Prefer to just listen? Catch our audio below!
Welcome to another episode of Feminine Wealth TV.
This week I am super excited to have Dr. Pippa Malmgren on the show to talk about the simple and practical everyday signals we can all use to shape our financial decisions.
Dr. Malmgren is a global strategist who advises some of the world’s largest investors, was an economic advisor to The White House 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!
She talks about women and investing and gives us her key tips on investing money (in a language we can all understand!). She also debunks some of the biggest myths that exist around business and wealth building today and, of course, gives us the key signals to look out for if we want to protect our financial and business lives.
This episode is one you definitely don’t want to miss!
Prefer to read? See full transcription below!
Barbara Turley: Hi there. I’m Barbara Turley, and you’re watching another episode of Feminine Wealth TV, the show that uncovers the diamond tips on creating truly conscious wealth from change-makers, world-shakers, and wealth-creators. Let me ask you a question. Would you consider a designer handbag an asset, that it could be an investment? Do you find economics unbelievably boring and making decisions about your financial life and your business? Well, I’m joined today by a woman who’s going to change all of that for us. Author of the new book, Signals, and former adviser to the White House in the US, please welcome to the show Dr. Pippa Malmgren.
Pippa Malmgren: Hello.
Barbara Turley: Pippa, welcome to the show.
Pippa Malmgren: Thank you.
Barbara Turley: First of all, it’s such a pleasure to have a woman of your position on this show who runs her own business and also advises some of the largest investors in the world, so I’m really excited to have you here today.
Pippa Malmgren: Thank you.
Barbara Turley: Let’s try and debunk all these myths we have about economics and money and how it’s so boring.
Pippa Malmgren: Ah, yes.
Barbara Turley: First of all, tell me what drew you to the whole financial industry, way back in the beginning, the beginnings of your career.
Pippa Malmgren: Well, I was very lucky I grew up with a father who served 4 presidents. I was very exposed to what the world economy really is, stories at the dinner table auto parts and textiles and steels seem perfectly normal and interesting to me. Then when I got into the market, so I realized this is the juice. This is where the action is, and if you understand that, wow, what a incredible power you have in the world.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. I mean, I feel that way too because I started out in a trading role, in investment banks as well, so I love being at the coalface there and I find it really interesting. You’re right, once you learn that, the world is your oyster kind of thing.
Pippa Malmgren: That’s the thing. We both worked on trading floors. I was the chief currency strategist for one of the world’s biggest investment bank. We’re on masculine environment. It’s a very brutal, tough environment, and yet it is where you really learn how things work. What I discovered is that trader and policymakers alike like to think about these things very complicated ways, but actually, it’s pretty simple, and a regular person can understand what’s happening in the world economy if you stop trying to explain it purely in math, models, algorithms, and instead you use practical everyday examples, which is what I like to do.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Great. I think a lot of what I’ve been talking to a lot of women about recently is that the industry is very masculine paradigm, money, business, investing, very masculine energy run things. It’s lovely to see the more feminine energies coming in, which is stories, intuition, creation, all these sorts of things, collaboration. Tell us a little bit, so what prompted the book? Where does the book come from?
Pippa Malmgren: In May 2007 I sold my personal home, moved my family into rental accommodation. I recommended to all my clients to sell every asset they owned. Everybody basically said, “I think you need to take a vacation,” and then we had this huge crisis-
Barbara Turley: Sure, I remember that. I remember you telling people that.
Pippa Malmgren: Do you?
Barbara Turley: Yeah, I do. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: I decided, gosh, I need to actually explain to people so they can see these things themselves. It’s hard when the bank manager tells you, “Well, your property will be worth another half a million in 6 months,” and maybe you’re just like, “Do you really think that without even a single coat of paint it’s going to be worth that much more? Don’t you think that signals something is wrong?” I decided to write a book about how economic signals are everywhere. They’re around you all the time if you just open your eyes. You don’t have to read the Financial Times. You don’t have to be a financial expert or have a PhD in economics. Regular everyday people, once they begin to understand what a signal really is start to see them, and so I’d love to talk to you about the signals I see today.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. I’d love to. What I just love about that is that you’re making this whole thing of, people get bamboozled by the financial industry. People say to me, “Should I buy a house? I don’t know. Am I missing the boat?” I always say, “I think that’s the wrong question to be asking.” Tell me, yes, some of the signals that we can be really looking out for that will help in our financial decisions.
