Rotimi Merriman-Johnson & Laura Ann-Moore Answer Your Pension and Money Questions

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[00:00] Laura Ann-Moore:

I was like, I’ll help people with their money. And he went, Oh, you’re gonna need to help me. I went, Oh go on WhatsApp and he went, Oh, I just lost like about 50 grand on crypto. And I was like in the back, like, uh. Hello, my name is Laura Ann-Moore. I am a money mindset expert, financial well-being speaker, and content creator.

SPEAKER_00: My name’s Rotimi Merriman-Johnson. I’m a qualified financial advisor and financial content creator. There’s several billion pounds worth of lost pension money. It’s 31 billion. 31 billion. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It’s a consequence of how many jobs the average person has. So the average person has between 11 and 12 jobs over the course of their life, and I can imagine that will increase.

SPEAKER_01: If buying a house is your dream and it trumps everything else and it’s really important to you, you could look to move location. Yeah. Like, I don’t want to move out of London because my work is here, my friends are here. Like, right now it makes sense for me to be here. I can’t afford to buy, so renting is fine.

[00:56] Rotimi Merriman-Johnson:

If you have savings, working out how much you’d like to set aside for emergencies, and then you can begin to invest the surplus cash, or the more advisable way to do it is it’s the Money Gains Podcast.

SPEAKER_02: So Timmy and Laura, welcome back to the Money Gains Podcast. How are you guys? Doing good.

SPEAKER_01: Very good, also.

SPEAKER_02: Nice. Well, this is Ask Me a Money question, where we have you two join us for an episode where audience sends in their questions and we answer them live. If you’re listening to this and you want to get your questions answered by uh Timmy, Laura, and myself, then you just need to email invest at Up The Gains and we will answer your question. As long as it’s not too left field, because you know we’re not answering like everything. It’s money related, guys. Money-related questions.

[01:46] Laura Ann-Moore:

What’s this rat?

SPEAKER_02: How do I fix this? Slightly aucs. I’ll leave it to me with that one. Um, but for those of you don’t know you guys, if you wouldn’t mind, um, just giving a quick 411 into you and what you do. Let’s start with Laura. Ladies first, it’s Valentine’s Day.

SPEAKER_01: That is true, it is Valentine’s Day. Hello, everybody. My name is Laura Ann-Moore. I am a money mindset expert and financial well-being speaker and content creator. And my whole thing is about helping people to think differently about money.

SPEAKER_00: Love it, Timmy. And I’m Rotimi Merriman-Johnson, and I’m a qualified financial advisor and content creator. Love it. Carl.

[02:32] Laura Ann-Moore:

Gets him off every time.

SPEAKER_02: Does actually. I’m just like, wow. Like, what do I do? I make videos online, guys, and uh and talk about money. Um but let’s get into it. We’ve got our first question of the day, and it comes from Jenny from Nunhead. Um, where is Nunhead, by the way? Does anybody know?

SPEAKER_00: Southeast, isn’t it?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Oh, that’s a great question. I actually don’t know. I’ve heard of it.

SPEAKER_02: Southeast London. Southeast London, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: I should know that because I literally live in Southeast London.

SPEAKER_02: Right.

SPEAKER_01: Shame on me.

SPEAKER_02: To be fair, you do you don’t like look at the map, do you? You just go and like get on a train. Yeah, I need to go there, so people can tell me.

SPEAKER_00: I think you get there from like London Bridge Station going out south.

SPEAKER_01: You can get everywhere from London Bridge Station, you can.

SPEAKER_02: Literally, true. Yeah. Um, but Jenny from Nunhead has asked, I’m 44, I have no debts and a decent level of savings, but I’ve never invested before. Is it too late to start investing? I’ll start with you, Timmy, on that one.

