School Leaver's Money Essentials

A practical session for students finishing high school (and their parents) covering the five core money skills every young person needs before entering the real world: building wealth, budgeting, banking systems, saving, and smart spending. Financial educator Mandy Money breaks each concept into simple, immediately actionable steps.

Key takeaways

• True wealth is measured by net worth (assets minus liabilities), not by appearances: owning a car or house with no debt attached is worth far more than looking rich while leveraged to the limit.
• A functional budget needs only three columns: income, spending, and savings. The moment pay lands in your account, transfer your savings portion immediately rather than spending first and saving what is left over.
• Setting up separate bank accounts for income, spending, and savings (the digital equivalent of your grandparents' cash tins) is one of the most effective ways to stay on budget without complex spreadsheets.
• Having a specific, time-bound savings goal (for example, saving $1,000 a month for 12 months to buy a $12,000 car) makes it far easier to resist impulse spending because you have a concrete future reward to weigh against the purchase.
• Creating personal "black and white rules" around spending (things you simply never buy) removes the mental effort of resisting temptation each time and is one of the most powerful behavioural tools for building long-term financial security.

Welcome and why money skills matter for school leavers

Rob: G'day, and welcome to the National Virtual Expo. I'm your host, Rob Malicki, coming to you today from Garigal land in Sydney. Paying my respects to the traditional custodians of this magnificent land on which I live and work. I'm really pumped about today's session because it's such an important one for young people, and in fact not just for young people. Basically anyone at almost any stage of life. But this one's especially for people who are getting towards the end of their time in high school. This is, of course, on money essentials for school leavers. We're going to be talking about the five things that high school students need to know about managing their money before they leave high school. My guest today is possibly the perfect person to talk about it. I'm going to be joined in just a moment by Mandy Money.

Rob: Throughout the expo, you've got your chance to engage with these sessions. If you're on social media watching this session, you can ask your questions in the chat. If you're on the virtual expo hub, you can also pop your questions in there and we'll do our very best to get to them. And of course, lots of information in the description down below about this session and about Mandy Money, along with links to other sessions coming up as part of the virtual expo. But without further ado, let's sit down with Mandy Money. Welcome, Mandy. Hello, National Virtual Expo. Thanks for joining me.

Guest: Thank you for having me. Great to be here. I'm super pumped for this.

Rob: When I first came up with this concept of doing a national virtual expo, I thought to myself, if I could get one person as a keynote speaker, it would be Mandy Money. And the reason for that is that when I was going through school and even at uni, I had no knowledge of any of this stuff. Now, being where I am in life, I look back and think: if I'd known what I know now, back then...

Guest: You'd be so much better off. Yeah, hindsight is 20/20. One of the big reasons I do what I do is for that exact same reason. If someone had given me just some of that information back then, I would have made so many different decisions and my run would have been a little bit smoother along the way. So now the mission is to make sure that we build a generation of financially empowered young people that have this information and take action as soon as possible.

Rob: It's funny, isn't it, because it seems scary. Money and financial management seems like something that's really technical and complicated. But as we're going to discover today, there are so many easy, actionable things you can do, whether you're 14, 16, 18, or 40, that can actually help set you up for the years ahead.

Guest: Absolutely. It's something I always find interesting. It's much less about massive numbers and heavy technical detail than you might think, and a lot more to do with the psychology behind taking action, and maybe why you don't take action. So it's a fascinating concept. The technical components can be difficult when you get into more complex things, but fundamentally what we're going to be talking about today are five really actionable things you can do right now as a high school student. These are things you can absolutely implement within minutes. They don't need a huge amount of technical or mathematical expertise, and that's the beauty of it.

A map of your financial life: the two key levers

Guest: Before we dive into those five things, I think one of the most useful places to start is with a bit of context. When we think about financial literacy and money as a young person, often one of the key reasons we don't dive in, or we're scared to, or it's intimidating, is because it seems like there's so much, and you don't know where to begin. So let's start with the lay of the land.