Pippa Malmgren: Okay, so let’s understand the broad landscape is, most of the industrialized countries like Australia, the United States have a historic debt problem, and that’s why all the central banks are doing something called quantitative easing that nobody really understands what it is.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: In plain English, it means they’re trying to create inflation. When governments want to create inflation, usually they succeed, but they don’t tell you this is what’s coming. When you look around, what do you see? Beef prices are at an all-time record high. When you go to a restaurant, you order a steak, have you noticed how the size of the steaks on the menu is getting smaller? In the US, they’re down to as small as 6 ounces, which in the old days used to be considered as an hors d’oeuvre. The thing is it’s more expensive per weight, or the can of coke is 3 quarters the width, 3 quarters the height that it used to be. You’re paying more per weight.
Companies that make things like baby powder, they make the size of the aperture larger so you use it faster and weight the bottom of the bottle so it feels as heavy as it used to, but what’s really happening in this kind of shrinkflation is it’s reflecting the efforts of central banks to raise asset prices. That means property. That means food, because the value of farmland property in the US hits all-time record highs, and the cost of producing on it goes up as well, and so the steak gets more expensive.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: You can see it in many things. The example I like best, I really like using examples that are not from masculine industries, because we know about those. This morning I put up on Twitter an example that an Hermes handbag has gone up 60% in a decade in the initial value. That’s not even the value that it keeps, and a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes are up 48% in a decade.
Barbara Turley: Wow.
Pippa Malmgren: That’s an inflationary change.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Now, there are things that are still falling in price. It’s important to understand-
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Like computers and tech and stuff like that.
Pippa Malmgren: Right.
Barbara Turley: It think that’s where people find it really difficult to understand these things and why this is a problem.
Pippa Malmgren: Exactly. Let me jump a little bit. When food and energy prices are rising or high, this really hits the emerging markets very hard because their workers spend 40% to 70% of their income on that stuff.
Barbara Turley: The emerging markets will be like China, India, or Bangladesh-
Pippa Malmgren: China, Bangladesh, India. Yeah.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: In all those markets, workers are asking for much higher wages, and that means the cost of, for example, the clothing that you might get at H&M is going up. In fact, they’re less and less competitive because they’re more and more costly. Manufacturing a clothing is moving back to Britain and the United States and Western Europe, which is just mind-boggling to some people.
Barbara Turley: Wow, a huge chain.
Pippa Malmgren: It’s a massive change. That of course means that the old really inexpensive deals we used to get when you went to H&M, it’s not quite as inexpensive as it used to be is what I find now.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Then tell me, so this is causing … It sounds like these are tectonics shifts, globally, in terms of … These people out there running businesses that are going to be extremely affected by these things, and if they’re looking out for these signals and knowing what these signals mean, they can make wrong business decisions.
Pippa Malmgren: Correct.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Let me give a couple examples of that. Again, understand the purpose of this thing they call quantitative easing is basically to make it so painful for you to keep cash in the bank where you’re losing money because you don’t get paid any interest and to compel you to force you to put it into something risky. Naturally, people go, “It makes more sense to own property,” and property starts to hit record all-time highs. Also, investment strategies, that’s why we have record mergers and acquisitions going on, record initial public offerings and things. Now we have environment where everybody who really understands their business are saying, “The valuation the market is giving my business is way too high. I can’t possibly generate the cash flow that these numbers assume,” and so they’re beginning to get scared and hold back. The question is, should you stay in or should you pull out?
Barbara Turley: It’s like if somebody is bidding for your com- … I had a few women on the show actually who have bids around for their companies. They’re crazy bids, right? Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: The other day, is it Jessica Alba in California who has like a baby food company, the initial valuation on her IPO was like-
Barbara Turley: Through the roof.