[03:30] Rotimi Merriman-Johnson:

Well, we don’t know whether she has a job or not, but if she has a workplace pension, then she has been investing probably since the start of her career. Um, but albeit for a later life stage. Um but no, it’s not too late to start investing. There’s a a saying which says that the best time to plant a tree was yesterday. Yeah, best the second best time is right now, or something like that. Maybe I just made that saying up. But um, yeah, it’s just a case of if you have savings, um, working out how much you’d like to set aside for emergencies for a rainy day, um, saving towards any short or medium-term priorities that you have, uh, things coming up maybe in the next year or two, and then you can begin to invest the surplus cash um once you’ve decided on those two points, and um you can whack it all in um in one go. Or the more advisable way to do it is is what’s called pound cost averaging, which is where you take the money and then you you drip feed it into the to the market. And that way you ride out the lumps and bumps in the stock market.

[04:42] Sammie Ellard-King:

Nice. I love that. I love that advice. Uh anything from you, Laura, there in that one?

SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think like there’s so much online about if you’re 20, invest for 40, 50 years, if you’re 30 and anybody below, I feel the age of like 40 feels like investing isn’t for them if they haven’t started. I get so many messages, like DMs of people in their 40s, like, I feel like it’s too late. And I’m like, isn’t that too late? I promise. As long as you have, if you’re taking a long-term approach, I think as long as you have like 15, 20 years, and if you’re in your 40s, I hope that you do. But even then, technically, somebody in their 60s could start investing, they just access that money, you know, further down the line. So I think, yeah, trying not to get too wrapped up in feeling like if you haven’t started investing at 20, that you’re you’ve ruined it is a key thing. And also really understanding why you’re investing. Like Timmy said, she could, Jenny could already have a pension. She might already have enough money to retire on and, you know, she’s happy. And that would then help her understand well, how much do I want to put in investments and what am I actually doing it for? Um, and am I keeping my savings separate on their own or am I investing those savings? But I think the key thing is understanding why you actually start investing and like what your goal is for it, and then that’s gonna help. But it’s not too late. It’s not too late, Jenny. You got time, babe.

[06:04] Sammie Ellard-King:

You do, Jenny, you do. Look at Warren Buffett. He’s investing now.

SPEAKER_01: Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: And I listened to I’m listening to um Barista to Billionaire book by Andrew Wilkinson at the moment. It’s a really cool book, actually. Actually, really enjoying it, but I’m halfway through. Second chapter, he meets Charlie Munger, and Charlie Munger’s 97, and they go in, and Charlie Munger talks about merging their two businesses and reinvesting into his media business, which wasn’t doing as well at the time. And that’s a guy at 97 making serious moves by investing. Now, of course, these guys are stratosphere levels, but if you’re at 44 and you live till 97, you can still be making moves. And it just because of an age bracket, I feel like it doesn’t necessarily need to be stopped, right?

[06:54] Laura Ann-Moore:

Yeah, I think society really pushes this narrative, especially on women, that you’re like, when you’re in your 40s, life is over. But I have a lot of friends in their 40s, and so many of them are like, life has just started. I think if you look after your health and you are maintaining a level of wellness so that you can continue to enjoy your life into your later years, your 70s, your 80s, your 90s, yeah, investing at 40 is not like not a bad move. It’s a great move. Great move. And I think that if we can, if we lean too far into thinking that we get we’re old by the time we’ve hit our 40s, we’ve literally written off half our lives. Like, no, we’re not gonna do that. We’re not listening to that narrative anymore.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, completely. I I love that you said that because like life expectancy’s gone through the roof, and that’s only gonna carry on increasing as we like get better drugs, get better data on like how to keep ourselves healthy, as you were saying. And like these things are just gonna like you know, increase. Yeah, it’s not gonna get worse from this point on. It was like 100 years ago, it was like 41, and now it’s like 89 and 90, it’s like for the uh women and men, women living longer. Um, so so a lot, a lot of time if you’re 44.

[08:09] Laura Ann-Moore:

I wonder if um at some point in the future, when you get a letter from the king or the queen, that age will up to 150. Because like everyone will just be living to 100 and they can’t write that many letters.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you know, you see those stories of them like literally holding out for that. Oh my god. And they do and they get it through, and then they’re like, right, I’m done. See ya, see her. So just waiting for that one moment. My nan went at uh 99 and nine months.

