Michael Gilmore, Financial Literacy Campaigner

We are pleased to have financial literacy campaigner and investor Michael Gilmore share with us an “AHA” money memory.

Michael is based in Singapore. Welcome Michael!

About Michael

Michael Gilmore, is founder of the "MAIAs," the Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards.

He has worked in finance in Singapore for more than two decades, as a fund manager and investment analyst.

His passion for financial literacy education was born when teaching basic money lessons to migrant workers in Singapore – and also noticing his own daughter didn’t comprehend those same fundamental concepts. It was at that point Michael understood money is simply not being taught properly across the world – To anyone. To address this he wrote two books, The Thousand Dollar Journal for migrant workers and Happy Ever After.

He also realized this was barely scratching the surface. He asked himself, "What can I do that can have much more impact?" 

Inspired by the way the Korean movie Parasite changed global viewing habits after winning the Oscar for best movie, he noticed that the financial literacy sector didn’t have an equivalent. He thought, "Isn’t learning about money more important than movies?" 

Michael saw an opportunity to leverage Singapore’s status as a rising international financial hub and a nation with a globally renowned education system, to create an awards ceremony to find and promote the best money awareness projects in the world. He hopes that the MAIAs can help make money better for everyone. 

You can discover more about Michael Gilmore, financial literacy campaigner and his work at: maiawards.org/about.

The "AHA" Moment: Why Hadn't I Been Taught This Stuff?

For me, the "AHA" moment came when I moved from being a journalist to working in finance. I had to learn a lot of financial terms and methodologies very quickly, and although it wasn't easy, it was a lot easier than I had been anticipating.

But it was also a lot more powerful - I realised there and then that what I had learned in a matter of weeks would change my life.

And the combination of those two things - it being easier than I had thought and a lot more powerful - made me really angry! Perhaps that's an unusual reaction, but I could not understand why I hadn't been taught this stuff, why it was treated like such a big secret. Or why you're supposed to just get it for yourself. I still feel that anger right now.

We shouldn't take away 12 or more years of a kids' life and not teach them about the one thing we know they're going to use immediately they leave school. We owe it to them to do better.

Grandpa and Grandma

Before that, I had had a fairly simple conservative approach to money, but it was based on ignorance more than anything else.

I was raised by my grandparents. My grandad gambled and drank most of his money away, although he taught me a lot of mathematics while doing it, which came in handy later on in finance.

My grandmother saved. She saved money and she saved everyone from being thrown in the street. She also devoted a lot of her time to charity work and helping others, and that stuck too.

Two Basic Rules And Then Life Changed

Before I worked in finance, I only knew two basic rules of personal finance. One, don't spend more than 30% of your income on housing, and two, pay off your credit card every month.

Although those are really important rules, that was all I had. I was in my late 20s, married, kids coming soon, and I had no grasp of investing, of compounding, of markets - anything.

As a result, I had just a little bit of debt left, but no savings at all. Immediately, my wife and I switched behaviour to focus on saving. Whenever we earned a little more money we got in the habit of saving it rather than spending more. For years we asked ourselves if our future could afford the lifestyle decisions we were making today.

The Key to Saving

That, to me, is the key to saving. If you can learn to push back on "hedonic adaptation" or "lifestyle creep", you will not only be better off, you will also be happier.

If you don't do that, advertising will keep convincing you that you need something new to be happy, even though what they're offering doesn't work.

Optimise for Happiness!

If you can assess what makes you happy and how little money really contributes to that, then you can optimise your life for happiness and for saving.

That's what's behind the most recent book I wrote for Wiley in their "Little Books, Big Profits" series (an incredible honour, to be alongside Jack Bogle and Aswath Damodaran!). It's called "The Little Book of Zen Money: A Simple Path to Financial Peace of Mind", and it's how to optimise for money and happiness, without too much stress.

Start Where You Are

But the reality is that we all need to find our own way there. My story is mine, yours is yours, theirs will be theirs.

Many of our paths will have a few basic things in common, they may even cross over, but you need to start where you are, and you need to work out where you want to go and how you want to get there. This requires some understandings of the basics, and those are best taught young, before we get in trouble we can't get out of, before we learn bad habits, and before we wrap emotions around behaviours that make them harder to change.

Creating More "AHA" Moments

That "AHA"moment still sits with me now, how life-changing it was and how angry it made me that it was left to chance.

It's why I've started work on the MAIAs, the Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards. I want to find the people who are creating more and more of those "AHA" moments for other people, understanding how to get them on their own paths, and change their lives.

If we can support more people doing that, we can help so many people avoid unnecessary stress, anxiety and even poverty later in life.

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