Hannah McQueen: Why earning good money won’t make you rich

Hannah McQueen, managing director of Enable Me. Photo / Supplied
Hannah McQueen, founder of financial coaching and strategy firm EnableMe and author of Kill Your Mortgage & Sort Your Retirement, could have been a mortgage broker if she hadn’t been fired at just the right time.
Talking to Liam Dann on the Money Talks podcast McQueen says she has always been a spender – that’s why she had to learn how to manage money well.
“My mum highlighted to me very early on that I’ve got expensive tastes, I like nice things. And so I’d need to earn good money for that lifestyle,” she says.
“That just put me on a course. And she said, ‘why don’t you start reading the business pages and see what people are talking about, see what jobs are available’.”
McQueen started doing that in intermediate school, she says. She studied and qualified as an accountant, getting a good job with international giant KPMG.
But something still wasn’t right.
“Although I was earning good money, I still wasn’t getting ahead and I think that was the first lesson for me that, okay, I am financially literate and I’m financially confident and I’m earning good income. So that should be like the three trump cards right there. Yet it wasn’t translating to progress. I’m not stupid. But why is that?”
There was a missing piece to the puzzle.
“I think earning money doesn’t mean that you know how to grow wealth. And I wanted to go on a journey to try and understand that with me, I guess, as the guinea pig of that journey.”
One of the troubles with financial advice is it is often about where to 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 behaviour around money, she says. All the knowledge in the world doesn’t make you rich unless you act on it.
McQueen realised traditional financial consultancy wasn’t for her.
“For some people that is the right path. For me, although I am a qualified chartered accountant, I’m not an accountant. I’m aware of risk and I mitigate risk, but I’m not fearful of risk. I’m entrepreneurial. I want to push the boundaries. I want to challenge the status quo,” she says.
But her initial leap into the entrepreneurial world wasn’t exactly intentional.
McQueen took a job as a mortgage broker.
“I wanted to try and understand how the banks see people because they’ve got their own kind of weird calculators,” she says.
“As part of that, I was talking to one of my colleagues and she said, It’d be so good if we helped people get out of debt rather than into debt.”
To McQueen, this sounded like a great idea. She and her colleague devised a business plan.
“Through the mortgage brokering, I came to realise that you pay three times what you borrow back to the bank. And the banks would have us focus on interest rate discounts and things,” she says.
“On my mortgage, I was going to pay a million dollars back. The interest rate that I was fighting for was going to save me $12,000 out of the million dollars. 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 was not having a bar of it,” she says.
“I am the definition of a goody good. I love to please people and being fired from a job at 22, or whatever it was, that felt humiliating.”
With hindsight, one of the benefits of being completely humiliated is that you no longer have fear of failure, she says.
“And so that’s when I thought, okay, well 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 for paying off her mortgage as quickly as possible.
She hit a wall when the maths got complex so she partnered with University of Auckland’s Dr Jamie Snedden to develop a calculus formula for paying off her mortgage in the shortest time, with the lowest interest cost, and the greatest flexibility.
McQueen says the other part of the equation is addressing people’s financial behaviour and helping them adjust it to keep moving forward.
“Behavioural economics has more of a role to play here than financial literacy,” she says. “If you’re programmed to be a spender as I am, it’s not that I can’t save, I just need a reason to save. So engaging me is different to how you would engage a saver.”
Listen to the full episode to hear more from Hannah McQueen about her story and her advice.
Money Talks is a podcast run by the NZ Herald. It isn’t about personal finance and isn’t about economics – 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 has shaped them.
The series is hosted by Liam Dann, business editor-at-large for 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 on iHeartRadio, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.