Life Chapters, Money Choices – Episode 1 Transcript

Why We Tell These Stories

Interview Transcript

Michael Avery:
Welcome to the very first episode of a new podcast, Life Chapters, Money Choices. This podcast has been a long time in the making. I’m Michael Avery, and in this series we’re exploring the human side of money, not the TLAs, the three-letter acronyms, or the investment jargon, which are important, but the real, raw, sometimes messy and sometimes magical moments that money quietly shapes in our lives, and the conversations and relationships we have with it. Because life doesn’t happen in neat, straight lines. It unfolds in chapters. Some are expected, some are surprising, and every one of those chapters comes with choices: financial ones, yes, but also deeply emotional ones.

In this opening episode, I’m joined by the person who has been pioneering this way of thinking in South Africa, the heartbeat behind this podcast, Kim Potgieter. She’s a coach, an author, a director at Chartered Wealth Solutions, and someone who has really flipped the script when it comes to thinking about financial planning as life planning in South Africa. We’re going to explore Kim’s journey and why we started this podcast.

There’s a lovely metaphor in your book Retirement, Kim, around the kaleidoscope. You open the book by inviting us to imagine our lives through a lens that is always turning and always changing, with the same pieces forming entirely new patterns. So, on that note, welcome. Take us back to that first meeting we had at your office, when you approached me with this idea of talking about the emotional and psychological relationships we have with money. I thought it was a breath of fresh air. As someone who does this daily on radio, we talk all about cents, the movement of gold, what is happening geopolitically, and IRRs, but we don’t talk about this side of things. Why did you want to create this space, this kind of conversation, now?

Kim Potgieter:
Thanks, Michael. I’ve written the two books Retirement and Midlife Money Makeover. I’ve been working as a certified financial planner for the last 18 years. Every day I work with people and chat to them about their life with money, and yet I still see so much confusion, because the general conversation is so often centred around return on investment.

The reason I came into the industry was because I wanted to help people see money as an enabler, and I wanted to encourage more return-on-life discussions. I’m not saying return on investment isn’t important, because without money, it’s like oxygen, there’s not much we can do. But there are so many layers to it. There’s a whole relationship that we have with money.

I get to work with people who have a lot of money and are very happy. I also work with people who have a lot of money and are very unhappy. Then there are people who don’t have much and are likewise happy or unhappy. So, for me, it’s less about the number and more about what is going on inside you, and all the dynamics of the relationship you have with money.

The reason I approached you to do this podcast is that I want to spread this message. I want people not to feel alone. I want them to resonate with what we’re talking about, and I want to offer hope that there is a different way of doing things.

That hope often comes from vulnerability and from sharing our experiences. I think people often have a misconception. You look at people who seem happy and who have perhaps found financial freedom and comfort, and you assume it must have been a straight line, that it must have been easy, or that they must have come from money. All of those things are complete myths.

Michael Avery:
And you’ve written very openly about growing up in a financially comfortable but emotionally constrained household. How did that shape your early beliefs about money, safety and control?

Kim Potgieter:
Well, it’s why I’m doing what I’m doing. Often, when people devote their lives to something, I always say the work that I do is not a job. It has been a personal journey for me. I came from a completely dysfunctional family around money. My father controlled us with money.

I don’t think he did it in a way he was even aware of, but it was what he knew. He believed that if he controlled the money, he could perhaps make sure that we stayed around and did what he wanted us to do. I don’t think it brought him happiness, and it certainly brought us a lot of complexity in our lives.

When I was a young girl, I was at a private school and mixing with people from very different circumstances. Yet at home I knew that my school fees weren’t being paid and that I couldn’t go to the dentist and have an injection because we didn’t have medical aid, so I had my fillings done without it. I was living in two worlds, and it wasn’t as though my father didn’t have enough money. It was simply how he operated.

He hoarded. We would go to Makro, and he would stockpile all sorts of things at home. When he passed away, I had to throw so much of it out. That was his complexity, but it deeply affected my mother, my brother and me. From that, I made a whole set of decisions. Those were beliefs I had absorbed, and I decided that nobody was ever going to control me with money.

Those are the kinds of things I was thinking about as a young girl. I think that is why I went to university and studied psychology, because I wanted to understand it more deeply. Only years later did I go back and study finance, because I first thought I was going to be a psychologist. Then I realised that people don’t usually talk to their psychologist about money. They talk to a financial planner. That is why I went back to study finance and eventually came into the financial planning industry, perhaps in disguise, but still with the same goal: to talk to people about money in a more meaningful way.