Pippa Malmgren: … $70 million in-
Barbara Turley: Yours. It’s all yours.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah. Everybody goes, “Look, does that really make sense?”
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: This is an issue we really have to think about. Let’s put it really simply, you have to ask yourself, how much of the value of the asset that I’m controlling, if it’s my own business or my own balance sheet, how much is a function of my hard work, and how much is the function of free money in the world that you can have?
Barbara Turley: The cheap money floating around the world. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: That’s right.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: That’s one question. A second question is what is my capacity to outrun rising costs? If costs are going to rise, then I’m going to have margin pressure. That’s why candy bars are getting smaller because the price of the chocolate, the cocoa beans goes up. The only way they can save themselves is to charge at a same amount but make it smaller.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Well, it’s like clothing. Clothing is getting less … The quality is falling.
Pippa Malmgren: The quality is falling, exactly.
Barbara Turley: It shrinks in the wash.
Pippa Malmgren: Indeed, it’s another version of shrinkflation.
Barbara Turley: Shrinkflation, yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Exactly.
Barbara Turley: You need to buy another one.
Pippa Malmgren: That’s right.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: This is another question you have to ask yourself, what’s your personal capacity to stay in front of a rising cost base? This is interesting where Warren Buffet says, “Some people like to buy gold when inflation starts,” and he says, “Actually, that’s crazy. The most useful valuable thing you can do invest in yourself, in your own personal skillset so that you can command a higher income going forward.” That’s really the question you should be asking yourself. What do I need to do to stay in front-
Barbara Turley: To raise my value.
Pippa Malmgren: … To raise my value and stay in front of a rising grocery bill?
Barbara Turley: Yeah. That’s fascinating, and actually just … I’m going to digress slightly on this topic because this is a really interesting one, because women, and this is a generalization, but as we know as women, we get paid less than men. We tend to value ourselves less than men. As women, I think it’s really important for us to understand that point and go, it is so important to value what it is that you bring to the world in business, for example, and to price it properly.
Pippa Malmgren: That’s the thing. How do you price yourself properly?
Barbara Turley: How do you price it? Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: I remember-
Barbara Turley: How do you price yourself?
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: That’s the age-old question?
Pippa Malmgren: It’s a very interesting question. It’s funny, when they’ve done studies, guys are very quick to say, “You should pay me more.”
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Women are always like, “Well, I’m going to do a great job.”
Barbara Turley: Yes. We want to do a great job first.
Pippa Malmgren: Pay me-
Barbara Turley: Perfection.
Pippa Malmgren: That’ll come later.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: That doesn’t really actually work.
Barbara Turley: In this context though, then this could mean that as women, if we are underpricing which is a major problem in businesses out there, not only are we doing ourselves a disservice but we’re also ruining our ability to create wealth.
Pippa Malmgren: We’ll become more endangered as inflation goes up.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Inflation definitely always hits the poor and the savers, right?
Barbara Turley: Ah, yes.
Pippa Malmgren: Inflation basically is a tax. Some people would call it much worse. They would call it an excorporation or a confiscation of your assets, but it’s like the money is coming out of your back pocket and you’re not noticing that this is happening.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: The lower down you are on the income poll the harder you’ll be hit by these phenomena. That’s why I think it’s important to start thinking about the social consequences, the impacts on families, so for example, I’m giving a lecture at The Royal Society of Medicine about when you have record high protein prices, people get pushed into cheaper calories. You start buying cheaper calories at the store, but all the cheaper calories are also emptier calories.
Barbara Turley: Bad for you.
Pippa Malmgren: Very bad for you. We’re seeing the population in the industrialized world starting to split between the wealthy who can afford the best, and the poor whose health will deteriorate. Their longevity of life will be less. In fact, they’re becoming more obese because these emptier calories are basically sugar.
Barbara Turley: They’re becoming mentally and emotionally more unstable.
Pippa Malmgren: It’s all bad.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: It’s all bad. These are things that I think-
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: As women, we’re very conscious of what is happening to the structure of the society that we live in. It may be that the only way out of the debt problem is to go down an inflationary road, but I think we should be cognizant of the consequences.
