On the latest episode of The Tony Steuer Podcast, I spoke with Michael Gilmore, the founder of The Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards about the MAIA Awards.
In this episode we discussed:
On the latest episode of The Tony Steuer Podcast, I spoke with Michael Gilmore, the founder of The Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards about the MAIA Awards.
In this episode we discussed:
You're listening to the Tony Steuer Podcast, where Tony interviews financial literacy advocates who are changing the conversation on money. So you can catch up on the latest trends and ideas in the world of financial literacy and education.
Tony:Welcome to the Tony Steuer Podcast. I'm pleased to be joined today by Michael Gilmore. Michael is the founder of the Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards, as well as an author and Research Director at Albizia Capital. Michael, welcome to the Tony Steuer Podcast. Thank you for joining us today.
Michael:Oh, thanks very much for having me on Tony. This is a real pleasure. I'm looking forward to having a good chat about financial literacy and money and what we can do about it.
Tony:Yeah, no, that sounds great. I'm looking forward to it as well. So, you know, as we get started, you know, can you tell us a little bit about your origin story? How did you get started in financial literacy and financial wellness?
Michael:Yeah, it it's actually, it came about by accident. So I, one of the reasons I'm particularly, I mean, possibly more keen on financial literacy than most people who work in finance is because I didn't want to work in finance, that wasn't my goal. I was a, a writer, a postgrad researcher studying economic history. And then I accidentally got a job in finance and I was, I thought, I'd get like three months to, to learn what I was doing. And they said, start on Monday. So I, I went and got all the books. I, this is pre-internet day, so I went and got all the books I could find on, you know, on learning about money. I remember one was called Pocketbook MBA, and I think the second one was I tried to get all the way through Ben Graham's Intelligent Investor, and I sort of just, just dived in. Before that I had the same feeling, I think about money and finance, lots of people do outside of it, which is, it's all kind of scary that these people all wear suits and they want to keep us out and they use big words and they act with big egos deliberately trying to frighten us. And I felt exactly those feelings, but once I got in, I, I spent this sort of couple month period and I remember it so clearly it was learning very quickly. And I thought, actually, none of this is as hard as I thought it was before. And I remember thinking, okay, this is actually not that complicated. Number one, number two, it's really, really powerful. This is, and I immediately thought, okay, I'm really grateful I'm learning this. I can see that I'm gonna put things to work here for the rest of my life. But then this third emotion here, which was anger, I was just incredibly angry that I'd spent, you know, 12 years in K12 education. Like everyone else, another three years in university, I'd even done some postgrad full-time education and no one had ever bothered to teach me any of this stuff. And I was like, that can't be right. That we are still doing that to other kids today. And it was just like, and that anger maintains. It's like, I don't see school as being something we give to children. I see school as us taking their lives away. We take away 12 years of their lives. The one thing we could do is teach them about the one thing we know they're gonna use when they get out. And it's just like, we know that for a fact, so that that's, that hit me then, and I promised myself at some point I would start to address this. And I've done that in a number of ways. I really started to ramp that up about 10 years ago here in Singapore working with migrant workers, I was invited to work with migrant workers here, and they're such a great group to work with because they've, they've left their families behind to earn more money. They want to, to send it home, but they also want to save it. And so I was working with groups there and seeing the psychologies that they were, or the, the habits they were trying to build the psychology they were trying to use to do that. And that led to writing a book for them and a course for them, which then led to writing a book for my daughter. And then another book that I wrote last year and that led eventually to thinking, I think I need to do something a bit bigger than books, and that's how all this came about.
Tony:Fantastic, that's great story, you know, and it's interesting that you mentioned The Intelligent Investor, that's one of my favorite books and listeners to the show have heard me mention the book, but what's interesting is that so many of my guests who are in the financial services industry bring up The Intelligent Investor. It's not necessarily the Bible of the financial services or in investment industry, but it's,
Michael:It's clear. Yeah.<laugh>, I mean, Ben Graham invented everything we do. I mean, it's, I just today I was, I was writing in my day job. I was writing about the companies we invest in and, you know, and'm there using margins, return on equity price to book the, all the stuff that, that Ben Graham looked at, you know, gotta be getting on for a hundred years ago now. So, yeah. Yeah. It is absolutely essential in the industry. I would always stress to, if anyone's listening to this, I'm gonna go out and get The Intelligent Investor. There is one version, which is Ben's original words. Don't get that one, get a revised one. That's been written by someone in the last 20 years. So the language is a little bit easier.
