Get Started Snapshot
Name: Olivia ‘Marketplace Maestro’ Trotter
Age: 31
Hometown & current home: Sydney born and raised
Profession: Partnerships Manager
Favourite book: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Most extravagant purchase: A week’s holiday in Lord Howe Island
Favourite money-saving hack: For any big purchases for home or clothes I look up if I can get it second hand on marketplace or Depop first. Half the time you can find what you want essentially unused for half the price! 

What was your relationship with money like growing up?

I've been lucky and never had to go without, but my Mum and Dad always instilled a strong work ethic in me and taught me the value of money from a young age. I've always been a saver, as a kid I'd save half and spend half of any pocket money or birthday money I got.

I always had a job throughout school and uni, so holidays, clothes, going out and activities were all funded by me. I'm not a big spender, but I do like nice things, so I've always saved up for the things I want.

What was your first job? (And how much did you get paid?)

I wanted a job as soon as I could at 14, and landed a job at Humphrey's Newsagency on Manly Corso. It’s a family run business that was an institution in Manly – a real hub where local characters would wander in each day for a chat even if they weren’t buying anything.

Two things stuck with me from that job: just how much people spend on lotto tickets (a lot), and the value of talking to people from all walks of life.

I was on $8.40 an hour, so I was always hustling for the Sunday shift to get double time.

How did you first come across investing?

I knew vaguely about shares as a kid as I remember collecting the mail and there would often be letters from BHP, but I didn’t really know it was something worth doing until my mid 20s. I’ve always had lots of jobs and saved up to travel and live overseas, when I hit my mid-late 20s and started thinking about eventually saving up for a house deposit I wanted to learn more about investing.  

I listened to a million different podcasts (including Equity Mates), read some books and learnt more about it before eventually taking the plunge and buying my first investment.

Was there a memorable early investment?

I’m pretty risk averse so it took some time to eventually pull the trigger and start investing in ETFs. I did get sucked into the meme coin hype and bought a coin called Harmony One with some friends at the height of crypto mania and lost about 90% of my money… lesson learned!

How are you currently investing and can you provide a breakdown of your portfolio?

Since then I keep it simple and just invest in index ETFs, with the occasional stock pick to keep me interested and engaged. I have hopes for a 10 bagger one day.

Here’s the breakdown of my portfolio:

Where do you see investing taking you?

I see it as a way to plan for the future and give me more flexibility over the big decisions in life. My partner and I would love to take a year off to travel around Australia at some point and tick off lots of bucket list destinations overseas.

Investing is hopefully what makes that possible and give me the peace of mind to make choices not purely dictated by the necessity of money.

If you only had 25 words to convince someone to invest, what would you say?

It’s actually very easy so just start. Put away whatever amount you can each month, invest in an ETF and don’t look at it.

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The most influential factor for long-term wealth

Liv spoke about how she’s always been a big saver throughout her life, which is crucial for every investor. We spoke about how a ‘savings rate’ is the single most influential factor in growing your long term wealth in the episode titled ‘3. Saving to invest’ (Spotify | Apple | YouTube)

Your savings rate is the difference between the amount of money coming in and the amount of money you're spending. Morgan Housel, he's written one of our favourite books called The Psychology of Money and he had this quote, “the biggest determinant of your future wealth is your savings rate.”

We've put together a worked example to illustrate why that is the case. Let's say we can save and invest $20 a week and we invest that and we do that for 35 years and we get 13% a year (we use 13% because that's the long-term average of the Australian share market with dividends reinvested, 124 years of stock market history.

So $20 a week, you end up after 35 years with $570,000.

Now, but let's say we, uh, focus on our savings rate, we focus on our expenses. We think about where we can cut, making coffee at home, ordering less Uber Eats, whatever it is. Let's say we get to $50 a week. Well, that $570,000 turns into $1.4 million.

So that’s the same length of time, same returns but just focussing on savings rate.

So then the question becomes, could I just get that same result by investing better? Well, rather than 13% a year, to get to that $1.4m if you were just sticking at the $20 a week, you'd need 17% a year for 35 years, which is getting close to Warren Buffet.

So that is highly unlikely and there's so many factors that go into that. What is good about your savings rate is largely in your control.