About Me

Hi there, I'm Madison aka Saving Like Mad and welcome to my website!

I live in Melbourne, Australia with my husband and 2 young children. I am a stay at a home mum and in my spare time I'm doing online surveys and creating content for Saving Like Mad on Instagram.

For as long as I can remember I have loved saving money. When I was growing up, my parents would buy us those OG savings tins that had an Australian note on it, complete with a little slot on top where money could go in, but not out. (well there were ways to get money out, depends how badly you wanted it)

We had to fill up our tins before my dad would pull out the can opener and tip our riches onto the floor so we could run our hands through the mountain of coins (did you know coins are dirtier than a toilet seat? Now you do) before making piles and counting each and every one.

I will always remember that sense of accomplishment as I worked out the grand total and put the coins into ziplock bags ready to take down to the bank. Those were the days. No bills, no debt, just cold hard cash.

My parents would pay us $1 an hour to do odd jobs for them, from head massages to bookkeeping. It was money for us and slave labour for them. Win-win. Jokes on them though. I would have done it for free.

I was lucky enough to meet my now husband at 15. It was love at third sight and 12 years on, I still get the same butterflies in my stomach as I did when we had our first kiss inside a KFC establishment.

Like me, he had no idea what he wanted to do career wise. I envy people who have it all worked out at the end of school and already know what career path they want to go down in life. I ended up becoming a self-employed cleaner while my husband worked for a petrol station.

We enjoyed our jobs, but we realised if we were going to live on low incomes, then we needed to be smart with our money. We saved like crazy and on my 21st birthday we bought our very first home. We kept up the effort and 2 years later bought our first investment property. It wasn't easy, but it all paid off in the end.

I created Saving Like Mad to share my passion for budgeting and saving money, and to show people that it's not what you earn, but what you do with it that matters.

I am by no means a financial advisor or anything like that, but I want to open up the conversation about personal finance and share savings tips in the hopes that it motivates and helps somebody that needs it.