This week’s key strategic tips have been gleaned from my Feminine Wealth TV interview with global economic strategist Dr. Pippa Malmgren.

Having previously been a key adviser to The Bush Administration in the US, Dr. Malmgren currently advises some of the worlds largest investors, is an savvy femtrepreneur herself and has just authored a new book called ‘Signals’ to show the world what designer handbags, shrinking steaks and nude models can tell us about where to invest our money!

The interview was packed full of seriously good investment and business strategies so it took a while to whittle it down to the 3 most important takeaways for you!

Takeaway #1 – Financial Signals are right in front of our eyes

In 2007 Pippa correctly predicted the coming financial crisis and advised people to sell down their assets. Everyone at that stage thought she was totally mad and totally wrong. As her predictions came to fruition she realised she needed to find a way to show people how they could spot financial problems all by themselves simply by watching the world around them more closely.

And so the book ‘Signals’ was born.

Takeaway #2 – Protect yourself by staying ahead of rising prices

These everyday signals that are all around us can show us where prices are going and where we need to be positioning ourselves in order to stay ahead of things. When prices are rising and we are not pricing ourselves, our products or our services appropriately then we are placing ourselves in a dangerous position of weakness.

Takeaway #3 – Innovate and BE the future of the global economy

Despite all the doom and gloom out there in the global economy, innovation is absolutely ripe right now. Innovation is what will lead the world out of its funk and onto prosperity. Small business is where innovation truly lives and interestingly small business is where a lot of female entrepreneurs lie. By fostering innovation then women can truly be the future of the global economy and global change.

Transcriptions

Speaker 1: Want to know what successful people are doing with their money to create wealth and use it consciously for the greater good? Welcome back to Wealth Unplugged, the weekly podcast that gives you diamond tips on creating conscious wealth from change makers, world shakers and wealth creators. Now, here’s your host, Barbara Turley.

Barbara Turley: Hi, there and welcome to another week of Wealth Unplugged, the podcast where I give you my key strategies and takeaways from the guest that I interview on my Feminine Wealth TV show. Now, if you want to get the full shows and watch my full interviews, you can get those over on my website at Energisewealth.com and the full interviews are there.

Here on this podcast, I just narrowed down my key strategies that I get from the guests on my show and I give them to you here in this bite-sized pieces that you can just takeaway and really implement straightaway into your own life. It’s usually about 10 or 15 minutes long, never much longer than that so it’s very easy to get it in while you’re doing the shopping, in the car. I know a lot of you listen to this when you’re out walking or out running. It’s a great way to get it in.

This week on the show, I have an amazing guest that actually I was very excited to get this woman on the show because she’s someone who I have known in my previous career for quite a long time and it’s a woman I’ve had a lot of respect for. She is a former adviser to the White House. She advises some of the biggest sovereign wealth funds in the world, so the biggest investors in the world.

On top of all of that, she’s an entrepreneur by herself as well. She runs her own company. Her name is Dr. Pippa Malmgren and Dr. Pippa Malmgren is basically a global economic strategist. She has recently written a book called Signals and Signals, the book, I love it because it’s all about making everyday signals that we see around us in our everyday lives, things that we can all follow to make better financial decisions and to actually see where the economy is going.

I loved the interview. It was absolutely fascinating and I would really urge you to go and listen to the whole interview because honestly I could have like 10 takeouts from her talk with me, but the three key ones I really wanted to talk about today, the first one obviously this concept of signals. She wrote this book and what triggered her writing a book called Signals was back in 2007, Pippa actually correctly advised people to sell down all of their assets.

She sold her own house. She sold her own assets and she basically said to everyone it was time to sell up. People thought she was completely mad, but of course in the end, she correctly predicted the financial crisis coming. She realized after that that she actually needed to tell people and to show people why she had made those predictions and why it was actually quite easy to spot what was coming in everyday life.

She tells us that basically economic signals are absolutely everywhere. They’re all around us and it’s really about us using our heads and watching what’s going on in our everyday lives. A classic example of this is the property market. Now, where I am here in Sydney, Australia, the property market is just booming like mad at the moment. It’s going through the roof.

Ridiculous prices, ridiculous valuations and everybody of course is running around saying why it’ll never stop. Pippa pointed out to me that when you are told that your property is worth half a million dollars more than it was a year ago, without having done any renovations to it or even a lick of paint, that that is a signal that is telling you that there’s something in that market you need to watch out for.

I wholeheartedly agree with this because people never question. You never question why a price is higher particularly when it comes to investments. Ask the question and ask yourself, “What is this signal telling me about what’s going on in the money markets, in the property markets and why I should be making decisions based on this?”