Guest: Right where you are now, you're probably leaving school or you've recently left, or you will in the next few years. One pathway you're going to go down is finding employment or income: choosing your study and career direction, looking for a job, developing those skills, starting in the world of work, and perhaps creating side hustles if entrepreneurship is an ambition or you're looking for extra income streams. Down the other pathway, all these other exciting things are also going to happen: buying a car, a phone, maybe going on holidays like schoolies, looking after your health, moving out, whether that's renting or buying.

Guest: A little further down the track, the next level of things will come your way: investing in property, the stock market, or funds, and getting serious about your super. On the other side of that, you'll be looking at how to protect money from dwindling through inflation or hidden costs, how to save on tax, how to do tax returns, insurance, and dealing with debt, whether it's small or bigger.

Guest: You can spot two trends here. On one pathway you're focused on increasing the money coming in: all the activities and skills you want to develop to increase the amount of money that flows into your ecosystem. On the other side you've got money going out, and this is all about developing the skills to decrease the money leaving your ecosystem. Those are essentially the two levers you're working with. At the core of all of these skills is budgeting and your money systems. You're effectively just trying to create the places and processes and that very basic planning to make sure the money coming in and the money going out are balancing. That is effectively it. You don't need to overcomplicate it with heaps of spreadsheets. It's about just managing that money, in an app for example. And the ultimate aim for most people across all of this is building wealth.

Understanding your money mindset

Rob: Just as you're talking about mindset, I think it's so much about what we're anchored in. All of our values, ideas, thoughts, and approaches to life come from somewhere. Some people will, by default, want to make a lot of money. That desire comes from somewhere in their back story. Other people are like, I want to spend it all, I just want to enjoy life, and that also comes from somewhere. It could be that their family had no money, or maybe they had a grandmother who had a lot of wealth but regretted not doing more with her life. We all have these influences. So I really encourage people to think about why they have their particular attitude to money, whatever that might be.

Guest: Absolutely. It's been really interesting going through this journey as an entrepreneur. Coming out of high school, one of my ambitions was to have more money than I knew what to do with, because of certain things in my upbringing. We were immigrants and moved countries three times, and there was a lot of perceived financial stress. That really drove a lot of my career choices. Then maybe five or six years ago I looked at that and said, is that really what I want, or is it just something ingrained in me from a history or a story? That made my entire experience with my career, my business, and my life so much nicer, because now I was working from a place of, I'm working to create impact, and money is an important part of that. The desire for security and safety and freedom is still there, but it's different. Analysing why you think the way you do is really, really valuable.

Rob: And if you're watching this, you are allowed to feel how you feel. Nobody's allowed to tell you that you're wrong to want more money, or that you need to do things any particular way. I personally believe that understanding why you have these feelings is going to set you up in the long run. Just make sure you're doing what you're doing because it's actually you, not because somewhere in your back story someone told you it needed to be that way. One day you could wake up and realise, whoops, this isn't actually me.

What wealth actually means: assets, liabilities, and net worth

Guest: So, what actually is wealth? There's a very key difference between being wealthy and having the appearance of being rich. You might see someone walking down the street with the designer sunglasses and the nice car and the nice house, but they could be leveraged up to their eyeballs in debt. The definition of net wealth is: your assets minus your liabilities equals your net worth. Assets are your positive financial things. Maybe it's a house, maybe it's cash. If you could sell your car tomorrow for $12,000, that technically is an asset. Your liability is anything negative on the balance sheet: something that will cost you money. So if a house is worth $400,000 but you have a mortgage of $100,000, your asset is actually only worth $300,000 in net terms. And something like a credit card bill or a buy-now-pay-later balance counts as debt too, even if it might not feel like it. So you take out all your positive assets, subtract your liabilities, and that is your actual net worth. When you're building wealth, you're aiming for more assets and fewer liabilities: earning more, saving more, investing more, and reducing the money going out.

Rob: To summarise: assets are what you own and liabilities are what you owe. And to me, wealth is also about the non-tangibles. You own your time, you have flexibility in your work, you have your values. Everything that we own is part of our wealth. Wealth is about so much more than money.

Guest: Absolutely. You could have enormous financial assets but if you have no time or health to actually live your life, you do question whether that is true wealth. In a pure financial sense that equation is the definition, but you've got to think bigger. And when you're choosing your career and your university, it is worth thinking about what will create financial wealth but also give you the opportunity to create wealth in other areas of your life, like time, lifestyle, and being able to live according to your values.