SPEAKER_01: Oh nine nine nine.

SPEAKER_02: I know. Wow, I know, yeah. We were all like, damn it. It would have been so cool. That would have been cool, yeah, yeah. It would have been Queen Elizabeth at the time as well. But um, yeah, things have changed. But yeah, I agree. Look, look, you you can you can get started. I think if you’re it very much depends on your expectations and when you fan want to access the money, I think as well. If you’re like, I’m retiring 65, that’s it, then you know, even at that point you still have 21 years, which is quite a significant amount of time. You know, the longer time you have, the more time you give compounding to work. So maybe you have to shorten your expectations, and perhaps you know, you’re gonna have to figure out some sort of level of volatility, which might happen in the shorter term time frames. What do you think about that, Timmy?

[09:22] Rotimi Merriman-Johnson:

I think I agree with Laura’s point about knowing why you’re investing, and and actually your point about it not being too late, the Charlie Munger example starting at 97, because there is a really simple reason to invest your money in and it’s inflation. So we’ve talked about this on previous episodes, but it’s like okay, so you make income and that you you try not to spend 100% of it. So you spend on your needs and your wants and you keep a bit of the money that you’re keeping, you then divvy that up. You go, okay, fine, I’d like to have some readily and accessible just in case um I you know lose my job or I need to make a big purchase, fine. You divvy another pot up. I’d like to pay for things I’d like to do or have in short or medium term, fine. With the money that you’re keeping, but not earmarking for either emergencies or your savings goals, if you keep that money in cash and if you keep it in cash for significant periods of time, what’s going to happen? What inflation essentially means is the price of things goes up on average at a rate of about 2% per year. So even though you’re holding on to that money in cash, over time, the price of everything else is gonna go up around that money. And we’ve seen that happen in real time when we came out of the pandemic. So one of the very fundamental reasons to invest is to give your money a chance of growing above the rate of inflation. And when we look back at the data, the stock market appreciates in value at about 7% per year. So after inflation. After inflation, yeah. So it’ll be like 10 and then once you adjust your inflation. So that money has a chance of not of being able to keep up its purchasing power over time. That’s the answer that I would give to the point of like, is it too late? Well, no, because inflation is still here, right? Yeah. So going anywhere. Yeah, so investing is the way that you keep pace with it. If you um I’m kind of branding here, but if you there’s a inflation calculator on the Bank of England’s website, and you can put in what an amount of money so many years ago was worth today, and about 30 years ago, um, like £100 could buy you double what it can buy you today. You’d need £200 to buy the same amount of stuff. And that’s very much by design. That’s how the system is designed.

[12:01] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah. You have to have inflation basically to be able to increase the amount of government spending. They need that, and they need GDP growth to match it up.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, a little bit of inflation is considered good for the economy. Too much, it runs away from how much money people actually have. But that that would be the reason I would say it doesn’t matter if you’re 44, 54, 97. Like as long as the prices of things are going up, the value of your money um needs to be given a chance to keep up with that.

[13:15] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah, absolutely. It’s great advice, man. Um cool. Well, moving on, I hope that answered your question, uh Jenny. And we’re gonna go to Mark in Winchester. Um, my wife has recently come into some money, and we’re wondering whether crypto is worth looking at. What’s your guys’ overall view on crypto and should we be considering it?