Barbara Turley: Also, because another topic I try to … I mean, one of my missions as I was talking to you off-air is to get women to really think differently about this money thing and to really embrace money, embrace investing, like the saver thing we talked about earlier. If you’re going to stay and savor and just hoarding money all the time, you’re actually not going to get ahead in this kind of world.
Pippa Malmgren: No. In the current environment where the central bank is going to penalize you for holding cash and saving, so you really need to think about what are good source of wealth. One of the most difficult things with investing is you have to do something different from everybody else in the market, because by definition, by the time everybody starts saying, “Oh, property is a great investment,” it’s too late.
Barbara Turley: It’s too late.
Pippa Malmgren: Right?
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Just like now in Sydney, we have property prices through the roof and everybody is jumping in but, it’s just too late. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: One of the things that one has to learn how to do is to hold a different view and be comfortable with that. The other thing too is that the measure of success in investing is not about what you but, it’s about what you sell. You can buy a house if it goes up in value and you can gloat about that and say, “Oh, I bought this property in Sydney and I made a fortune.”
Barbara Turley: You didn’t until you sell it.
Pippa Malmgren: That is nothing until the cash is on the table in front of you.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: We should all focus on what are we selling, what is our plan to sell. The way people-
Barbara Turley: What’s our exit strategy?
Pippa Malmgren: What’s your exit strategy? The way people lose huge fortunes is they set a plan in their mind for an investment target. They reach it, and instead of selling, they say, “Oh, let’s sit tight.”
Barbara Turley: They set the next one. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Then it falls over.
Barbara Turley: They assume they’re wealthy.
Pippa Malmgren: They assume they’re wealthy along the way.
Barbara Turley: The other mistake, like you’re not really wealthy until … It’s the selling thing, and it’s the same with property.
Pippa Malmgren: Cash in the hand.
Barbara Turley: With property, I always say to people, “Your house is only worth what the next person is willing to pay you for it. I don’t care what valuation you think it’s worth. Until somebody puts a check in your hand, don’t assume it’s worth whatever it is because tomorrow it could be worth 50% less,” and that’s the reality.
Pippa Malmgren: Exactly. Another element of this that we should talk about is innovation.
Barbara Turley: Yes. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: The one thing that gets us all out of both the debt problem and the funk and lets you manage or fix inflation is innovation.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: There such extraordinary innovation going on in the world today.
Barbara Turley: That’s the good side of it. That’s the good news.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah. It is a good news.
Barbara Turley: You come to embrace this inflation because there’s some innovation.
Pippa Malmgren: It’s very exciting, innovation. Remember that two-thirds of the net new jobs in all industrialized economies are driven by companies that employ less than 50 people. All the cool new drivers of growth and wealth is small business, right? Everybody always thinks like getting a Steve Jobs at Apple, right? Megacorporation, we use all the equipment they produce. How did that start? At a kitchen table, in a garage. All great businesses begin this way. This is a time we should be thinking about, what is the thing I can build that will be my protection against the future. Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it’s risky these days. In fact, big businesses are full of risk.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, because they’re less nimble.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: I mean, I have people who say, “Oh well, should I work in a small business or take less risky position with an investment bank?” I’m like, “You think working in investing banking has no risk these days? Are you kidding?”
Barbara Turley: I know. It’s risky. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah. It’s very risky.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. The other thing I wanted to talk about is this social impact thing, because I know as women and particularly my audience is predominantly women, we love to give. I know women are really bothered about what’s going on in the world right now. We still have domestic violence against women, one of the greatest problems in society. We have girls being sold in sex slavery. We still have all these things going on. I’ve been sort of saying to women, if you harness an asset like a business and you innovate and you value yourself properly and price it properly and build wealth to investments, building your own structures, the impact you could have in terms of supporting foundations and actually channeling some of that money towards the less-off in a really beneficial way is massive.
Pippa Malmgren: Not only that but the correlation between financial stress and the breakdown of marriages and families is huge.
Barbara Turley: It’s huge. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: To protect your own life you need to take greater control and make sure that your finance is in order, and then to be able to extend your graciousness to others who need it, you need to do this as well.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, because you can serve in a much bigger way if you harness more-
Pippa Malmgren: Much bigger way.