Michael Avery:
We’ll come back to the way you’ve been very courageous in approaching Andrew Bradley and a few others. It’s really a hallmark of yours, Kim, and it is also courageous to write so openly about your formative years. I think many people have difficult relationships with money that stem from those early experiences.

I just want to stay with that for a moment longer, because there was a very vivid section in the book where you wrote about your mother not being able to choose what to cook, and about how you suffered burns in the bath and she had to run with you to the hospital because the car was locked away. That was the level of control.

What did that teach you about the role of agency, especially for women?

Kim Potgieter:
When I was younger and watching my mother, I used to feel frustrated. I’m talking about a 16-year-old girl thinking, “You know what, Mum, just stand up for yourself. Why are you letting him do this to you? Why would you ever let somebody have this kind of control over you?”

Then, when I had my first child and looked at my own child, I realised that for my mother it was so important that her children did not come from a divorced family, because she herself had come from one. She stayed in that situation so that we would not carry the pain she had felt as a child.

So, when I went into relationships, I always wanted to make sure that I had control. Yet so much of what we do comes from our past and from the ways we’ve been shaped by it, the stories we create about what makes us safe, and what makes us a good mother or a good person.

I judged my mother quite harshly. Now, as a more mature adult, I look back and realise that she was simply doing what so many of us do, trying to be the best version of ourselves and doing the best we can. She’s no longer here for me to share this with, and that is sad for me, but I did have the chance to speak to her about some of it.

I think that is part of why this work matters so much to me. So many of us carry these complexities, and often we do not really have anyone to share them with.

Michael Avery:
And both your parents, in fact, died quite young and quite tragically, your father in a hijacking and your mother after a short battle with cancer. That must have shaped your urgency to live life on your own terms, because we often look at our parents and see people who lived with the idea that one day everything they wanted to do would begin.

My parents were certainly like that. My dad had his own business, DJ Motors in Jewel Street, and he put all of his retirement savings into that one basket. As the saying goes, don’t put all your eggs into one basket. But he did, and his business partner ran away with the money. In his 50s, as a white male in the early 1990s, he was almost unemployable. It was a very difficult period for him until he died five years ago.

That shaped my own relationship with money, because I did not want to end up in that situation. So I started saving for retirement almost from my first pay cheque. But how did those experiences shape your urgency and your relationship with money?

Kim Potgieter:
Sure, Michael, the story you’ve just shared is one I hear quite often. People talk about what happened in childhood and how it shaped them, and those experiences can affect you throughout your life. Maybe not always in the same way, but through awareness and reflection, you can begin to realise that those experiences do not have to define your reality.

For me personally, my father was 59 when he died. I remember looking at his desk the next day and seeing a list of all the people he wanted to invite to his 60th birthday party. My dad was one of those people who kept saying, “One day, when I retire, one day, when I retire.” And although I had a difficult childhood around money, I loved him completely.

I remember looking at that list and thinking, We never got to do this. Seeing that he had not lived his life fully was the catalyst for my decision to go back and study financial planning. I thought, You know what, I need to reach more people and help make sure this is not their story.

That was a huge turning point for me and the reason I entered the financial planning industry. Then I looked at my mother, who died at 63 from pancreatic and liver cancer, and I realised how much resentment she had kept inside herself. So much of her life was spent doing what she believed was the right thing for us as children: not getting divorced and not rocking the boat at home.

She internalised all of that pain and carried it on her own. For me, that became another lesson. From my father I learned about the danger of postponing life until retirement. From my mother I learned what can happen when pain is never expressed and simply stays inside you.

Those are the conversations I like to have with people. I want to encourage them to talk about their pain and to talk about their dreams. And when people speak about one day, I want to say, “No, today is the day.”

So yes, those experiences have had a profound influence on how I live my own life. Anyone who knows me knows that I love going on courses and travelling overseas. I try to balance living fully now with planning responsibly for the future, because I cannot encourage other people to do that if I am not willing to live it myself.

Michael Avery:
You know, it’s such a powerful lesson, especially your mother’s lesson, around simply absorbing the pain, being a martyr and living quietly. You think you’re doing the right thing in that position. And this is not to judge in hindsight, because we do what we think, in the moment and in our circumstances, is best for our children. We think we’re being selfless.