Rob: Of course, it's very hard to have wealth in those intangible areas of life if you haven't got the hard assets behind you as well. So this is a balance between the two. Happiness isn't guaranteed whether you're rich or poor, but having that security and that freedom can bring a lot of opportunity. It can almost sit at that level of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, where it needs to be there to enable you to experience a certain level of emotional safety and happiness. It's not essential, but it can really, really help. So it's about finding that balance. And I think when you're young, there's a really easy mentality to fall into: YOLO. Go and live your life, spend money on experiences and experimenting and doing things. But just keep one eye on building little levels of financial security so that one day, when you decide to turn the corner into a more serious stage of life, you have a little bit of leverage and something there to help you take good steps forward.

Budgeting: keeping it simple with three numbers

Guest: Budgeting gets a bad rap. When I think of budgeting, the first thing that comes to mind is complicated graphs and Excel sheets and the whole thing. And absolutely, when you're older there is a time and a place for that. But effectively all you're doing is balancing money coming in and money going out. The money going out is either going to come out today, on things like rent, food, or fun, or it's going to come out later for future you: maybe saving up for a house deposit in ten years.

Guest: When you transform that equation, you literally just flip it sideways, and that forms a functional budget. You've got three headings: income, spending, savings. Under income, maybe you've got two jobs or a job and a side hustle. Under spending, you've got food, fun, essentials, health, whatever your categories are. Under savings, maybe you've got one goal, maybe two or three. That is effectively all a budget is. If you have a good grip on just your key category numbers and you're able to stick within them, what more do you need?

Rob: I've run multi-million dollar businesses, starting from zero. And I've run a fairly streamlined process around that, which is: spend less than you make. That's basically it. In the end, that ends up as a positive, which grows the savings. Of course it becomes more complicated the bigger you get, but even when we graduated to spreadsheets and proper budgets, the overall principle was fairly simple.

Guest: That's it. And as a high school student, don't freak yourself out by trying to overcomplicate it. Those are the three numbers you're looking for. At the start of the week or the month, you write down what those numbers are: how much income you're going to make, how much you're going to spend, and how much you're going to save. When your money comes in, you take action. Your boss pays you into your account, you transfer money into spending and you transfer money to savings. Then at the end of the month you check: did I make those numbers, or did I go over? And if you went over, you make a new plan for the next month.

Setting up a banking system that matches your budget

Rob: You mentioned having multiple accounts. Can you talk to that quickly? When I was young and doing my initial savings, that's pretty much how I worked.

Guest: The first time this really clicked for me was when my grandma was telling me a story about how, when she was in charge of the household finances, she would literally get an envelope full of cash and divide it up into tins: one for bills, one for food, one for savings. That philosophy is exactly what happens today, except the money's in the cloud and the savings tins are on your phone. What you want to do is have separate locations, which might be bank accounts, for each of the different purposes of your money. You might have the account your boss pays your income into, and then from there, according to your budget plan, you send some to a savings account and some to a spending account that has a card attached to it. Keep in mind this is just visualising the locations for your money. It's not necessarily a recommendation of what accounts to get. You can have a simpler or a more complicated system than this, but it's about visualising: my money's coming in, where is it going and where is it being stored?

Guest: So going back to our example budget: you've got $200 income, you transfer $110 according to your budget plan into spending and $90 into savings. The plan is there, and now you put it into action.

Building your savings skills with goals and systems

Guest: Improving your savings skills is a really important thing to do. There's a lot of research to say that once your income reaches a certain point, it has very little to do with your financial wellbeing. Your ability to save and then invest that money is a really big component. I know people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars who spend all of it, so their savings amount is similar to someone earning much, much less who saves much more. So the ability to prioritise paying future you is a really big skill to master.

Guest: The first step in developing savings skills is quite literally: what are you saving for, and how much are you saving? They call it a SMART goal: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. So rather than saying, "I want to buy a car at some point this year," you say, "I want to buy a car that is $12,000, in 12 months, which means $1,000 per month in savings, and I want it because it will bring freedom and flexibility in my ability to travel." Getting really specific, with a measure and a time frame. Then you build it into that budget plan. A goal without a plan is just a dream. And I know this sounds simple, but most people don't put savings into their budget. Just having that as part of your budget plan puts you in a really, really good direction.

