McQueen started doing it in middle school, she says. She studied and qualified as an accountant and got a good job with the international giant KPMG.
But something still wasn’t right.
“Even though I was making good money, I still wasn’t getting ahead and I think that was the first lesson for me that okay, I’m financially savvy and I’m financially secure and I’m making a good income. So it should be like the three trump cards right there. Still, that didn’t translate into progress. I’m not stupid. But why is that?”
A piece of the puzzle was missing.
“I don’t think that making money means knowing how to grow wealth. And I wanted to go on a journey to try to understand that with me, I guess, as the guinea pig on that journey.”
One of the problems with financial advice is that it is often about where you should invest your money, she says.
“And the person giving the advice often has a vested interest in what that investment vehicle is.”
What matters is taking control of your behavior around money, she says. All the knowledge in the world won’t make you rich unless you act on it.
McQueen realized that traditional financial advice was not for her.
“For some people, that’s the right path. For me, although I’m a qualified CPA, I’m not an accountant. I’m aware of risks and I mitigate risk, but I’m not afraid of risk. I’m an entrepreneur . I want to push the boundaries. I want to challenge the status quo,” she says.
But her first leap into the entrepreneurial world wasn’t exactly deliberate.
McQueen took a job as a mortgage broker.
“I wanted to try to understand how the banks see people because they have their own kind of weird calculators,” she says.
“As part of that, I was talking to one of my colleagues and she said, It would be so good if we helped people get out of debt instead of debt.”
To McQueen, it sounded like a good idea. She and her colleague devised a business plan.
“Through mortgage brokerage, I became aware that you pay three times what you borrow back to the bank. And the banks wanted us to focus on interest rate discounts and things like that,” she says.
“On my mortgage, I had to pay back a million dollars. The interest that I was fighting for was going to save me $12,000 out of the million. I’m like: I think I’m focusing on the wrong thing here!”
She took the plan to her boss to see if it could be developed.
And he said, ‘You’re fired!’
“I don’t know if it’s men. I don’t know if it’s insecure people, but he didn’t have a bar about it,” she says.
“I’m the definition of a good commodity. I love pleasing people and being fired from a job at 22 or whatever it was felt humiliating.”
In retrospect, one of the benefits of being completely humiliated is that you no longer have the fear of failure, she says.
“And that’s when I thought, OK, maybe we should help people get out of debt.”
To help get her finances under control so she could afford to start a business, McQueen tried to devise a formula to pay off her mortgage as quickly as possible.
She hit a wall when the math got complex, so she teamed up with the University of Auckland’s Dr. Jamie Snedden to develop a calculus formula to pay off his mortgage in the shortest amount of time, with the lowest interest costs and the most flexibility.
McQueen says the other part of the equation is about people’s financial behavior and helping them adjust it to keep moving forward.
“Behavioral economics has more of a role to play here than financial literacy,” she says. “If you’re programmed to be a user like I am, it’s not because I can’t save, I just need a reason to save. So engaging me is different than how you would engage a saves.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more from Hannah McQueen about her story and her advice.
Money Talks is a podcast powered by the NZ Herald. It’s not about personal finance and it’s not about finances – it’s just well-known New Zealanders talking about money and sharing some stories about the impact it’s had on their lives and how it’s shaped them.
The series is hosted by Liam Dann, business editor of the Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Herald in 2003.
Money Talks is available at iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcastsor where you get your podcasts.