Help & support
- Meg Lanning once purchased a costly car that she barely used due to her international cricket commitments – this helped her learn the importance of assessing value before buying big ticket items
- Once a spender, she became a saver and investor after learning to structure her finances with more foresight, particularly now that she’s retired from international cricket
- She started investing after around five or six years on a decent wage, and her only regret is that she didn’t start sooner
Meg Lanning is known for being cool, calm, and collected after captaining the Australian women’s cricket team for a decade, but is she the same way with her money? Here she explains how she went from being a big spender to a big saver – and what she’s learnt.
Think seriously about your purchases
Meg’s biggest purchasing regret is “an unreasonably expensive car”, which she then proceeded to only drive 10,000 km over the next three years. Thanks to her international cricket commitments, Lanning was away on tour 90% of the time, she says. Suffice to say, the car was “very nice to drive”, but “for it to just sit there [most] of the time didn’t really make a lot of sense”, she admits, laughing at the memory.
It can take time to learn how to save money – and that’s okay
As she came closer to retirement from international cricket – a decision she announced late last year – Meg was thinking more about life, and money, after sport.
“For the most part, retirement wasn’t something I thought about while I was playing because you think it’s going to last forever – you don’t really see the end coming.”
Thankfully, though, she had stopped describing her money type as a spender and is “now more of a saver and investor”. “Initially, I didn’t have any understanding of what was involved or what I should be doing [with it],” she says of when she first started to earn money. “I’ve tried to add a little bit of structure to my money set-up.”
Start investing sooner
Meg says it took about five to six years of earning a decent wage to realise that she could be making her money work harder – something she wishes she’d learnt sooner.
“What you do early on when you start earning money can make a big difference at the end [of your career].”
“Rather than waiting five or six years, think about buying an investment property or putting your money into different [savings] accounts – that can make a big difference. When you’re young, I don’t think that’s at the top of your mind – like, ‘How can I make the most of this and set myself up?’ But the earlier you can start thinking about that, the better off you’ll be.”
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