Tell us about your blog.
Skilled Finances is about teaching you the skills to manage your money, run by myself (Thando) and my wife, Lindie.
I’m mainly the one behind the blog and Lindie is mainly behind the Instagram page
Why do you write about money?
We want to live in a world where we can talk about money as easy and comfortably as we talk about movies, shopping, and gadgets.
Plus money is as much a part our lives as food is, so we want to change the narrative of money being the thing we don’t talk about.
How did you start blogging?
I actually journal a lot about money privately, plus Lindie was part of a media team producing visual content for churches. So I thought of putting the two together.
To get guidance we joined the mentoring program with The Humble Penny to learn about building an online business.
What’s your most popular post and why?
On the blog, Money Books Beginners Must Read
We always get asked what money books we’d recommend, so I compiled 5 of them and wrote a summary of each book’s key lessons.
A fellow Instagrammer actually challenged us to make this post as we felt there was a lot of content about active investing picking stocks but not enough about the power of passive investing in index funds too.
What’s your favourite post you’ve written, and why?
Following from the Instagram challenge, I wrote a series or blog posts about index funds investing, with my favourite one being about the 5 different types of index funds you can invest in.
I believe index funds are a great investment vehicle for most people and having all these options available means people have choices to how they construct their index funds portfolio.
On Instagram we actually love doing our weekly IGTV videos were we answer questions we get from our followers. Our recent one was about how we’d feel if our partner had debt we didn’t know about.
What’s your top blogging tip?
Don’t be afraid to try new things or do something a bit different from what you usually do.
Why are you part of UK Money Bloggers?
We joined to be part of a community of like-minded people to connect, forge relationships and learn from others who are in this field. Plus it’s great to also be part of a community that is UK based as most of the personal finances influencers we knew prior to joining where from the US.
Who are your three favourite UK Money Bloggers?
These three are the ones who have influenced us and impacted our journey:
And now…some quickfire questions
What’s your number one money tip?
Automate your saving and investments.
It’s so easy to spend what’s in the account and savings and investments becomes an after thought, or more of a wish.
Automation guarantees you’re saving and investing for future you.
What is the best bargain you have ever bought?
For our wedding we timed our purchases around Black Friday, boxing day sales, and January sales. We got a lot of items for a fraction of the price we would have paid for them.
What is a product / service you are happy to pay the extra for?
Education. courses, masterclasses, masterminds, books, basically things to do with personal and professional development.
Tell us something about yourselves.
I’m a musician and I play the bass and keyboard, Lindie is a makeup artist and beauty enthusiast.