny that we both had guys to sort of push us in in the end? Like, you know, they in both cases, my brother and your partner, that sort of gave us the confidence to finally sort of take the plunge. [00:14:33][12.0]

Maddy Guest: [00:14:34] I know that is like the thing. It's because I hadn't really thought of it, to be honest. I just thought, oh, my gosh, my money saved my savings. I love saying that, like, little cute figure accumulate every time I figure it was cute. You know, [00:14:45][11.2]

Maddy Guest: [00:14:46] I've been working since like fourteen, so I've been saving for so long and I just didn't really feel comfortable at all taking money out, transferring money out of my savings and putting it into the unknown. I think that one of the things that pushed me over the. Edge was that when I was talking to my partner about buying this stock, it was off to pay. It was a product that I knew and a product that I had used. So it didn't seem so scary. I think if he had been like, buy into this gold mine. Yes. Like minerals or expediters commodity, I would have been like I'm not touching that, but because I had used the product and I think that's a really good lesson. Sometimes when you are investing is that it's like it's kind of like the feel safe approach or the safe feel approach. And I could be making this up. But would it make it off anyway? If you know a product and you love the product and you think it's going to do well into the future, then sometimes that is something that, you know, could be good to invest in because you can actually like, I guess, feel and see it. [00:15:43][56.7]

Sophie Dicker: [00:15:44] Yeah, I think that's a great point. And I think sometimes when you're getting into the stock market or if you're, you know, writing something about particular stocks, it's really easy to get drawn into the commentary about financials and ratios and all that kind of stuff. And it can be so intimidating and confusing. But really a good story sometimes can make a lot of sense. And we look around us and say products that we know and, you know, we're millennials. So we often, you know, the more early adopters of some really great products that are out there. So I think, you know, we can have that confidence that when we say something that we really like and we think it's going to continue to sort of well into the future, that could be a really great investment. [00:16:25][41.7]

Maddy Guest: [00:16:26] Yeah, I agree. It doesn't have to be all the numbers. You know, it can just be. That's a good product. [00:16:31][4.9]

Sophie Dicker: [00:16:32] Yeah, for sure. So I think we sort of in talking about our investment stories, have really come to realize that, you know, having someone with you along the journey can be a super helpful thing to have. And I guess we really hope that this podcast can sort of provide that for a lot of people and a lot of families out there who want to take that plunge into investing, I guess, to round out our first episode. [00:16:55][23.8]

Maddy Guest: [00:16:57] Woohoo! [00:16:57][0.0]

Sophie Dicker: [00:16:57] when we start out investing and we've touched on a little bit today about one of the most challenging things really is just figuring out what to buy and, you know, where we should be focusing our attention. And that is why each week we'll be bringing you the watch list. We'll be asking the experts or chatting among ourselves about interesting trends, industries or companies that were curious about. At the moment, the purpose of this is to really get us thinking outside the box and really to try and I guess broaden our horizons in the investing space. [00:17:28][31.0]

Maddy Guest: [00:17:29] But when not financial advisors, [00:17:31][1.9]

Sophie Dicker: [00:17:32] we wish [00:17:32][0.2]

Maddy Guest: [00:17:33] everyone did. This is purely for educational purposes only, and it absolutely does not constitute any investment advice to start us off today. And that's what are you adding to our watchlist? [00:17:44][10.8]

Sophie Dicker: [00:17:45] Yes, sir. I am bringing what was one of my best investments, and that is the iShares Australian ETF. And that's got an ASX like the Australian stock market sort of code, a two hundred. So basically what this is, is you can buy one ETF, which is basically one sort of stock on the stock market, and then you get exposure to the 200 largest companies on the Australian Stock Exchange. So the two hundred largest companies in Australia, essentially, [00:18:15][29.8]

Maddy Guest: [00:18:17] Matsue, is saying that you bought this like when you first started out. Do you think that's because maybe you are comfortable with the fact that they were Australian companies and you knew them? [00:18:25][8.1]

