Jasmin was always a good saver. “I’m really good with money,” she explains, “for as long as I can remember I was a good saver, with excel spreadsheets mapping out what I was spending and saving.” This doesn’t mean the 39-year-old, who works in UX design for a bank, hasn’t experienced her own financial mishaps though.
“It was 2018, and I was in my early 30s,” she explains. “I met this guy, who introduced me to the concept of day trading.” Day trading is a strategy used in the stock market where people buy and sell stocks or other assets within the same day, the goal being to make a profit from short-term price movements. A day trader typically buys a stock at a low price and aims to sell it at a higher price, all within the same day. Sometimes, they might sell a stock they don’t own (short selling) if they think the price will drop, and then buy it back later at a lower price.
“It turns out I was really good at it,” Jasmin continues, “and pretty soon, it became addictive.
I’d always measure my profits in terms of coffees or lunches. I’d make a trade, then in a few minutes, would have made the cost of my lunch back, or the cost of a coffee. I continued doing that throughout the days as a side-hustle, and pretty quickly made a bit of money.” “You really have to be glued to your phone all day making the trades though,” Jasmin warns, “and another very important part of day trading, is that you need to put what’s called ‘stops’ on your trades – automatic triggers that tell the app to sell if the price drops below a certain point, or gets above a certain point. If you don’t have these stops in place, it’s possible to lose significantly more money than you invested.”
It was this last point that ended up creating an issue for Jasmin, when she departed for a diving holiday to Mexico. “I’d told my bank that I would be travelling, but once I landed and they saw transactions in Mexico, they locked my account,” she recalls. “Because I’d been on a plane, and then because of the time difference, I wasn’t on my phone for when the stock market closed. I hadn’t put any stops on my account, and because of this, within a couple of hours my stocks fell and I lost everything.”
Jasmin, who can’t remember the exact amount but says it was “definitely five figures”, went into a kind of shock. “I think my heart just stopped and I refused to actually acknowledge what was happening,” she says.
“I didn’t even really explain to the friend I was travelling with — I wasn’t ready to accept I’d lost everything.”
After returning to Australia, Jasmin said she felt a lot of shame around the loss for some time. “To be honest I think I still feel a lot of shame around it,” she admits, “partially because it was a stupid mistake, and I was embarrassed because it looked like I didn’t know what I was doing, but also partially because the whole process has a lot in common with gambling, and felt a bit addictive. I was ashamed I’d let it spiral.” After a while, however, Jasmin realised she could lean on her money-saving skills to regain her savings in a more stable way.
She went back to what had always worked for her, first with her excel spreadsheets, and later with money-management app, Moorr.
“After a few years I had managed to recoup most of the money I’d lost,” Jasmin explains. “Then, in 2021, I was sitting in my shoebox-sized apartment in Sydney’s Newtown with my two greyhounds, and I asked myself why I was spending so much money on rent instead of buying a house. The bank I worked for ran webinars on buying homes and I connected with a lender and realised I could buy in the South Coast.”
Jasmin purchased her home — right near the beach, in a quiet town where she can take her beloved dogs to watch the sunrise each morning — and says she wants other single women to know it’s possible as well. “Since I bought it, the value of the home went up, and I was able to leverage the equity and purchase an investment property in Brisbane,” she adds. As well as leading a team in her role with the bank, she also runs a greyhound rescue service, Homeward Bound Hound, where she helps ex-racing dogs find their forever homes.
Jasmin hasn’t been tempted to go back to day trading (“I deleted the app as soon as I got home and haven’t touched it since”), and says the sense of peace and achievement she feels now and the lessons she learnt through the experience have shaped her new outlook.
“Look, some people would say that if the whole day trading thing hadn’t happened I would be further ahead than I am, but all I know is that I’m happy, I love where I live, I love my doggies and maybe none of it would have happened if it wasn’t for that disaster in Mexico.”
This article was featured on Mamamia by Bek Day on 24 September 2024 here >
