It doesn’t quite matter how good our intentions are, for many of us budgeting, saving, and investing can be an arduous affair. But all those money goals and dreams could soon be a reality as The Curve co-founders — our favourite proponents of empowering women with financial savviness — have teamed up with An Organised Life to create the ultimate financial tool.
Inspired by women jotting down tips and tricks while attending their events, The Curve co-founders Victoria Harris & Sophie Hallwright decided to approach An Organised Life founder Beck Wadworth about a collab that would help women organise their financial goals. Soon enough, the An Organised Life x The Curve Financial & Investment Planner became a reality — in fact, you can pre-order yours from today.
Fashion Quarterly caught up with the trio to discover why we all need this clever planner in our lives ASAP.
Vic and Soph, tell us a little bit about how the collab with An Organised Life. What inspired the project?
We kept noticing women at our events scribbling down notes on paper, or napkins — anything they could find really. We thought ‘how useful would it be to have a planner that helps you track your investments and achieve your financial goals?’ A place where all of your scribbles and financial planning could live.
At The Curve, we’ve always been huge fans of AOL and both use their products. Beck designs beautiful and easy-to-use diaries, so when we decided to embark on creating a finance and investment planner, it was a no-brainer to collaborate with her.
When it comes to investing, we always hear ‘I’ll do it tomorrow’, and before you know it, tomorrow becomes next week, next month, or next year. Being able to track your investments holds you accountable, and giving people easy-to-follow tools means they’re much more likely to succeed!
Finance and investing have historically been such a dull and boring topic. We’re on a mission to break this stereotype. Growing your wealth should be an exciting, rewarding, and empowering journey, and we truly think this planner will help enable that.
This is a product created by women, for women, and there truly is nothing else like it available! I only wish I’d had something like this when I started my investing journey over a decade ago!
Beck, the planner is quite a different offering for An Organised Life. How did you approach the collab?
As a brand, our core objective is to provide people with tools and content to live a balanced life, and this is always my focus when designing. Personally, since hitting my 30s I’ve been learning more about investing and really focusing on my financial goals. I’ve been following The Curve since the beginning and learning so much along the way.
There is so much content to digest in this space that it can often be overwhelming to start, which made it an easy decision to collaborate with The Curve to provide a functional planner for both our audiences to helpguide and educate them on their personal journey too.
Beck, tell us about how you worked out what was going in the planner.
When we sat down to plan out what we wanted to include in the planner, we harnessed both brands’ strengths. From the An Organised Life side we knew we wanted to include checklists, tips and tools as well as a section dedicated to goal planning, budgeting and tracking habits. We naturally, also took on the role of handling all design & production for the project.
For The Curve, their knowledge lay in the investing and finance space. Vic and Soph spent so much time working on every single section (I was absolutely blown away when they sent it through to me), which has in turn made it such a thorough and helpful toolkit.
Vic and Soph, how do you envision the planner being used?
It totally depends on someone’s investing, or savings approach, but we hope that it lives either in someone’s handbag, or on their desk. Somewhere where it’s easy to reach at any point in time.
Theory is great, and of course, at The Curve we’re all about education, but putting that theory into practice is when the magic happens. This planner has been designed with that in mind – so we imagine it being stuck to your hip! We’ve started calling it your new investing best friend.
The planner has been split into helpful and practical sections dedicated to investing, budgeting and financial planning, goal setting, and tracking your investments. Each section has easy-to-follow explanations and educational tools like glossaries, tips and checklists. There are also monthly trackers to help you hit your targets. It’s a practical guide that will help you feel more confident when it comes to your finances, and of course, investing.
Beck, we live in a highly digitised world and for many, our smartphones have become our calendars, our daily organisers. What is it that draws people to An Organised Life?
I think there will always be a place for pen to paper, even with the shift to digital for calendars and daily organisers there’s so much more to stationery than just writing to-do lists and remembering appointments. A notebook or diary can be a place for journaling, taking notes, sketches, planning, budgeting, to-do lists and so so much more.
Not only does a diary help you manage your schedule, our An Organised Life diaries hold everything you need for day-to-day. From your goals, budgets, favourite memories, yearly and monthly calendars, notes, lists, appointments and more to your bits and bobs like your receipts and business cards. Unravel those ideas in your head, prep, plan and ultimately organise your life. There are also studies that have shown you’re more likely to achieve something when it’s in writing, like your affirmations or goals.
We aren’t a brand that launches new products frequently and when we do it’s all about the details and ensuring we provide our customers with educational content that compliments that product and how they can use it — I think this really resonates. I want to produce products and content that our customers are going to love for years to come and feel happy to come back to purchase the exact same notebook or diary again, month after month or year after year.
Beck, I’ve always found there’s something cathartic about putting pen to paper. What’s your own relationship with writing?
In my opinion, you can’t beat putting pen to paper, there is something therapeutic about the notion. I personally use at least two to three of our products every single day! My go-to is a yearly diary for managing my schedule and workload, a notebook for taking notes in meetings and developing ideas or designs and sticky notes for reminders.
An Organised Life x The Curve Finance & Investment Planner ($50) is available in black with gold foil in A5 and can be pre-ordered here now. The planner goes on sale on 15 July via anorganisedlife.com.
Discover Money Talks: FQ’s financial column by Victoria Harris of The Curve.
