Pass Me a Bucket

I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw that my six-year-old had crossed arms and a cross face.

“What’s wrong, cobber?”

He screwed up his little face and pointed his finger at a billboard that we were whizzing past.

“Banking Buckets!” the billboard said.

My son had cottoned on to the fact that BankWest has been ripping off the ‘Bucket Strategy’ from my book.

(My Bucket Strategy uses zero-fee transaction accounts and linked online savings accounts.)

He was not impressed.

“They should get their own ideas, Dad”, he said.

“Agreed!” I said proudly.

Then, not long after, ME Bank sent a marketing email showing people how to set up their ‘Splurge’ bucket.

I forwarded it to ME Bank’s head of marketing with the subject: “WTF?”

So while I’m as dark as my son at banks shamelessly piggybacking off my book … there’s also a part of me that’s proud of having made saving something worth ripping off.

The bucket strategy -- which is so simple it can be scrawled on the back of a serviette -- has probably helped well over a million Aussies gain control of their money.

In fact, I’ve created an entire high school money program around them: it’s called ‘The Bucket List’.

I get the teachers to bring large plastic buckets into the classroom. I even had one in Perth who drilled a hole in a bucket in front of his class to illustrate the idea of credit cards putting ‘a hole in your bucket’.

Kids inherently ‘get’ something as visual as buckets. And in the program I tell them that I don’t care who they choose to bank with, so long as they go ahead and set their buckets up. The key is to create a lifelong habit of saving, which of course is the number one rule of creating wealth.

And if you, or your kids, have set up your buckets and started saving, well … as Holden says in their more recent television ads: ‘You Got This!’

Tread Your Own Path!