Information on RRSPs, credit card fees or mortgage interest rates, all interspersed with pop culture references and a candy pink background. Here is a summary description, but on point, of what we find on the Elleinvestit Instagram account. Like the page that made it famous, its founder, Karman Kong, is releasing a new book — a refreshing personal finance primer — whose cover we don’t need to tell you about.
Serious content, but not boring. This is the goal that Karman Kong set for himself when he created, a little less than two years ago, his Instagram account on personal finances, which today has nearly 30,000 subscribers – almost all of whom (about 90%) are women.
“Basically, I like things girly. She invests, it’s me, but in a little more extra, ”she says in an interview over a coffee taken early in the morning, before her working day begins. It’s that by day, Karman Kong is a tax litigation lawyer. It is only in her spare time that she takes care of this personal project, out of a “passion” for personal finances.
A passion that the young woman discovered in 2018, when she was 28, when she inherited a large sum of money. “I had no idea what to do with it. I realized that my parents had never taught me anything about investing, because they themselves knew very little. And that’s how I started to read a lot about it,” she explains.
Helping Women Invest
Yet, Karman Kong quickly notes, books on investing rarely address women… or do so in a moralizing way. “When we talk to women about personal finances, it’s always from the perspective of expenses. “Your coffee lattes cost you too much! You shop too much! Reduce your expenses.” It’s a speech that stinks in my face, ”she says bluntly.
“Making money is more often seen as a man’s business. If women are not interested in investing, that contributes to the wealth gap, which is added to the wage gap that is already present between men and women”, underlines the one who wants to help reduce this discrepancy thanks to her book, in which she takes the apprentice investors by the hand.
His book revisits the basics to respect not only to manage his money – by giving tips for buying groceries at low prices, making his first budget, settling his debts, but also to make it grow – by helping the reader to understand the mechanisms investment, and by demystifying the principles of the RRSP, the TFSA and the future TFSAAPP.
“I have always been told that I was good at popularizing. I think it’s because I manage to put myself in the place of those who don’t know anything about it… because I’ve already been in this position”, notes the author.
Today rather than tomorrow
The one who started investing at the dawn of her thirties also insists that it is never too late to take an interest in her finances, but that it is more “paying” to start as soon as possible.
“Initially, I was like, ‘Oh my God, how am I going to catch up?’ There are people who start at 16… So I lived a monk’s life by limiting my expenses as much as possible to devote most of my income to investing. But I realized that it wasn’t working for me,” says Karman Kong.
Since then, she has watched her expenses, without depriving herself of what really makes her happy. Instead of asking the question “Do I really need it?” “, the author wonders if this expense is aligned with its “values” and “its long-term objectives”. Or, to quote the famous storage specialist Marie Kondo, if this expense really brings her joy.
And letting go of ballast does not prevent Karman Kong from maintaining her savings and investment discipline, which she hopes to transmit in her book, on sale from March 22. “Everyone wants to get rich. Not for the simple fact of being rich, but to be independent, to be able to make choices,” she concludes.