Barbara Turley: When you looked after yourself. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah. No question. I mean, I think part of the message in the book that I’ve written is that the answer to the question lies with the reader. Are you going to sit back and think, oh my goodness, tomorrow we’re going to have a catastrophe. The economy will never recover and therefore I’m not going to invest in the future or in myself.
Barbara Turley: That I’m just going to knuckle down and … Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: I’m just going to pretend this isn’t happening. Then we know what the outcome will be. If everybody says, “Actually, I have faith and belief in my own ability and in the future, and that the world economy always innovates its way out of difficulties,” and we start to be part of that, then, I think, we’ll have much stronger world economy.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: You see, here’s the thing. The answer doesn’t lie in Canberra or in Washington DC or in some wood-paneled room where a group of policymakers make a decision. I was one of those people.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. You’ve been in there.
Pippa Malmgren: I’ve been there.
Barbara Turley: Which is the thing, you’ve seen-
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah. That’s not where the answer is. The answer is with each individual and their willingness to engage in calculated risk-taking to balance their hubris, their belief of I could do this with their reasonable assessment of what is my actual capability. If you can balance these 2 things and reach for something that’s beyond your grasp but potentially within it, that’s what creates GDP. That’s what creates growth. That’s what creates the future. I’ve written a book to try and encourage people to engage.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Also because it’s fun and it’s interesting and it’s cool.
Barbara Turley: It is fun.
Pippa Malmgren: I’m so tired of economics being associated with gray book covers. They’re books written by not middle-aged white guys but older than that with gray hair writing in math, writing in formulas, and writing about boring things, and so I chose-
Barbara Turley: That nobody cares about.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah, nobody cares about, and so I chose as the cover color for my book, hot pink.
Barbara Turley: I love it. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: It was so funny, but you know what, how many hot pinks are there in the business section? Answer, there will be one.
Barbara Turley: It will stand out.
Pippa Malmgren: It’s written by a woman, and I’m using a lot of feminine examples. I use examples of fashion magazine covers.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, I love that about that.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: Tell me that story because you have this thing where you say, “What can nude models on the front page of a magazine or the front cover of the magazine tell us about the global economy and where things are going?”
Pippa Malmgren: This was in 2009. I think it was the August 2009 edition of British Vogue, and I saw the cover in a newsstand because I was reading the fashion magazines of course, and there is Natalia Vodianova, one of the world’s most famous supermodels wearing absolutely nothing.
Barbara Turley: She’s completely naked on the-
Pippa Malmgren: I’m like, “Wait a minute. It’s a fashion magazine showing no fashion. What does that mean?”
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: What I concluded it meant was the fashion industry was in such disarray from the financial crisis they no longer understood who is the customer, what size is the customer, how much money do they have to spend. Have you noticed-
Barbara Turley: What they want.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: For example, have you noticed there’s no agreement on where the hemline should be? We’ve got Maxi skirt, miniskirts for all the shop, and no agreement on the silhouette either. Usually we all have a clear idea of what the cool silhouette is? Why is there no agreement? Nobody can figure out who is it I’m actually trying to appeal to, where is the money? Before the financial crisis, it was young women who were receiving unsolicited credit cards in the mail and spending it on clothes. Today, that’s no longer the case. In fact, older women like myself who are not so skinny-
Barbara Turley: You’re looking pretty good.
Pippa Malmgren: Not as good as before.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: We have to be catered to, so what’s interesting as a signal as well in the US, I don’t know if you have it here in the US, what used to be a size 14 is now called the 12.
Barbara Turley: To make us feel better.
Pippa Malmgren: To make you feel better.
Barbara Turley: Exactly.
Pippa Malmgren: It make you buy more.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Well, a 10 is probably … A 10 or 12 is bigger. I got used to the smaller-
Pippa Malmgren: A 10 or 12 is bigger. It used to be big.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah. That’s why we have triple zero now instead of zero because it’s all moved down the spectrum to accommodate the fact that the bulk of buyers-
Barbara Turley: Are bigger.