But we’re actually setting examples for our children: money examples, relationship examples and other patterns they may carry forward. Sometimes, doing what makes you happy is the most selfless thing you can do, because you cannot pour from a cup that is suffering internally and half empty.

And I think this is one of the themes we’re going to unpack throughout the podcast series. But I want to move away from that formative period to the point when you found yourself running a catering business, was it? From there, how did you meet Andrew Bradley, who I think is very well known in the industry? In fact, one of his books is sitting on my bookshelf, How Much Is Enough? But you simply picked up the phone and called him, because that’s what Kim Potgieter does. And you said, “I want to work with people and their money. I just don’t know how.”

Kim Potgieter:
As I said, I thought I would become a psychologist and do it that way. Then I realised it was through financial planning. I started investigating who the good financial planners were. To be honest, I didn’t really like financial planners.

Michael Avery:
They got a bad reputation, and some of them deservedly so, right? You talk about life annuities that were sold with punitive early termination terms and all the rest of it, and the pension funds that got involved. There was that old-school image of a very masculine man arriving at your house with a briefcase, knocking on the door, selling you a policy, and then you never saw him again.

Kim Potgieter:
Absolutely. And that had been my experience. Look, things have definitely improved now, but that was my history. Then I picked up an article Andrew Bradley had written and thought, “Oh my gosh, this is someone who I think is a real financial planner.” I contacted him, and he very kindly gave me some time and more or less offered me a job.

And I said, “Andrew, that’s not quite what I want to do. I want to change the industry.” I knew that deep inside myself. Then he said, “Well, I know these forward-thinking guys who own this business, John Campbell and Barkley Hall. Maybe you should go and see them.”

I went to see them, and they were very kind. They simply hired me. But unfortunately for them, they hadn’t asked me a few pertinent questions, like, “Do you like working with a computer?” which I absolutely do not.

So yes, fast forward a couple of years and after making some changes in the business, I became a shareholder. I started having a major impact on how we worked. What we did at Chartered was different, because we brought in this concept of life planning.

I didn’t feel we could be investing people’s money and planning their futures if we didn’t understand what they wanted for their lives and what their relationship with money looked like. Fortunately for me, John and Barkley were open to changing the business, and they embraced it. I’ve now been in business with them for 15 years.

Michael Avery:
You had no prior industry experience. This is important. You studied industrial psychology, and then, what, clinical psychology through UNISA. How did you navigate the self-doubt that must have come with retraining, starting over and carving out a new identity?

Kim Potgieter:
I don’t know. I was like a bull in a china shop, to be honest. There wasn’t a lot of self-doubt, because I still remember having to investigate what you needed to do to become a financial planner, and I saw that you had to do a postgraduate qualification.

I applied to the University of the Free State to do it, and they turned me down because I didn’t have a finance degree and therefore couldn’t do my honours in it. But it didn’t stop me. They had a refresher programme for postgraduate students, and I went to it. The head of the university was there.

I waited until the end. I’m now friends with Wessel. I went up to him and said, “Wessel, I applied, you declined me, but I’m coming to change the industry, so I’d really like you to accept me to do my studies.”

The next week, I heard that I had been accepted. I went on to study, found people who helped me, and finished with quite a few distinctions. But there was such a strong calling in me to help other families. It was never about making a lot of money. It was about reaching a lot of people.

So, if you talk about confidence, my confidence came from wanting to help people.

Michael Avery:
You want to change the industry. I mean, that is your big, hairy, audacious goal. And it really is. It’s an industry that needs changing, and it’s something I can wholly support.

What is the big issue, the fundamental thing that is broken in the way financial planning was structured, that you wanted to change?

Kim Potgieter:
For me, it was that people saw money as the client. But it’s not the money that’s the client. It’s the person.

I remember many years ago being asked to speak at the Financial Planning Industry Conference, and I wanted to hand out hot chocolates to everyone to show that this was heart work, heart business.

My business partner John said to me, “Kim, you are going to embarrass us completely.” I said, “I don’t really mind, because I want people to realise that they’re dealing with people’s hearts. They’re dealing with their money, their dreams, their emotions and their families.”

I did that talk, and I’m not saying I got a good response from the industry at the time, but fast forward 10 years and it became the way we started talking in our industry. As good financial planners, we now talk about clients as people, not as money.

There has been such a shift, and I’m very grateful that I’ve had opportunities to help shape it.