Rob: When I went into university, I wanted to do a student exchange programme, and that was my big focus. Just having that goal and knowing that I needed to get to a certain savings amount in order to self-fund that international travel experience was what motivated me to work harder. And let's face it, most of us spend too much money on stuff we don't need and won't use. Once you have that motivation, that goal that really draws you, you realise: I don't need a $15 smoothie when I'm walking through the mall. You'd much rather put that aside for the big thing you're working towards.

Guest: Exactly. When I don't have a goal it's much harder to resist spending, because you don't have anything to latch onto. You're like, well, what does it matter? So it's really important for multiple reasons. And then the third part, which I think is the hardest, is just making it happen. What is the actual process? You've got this plan to put $90 into savings each week. How, literally, will you do that? The answer could be automating a transfer on your phone, or if you work casual and don't always know when or how much your pay will be, it could be that on a Sunday night you sit down, you transfer that money, and that is how you do it. Then do what you can to make that money inaccessible. My banking app has a hide feature where I literally hide my savings account from view so I can't see it, and that's sometimes enough to let me forget it's there. You can lock it, you can get a term deposit, you can even call the bank and ask them not to let you touch that money without calling them first.

Rob: That's about friction, isn't it? The harder you make it to access your savings, the more it puts just that little bit of resistance there. It's about increasing the friction around spending and decreasing the friction around saving. You can literally rig your own life to work with your brain rather than against it. If you want to lose two kilos, don't have chocolate in the house. There might be a shop around the corner, but that's the friction: you've got to go out of your way, and that little bit of time is enough for your brain to go, actually, I don't really want this, because I've got this bigger picture goal.

Guest: Ultimately, when it comes to saving skills, you can put all the systems in place that you want, but it comes down to building your delayed gratification muscle: being able to resist something now for a much bigger future reward. As a generation surrounded by technology built for instant gratification, this is a muscle that is not very well exercised in young people generally. One way to practise is to develop a really clear picture of what you want. So: I really want to go to Oxford. I can imagine walking out onto the lawns, meeting friends, going to the pub after. When you're faced with the temptation to spend on something, you compare it with that feeling. Do I really want this compared to that? The expression I always come back to is: what do I want most versus what do I want now? Always try to choose what you want most.

Spending skills: wants versus needs, thrift, and black-and-white rules

Guest: Now to the last area: working on your spending skills to reduce the money going out. One of the key decisions you're constantly going to be making when you spend is whether what you want to buy is a want or a need, and constantly weighing that up. There's a tool called the Demand Score Calculator, by a company in Canada. It's a little tool that helps you calculate whether something is a want or a need. It looks at factors like: will you reuse it, is it good for your health, is it good for the environment? You do this for a little while and those questions start popping up in your head naturally when you go shopping. I'd give it a try, and Rob can link it in the chat or in the session description.

Rob: Yep, absolutely. And for those watching the recording, these resources are already in the session description down below, because Mandy provided many of them in advance.

Guest: Spending skill number one: get thrifty. Get used to secondhand shopping, keeping your eyes out, fixing things rather than buying new, getting items tailored, borrowing from friends, using marketplace apps. There are so many ways to get really thrifty and save money.

Rob: People might think that means being so frugal you can't enjoy yourself, but even something simple like going to a cafe with friends and sticking to your $20 budget rather than adding extras that push the bill to $40 can make a real difference. It doesn't mean cutting yourself off from life experiences.

Guest: Exactly. Eating something small at home before you go out so you're not starving and over-ordering is another one. Spending skill number two: spend according to your values. Figure out what actually matters to you, and that might make you think, "I really want this fancy dress or these nice shoes, but I value experiences more, so do I want to spend $300 now, or put this towards a flight or a camping trip?" Wasting money on things that aren't actually going to bring you happiness is one of the fastest ways to undermine your financial goals. And then: cancel unused subscriptions, remember to cancel free trials. That's a big money drainer.