SPEAKER_01: Dun dun dun. Um, okay, so I guess what I would say is I don’t know enough about crypto to offer, you know, any kind of guidance or education. Um, but what I do know is that it is very, very volatile. And it is classed as an alternative asset as opposed to, you know, investing in something like stocks or property or index funds. And in this person’s case, we don’t know what else they’ve got going on. Let’s say this couple have no money in savings, no money in investments, maybe they’ve got a small pension pot, maybe they do or don’t own the house, but they’ve come into money. It depends on your financial situation, what you then do with the money. Where it might make sense to them to look at crypto would be they’ve got a pension, they’ve got an investment pot, they’ve got savings in their emergency funds, they own their own property, they’ve got all these like financially secure things going on, they’ve got a plan. And this is like play money. It’s extra. And they’re going, we want to dabble in something a little bit higher risk because we don’t mind if we lose the money. We don’t mind if it goes up or down. It’s not money that we need to survive or for our retirement. If it is, and you’re like, actually, I could really do this money for security for the future. This is really gonna help us out. You probably want to put it into something that’s gonna A, be a bit more safe and a bit more low risk, maybe, and something that you can trust is gonna grow or appreciate over time. And obviously it depends on their risk profile as well. But yeah, I think it depends on what their financial situation is. I know so many people in my community, in my close general circle that have lost a lot of money with cryptocurrency. Um, I literally was in a cab two days ago. I was in an Uber driver, and he was like, All right, what’s the outo? I was like, I’m gonna help people with their money. And he went, Oh, you’re gonna need to help me. I went, Oh go, and what’s happened? He went, um, I just lost like about 50 grand on crypto. And I was like in the back, like, eh. He was so just like nonchalant about it. So I think he was kind of, he’s obviously been in the mouth of the game for a while, but it was just so interesting. He was like, Yeah, you know, he was like a I dabbled with day trading, and I think I got used to losing money. So then I got into crypto. Um, obviously it was very used to the same kind of thing. But again, like I’m sure Mum’s gonna have all the the Bitcoin bros in the comments being like, naturally, it’s about to go up. Um, but yeah, my my whole thing is I was my other thing is like it depends on how important that money is for you in regards to like your financial security. Yeah. If it’s play money and you want to sit and learn about crypto, go for it. But make sure you’ve done all of the other things first to secure your sort of own financial future first. That’s what I would say.

[16:27] Sammie Ellard-King:

Love that, love that.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, again, completely agree with what Laura said. Um, to build upon what Laura said. Hey, it’s back. To build upon build upon. Um to build upon what Laura said. Um, so I think cryptocurrency, I I I don’t invest in crypto. Um I bought it a couple of times uh just to see what that was like via the platform, but I don’t invest in it. Cryptocurrency um has been with us since 2009, since the creation of Bitcoin. And if you read the Bitcoin white paper, which was authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, um it’s 12 pages long and it’s well worth a read because it sets out what the vision was for Bitcoin. And essentially, it was intended to be a form of money. When we look at the creation of money, money serves three purposes. It’s a medium of exchange, it’s a thing that you can use to trade for real-world products and services, it is a unit of account, so it lets you decide the value between two different things. Um, the value, say, between a house and an apple. Money lets you measure that. Don’t know why I picked those two things.

[17:58] Laura Ann-Moore:

Great things.

SPEAKER_00: And it is a store of value. So it’s a place that you can you can leave money and then come back to it and still use it. And the thing with uh the original vision for for Bitcoin is that it was deemed to be a much better um a much better way of achieving these three things versus um the money that we use today. Because as we have seen, and we said with a previous question, money can just be created, right? And that causes that that that has an inflationary effect, and it means that things get more expensive over time. Bitcoin isn’t like that. Um the the idea behind Bitcoin is that there would be a finite, I’m giving a long answer, so you can cut this down. I love this Mickey game.

[18:47] Sammie Ellard-King:

Super interesting.