Tony:Yeah. I, I would a hundred percent share that recommendation, you know, the original's little bit impenetrable. It was actually one of my college textbooks, fantastic book though. Definitely. So, as we talk, what inspired you? I mean, you, you talked about it a little bit so far, but what inspired you to start The Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards?
Michael:Yeah, I think it was really a, it was, okay. There's a number of things. Let's cut it down to just two. The first thing was working on the books and I was very lucky to be invited by Wiley who published the, the book that I wrote for my daughter called Happy Ever After. And once I'd finished that they invited me to write a book for their Little Book of... series, which, I mean, this incredible privilege. I mean, considering that, you know, the Little Book of Common Sense Investings written by John Bogel, you know, Little Book of Valuation written by Aswath Damodaran, and, and then they, they came to me and I was like, okay, that's quite amazing. So I, I, I I've, I've, I have written that book now, and it just got published last week or week, two weeks ago. But the, as I was writing it, I had this thought process, you know, wouldn't it be amazing if that's a best seller and then little voice, you know, the kind of red we do this thing in fund management, where we have red team blue teams, and we argue with each other and we argue with ourselves, and I engage that arguing saying, okay, but you know, what kind of, what would a best seller mean? I say, well, maybe that's a million copies. Oh, that would be amazing. Like the blue team thinks and the red team's like, yeah. But what problem is that addressing in terms of financial literacy? What is the problem of financial literacy? How big is it? And I don't agree with the numbers that say that two thirds of the, the world is financially literate. I, I think it's more like 99%, like on a real, you know, can you invest, do you know how you need to invest? I mean, the, the one third of the world that's financially literate is using a very low bar and I, okay. So really the whole world, we need to get the whole world. And what's 1 million copies outta the whole world. It's like no point nor not 1%. And, and it's not even the 1% that really needs addressing. I mean, they're buying books, you know, they're gonna buy another book instead of mine. They're, they're looking for a book on finance. We need to address it a bigger problem than this. And so that was part of it. I was, I was searching for an answer that would be a bigger answer than, you know, a, another book. And then my daughter, my younger daughter is a film student. And before she went off to film college, she dragged me to the cinema. It was one of the last things we watched before, before she went off was the Korean film Parasite. Now it had just come out in Asia, no one had heard of it in America. No one had heard of it in the UK when she got to film school, no one had heard of it there, not even the teachers. And she's like, but this is an amazing film. It could play, it could win Oscar. And everyone's like, no Korean films don't win Oscars. You know, they might be the best foreign film. And of course we now know that Parasite won the Oscar. But through last year, as I was really thinking through about developing the, the MAIAs, there was a phenomenon that the number one show on Netflix was a show called Squid Game. And Squid Games was a Korean dysfunction, you know, post apocolyptic dysfunctional drama, very, very along the lines of, of Parasite. I think that win by Parasite didn't just change the, the, the box office numbers for Parasite. It did, but it changed the, it changed the ecosystem. It changed what people thought it changed, what people were looking at. And that's huge. And, and I suddenly made me realize that what award shows can be, cuz we all think of award shows as being an opportunity to pat each other on the back, and you know, so well aren't they great, you know, let's look at famous people. But you realize, there can actually be something that helps catalyze and create an, an ecosystem, a feedback loop where people know what's good, what they can, what they should work on. Who's doing great work. Who's, you know, what, what areas they could focus in their own work, what they should do and become a talking point, become something that brings things together. And that made me realize that when I look at the world of financial literacy, there's a lot of people like you and like me who think this is really important. And there's a lot of people who don't disagree with us, but don't hold it quite as strongly as us. And we need to catalyze that and bring it together and say, no, no more messing around, no more waiting 10 years to get this into a few schools here and there and debate whether it works, let's not let any kids, you know, go outta school now without learning this, let's let everyone get outta school understanding money. And I thought the, well, the thing I could do is start an award show. Luckily I have started one before. It was not very big, not very serious. It was just about raising money, but it had made me realize that no one owns awards. You can just create them. And as long as you take them seriously and you build them properly, then you can create something outta nothing. And that's what I'm trying to do with the MAIAs. And I've been very lucky to get some incredible support doing that.