Sophie Dicker: [00:18:25] Yeah, for sure. I think, you know, businesses that I knew, Coles, Woolies, banks, things like that, you know, businesses that I know and use and frequent really often. That's what I was putting my money into it. I could feel really safe about that. And I knew where my money was going. I think, you know, these kind of businesses long term are going to be really valuable investments for Australians. And I think that's what really sort of drew me to this ETF. When I was first starting out, wanting to be quite sort of aware of with ETFs is they have a management fee and this one is zero point seven percent. It's one of the lowest in the market for Australian ETFs. So, yeah, that's what really attracted me to this one. I think another sort of point just to finish off on is Australia compared to overseas where quite a small market. So, you know, our supermarkets might have one or two competitors, but not 10, whereas overseas you'll often find that they'll be, you know, five, six, seven major supermarkets. So that's just one example. But I think Australia is, you know, being a smaller market, there's less competition. And it means that those bigger companies sort of have a little bit more room to potentially really grow and really and great returns for investors. Yeah. So what are you bringing to the watch list today? [00:19:45][79.6]

Maddy Guest: [00:19:46] Today I'm going to be adding the Bumble IPO onto our watch list. [00:19:49][3.2]

Sophie Dicker: [00:19:49] I love this story. I'm so glad you bought this one. [00:19:52][3.0]

Maddy Guest: [00:19:53] So for those unaware, an IPO stands for initial public offering and it pretty much means that a company's going from. Private, owned by, you know, your local mom and dad was a big company being owned by a couple of people to public, whereby anyone can buy stocks within the company on the exchange or stock exchange. In this case, it's the Nasdaq. So the US market and I think I want to add this one to follow along, because honestly, the story of Whitney had Wolf becoming one of the youngest self-made billionaires is such an inspiring story. One of the coolest images I saw was her signing the life of the IPO with her baby on her hip. Yes, it was an amazing image. [00:20:32][39.3]

Sophie Dicker: [00:20:32] I loved that. I think I felt like it was a little video on, like a loop. Yes. I found myself sitting there watching it for ages and I was like, what am I doing? But it is such an incredible image. It was so cool. Yeah. [00:20:44][11.7]

Maddy Guest: [00:20:45] One thing about IPOs, though, and I often I don't think I ever have and I'm not sure if I ever wilkes' I'm not too risky to invest in IPO when it's just launches because the prices of IPOs can be quite volatile and that's because they haven't really adjusted to the market. You know, you haven't actually got the earnings reports and seeing what the fundamentals in the financials are often like, an IPO price will go up really quickly when they launch because of all the media buzz around it. Yeah, lots of hype. Yeah, there's a lot of pop, but you do need to kind of watch it and actually wait to adjust to the market. I think it's the earnings report for it came out the other day, which I actually did read. So I know that it came out, but they were doing well in terms of their revenue when I read it at the point that I was reading it. So I think the share price is stabilizing a little bit, but it's definitely not saying I'm going to be investing in, but just something that I kind of want to watch. [00:21:34][49.4]

Sophie Dicker: [00:21:35] Yeah, I think that's an awesome story and definitely looking forward to sort of watching how it goes over the next few months. [00:21:40][4.8]

Maddy Guest: [00:21:40] Thank you so much for joining us for our very first episode of You're in Good Company. [00:21:45][5.0]

Sophie Dicker: [00:21:46] We hope you survived this. Yeah. If you haven't yet. Yes. Thank you to them. [00:21:53][6.6]

Maddy Guest: [00:21:54] But if you haven't already, go and follow us on our Instagram page. It's YIGC podcast [00:22:00][5.8]

Maddy Guest: [00:22:01] for what you can find us on Facebook. We would love for you to join our Facebook community. It's an awesome place where you can post questions, things that you're sort of saying a lot about at the moment. And we can all sort of come together and discuss it is YIGC investing podcast discussion group. [00:22:13][11.9]

Maddy Guest: [00:22:17] and you hear us next week or next episode in your use talking to a newbie investor about our savings and why she's ready to jump into investing. [00:22:26][8.8]

Speaker 1: [00:22:27] See you then. [00:22:27][0.0]

[1246.9]