The financial mindset my dad taught me

My relationship with money started when I was very young. In my eyes, my dad was an expert in detecting where money was being wasted. “Why is the light on after you left the room?” or “Turn off the hot water heater, you have plenty of hot water today”. Most of what my dad taught us, growing up, was how to avoid money waste — in any shape or form. It was like he had this sixth sense to detect where money was just wasting and he instantly wanted to stop any form of money waste.

As a kid, this always seemed like a very tedious task done by my dad. He was constantly on his toes looking for places where we wasted money and trying to correct us, which ended up making me extremely frugal growing up.

Attitude aside, looking back I saw how this made our family much more secure financially. We could always afford amazing trips to Europe, great education and healthcare. I grew up in a comfortable, safe and untroubled economic environment.

The way my dad approached personal finance was on a day-to-day basis. Looking at the little things and solving them one task at a time. This approach did not let things become enormous and too hard to handle, and it gave him the kind of self-control he needed. It also kept him ‘in shape’ when it came to handling various financial chores. He kept practicing his Money Muscle.

This is a philosophy that guides us at Change. We aim to make Personal Finance a daily and continuous thing, by breaking it into tiny tasks where our technology takes care of the heavy lifting, and our clients are left with the absolute essentials.

We understand that handling money can be nerve-wracking sometimes, so we will try to make it as funny, interesting and intriguing for our clients, so it feels like a pleasant experience rather than an overwhelming one.

Change develops an Invisible app that links to bank and credit card accounts, analyzes money transactions and discovers bad financial behavior (symptoms). It then matches those symptoms with behavioral treatments that are executed through smart SMS messages (nudges).

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