Tony:Fantastic. Yeah. Well, it's an exciting concept and I, I think what's really important is the, the words in the title"money awareness" which we've discussed and"inclusion", you know, tell us a little bit about why you feel that inclusion is so important.
Michael:Yeah, because I, I, it's actually very much part of, of, to me, financial literacy people aren't being included. It's just that with the way we've treated money so far as that, if you get it, you get it. And if you don't, you don't, but what don't means is you are left out of the financial system in many ways, even if you're in a developed country and you, and you might be considered included in, in sort of, you know, development, economic terms, you might have a bank account, et cetera, et cetera, but you might not be included in the stock market. You might have decided not to, you might be saving into, into a savings account or some other form. Inclusion goes into many ways and it, but it requires education. And there's actually, I'm glad you brought it up because there's a, they're also in a very specific order because people have talked about financial inclusion a lot in the say the last 10 years, particularly in the developing world. To me, I think financial inclusion must come after financial education. And I, every non-American I speak to gets this joke, but I'm gonna test this with an American now, which is, you know, having financial inclusion without financial education is like having gun inclusion without gun education. You know, you just, you wouldn't want that. You wouldn't wanna kind of run around throwing guns at people without any education on how to use them. If you do that with financial inclusion, you will get very expensive debt running through that economy. And, and we see it right now across the world with BNPL sprouting everywhere, because FinTech is out there saying, oh, I've got this great thing. And all these people are gonna come in and use my wallets. And they do use the wallets and they don't make any money. So then they start lending them money at really high rates. And until you've educated people to say, but only when you really need it, should you be taking that debt? And when they say really need it going to die, if you don't take that debt, that's when you take really high debt, otherwise you don't take high, high price debt. And you know, that's the level of education that just is lacking people, take high price debt, cuz cuz they see something they like online. And that's where we need to, to build that in all kinds of ways.
Tony:Definitely. Well, you said a couple things in there that I think are important. Well one I wanna clarify for everybody who's listening, BNPL is buy now pay later and it's, as you mentioned, it's a very catchy trend, especially promoted by FinTech. I think PayPal has been pushing it quite a bit and it's a form of a loan as you talk about, it's a very expensive form of debt. Sometimes I think quite a bit higher even than credit cards. Right? On some of the terms.
Michael:It can be, it depends. Depends on the structure. Yeah, it can be, but it's very opaque. All the structures are very opaque and they like it that way. Cuz people then borrow more.
Tony:Definitely. And I, I like the gun analogy, however, unfortunately in the US there's quite the gun culture<laugh> you know, so yeah. You know, uh,<laugh>, we, we definitely wanna stay away from that topic, but I, I think everybody can agree that a little education is important before you hand somebody a firearm. It's just a good course of action, no matter where you stand on the spectrum of firearms.
Michael:Exactly, education before inclusion and, and that's where we went and that's why we went with the structure money awareness. We also didn't use the word financial literacy because, or the words financial literacy, because we, we feel that they're, they they're in just in their terminology. They're a bit exclusionary. And again, it's just like, you know, are we saying to people, well, no number one, if you talk about finance, half of your audience just blanks. They've, they've been preconditioned to think they don't understand. And you know, if you are, you know, that is that their fault maybe, but if I'm in sales and this is another thing that I, I hope we do with the MAIAs is encourage people to take in our world to take on a more sales approach. We want to sell to people. We don't wanna teach them. Teaching can mean, I just talk, you listen. And if you don't listen very well, you get a low grade. Now I wanna sell to people. I wanna sell to them the idea that they can understand money better and then change their lives. And then cuz then if I don't sell well, it is my fault. And I, and I have to bring that to, to the game a little bit. And that's where we don't use the word finance. We use money and we use awareness because it's not literacy. It's really just an understanding of what's around us. And it also incorporates that sort of concept of mindfulness. Now we're not gonna get all meditation on this, but you know, awareness and mindfulness of, of what we spend and what we do with our money is crucial to the whole, the a whole message.
