10 golden rules on how to be good with money

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BASICS By discovering the rules of spending and saving you can feel safe in the knowledge that your money will support the life you want to live. Whatever your budget, you can create a solid financial plan, allowing you to rest assured the future is well looked after.

Here, in an exclusive extract from his new book, How To Be Good With Money, financial planner and TV host Eoin McGee explains the 10 golden rules to follow as you spend now and save for the future.

you start with daily spending rules. Get the foundations right and build from there.

BEING loaded and being broke is entirely relative. I take three 15-minute phone calls per day from prospective clients in my private practice. We call these initial calls, and they usually book out months in advance, but the idea behind them is to find out what the client hopes to achieve by engaging with us, and to give them an idea of how we operate and to see if the fit is right.

These phone calls give me a unique insight into lots of things, including people’s perception of wealth.

People often start off by telling me how they are just not sure if they are doing things right. They don’t want to wake up in ten years’ time and find they should have taken advice earlier and that they’ve made mistakes. Believe me, lots of people talk about earning good money but are struggling to make ends meet. It’s classic Parkinson’s law which decrees that ‘work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion’, or our ability to overspend expands with the amount available to us! We’ve found that about 85 per cent of our clients suffer from Parkinson’s law regardless of their level of earnings. The 15 per cent who’ve cracked it all have the common trait of being conscious with their money.

What’s really interesting during these calls is how people convey information about themselves, and the language they use. I’ve learnt that that when people say, ‘We make really good money’ or ‘We’re