David Wright grew up on a small farm in central Queensland and after completing high school, spent five years training and working in a Metal Trade before deciding in 1980 to change careers.
He trained to become a Secondary School Teacher specialising in Manual Arts /Industrial Technology and Design and took up his first teaching position in 1982. Realising very early on in his teaching career that this was definitely NOT the profession he thought it would be, he began looking for opportunities to get out of teaching, but with a young family to support and a mortgage over his head he felt stuck.
After reaching the top of the pay-scale as a classroom teacher David became frustrated over difficulties managing his day to day finances. He realized that nothing was going to improve financially unless he found a new and more effective way to plan his cash flow. Driven by a desire to do better, David spent thousands of hours developing and fine-tuning a system to overcome the difficulties he had experienced. The system he developed worked so well he became very passionate about sharing it with other people.
He began by going into people’s homes at night and on the weekends and then with the help of a software developer, he created the ‘Simply Budgets’ software.
David left teaching in 2002 after an incident with a student that was 'the straw that broke the camel’s back’, and in the first year after leaving teaching he earned more money than in his entire 20 years as a teacher.
Simply Budgets was featured on A Current Affair, Today Tonight, Money Magazine, PC Authority (and more) and has produced amazing results in people’s lives with close to 30,000 customers around the world.
David has gone on to speak on stage in the UK, the USA, New Zealand and right around Australia on the topic of personal money management. He has also been interviewed on TV and radio many times in the USA and Australia.
In 2015 David created the Spending Planners Institute.
Having identified a huge gap in the financial services industry between Financial Counselling and Financial Planning, the Institute has trained almost 100 Spending Planners and in doing so has now created a new industry called Spending Planning that fills that gap.
The Institute is dedicated to training and supporting Spending Planners who in turn are dedicated to changing people’s financial direction, by providing them with education and accountability, whilst leading them through simple steps to set up their own personal Spending Plan based on David’s software system which is now web-based.
Listen in as Elizabeth interviews David about how he got out of teaching and into his dream career…