Discussing About The Emotional Side Of Money Here

I'm Martha Lawton, I'm a financial wellbeing expert and former financial adviser, who has been helping people understand and use money better for 14 years. My co-host is Alex Lemon, a former chartered accountant, content strategist and bringer of some pretty off-the-wall funnies.

Our podcast is Squanderlust, the podcast about the emotional side of money, why our actions aren't always as good as our intentions and what we can do about it. As well as explaining the psychology of money, we share our own stories of financial fails and foibles to try and break down the idea that the experts are all perfectly rational with their money and if you aren't, then you're stupid and deserve to be poor.

Our listeners are smart people who know they 'should' be better with money and want to hear how they can go about that from someone who won't judge and doesn't just spout jargon at them. They're people who are embarrassed that they don't seem to be able to fix their financial habits and realise there's probably an emotional explanation for why that is.

We explain how listeners can overcome the innate human tendency to make bad financial decisions and develop a happier, healthier relationship with money.

I love podcasts (favourites include 99 Percent Invisible,Writing Excuses, and Stuff You Missed in History Class). I thought it would be a good medium for communicating about money, because it's such a personal subject. Podcasts hosts form a close trusted bond with their audiences and I felt like I could use that to help people get comfortable with a subject that many find boring, scary or otherwise uncomfortable.

I was talking about the idea with Alex and she came out with loads of insightful comments and it was immediately clear that a show with both of us would be much better than me on my own.

Alex put me in touch with Wardour Studios and we pitched the idea to them. They became our technical sponsors and we went from there. We first started talking about the idea in September 2018. We started recording later that autumn and our first episode went out 8th February 2019. The delay is because we recorded a whole series of nine episodes before we released any. We now have three series out and are planning a special one-off guest interview episode soon.

When we have a series out we release weekly. Series are eight episodes long. It takes about eight weeks for us to script, record and edit an episode. The technical side is all handled by the studio, thank goodness. (We love you Wardour!)

Alex and I are both freelancers so the podcast fits into and supports our day jobs. We're now offering consultancy services to businesses like fintechs that want to use the emotional and psychological side of money to add value to their customers in the design of their products and services.

The studio is our technical sponsor, but we pay for web-hosting and other non-production costs. It's not cheap but it's enabling us to take our careers in a direction that we're very excited about.

At present the ad revenue from our show goes to our hosts, Acast. We would love to discuss sponsorship though with the right partners. It's all about finding a fit with our ethos.

As we said above, podcasting has helped us to build our careers by demonstrating our expertise and also our approach.

It's also a lot of fun and meets my personal goal of just helping as many people as possible dump the shame they feel when thinking about their finances and start making positive changes to improve their situation.

I'm afraid I couldn't tell you anything about the tech side of things because the studio handles all of that - but they do it brilliantly! Here's a link to their info wardourstudios.co.uk/services/#our_spaces

You should book them and pay them lots of money, because they're great.

I have quite a lot of connections in the world of financial education and related fields so I find guests through my networks, although our upcoming special happened because I reached out to the writer of an article I really loved and she offered to come on the show.
So far we've interviewed guests in person but if we have a guest from overseas we'd probably use Skype or Zoom.

For most episodes I research and prepare an overview script with bullet points to talk about and rough estimate timings. We have a structure we often use that works for most topics so we can cover them properly within 30 minutes.

Then Alex and I discuss the script and amend it if necessary. Then we record. It's pretty simple. Having a solid preparation process greatly reduces waffling and that reduces editing time and we have got faster and smoother with practice.

Listeners come to us mostly through Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Castbox.

We do a mix of marketing via Twitter, Instagram, guest appearances on other people's shows, guest blogging and PR.

The most effective thing so far has been making connections on Twitter with journalists, other podcast hosts, podcatchers and so on.

Because of a Twitter conversation, we became a Castbox "Indie Pick" for three months, which was huge for us and we're very grateful.

I've already given my most important piece of advice which is plan your content in advance. The more you plan what you're going to talk about, the less you need to edit, but don't feel like you need to script every word because you will want to stay sounding natural.

Always remember you can edit, so don't be afraid to stop, think, rephrase and do better.

Cut the waffle. Seriously. Self-indulgent chat happens sometimes, especially when you're having fun, but remember your audience has chosen you from amongst thousands of other podcasts, so don't waste their time.

We are at squanderlustpod.com where there's also a contact form to get in touch. We're on Twitter @squanderlustpod or you can follow the hosts @marthalawton and @lemonosity. You can also find the show on Instagram @squanderlustpod. We record at the wonderful Wardour Studios wardourstudios.co.uk