Guest: Number three: make your savings really hard to access. If you can't easily get to that money, you're much less likely to spend it. I also like framing it as a challenge. I've only got $200 for the rest of this month, let's see how well I can stick to it. Phrase it in a way that makes it almost a game.

Guest: Number four: learn the numbers that help you make good spending decisions. Things like discounts, unit pricing, and markups. In the supermarket, for example, loose potatoes can sometimes have a lower unit price than the same potatoes sold in a bag. Being able to look at those numbers and understand what they're telling you helps you make better decisions. Another big one is being able to spot impulse marketing. Your social media feeds are filled with people paid to sell you things while making it look natural. Being able to spot sponsored posts and paid influencer promotions makes it much easier to say no. And then there's buying for value and long-term savings. Sometimes you don't have the choice, but when you do it's worth asking: can I buy the slightly more expensive but better-made option that I won't have to replace three times?

Rob: I've got one that's always worked really well for me, and it's probably a good rule for life in general: having black-and-white rules. Things you absolutely do every single time, and things you absolutely do not do. For me, for example, if I'm trying to save money, I have a black-and-white rule that I do not eat donuts. I have a weak spot for donuts. So if I'm trying to save money, I just set myself a black-and-white rule: I do not eat donuts. Sounds trivial, but it really works. And I'll give you another example: I was in Vanuatu a couple of years ago chatting with a young woman who had travelled extensively. I asked how she managed to make it all happen, and she said she doesn't drink. She made a conscious decision as a teenager that she would never drink alcohol because she wanted to travel, after reading that the average Australian adult spends something like $100,000 on alcohol over their lifetime. She decided she'd rather put that money towards airfares. That was her black-and-white rule, and it funded years of travel around the world. She still goes out with friends. She just drinks water.

Guest: Absolutely. These little things that align with your values, and having that kind of cold turkey approach around specific areas, can be really, really valuable. Some people have no-spend weeks or no-spend days. For this next seven days I am not buying coffee: that's just it, and I'm going to deal with it. Then you start making it at home and you build those habits. If you're feeling out of control with your money, creating those rules, even temporarily, can really help your brain lock in and say, that's off limits.

Rob: And when you're faced with resisting it, you just say, "I don't do that, that's not me." It's a complete sentence. People will actually respect you for those choices the moment you say it, because it demonstrates strong will. Black-and-white rules: gold.

Wrapping up: your five core habits to start today

Guest: So those are the five areas we've focused on today. Building wealth: understanding what you're actually aiming for, which is owning valuable assets, not looking rich. Budgeting: beginning even simple budgeting processes. Banking systems: setting up your accounts to align with your budget. Savings skills: creating those goals, putting in those systems, and working on that delayed gratification muscle. And spending skills: putting in those processes, getting clear about what you're spending on and what you're not, and making money you don't want to spend as inaccessible as possible. All the other financial things: investing, super, tax, and so on, you can work on at different points in your life. But these habits right here are your core. That's it from me, Rob.

Rob: Thank you so much. We've got some questions that came in advance from people who filled out the survey before the expo, and a fair few on this topic, so let's get to at least one. For anything we don't get to today, head to the virtual expo Discord, details in the description below, and parents, there's a Facebook group for you as well. All questions will be answered there. But just one quick one for you, Mandy: how much of their part-time or casual income should someone who's just finishing high school be looking to save?

Guest: There is a ratio that gets bandied about quite a lot: 50% of income on needs, 20% on wants, and 30% on savings. That can be really positive if it works for you, but it can also be completely irrelevant depending on your life situation, what you're spending on, and what your income is. To be very honest, I think you should be putting as much as you can into your savings, and I don't mean that in a way of not living your life at all. Look really critically at what your actual expenses are and what you genuinely want to spend on. Whatever is left over from your wage, put that into savings the second it lands in your account. Do not wait until after you've spent to put it in. Pay future you first, and then whatever's left over is yours to spend today.

Rob: Mandy Money, thank you so much for joining me at the National Virtual Expo.

Guest: Thank you so much, Rob. This has been so great. Feel free to reach out on Facebook or Instagram with any questions or feedback, and if you'd like to grab a copy of the Mandy Money book, there's a QR code in the session description. I hope those ten copies have already been claimed!

Rob: Thanks everyone. See you next time.