SPEAKER_00: Um the whole idea was that there would be a finite amount. So you you create um individual coins through what’s called mining, and the final coin is um supposed to be mined at around 2140. So when you have a fixed amount of money, then that means that it’s not inflationary, right? It makes it much more similar to gold than like a government currency. We can just be introduced and taken out of the system. That was the original vision. But what people have realised in the interim is that you can buy crypto like Bitcoin and then sell it to other people for more. That makes it fail the test on all three, right? It’s not a great medium of exchange because the last time I went to Sainsbury’s, I didn’t use Bitcoin to buy my groceries. It doesn’t make it a great unit of account because the price is doing that. And because it’s so volatile, it also doesn’t really meet the test as a store of value. It’s actually a hugely volatile, non-productive asset with zero sum kind of gains for people. So the 50 grand that that cab driver lost has gone directly to someone else, but nothing has actually been created in the real world as a result of that transaction taking place. Very different if we invest into a business which actually produces products and services in the world. And there’s a huge opportunity cost to all the crypto investing that’s going on versus what could be going into like building houses, starting businesses, um, investing in like during COVID, like we invested and created a vaccine, for example. So this isn’t me saying that people shouldn’t invest in cryptocurrency. I’m just trying to give a picture of like what’s what’s actually happening at the moment. I think that its place in a investment portfolio is that you have your core investment, maybe that’s in index funds or diversified ETFs, you have your satellite investment, which is um, you know, maybe like an individual stock that you’ve researched. And then once those two things are accounted for, if you want to take a very small percentage of your portfolio and put it into cryptocurrency, fine. And you just do that knowing that you might never see that money again. Um, again, just to come back to the example of Bitcoin, because it’s the biggest cryptocurrency, it’s it’s crashed at least six or seven times since its inception in 2009. It crashes kind of every couple of years, the price plummets, and people who bought it when it was super expensive then lose all their money by having to yeah, having to sell at a loss. So um with all that in mind, you can go for it, but you just need to recognise that it’s not being used for what it was intended for. Yeah. Like a lot of crypto, isn’t it? That’s my that’s my point of view.

[21:40] Sammie Ellard-King:

I completely agree with everything you just said, because that’s the thing. It was supposed to re-inchange the whole way we do finance, and I’m sure eventually there will be some sort of change to the way that it works, and you know, there’ll be some form of currency exchange. I mean, there was online for a little while, mainly on the black market, and it’s not really done what it set out to do. Now it’s just really people trading it. And could be Pokemon cards, could be Pokemon cards, exactly. It becomes any other asset, but even Pokemon card, you can hold it. So it’s like it becomes a it just lives in the ether. You’ve got a number, and that’s about it. Um so I do it, but I do it with exactly like you said, it’s never goes above five percent. It’s gone above five percent a couple of times, and I immediately bring it back under control because I’m like not okay with it being higher than that. Friends of mine are 50 50, some friends are 20, 80 20, some friends it depends on how much you’re happy to risk. risk into that and exactly going back to the build on what Laura says, hey, um the like, have you got an emergency fund? Have you got things secure in the background? Are you okay to take that risk? By the way that this question’s being phrased in the language they’re using, I’m guessing not. So I would say have you looked at those things first and then perhaps make a quite a small decision with all of your m the rest of your money. By the sounds of it, you’re sort of perhaps going, oh someone’s mentioned that Bitcoin thing to me once, which happens a lot. And usually that’s probably not the time to invest in it.

[23:21] Rotimi Merriman-Johnson:

And that and that’s why that’s why I say that if if anything, um the conversation around crypto has been positive because it’s gotten a lot more people thinking about invet investing where they probably wouldn’t have. But there’s just an enormous amount of survivorship bias when you hear about people’s crypto wins.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: You must understand that if you hear about someone making 100k in crypto that must necessarily have come from all of the other people who collectively lost 100k less platform fees.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah you’re so right. And it’s so funny when you see those crypto videos and they’re like yeah um he’s like yeah I’m up I’m up 800% and they’re like have you sold it and they’re like yeah and they’re like have you sold it they’re like no no no no I haven’t sold it.

[24:08] Rotimi Merriman-Johnson:

They’re like you probably should sell it and then after the guy’s literally on like the park bench on his own and it’s got the big sell button on his phone and he’s like I just get to it because they just because when you get it’s a form yeah it’s a form it’s a it’s a form of gambling yeah yeah the the yeah it’s very it’s like speculation um and then there’s a final piece to it which I and then I’ll be quiet which is that when you look at the um the amount of compute power that’s needed to mine cryptocurrency and then you you then map that onto the energy that’s needed to mine it and the amount of carbon that’s emitted into the atmosphere it’s like we’re doing this thing which only exists in the ether to use your phrase but is having real world consequences in terms of the climate and the environment and I think just only humans would do that. Like only only we would mess up the real world just in pursuit of a pretend thing.