Tony:Fantastic. Well, I think that's a great point. I've gotten away from the term financial literacy, but more because I think literacy in itself can be an intimidating word that most people are not familiar with. However, that's an intriguing point about the word financial, because as I, you know, as I talk about financial wellness is I hadn't thought about that. Even financial wellness may be unapproachable for some people as you, you mentioned, I don't know if we can call it money wellness because that doesn't sound quite, you know, quite right either. But,
Michael:But that's but, but it's, it's, it's a, but that's the kind of thing that people in marketing would do. I mean really good advertising. They would just be sit down there and they'd go to what, what hundred terms could we use? Which ones would work, where they wouldn't, they work. I had a conversation with someone a while back and they're talking about how do we, it was a conversation about how do we get young people to, you know, understand and start taking up pensions much younger, cuz they need to. And I was like, what? Stop calling them pensions. It's your fault? You know, everyone knows a pension is the thing you draw down when you are old. Um, mm-hmm,<affirmative>, it's, it's a thing for old people. You cannot educate people away from that mentality. That's what the word means. You need to give your product a new name. You know, that's what, that's what marketing does. If, if someone associates with that, you move the thing. I said, call it a freedom fund. You know, tell people they'll be free when they have this much money. Tell them that's what they're saving for. And you'll find 20 year olds will say, I I'm saving to be free. Yeah, I'm in. Right. Rather than I'm saving to be old. No, you know, that's, that's what they think a pension is. I save up and I'll get to be old one day. It's like not, I'm gonna do it. And that's where we have to constantly think. And it, this was, this is one of the things that's actually in, in the MAIA structure, is we try to talk to the organizations about where they're innovating and how they're communicating with specific communities, because that's what we want to see. We want to see more of that thought process on, on really understanding who the community is they're talking to and what, and how they've understood them and how they've engaged with them.
Tony:No, that, that, that's a great point. So, you know, as you know, we start to wrap up, I wanna make sure we really talk about the awards themselves and how people, you know, can support the awards. You know, maybe tell us a little bit about the categories and you know, the ceremony, you know, a little bit of the, I guess procedural. Yeah,
Michael:Yeah. The ceremony that's gonna be on May 31st. It's gonna be, I'm gonna be right here cuz it's gonna be online and I'm gonna be looking into my laptop screen as I am right now. But we are very lucky that we've got a, as a host for the evening. We've got a lady called Jeanette who works for, she's worked for Sky News and BBC news as a, as an anchor. And she's agreed to anchor the event for us. We have, so I'll be one of the guests that she's bringing on to, to talk about it. And then we'll also have Patrick Jenkins. Who's the deputy editor of the Financial Times and also the chair of their financial literacy and inclusion campaign that they launched, I think beginning of last year or, or just a little bit earlier than that. And then we have, I think our third and fourth guests are, are professor David Fernandez from the Singapore Management University. Who's the, the head of the Asia Pacific Financial Education Institute. I was trying to remember that one, it's quite a long one. And then we have a, a, a, a FinTech entrepreneur lady called Rosalia Gitau who runs a, a FinTech that's aimed at, at women in developing countries. And she's one of, and so Dave and Patrick and Rosalia were, were three of our judges. So we had 11 judges in total coming from a, a range of different backgrounds decision here. We've got a FinTech lady, we've got a, you know, financial journalist and a, and a professor in there, but we also had influencers. We had some more FinTech business people. We had a couple of fund managers in there, so we had a really nice range of people who use money and use money to communicate and are very engaged in financial education and, and financial literacy. So that was the, the first thing we had to do was sort of pull together that judging panel. And they've been, in their, in their own ways and in their own places judging the, the awards that came, the entries that came in, we had about 150 total entries that came in into, I think initially about we had about 15 categories, but we've actually kind of got rid of some and reallocated some, some entries. So we're gonna come out. I think now with sort of 11 different categories, there's some pretty simple ones like, you know, the best book and the best influencer, but also there's some more sort of specific indu sort of industry type ones. So we've got things like, you know, the best nonprofit working with school aged children, but also best nonprofit working with adult, you know, adult education. We have some really interesting entries that, that we've seen come in, you know, from places like, in as far apart as stuff here in Singapore in my home, but all the way to Peru, in Ghana and the UK and the US to really a very global representation in all these different categories. And so the a hundred fifties now being whittled down, I think we are down to about 40 finalists across the, all the different categories that we have at the moment. And we're hoping that we come out of that with 11 winners by May 31st that we can announce then. So yeah, it is, they they're from all over the place and I've seen every single entry, and it's just fascinating what people are doing in different places. And what I hope we, we