The Surry Hills founder teaching Sydneysiders to invest their way through a cost-of-living crunch

Mara Deluca launched Groundswell Financial from a shared office on Foveaux Street eighteen months ago with $80,000 in savings and a pitch deck that most Sydney venture capitalists told her was too unsexy to fund. By June 2026, her micro-investing education platform had signed up 14,300 users across New South Wales, and her flagship eight-week program — priced at $349 — has a waiting list running into August.

The timing matters. Household budgets across Sydney are being squeezed from multiple directions at once. The Reserve Bank of Australia's cash rate has held at 3.85 percent since March, mortgage stress remains acute across the outer west, and property — for decades the default wealth-building tool for working Australians — is no longer the sure thing it once was. Auction clearance rates in Melbourne collapsed through the June quarter after the Victorian budget's investor-tax changes, and national data shows first-home buyers pulling back even in markets where prices have softened. People who assumed they would eventually buy their way to financial security are running out of road.

Deluca's answer is not property. Her curriculum centres on exchange-traded funds, dividend reinvestment, and building emergency buffers before touching any growth asset. She runs in-person workshops on Thursday evenings at The Commons on Commonwealth Street in Surry Hills, and partners with the Redfern-based community finance organisation Five Loaves Money Mentors, which provides free referrals to Groundswell for clients who have stabilised their debt but want to move into wealth-building. "We're not trying to replace a financial planner," Deluca told The Daily Sydney. "We're filling the gap between the person who needs help and the professional they can't yet afford."

Building wealth on a tight budget

The numbers behind the platform reflect a particular Sydney reality. The median weekly household income across the inner west and eastern suburbs sits around $2,450, according to the 2021 Census data rolled forward by the NSW Department of Planning. But the Australian Securities and Investments Commission's 2025 financial literacy survey found that 61 percent of Australians aged 25 to 44 had never purchased a share or ETF outside of superannuation. Deluca targets exactly that gap — people earning enough to save something, but unsure what to do with it.

Her most popular workshop module covers how to begin investing with $50 a fortnight through platforms such as Pearler or Spaceship, and how compound returns on even small regular contributions change the calculus over a ten-year horizon. The Groundswell model also integrates a referral arrangement with the Credit and Debt Hotline run by Financial Counselling Australia, so users who arrive with consumer debt get redirected before they invest a dollar.

Deluca is not operating in a vacuum. The AI-data-centre boom pushing up industrial land values across Sydney's outer west — logistics precincts in Eastern Creek and Kemps Creek are already seeing rental escalation — is crowding out the commercial lease market and making it harder for small operators like hers to find affordable space. She is considering shifting her Thursday workshops to the Addison Road Community Centre in Marrickville to cut costs by roughly $600 a month.

What comes next

Groundswell lodged its Australian Financial Services Licence application with ASIC on 14 May. If approved — typically a six-to-nine-month process — Deluca intends to launch a formal managed account product by mid-2027, which would let users pool small contributions into a professionally administered portfolio for the first time. Until then, her platform remains squarely in the education and coaching space.

For Sydneysiders looking for a starting point now, Deluca recommends three concrete steps: build a three-month cash buffer in a high-interest savings account paying at least 4.5 percent annually before any investing; open a low-cost brokerage account and buy a single diversified ETF; and review superannuation fund performance before the next financial year statement arrives in August. None of it is glamorous. None of it requires a property deposit. That, Deluca argues, is precisely the point.