Cooking up financial freedom
Ann Wilson is The Wealth Chef. She tells Margaret Harris how attaining financial freedom requires following a series of steps and processes, just like using a recipe when cooking
Where did the term “wealth chef” come from?
Money is one of the most important ingredients we have to create and live an amazing life. Unfortunately, most of us are never taught what to do with it to transform it into wealth and, specifically, assets that can keep on feeding the life we desire.
As I discovered on my own journey to financial freedom, creating wealth is a learnt skill, just like cooking. When we want to cook something new, we get a recipe and discover what ingredients are needed, the order they get added, the specific techniques we have to use and the tools we need. We then give the recipe a go, improving it and getting more skilled as we go along.
Breaking free from consumer debt, managing money successfully, investing and creating wealth-generating assets and protecting ourselves and our wealth all consist of a series of steps and processes, just like a recipe, and require an understanding of how money works. By learning these recipes and applying them consistently in our lives, we get better and better at creating wealth heaven rather than money hell.
And so the term TheWealth Chef was born.
Using the analogy of cooking also helps bring money back into the realm of the possible: something achievable and a skill everyone can be great at — removing the confusing jargon often associated with investing.
What exactly do you do as The Wealth Chef?
I teach people how to become great wealth chefs too and achieve their own finan- cial freedom. I help people master their money, showing them how to manage it, get out of debt, invest it and make it grow so their money can support them rather than enslave them.
I do this through The Wealth Chef Book and by providing loads of free content in the form of articles on my own blog and in magazines, videos, webinars and tele-seminars and speaking around the world.
I also run multimedia online training programmes. My signature programme is Financial Freedom University, which is a comprehensive, 10module course, and another course I run is JFDI (Just Friggin’ Destroy It), which is a debt-busting boot camp that helps people break free of their consumer debt forever.
I also work with a handful of people and run a three-day live event, Financially Free U, once a year in South Africa, the UK and the US.
You were a civil engineer. What made you change direction?
I loved, and am very grateful for, the incredible career I enjoyed as a civil engineer working on mega-infrastructure projects around the world and I enjoyed great success.
As I became better at managing and growing my own money, friends and family would ask me to help them too and I found myself talking more and more about this stuff and really enjoying being able to share and help. I then started introducing this work to my teams at work and realised just how big a need there was for financial education and how many people, no matter what they earned, desperately needed help. Not because they are stupid, but because we just are not taught this stuff.
When I achieved my own financial freedom, I chose to continue in my engineering career for a few more years but more and more my true desire was to help others in this area of their wealth and so The Wealth Chef was born.
How does your experience as an engineer influence the work you do now?
My engineering career certainly contributed to my current work and also my life. One of the biggest skill sets I gained is being able to conceive a project, know what the end state needs to be and what it needs to do and then being able to create it by breaking it down into component parts.
Creating financial freedom is exactly that: a project. And being able to break something down into bite-sized chunks and create a step-by-step plan to make it happen is crucial.
Another key skill is resilience and flexibility. Working on mega projects with multibillion-rand budgets and thousands of people inevitably bring with it surprises and challenges. No matter how good the initial plan is, you can never know everything up front and things will come along that require a new strategy or approach. Being comfortable knowing that you can and will need to adjust as you move along is so important — and the most important thing is to start. I see many, many people getting stuck in analysis paralysis, fearful of taking action, like starting to invest in the stock market because they are waiting until the feel they have all the information. There is no such time. We learn by doing and adjust as we go along, while focusing on the end goal.
What did you want to be when you were a child?
I wanted to be a helicopter pilot. Growing up, there was this police show on TV, 240 Robert, with a woman heli- copter pilot and I remember thinking that was seriously cool. I had only ever seen male pilots on TV and seeing her made me want to do things that society still considered “boys only”. I did in fact get my fixed-wing pilot’s licence, but realised that it was the pushing of the boundaries of what was considered possible for me as a woman [that appealed to me]. This most probably had a big part in me achieving my own financial freedom and, in a way, I feel I have given myself my own helicopter wings through financial empowerment, because I can now do whatever and go wherever I want.
What is financial independence?
You are financially free when you have a big enough wealth pot filled with wealthgenerating assets that can earn you an income to meet the cost of your chosen lifestyle without you having to actively work.
The key to this is that there are two sides to the equation. When we realise we are the ones to choose how expensive our chosen lifestyle is, we see that we control how big our wealth pot needs to be to provide us the income for that lifestyle.
What do you think are the most common money mistakes most people make?
One of the biggest mistakes most people make is focusing on their income. Income is not the most important ingredient in financial wellbeing: assets are. You ensure you can stop working and still lead the lifestyle you want by learning how to stock your life with assets that can earn you income. When people get that it is not what you earn that matters, but what you do with it, then real change happens.