all get from this is we all get involved in, in, I think even if you didn't enter and even if you didn't win to actually see this as a, this is somewhere we can learn about what other people are doing on this subject matter. Are they doing it well? Are they doing it badly? If they, if we think they're doing it badly, we can get involved and say, look, I can, I can help you. I've got these, these materials that I think you could improve yours, or if they're doing it well, say, look, can you mentor me? You know, I I'd like to, to see what you're doing. A really good example of something that's come out of this is, I was on the phone with someone from a, an organization in Australia. Who's working to get financial literacy put into schools in Cambodia, which is a, a great project. And they cuz they want to aim at getting it into every school in the whole of Cambodia within a five year timeframe. And I had just three weeks before had a conversation with someone from Hong Kong who'd introduced me to someone in Gambia. No, sorry. That's right. Zambia who is, who is getting financial literacy into every school in Zambia, across every age group. And they're negotiating with the government right now, how to do that. And Zambia might be the only country in the world in the next couple of years that has it in every classroom,, which it would be incredible for Zambia, but that level of connectivity in those conversations, I feel we lack in our industry as financial literacy. And that's what I want to bring to this is so that everyone can come to this. So you knows it's supporting the MAIAs, just reading what, you know, our entries do. It's supporting us by entering, it's supporting us by, you know, interconnecting telling people about it, saying if you've got friends, I mean, anyone watching this has got a friend, who's doing some kind of project that's in a financial literacy, you know, say to them, okay, you missed this year, but get in for next year, because the more entries we get, the more acknowledgement that those entries get, the more people see what's going on. Feel, talk about it, understand the bigger we can make this community. The more pressure we can bring to make sure that we are teaching everyone, whether it's kids, which it has to be, I think first, but everyone's catch up and that everyone starts to understand money properly.
Tony:That, that sounds great, cause as you mentioned, it is interesting that Africa is one of the countries or I mean, continents I guess, that financial literacy is really had some significant momentum. Ghana, Kenya, Zambia, you know, South Africa, you know, they're, they're big financial literacy movements that it's really caught on which is really amazing over some industrialized countries that you might think would be further. Yeah,
Michael:Well I think what's happened is that there's been a realization globally. There's lots of people like us, Tony who are realizing not only have we been left behind, but people today are getting left further and further behind. Finance isn't getting simpler and it never will. So unless we start learning the basics today and teaching everyone the basics, people are gonna be left massively behind. And I think that's more obvious in emerging countries. And so the people that get it are saying, okay, I can help people as well for almost no money. I mean, handouts are handouts and they are necessary in some places, in some situations and that, you know, financial literacy, isn't going to solve poverty on its own. But there are some situations where financial history is really making it a lot worse. And I, and I, that to me is we need both of those solutions and I think it's more obvious in really poor countries that you need both. You need to teach people what to do with their money so they can make more optimal decisions. So I do think it's, it's very interesting. I, Rosalia, who I mentioned earlier on, as one of our judges, she is friends with a lady now in Nigeria who is making a series on financial literacy for Netflix that will become global in the next year or so.
Tony:That's Amazing.
Michael:I, I know, right. I mean, but it's so big in Nigeria, and this, this woman is so popular that she, the Netflix said, yep. We want you to make a series about learning, how to use your money, how to use it well, and Netflix is financing that, so there is definitely, you know, there is definitely the demand for it and there is the supply for it, but at the moment there's no marketplace enabling it to meet. And that's what I, I, I'm not suggesting we can become that marketplace, but what the MAIAs can hopefully do is, is catalyze some better connections and make sure that we all have better information. So we can be a bit more efficient. I, I know when I wrote the first things I wrote on financial literacy, I thought I'd invented a wheel. And I think a lot of people go through that process themselves, like, oh, look, look at that, look what I've just done. And then you were like, oh, other people have done this. Okay. But we could reduce that. We could start standing on each other's shoulders a little bit and say, look, we can, money's not very complicated. Oh, sorry, take that back. It's, it's not complex. It is complicated, complex being something that's actually really hard to understand from the beginning, but complicated things are like a, an amalgamation of simple things. So most things in money can actually be understood quite simply. And you, the problem is they just need to get layered on and layered on. So it's a question of small steps and that's what I think we, we can do. We need to just start that process, get people involved in the early stages. Yeah. And that's what I hope we can, we can get done. And that's what I would I'm, I mean, and as I said, it's not the MAIAs getting it done. What I hope we can do is we can encourage more people to do it and to see better work and that our winners will do it.