Pippa Malmgren: … Are bigger, and that’s why again Natalia Vodianova was an interesting choice. She’s the mother of 3 children. Now, you can’t exactly call her really curvy, but she is not skinny. She is not the heroine chic kind of model that the industry had been using up until the financial crisis. Post the financial crisis they realize that actually everybody cares more about comfort, and so the curvier models-
Barbara Turley: The authenticity.
Pippa Malmgren: The authenticity, the whole thing about using plus size models has become much more mainstream. These are all signals about what is the condition of the economy.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Tell me Pippa the big burning question, in terms of investing where should we be thinking about investing? I know that’s a global sort of question, but I’ve been teaching a lot women around the global … I sort of said to women, if you can get your head around how money moves around the world between asset classes and how it works makes investing a lot easier.
Pippa Malmgren: Sure.
Barbara Turley: When you put these signals on, it makes things a lot easier again. What are you seeing out there in terms of the asset classes and investing world?
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah, so let me break it up a little bit. One aspect is financial investing.
Barbara Turley: Yes.
Pippa Malmgren: That’s how much is in bond versus how much is in cash versus how much is in equities. Of those, I prefer equities, because, again, free money makes them go up. It’s very complicated but central banks are making sure that the bonds don’t sell off.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: You can’t really make money on the upside but you could lose money on the downside. I don’t like bonds very much, but equities, oh yeah, and because they can shrink the size of things and because they can actually just raise prices-
Barbara Turley: They can innovate.
Pippa Malmgren: They can innovate and find their way to profitability no matter what happens to the input cost. That’s one aspect, but another aspect is what you with the investment in yourself. I think it’s very important that people take advantage of things. I don’t know if you’ve heard about it here in Australia. Have you heard about MOOCs?
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: They’re the massive online courses, so you can now basically take a course in any subject that interest you that’s offered by any Ivy League university in America, Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and that will improve your knowledge and your level of interest and your passion for things. I think that investment in yourself is very important aspect of investing generally.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Another piece of the puzzle is your investments need to be different from your friends’. For example, I worked in financial markets like you. I realized my whole income is dependent on whether the stock market is up or down.
Barbara Turley: Yes. You don’t want to be investing there.
Pippa Malmgren: Therefore, I can’t be invested in the stock market.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: In those years, in the 80s and 90s, I invested most of my money on property. At the time, people weren’t doing that. Later, that turned out the be a good strategy, but if you have inherited a property business-
Barbara Turley: Yeah, invest in something else.
Pippa Malmgren: Invest in something else. Yeah. Diversify.
Barbara Turley: Either in the textile or something.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah, diversify, and try to also be … The cutting edge of entrepreneurship and innovation, I think it’s going to be less and less the case that all of us work for 1 company for our careers or for even long periods. People are going to have a portfolio of activities where you work as an adviser to a friend who is doing a startup and you work as a consultant on some capacity to a big established business for a certain number of hours per week, and the more diversification you have in the business activities you’re engaged in the more knowledge you will also have and the less risk if any one of them goes wrong.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, you know lots of different avenues to take and-
Pippa Malmgren: People.
Barbara Turley: People.
Pippa Malmgren: People are important. You’ll never know who to call if things go wrong.
Barbara Turley: They’re your network. It’s your network. That’s right. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: That’s your network, and women are also very bad at networking.
Barbara Turley: Very bad at asking.
Pippa Malmgren: We got to get better at it. It’s important.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. It’s interesting that you brought up the investment in yourself actually. I will say that I didn’t plant this in there but I’m actually launching, it’s launching in 2 weeks time, a training program for women entrepreneurs called Get Savvy Academy.
Pippa Malmgren: Interesting.
Barbara Turley: The entire program is basically geared towards getting women from this fear around money right through to creating businesses that are true assets and not just glorified jobs.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah. Absolutely.
Barbara Turley: Huge problem out there.
Pippa Malmgren: Trophy jobs, this is no good.
Barbara Turley: Doing everything yourself.
Pippa Malmgren: It has to actually be profitable.
Barbara Turley: It has to create its own income outside of you.