Michael Avery:
I think by now listeners won’t be surprised to hear that, early on, you phoned Mitch Anthony in the USA, who, for those who don’t know him, is quite a doyen in this field, and asked the same thing you asked of Andrew Bradley. Tell me about that story.

Kim Potgieter:
I’ll always be grateful to Andrew Bradley, and I’ll always be grateful to Mitch, because he said, “Well, if you can get to the States, I’ll teach you.”

So we flew to the States, and Mitch gave us a week of his time in his home, where he taught us everything he had created about life planning. We came back and implemented it at Chartered, and we’ve remained great friends over the years because, for him, it has been really meaningful to see somebody put his work into practice.

He was a philosopher and a creator of these concepts, but he didn’t work with clients in the same way. At Chartered, we sit with clients and have implemented many of his exercises, personality profiling, money story questions and more. I think it has been encouraging for him to see this work lived out in a real practice.

Michael Avery:
What would you say that broader philosophy is? Is personality profiling really about understanding the human being, the individual and the heart, before we talk about the money and the head?

Kim Potgieter:
Exactly. And if people think their money is their greatest asset, I always say to them, “But you are your greatest asset.” So understand yourself. Understand your history, how you got here, the principles and values that have brought you to this point, the transition you’re going through, because we go through 60 or 70 life transitions, and then the vision for what you want to create.

Because if you can get those foundations right, the financial planning and investment planning all fall into place, and suddenly there is a why behind it all. I’ve seen far more successful outcomes when you combine both, rather than having purely transactional interactions with your planner.

Michael Avery:
It’s an industry that has, and had, become very transactional. And I think that’s why so many people are turned off by the thought of going to see a financial planner, let alone by the stories of the sharks and the bad apples out there.

Thankfully, over the last 10 years, as you say, the industry is starting to change. It’s not there yet. I’d like you to share what your ideal version of the financial planning industry in South Africa would look like five, 10 or 15 years from now, so that we can have better outcomes for South Africans.

I know you don’t like getting too deep into the numbers, but there is one number that, as a financial journalist, has not changed in the 25 years I’ve been covering the industry: only 6% of South Africans retire with enough money.

Kim Potgieter:
Six per cent.

Michael Avery:
And, to be honest, I think it may even be less than that now.

Kim Potgieter:
And then we have to ask ourselves, if that number is not improving, why not? I think one of the reasons is that we keep giving people the same message over and over again by saying, “You’re not going to get there. You’re not going to have enough.”

We’re not saying to people, “These are the steps you can take to improve your situation. These are steps within your control. These are empowering exercises you can do so that you can build a better relationship with money and feel more confident working with it.”

So I think the old fear-based approach, telling people they won’t have enough, that they’ll never be good enough, that retirement will be awful and life will be awful, is not what motivates us.

As an industry, we have to look at what different motivators will help people change their habits. At the end of the day, it comes down to habits, the beliefs we’ve picked up, the habits we put in place and the results they produce. We are not getting different results.

I think we need to change the way we have these conversations.

Michael Avery:
Yes, and that tired old marshmallow test about delayed gratification, if I have to hear or watch it one more time, I think I might throw up. It’s about finding a different way of connecting with people.

And I think a big part of what has been really impactful for me, and what I think you pioneered, is this idea of retirement not as an end, but as a rite of passage. Retirement is really about retiring to something, and that something becomes an entirely new chapter, not one of winding down or having one foot in the grave.

Where did that concept first begin to emerge for you, that retirement is really about reframing the conversation?

Kim Potgieter:
It started in my 20s, when I was going to retirement workshops.

Michael Avery:
And you were in your 20s?

Kim Potgieter:
In my 20s.

Michael Avery:
I still don’t understand why.

Kim Potgieter:
It was just something I did for fun.

Michael Avery:
There must have been a few questions asked when you were there.

Kim Potgieter:
Just looking around the room, I realised I was a bit of an anomaly. But there was already something there for me, and the message always felt very doom and gloom.

And when you ask where it came from, I go back to what I shared earlier about my father. He passed away before he even reached his 60th birthday, and I wanted to reframe this whole concept of retirement.

I worked with Chazelle, who was helping me write my first book, and she actually came up with the title Retirement. She was brilliant with words. The moment she said it, I knew it was right, because it captured the idea of finding more meaning in life in retirement.

That word does not go away. We can try to replace it, and I’ve heard other people come up with different words, but retirement is still what we’re all working towards in one form or another.