The other thing you can watch out for in our everyday lives, did you notice how the packaging in things is getting smaller? All of a sudden you pay the same price for certain food items in the supermarket, but yet the packaging is slightly smaller or I always notice this with clothes. Clothes are getting cheaper and cheaper for a long time, but have you noticed how the quality is dropping?

What are all these signals telling us about what’s going on? With the quality of clothes dropping, that’s telling you that in the emerging markets for huge amounts of clothes are made today in Asia, in China, and all these places, wages are actually going up. The cost of living is actually going up in those places and the demand is higher. In order to keep the price of clothing lower, the quality drops.

Basically, what’s happening here? This is my second key takeout from Pippa. What’s happening here is a basic concept called inflation. This is how we see inflation in our everyday lives and actually Pippa calls it Shrinkflation which I just love. Basically the sizes of stakes are getting smaller, but you’re getting the same amount of money per wait.

Watch out for these things in our everyday lives and know that when you see this stuff happening, when inflation is happening, the signal there, those are the signals that are telling you it’s happening. What it means is that the governments in central banks are forcing money out of savings accounts. Now, why is this important? It’s important to know because if the governments want to inflate which they are doing and they’re every aware of what they’re doing and they have to do it for debt reasons.

We won’t get into the ins and outs of it here, but basically they’re going to force money, they’re trying to force money back out into the investment markets. They want to force asset prices higher because after the global financial crisis, asset prices have taken a massive hit. We see this as I said in asset prices. We see it huge amounts of mergers and acquisitions going on.

We see it the valuations of companies going through the roof as well. Now, if you are not pricing yourself or what you do, or your products, or your services, or your businesses, or you’re leaving all your money in cash and not investing it properly, then you’re actually not putting yourself in a position to stay ahead of the rising prices that are coming.

Now, this is bad for two reasons. Number one, women in general, this is a generalization, but as women, we tend to earn less than men. We tend to find it very hard to price ourselves, to value ourselves and then to negotiate the right price for what it is we do be at that salary or charging for services that we do or even products that we sell or charging in our businesses.

It means we’re remaining behind the curve and this is dangerous because later on, if we’re not staying ahead of the rising prices, then actually we’re slowly getting poorer and inflation is making us poorer. It’s really important for us as women to think about this. We need to be savvy here. We need to stay ahead of this inflation game and we need to understand what’s going on and we need to watch it in our everyday surroundings around us.

What’s the third key takeout. the way out of this? The good side of this is innovation. Pippa talked a lot about entrepreneurship and innovation which I absolutely love. She’s a big supporter of entrepreneurship as a way to get us out of this funk that we’re in right now in the world. If you think about it, small business is where everything starts.

All the seeds of amazing ideas have started in people’s kitchens, in garages. You got Apple. They started around the kitchen table. Uber, all these things, Airbnb, all these businesses that are right there at the moment. They all started as a seed of an idea as a small business. Small business is the back bone of where innovation occurs and what pushes an economy forward.

As women, we are huge in the small business space and we make up most of the small businesses. We have an incredible opportunity if we take on innovation, to actually be the future of the global economy. Now the world bank and the International Monetary Fund are right there at the moment saying that women are the future of the global economy and we definitely can be, but we need to get this situation right around valuing ourselves, valuing our worth, pricing ourselves, staying ahead of the inflation game, staying savvy and then innovating our way forward so that the world can grow and grow in the right place and in the right way.

I hope that gives you some really interesting things to think about. Some of the concepts might be tricky for some of you, but go and check out the interview over on Energisewealth.com and on the Feminine Wealth TV show and you’ll get some amazing insights and even some little investment tips out of Pippa over there.

As always, if you love the show, please comment, leave me a review if you’re listening to this on iTunes or subscribe to the show because it helps me to get the show out to more people. We really want to do that because this show is actually growing and we’re getting followers now on Soundcloud. We’re over on Podomatic. We’re on lots of the different directories, so catch us anywhere there.

As always, if you want to leave a comment, let me know what you think of the show, even email me through the website or leave a comment below the video, the Feminine Wealth TV show. That’s it for this week. Be sure to come back next week when I’m going to be talking about what I learned from Cecilia Robinson who started a company called My Food Bag. Very interesting concept and she did it all while having a baby. See you then.

Speaker 1: Thanks for tuning in. Come and join us on Energisewealth.com to continue the conversation. Get your free video trainings, 7 Steps to Energised Wealth and watch the video interviews that were the inspiration behind this episode.