Afternoon everyone 👋🏽,
You’re about to read an example of the new ‘Monthly Best Of’ newsletter format.
You’re busy. I get it. School stuff, friends, part-time jobs, learning to drive, sport, assignments, relationships, TikTok, pets, exams, gaming, family stuff, deciding senior subjects, uni courses, exercising and sleep.
With everything you’ve got going on, I find it incredible that so many of you find the time to read Money Chats most weeks. Nicely done 👊🏽.
But there’s going to be times when you don’t get the chance to read every week. So I thought I’d try help with that.
These are meant to be a handy reference tool for those times when you don’t get to read Money Chats as regularly.
🚨 This is the second last edition before Money Chats goes to having some exclusive paid subscriber only content.
📆 5 October. You’ll hear from me twice this week. Regular Q&A will be on the 5th.
📆 6 October. Only paid subscribers will get the ‘Big Question’ newsletters (here’s a sample) and the curated ‘Monthly Best Of’ newsletters (like this one) after this date. I wrote a longer post explaining all of that here.
You can see the options (and upgrade your sub if you want to) by clicking below. If you do it by 8 October, there’s a discount on offer (no pressure, totally up to you). Since it’s an educational resource, you might like to ask your parents to help share the cost of an upgraded sub 🙂.
💰 Loose Change
Some interesting / amusing / newsworthy money stuff from the month.
💅>🧙♂️ Barbie Beats the Boy Wizard. Worldwide hit movie Barbie officially beat the earnings from the Harry Potter franchises’ biggest earning movie (Deathly Hallows, Part 2) in September. For the record that was $1,342,401,000 (1.34 billion) in US Dollars. That’s over $2,120,000,000 (2.12 billion) in Australian Dollars.
💸 Cash is Becoming Extinct. Your generation might see the end of cash in day to day use. Data from one of Australia’s largest banks shows that in 2018 cash was used in about 43% of all transactions. It’s fallen off a cliff since then. Now just 15% of all transactions use cash. For you guys its normal to not carry a wallet since you’ve always had your cards on your phone. For everyone older than 30 it’s a big change.
✈️🤷🏽♂️ Dude, Where’s my F35? You know how you get that slightly sick feeling when you think you’ve lost your phone? Makes sense. They’re worth around $1,000 or more. Now imagine if you lost a $158 million F-35 Joint Strike Fighter 🤭? Yeah, so that happened this month 😂. The wildly expensive plane went down in the United States during a training exercise. And then, somehow, they couldn’t find it. The internet had a fun time with that one. At least your phone has the find my phone feature on it. No idea how something with a roughly $160 million price tag doesn’t have something similar!
The Best of Your Questions & Answers from September
🏟 Your Odds of Making the AFL
🤷🏻♀️ How to Choose A Bank Account
🗺👩🏻🎓 Travel Budgets
🏟 Your Odds of Making the AFL
Q. “I saw your answer about the odds of making it into the NRL. I play footy. Is it any better for the AFL?”
-Joey, Vic
Answer
[Ry’s note: as a Brisbane Lions fan, the result in the GF this weekend is going to take a little while to get over 😞. But here’s an AFL-themed question from earlier this month.]
Hey Joey, I was hoping someone would ask this because I wanted to know the answer too! For those of you who didn’t see it, a few months ago someone asked this:
“People keep saying I need to try harder at school but I’m already in rep teams for footy and I’m just gonna play NRL and earn heaps of money doing that so why do I need to do better at school?”
So what I did was find some statistics to figure out an estimate of what the chances of someone getting to play professionally in the NRL was.
Now we’re going to do the same thing for the AFL.
🏟 There are currently 18 professional AFL clubs in Australia. By 2028 there’s likely to be 19 (with the new team in Tasmania).
🏟 There are 22 players in a match day team. But a full AFL ‘list’ (basically all the players contracted to a club who turn up to train each week) can be up to 44 players.
🏟 That means that by 2028 there will be 836 AFL team list spots up for grabs (19 x 44).
So that’s a big number. But now let’s look at your competition.
🤷🏻♀️ How to Choose A Bank Account
Q. “I read your answer last week about choosing a savings account. I want to get one. But I don’t know which one to pick? There’s so many choices?!”
-Lil, 16, NSW
Answer
Hey Lil, that’s awesome that you want to get a savings account, nice work 🙂. And you’re right - there are a lot of choices out there. That’s always the case with money stuff: lots of businesses offering really similar products.
I’m never going to recommend a company or bank (that means I can be 100% independent, which is a good thing for you guys). But what I can do is show you how you can make the right choice for you.
💻 Step 1 - Prepare a Doc
Open Microsoft Word, Google Docs or whatever you use for word processing. Or Excel / Sheets. Create a table. It should have these column headings:
Name of bank / company
Type of bank (e.g. traditional or online only)
Transaction / everyday account name
Interest rate for transaction account (this will be a percentage. For bank accounts that have your savings in them a higher interest rate is better).
Savings account name
Interest rate for savings account (including any bonus rates that might apply, how long they apply and any conditions for getting them)
Account fees and charges (look for ‘zero’)
Banking app (yes / no)
App rating (from App Store or Google Play Store or both)
🌎👩🏻🎓 “Should I Travel At the End of Year 12?” (Part 2)
Q. “Hey again! So I think I’d like to go to Europe for 2-3 weeks in December (I love the idea of Christmas markets in Europe and maybe spending New Years with family in the UK 🎄🎄)”
-E.H, 16, NSW
Answer
Hey E.H. thanks for writing back and sending through those details! Hopefully the answer to ‘Part 1’ of your question last week was kinda helpful to you.
Ok, let’s break this down. This isn’t going to be a perfect budget because the actual choices you’ll make will be different. But it’ll be good enough to let you plan and decide what to do.
There’s three big buckets of costs to account for here:
Flights ✈️
Accomodation 🛌⛺️
Daily spend (food, spending money, activities) 🍕⛵️
Assumptions
I’m going to use 18 days as your time overseas.
I’m going to assume you don’t have any savings yet.
I’m going to try go for the ‘cheaper but not cheapest’ option for everything. For example, for accommodation on a scale of 1-10, if ‘1’ is sleeping in a park (please don’t do that) and ‘10’ is a 5-star hotel, then I’ll be going for the ‘3 or 4’ level.
I’m going to assume that you work part-time during year 11 and 12 in retail or hospitality.
Read the rest of the budget breakdown here.
Thanks for Reading
You made it to the end! Congrats. I hope you got something useful from the newsletter this week.
Got your own question you want to ask? Can’t wait to hear it! You can submit it here.
See you next week,
-Ry
P.S. You’re one of 3,467(!) people who read this newsletter this week.
📆 From 6 October only paid subs will get future ‘Best Of’ editions of Money Chats like this one.
If you like how Money Chats is written, and it helps you learn, then an upgraded subscription might be a good option for you as an investment to help:
build your money confidence and,
financial literacy.
If you want to see what your options are (including a fairly affordable monthly one), you can view them here: