Tag: ABOUT

Buckle in, this is going to be a long, sappy post.

But first, a few introductory remarks:

• Aleks Nikolic, she/her
• 26
• Lawyer
• Runs the personal finance community @brokegirlwealth

how did you start investing?

I started investing after being broke (a long time after that actually.) I acquired a credit card I didn’t know how to use responsibly at a very young age and racked up some debt.

If you can imagine being 18 or so, with around $3,000 in debt and working a retail job. That sum felt insurmountable.

That freaked me out – and it made me realise I wasn’t as smart as I thought.

After paying it off as soon as I possibly could, I got really into personal finance (thank you #debtfree on instagram!) From there, I was hooked.

You can retire in your 30s?

You can live off dividends?

Why had nobody taught me this in school?

When I realised that some people were taught this – around their dinner tables, I felt this sense of responsibility. Personal finance is this inescapable illiteracy that we allow to proliferate in society because we think money is just something people ~understand~.

It’s not.

No one came out of the womb understanding a PE ratio or the meaning of NAV so lets please stop treating people like they’re idiots for not understanding how to budget or or save when the entire narrative in society is the opposite.

Money is a tool but for a lot of people it comes loaded with trauma, with scarcity, with shame.

@brokegirlwealth tries to be a safe place to everyone to ask questions. No question is ‘dumb’ – you just haven’t learnt it yet.

what was the first stock you purchased?

Afterpay, back in 2017. $12 baby.

what do you invest in now?

TBC. There’ll be a post on this.

why did you start brokegirlwealth?

@brokegirlwealth started as a project to demystify investing for millennials.

I realised that a lot of books about investing and finance were written by generations who would not start working following two global finance crises and who did not have to deal with a hyper inflated property market, stagnant wage growth and a climate emergency. Put simply, they lived in a different world.

I like to say that those events and my own struggle with finances started this platform as a means to help make investing accessible and relatable in a way that it just wasn’t when I started digging myself out of debt and investing.

I decided to put myself out there in a place where people my age (and younger) congregate – hence my instagram and shortly after, tiktok.

here is a bio (if you require)

@brokegirlwealth is a project to make investing make sense and empower people to take control of their finances in order to build wealth. It endeavours to be a light in a dark room. It is run by personal finance nerd and plant mum, Aleks, a 26 year old corporate lawyer in Sydney who is passionate about getting people #finlit.