Tony:Yeah. Well it sparks more conversations and you point out is that's, you know what I'm cons one of the things I'm concentrating on is helping to connect and, you know, raise up the profiles of other people who are doing financial education work. So Michael, as we wrap up, what is your number one tip on financial wellness?
Michael:Yeah. I, I it's, for me, it's about understanding it's taking small, simple steps. The, the analogy that I've used in, in the most recent book, which is The Little Book of Zen Money, is that the understanding money is, is like a path. And I think when we think of the analogy of a path, a lot of us think of like, you know, sidewalk or, you know, a, you know, a, a concrete path. But actually I think of it as coming from the countryside in the UK as a, you know, one of those countryside paths, which is just across a field. And really when you, when you're at the beginning of the path and you look across the field, you can see the path because it is just trodden down grass. It's just that grass is just bent over a little bit more and it reflects the sun in a slightly different way. And you know exactly where it is. If you kind of come in at the side, it's invisible, it's not reflecting any light back at you at all. It's just gone the path disappears. And it's the importance of actually understanding that when you are on the path, you can see the path. And so the importance of just taking really small, incremental steps, wherever you are on that path. So if, for example, you've never saved before in your life, and you think you can't save a dollar in whatever frequency you need to do to make it regular habit, saving that dollar and, and doing the thing, which is all important, saving it first, not, you know, not refuse to accept that people can save at the end of the month. That's not saving. That is accidental not spending, you know, you save it at the beginning of the month, that kind of small step, whatever it is can then build through small steps into the ability to know how to understand, to under understand how to invest and build a portfolio, build a financial security, but they're small steps and they have to be small because too often, because we don't teach it. Well, we say to someone who doesn't know about saving incrementally and, and, you know, and budgeting and planning and tracking, we say to them, oh, what you need to do is this tax advantage scheme here for self-employed people? And they're looking at you going well, they don't know how to save. There's no point they're coming at the path from the side. So to me, it's about really small steps and of being, getting at the beginning of the path, knowing when you're on, and then taking small increment and incremental steps forward. That to me is the biggest tip. Cuz other things take you off the path and you dunno where you are.
Tony:Yeah. The, that that's a great tip. I, I love that incremental steps, you know, at your own pace. So Michael, where can people learn more about you and of course, where can they learn more about the MAIA awards?
Michael:Thanks. Yeah. Tony it's it's, so our website is, MAIAwards.org. So that's MAIAwards.org. And I, we, we tend to be quitefocused on LinkedIn. If you look at the Money Awareness and Inclusion Awards on, on LinkedIn at the moment, whether starting to spread into some of the other social media, into Instagram and Twitter and a little bit on Facebook in the second half of this year, after the awards have been announced, one of the, the prizes that we will be giving to the award, the, the, the winners and the finalists is we'll be doing podcasts with them and interviews with them. And there'll be a lot of content to find out about who the winners are and what they do. And so you'll find all of those on, on the social media as well, but they will also be on that, that website, MAIAwards.org,
Tony:Fantastic. And for all the listeners and viewers, those links will be on the website and the show notes. So you can access it there. So, Michael, thank you very much for joining us on the Tony Steuer Podcast.
Michael:It's been a real pleasure and Tony, thank you for doing this. I, I absolutely love that you do this. And I, I love how actually people in financial literacy are, are, do all want to work together. I think it's one of the best things about none of us are competing. We all know that this is we're all working together, the moment we talk to each other. So thank you very much for doing this and inviting me on
Tony:Well, you, you as well, thanks for taking us on. And I agree with you, I think in the financial education, financial literacy, you know, whatever word we choose is that there is this feeling that we're in this together and that, you know, coming together, we can be more powerful than traveling our own paths. So yeah, a hundred percent.
Michael:That's great. Thanks very much, Tony.
Tony:And thank, yeah. Thank you, Michael. And thank you everyone for tuning into the Tony Steuer Podcast. Until next time.