Chances are, you’ve seen one of Frances Cook’s videos telling you how to save or manage your money better, after the award-winning journalist and podcast host became the go-to for smart and easy-to-understand financial advice. Well, she’s taken her own advice and gone solo, starting up her own podcast with partner Kiwibank. She talks to Capsule about taking the plunge and her advice for others wanting to do the same.
When it comes to money advice, people are always trying to offer you a magic number. Maybe it’s the amount you need to save for a house deposit! Maybe it’s the amount you need to keep in case of emergencies. Maybe it’s the amount you need to become one of those annoying people who wants to retire at 40 (and do what, I ask?)
This is not something that Frances Cook, award-winning journalist and host of the brand-new Making Cents podcast, subscribes to. Her platform as a financial journalist started when she turned herself into a bit of a financial case study: she didn’t know much about money, but as a journalist, she had the resources to find out. That turned into a best-selling book, Tales From A Financial Hot Mess, an award-winning podcast, Cooking The Books, and a rapidly growing social media platform, where she shares financial tips and easy-to-understand advice for the online generation.
In a relatively short amount of time, Frances has become the go-to voice of reason in a crowded market – someone who was passionate about helping as many people reach financial independence as possible. But what that looks like is different for everyone, she says.
There’s no point giving people a specific number to aim for, Frances says, because everyone’s actual aims are different. Instead, she believes we should think bigger. “What are you goals in life, what makes you happy – and how to do you work backwards from that, to make the money to support those goals?” she says. “That’s all that money is good for – building it up like a dragon and just having a big pile of money, like Smaug and his mountain, is not going to make you happy.”
In her own case, financial independence has meant that for the first time in her career, Frances has full creative independence. All of those podcasts and platforms she built, she did while working full-time as a journalist for major media companies like NZME – who publish the NZ Herald and run the IHeartRadio podcast network. And while she loved her time there and was prolific in what she created for the company, there was a tiny part of her that wondered what it would be like if she ran her own business – and had full creative control.
“I’m not someone who ever aspired to be a middle manager or climbing the ladder in that sort of way, I’ve always loved the work itself,” Frances says. “I’m just obsessed with my audience – audience first, all the time. I want to give them the best stories, the best tips and information that leaves them thinking for the entire day.”
Frances says she had reached the point that so many people reach before they take the self-employed plunge: “It was the biggest thing I struggled with, for the longest time: having the faith in my ability to do it on my own.”
Thanks to her work in the field, she had reached the level of financial independence she is always trying to help her audience to reach, where she had a buffer for her and her family (she and her husband have two young children). And what’s the point of a creating a solid financial base, if not to take a risk?
“I know that I can take care of myself for a certain amount of time – and that freedom then allows you to embrace instability elsewhere in life.” For someone who is a self-described “horrible worrywart”, Frances said eventually she realised she needed to follow her own advice.
“I thought, what advice would I give someone who wrote into me in this position: they wanted to try something on their own, but they were afraid?” she says. “I realised that I would tell them to jump. So, it was time for me to jump.”
Making Cents is her new podcast, her first solo project, where she teamed up with Kiwibank as a partner – to help bring on experts while also supporting Frances’ work. It was not necessarily an easy journey to find a partner who matched her ‘audience first’ mentality – Frances says she turned down two sponsors along the way – but she was thrilled to find a values match in Kiwibank.
“The audience is not dumb – they’re going to want to know that I’m still an independent person, that they can trust to talk to them about their money,” she says. “It’s about helping people figure out their money and if at any point it feels like it’s no longer audience first, then this is done. I will absolutely cut off my nose to spite my face to protect that.”
Trust is an invaluable part of talking to people about their money, because it is such a hugely personal and vulnerable part of people’s lives. Part of the reason Frances has been so successful is because she’s been where the audience is and understands how to communicate big concepts into small, achievable steps, all in a judgement-free zone.
“If at any point people feel talked down to, or they feel that someone doesn’t understand why they’ve made the decisions they’ve made so far, then people’s walls go up immediately. And fair enough!”
Early on in her career pivot as a financial journalist, Frances was already being exposed to how many people were at the mercy of bad advice, or bad situations, and ended up in a financial hole because of it. She talked to another journalist who had been covering personal finance for years and asked her: are there ever any stories that keep you up at night?
“She said, ‘No, it’s none of the stories that I’ve covered; it’s the thought of the people who I know will never see my work, and it could have really helped them.’”
This, in turn, haunted Frances as well. “There is really low-hanging fruit in the money world – really small changes that almost anyone can do, which will make their lives better. And especially over years, it can often make their lives much better.”
That was the impetus Frances needed to take her work onto social media – both on Instagram, where she has 87.6k followers and TikTok, where she has 111k followers. There can be a feeling of snobbery from journalists about using these platforms, but Frances says there is such a need for good, accurate information to stand out amongst the crowd. It’s a great place for experts to take their work, distill it into simple, easy to follow words and help reach an audience of people who, in any another circumstance, would simply shrivel up when they hear the term “personal finance.”
Her career trajectory has surprised her – “podcasts didn’t even exist when I was studying” – but the kaupapa has always been the same: “share information that is a) interesting and b) helpful to my audience,” she says. You just have to be willing to be nimble to meet the audience where they are. “There are still places to talk to people, to create a really good business, if you’re willing to embrace what is, instead of what was.”
For people who are mulling over their own leap into the world of self-employment, Frances has some specific advice. Firstly, do not let the fear of having to manage your own tax keep you from doing so – even Frances, a financial journalist, hates tax. “Everyone assumes that ‘Oh, you’ll be great at that side of it,’” she laughs. “But, nope! I don’t think anyone enjoys tax. That’s what an accountant is for!”
And secondly, if your employment contract allows, start your own business on the side and work your way up to a full-time business. Start freelancing in your own time or reduce your full-time job to four days a week and start your own business one day a week. Ease into it, rather than going all or nothing.
“I hadn’t even realised I was doing that – it wasn’t deliberate – but in terms of building up mu social media audience and talking to people directly, I had been doing that for quite a while,” Frances says. “All of that social media content I had been doing in my own time, and it turned into something super powerful for me.”
Making Cents with Frances Cook is available now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