But now that we may spend 40 years or more in that chapter, let’s look at it differently. For me, if you’ve invested well and have enough money, you get to choose how you live your life, on your own terms and in your own time.

That is my goal. I don’t ever want to stop working. I love working. I love contributing. So, for me, that word brought the whole idea together beautifully.

Michael Avery:
It really does. And you quote John Ruskin in the book: “It’s not how much you make, but to what purpose you spend.” I think that’s really powerful.

But you’ve sat across from hundreds of people at life’s most vulnerable moments, transitions, divorces, deaths and reinventions. That’s why we’re doing this podcast. We originally wanted to call it Chapters of Change, but that name was taken, so we’re calling it Life Chapters, Money Choices. I think it’s a really strong title. It captures exactly what we’re trying to do.

What have those stories mostly taught you about what people are really searching for at the end of the day?

Kim Potgieter:
I think, as people, we are all different, but in many ways we are also the same. We want different things and we pursue them in different ways, but fundamentally we all want to know that we added value by being here, that by touching this earth and touching other people’s lives, we made an impact.

We are social beings. We are relationship beings. I think recognising that we are part of this whole ecosystem together is really important.

When I ask people questions such as, “What does money represent to you?” many say security. But when we go deeper, I hear stories about relationships. I hear stories about the people who matter most to them. That is when I really realise that we are relationship beings.

What people are really looking for is good, meaningful relationships.

Michael Avery:
Kim, I have to ask: if the Kim of today could go back and whisper something in the ear of the young woman who felt silenced, unsure and financially dependent all those years ago, what would she say?

Kim Potgieter:
Just be kinder to yourself.

In general, I’ve always been a searcher. I’ve always wanted to learn more, but I’ve also been hard on myself because I’ve always wanted to achieve more and more. Something I’ve learned as I’ve grown older is that if you touch one person’s life, that is enough.

So I’ve slowed the pace at which I try to do everything, because otherwise I will burn out. There is always so much work to do. I’m energised by it, so I keep doing it, but we are all human, and I need to make space for rest as well.

So I would simply tell myself to be kinder.

Michael Avery:
Yes, because we’re all human beings. We’re imperfect and fallible. And I think, especially for A-type personalities, and I think you are one, Kim, you’re driven. You’re a blend of interesting characteristics that make you who you are and explain why you’ve been so successful in shaking the baobab and getting the industry to think differently, which I find hugely refreshing.

I’m very excited to be launching this podcast series with you, most importantly because I think we are not having the right conversations about money in South Africa, whether those are cultural, deeply personal or psychological, or rooted in what happened in our childhoods.

But from your vantage point, as a final thought to leave listeners with, why do you believe it is so important that we tell these stories and that we listen?

Kim Potgieter:
Because we carry this idea in our minds of perfection, and what does perfection even look like? What it often does is stop us from showing up fully in our lives.

One thing I’ve learned on this journey is that nobody’s path, as you mentioned at the beginning, is straight. In fact, we are perfect in our imperfections. So when we can show up fully, we have something real to offer the world. But if we only offer a watered-down version of ourselves, based on what we think the world wants to see, then the world misses out.

That is something I want to share with people, and it is something that has been lived out in my own life. Whenever I think life is going the way Kim wants it to go, something happens and changes the course. When you go through challenges, you have to learn how to pick yourself back up.

Part of the work I do is helping people through those hard transitions, because learning the skills to pick yourself back up is just as important as learning how to navigate the successful seasons of life.

So yes, for me, it is hugely important that people understand that this is the journey. This is life.

Michael Avery:
And that’s what we want to do. We want to bring all of ourselves, all of yourself. Thank you for doing that today, and for all the stories you’re going to bring into this podcast, from clients and from people who are not clients but have simply crossed paths with you along the way, so that we can remind people that money is never just about rands and cents.

It’s about values, heart, freedom and people, but most of all it’s about the choices we make. Hopefully we can begin to influence those choices and give people the space to think a little more deeply about what money means.

In the next episodes, we’ll hear from people navigating all kinds of transitions, second careers, unexpected inheritance, divorce, reinvention and retirement, to name a few. We’ll be releasing the podcast fortnightly.

If this resonated with you, I’d encourage you to share it with your networks. You can find it on all major podcast platforms, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And maybe it will help you shift that kaleidoscope just a little, so that you start thinking differently about money.

Until next time, I’m Michael Avery. Thanks for listening, and remember: it’s never too late to start the second half on purpose.