What can you say for someone who has just graduated acting school, is struggling as an actress, realizes she doesn’t like to be the glamourized state of “perpetually broke” and does something about it. She reads up everything that she can about money and personal finance and starts a blogging platform from the back of her tour bus and manages to make that her core business within 2 years. Some of the words that come to my mind are: inspirational, motivating and definitely enterprising.

This someone is Stefanie o’ Connell – now re-branded to Millennial entrepreneur and money expert. She started with a platform called The Broke and the Beautiful life which is now simply stefanieoconnell.com.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT

You know how I keep on harping about the fact that money is not just number crunching but also a lot to do with mindset? This website pretty much lives that theory.

To my mind, ditching the lofty goals of investments and asset allocation, she talks about the everyday financial calls we need to take day in and day out. She also extensively blogs about the mindset and how changing that could also end up changing your approach to money. Reading her blog just gives a lot of instantly actionable advice and her experience seems pretty relatable. She does do a few posts on very actor-specific issues too like cost-efficient classes and the like.

ONE BIG POST

Browsing through her blog, when I landed on the “Who Are “The Joneses” of Today’s Lifestyle Inflation?” post it was like a lot of my thoughts put in words. I am someone who does not believe in convention. While one of our favourite catch phrase as an Indian is “log kya kahenge” (What will people say?) we are also looking to constantly compete and be on the same level as we look around. And as correctly pointed out by Stefanie, earlier the field used to be limited to our immediate surroundings of neighbours and friends. Now, with the advent of media and reality shows, that field has exploded. If we want to, we can easily compare ourselves to the celebs and also look at luxury products in media and feel miserable about how we just can’t afford them.

The race for the bigger house, bigger car and beating the other guy at every possible materialistic possession can never end well

What we fail to understand is that just looking at the spends, and failing to look at someone’s income or constraints is only going to lead us to make the wrong decisions. Also, the more we spend money for intrinsically motivated reasons than the extrinsic motivation of what someone else has, the less happiness we will be able to derive from our money.

As a kid, I used to play a lot with this girl who lived down the street. Her dad was a lawyer and she was an only child. One day she got these shoes which had a Barbie print on it and I was totally enamoured by those. That was the one thing I remember being really hung up on. While my parents tried to explain things to me, there is only so much you can explain to a 6-year old. I got my shoes but clearly the lesson has lasted longer than those shoes.

 Other 2 personal favourite posts from Stefanie o’ Connell:

  1. 5 Money mindsets that are keeping you broke
  2. The high cost of NOT investing NOW

You can reach Stefanie through her website, Facebook, Twitter or Email.