Pippa Malmgren: Definitely.
Barbara Turley: You can work in it, and then when you get that pumping, it’s the investing piece and how do you actually make decisions around what you’re investing and then protecting, protecting the whole thing, so you’ve got sustainable wealth for the future.
Pippa Malmgren: Fantastic.
Barbara Turley: It’s great that you mentioned that because I’m just on this mission to get this out there and go. I want to lead that vision of women doing that and be the leader of that. That’s my-
Pippa Malmgren: Well I think that’s great.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: I mean, it is amazing that … I don’t know. Here in Australia do they teach you in junior or high school about how a checkbook works, how compound interest works-
Barbara Turley: No, people don’t even know interest rates, how do interest rates work?
Pippa Malmgren: Credit card fees, interest rates.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: It is incredible.
Barbara Turley: Do they teach in America?
Pippa Malmgren: Not really.
Barbara Turley: I don’t think they teach it in Ireland where I’m from.
Pippa Malmgren: Not really.
Barbara Turley: No, they don’t teach it anywhere. It should be in the schools.
Pippa Malmgren: I mean, it ought to be right next to sex education.
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Well, money is the last taboo, right?
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: It’s the last taboo outside of the sex education piece, yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: Pippa, if people want to connect with you, they want to find out about your book and they want to connect with you online, where should they go? Wanted to view your websites and-
Pippa Malmgren: Well, the book is called Signals and my company is called DRPM Group, as in Dr. Pippa Malmgren Group.
Barbara Turley: Okay.
Pippa Malmgren: It’s my company.
Barbara Turley: I’ll have that showing right here right now.
Pippa Malmgren: That would be great. You can find the book on there. We’re about to launch it. It will be up on Amazon eventually, probably in the next month or so.
Barbara Turley: Great.
Pippa Malmgren: I do a lot on social networking, so I’m on Twitter under @DrPippaM.
Barbara Turley: Okay.
Pippa Malmgren: I had to do that, because if I put PippaM everybody thought it was Pippa Middleton.
Barbara Turley: Different thing. Different topic.
Pippa Malmgren: No, it’s not so bad to be associated with that rear end, but anyway …
Barbara Turley: Yeah. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: @DrPippaM, and I try to put up examples of signals all the time.
Barbara Turley: Oh great, so we can follow what’s … You can tell us the signals that we should be watching for.
Pippa Malmgren: Exactly, and I encourage people to send me the signals they see. It’s interesting. Who do I trust more for information about what’s happening in food prices, our old colleagues from investment banking, all guys who says, “There is no …” or the moms who actually go to the supermarket? I trust them.
Barbara Turley: Yeah, who are feeding the kids. Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: I get a lot of women from around the world who send in these signals that they see.
Barbara Turley: Yeah.
Pippa Malmgren: I’m trying to create community and a dialogue around it because it’s encouraging if you can see somebody else talk about something then you don’t feel so shy, because people are nervous about economics. They are afraid of the subject.
Barbara Turley: It’s seen as boring.
Pippa Malmgren: They think, ooh, I don’t really know about that.
Barbara Turley: As women, I think, and one thing I kept saying is if as women we embrace this, I mean, I’m not saying it’s women versus men thing, but if women embrace this, it’s not an area we’ve naturally embraced before. If we embrace this, we learn about it and we get it right and master this and we come together community-wise, the change we could create in this world would be phenomenal.
Pippa Malmgren: Absolutely.
Barbara Turley: That’s kind of what I’m passionate about and obviously you are too.
Pippa Malmgren: Yeah.
Barbara Turley: I think it’s a great topic and I really hope people connect with you and send you some signals.
Pippa Malmgren: Thank you very much.
Barbara Turley: Thank you so much for doing this interview today.
Pippa Malmgren: Thank you.
Barbara Turley: I know a lot of people out there are going to get great value out of it, so thank you.
Thank you everyone for watching again for another week. Remember, you can catch me later this week on my podcast, Wealth Unplugged where I’ll be giving you my key tips from my chat here with Pippa today. You can get that on my website at EnergiseWealth.com, so until next week. Have a great week and we’ll see you then.
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