[25:07] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah yeah yeah so just be careful and when you’re getting into crypto just be wary of the risks um we’re not gonna tell you not to the planet stop missing our planet crypto barrows don’t cover us in the comments actually actually do we’re yeah we’re we’ll all be there eight o’clock on the day it comes out ready to battle the crypto bars um but Omar from Newcastle we’re gonna move on now Omar from Newcastle and Newcastle Newcastle um can’t resist it when we’re from the south in it I was up in Leeds and it was quite an experience if I’m honesty yesterday as the amount of times they’re like are you from London? Wow that was awful I can’t do it I can’t do it’s Leeds you in the they try and do the London accent out were you doing an impression of someone doing an impression of you yeah wow paradoxical and I’m like yeah yeah yeah I am yeah because and you go up there and it’s yeah it’s different world man this is a different world it’s fun out there though um Newcastle great night out by the way fantastic night out big market sides Geordie Shore it’s wild man I’ve never been in a high street and seen these girls sorry Lil but just with gold on no that is true and it’s minus four.

[27:37] Laura Ann-Moore:

I I think that they are their internal temperature system is just like off like they do it they do it for the game and I I respect it. When I see them with the cameras and their legs out I’m like yes Queen get it I wish I could do that but I am comfort over fashion every single day.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah fair hands down yeah I get it fair play to them. It’s not that cold in Stephen it’s just can be yes in the winter of nothing um but Omar from Newcastle I’ve worked in a number of different jobs and I’ve only just realised that I’ve been paying into a pension at all of them and I’m finding it quite overwhelming to know where to start even finding them.

SPEAKER_00: Any recommendations from you guys on where to start yeah there’s there’s several billion pounds worth of lost pension money. It’s 31 billion 31 billion yeah yeah yeah mad. I yeah last start I saw was 19 but it’s it’s it’s growing all the time and it’s a consequence of how many jobs the average person has. So we have auto-enrolment which means that if you work for a company you’re aged over 22 and earn more than 10,000 pounds a year they legally have to pay into a pension for you you pay in as well and then you get a tax relief from the government but the average person has between 11 and 12 jobs over the course of their life and I can imagine that will increase as well. As we said in the other um question answer as well life expectancy is going up pension age is going up so more people will be working in more jobs for longer. So that’s great for people saving into pensions but could lead you to have lots of different pots. Even though you might not be paying into a pension pot anymore it’s still there you know it’s uh it’s like similar to a bank account it’s just an account that’s in your name. And also it doesn’t actually take that much for it to be considered lost. I mean if you move house and you don’t tell your pension provider then that you know that’s counted as lost. So um it’s quite a common thing. In terms of what you can do with it you can do um you can use the government’s pension tracing service and if you just Google that it is um a page on the gov.uk website that lets you put in the name of where you used to work and then it will show you the scheme name and the number but then you have to call it up yourself. There are also various pension platforms that offer consolidation services as part of their sign up process to get you to save your pension with them or you can so you can try that. I think another useful thing is you can go back through your emails if you’ve forgotten where you worked just go back through your emails and see you know normally they’ll send you the contract or or something at least and um you can use that to kind of figure out where you worked and where your pension used to be. But it’s it’s it’s a tricky problem for sure.

[30:36] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah I had nine grand when I found mine and I was like pretty shocked that I didn’t expect it to be that I think I calculated it to be about five and was like whoa cool like there was a couple that I didn’t remember from like little sales jobs that I had and I was like oh yeah like I worked there for a year when I was 22 like I just didn’t even think about it.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah um what what I’ve done with my pensions because I’ve I’ve not worked in that many companies is whenever I have like a main pension pot and then whenever whenever I would leave the company I would do a man a pension transfer manually from the job I was leaving to that main pension pot which was the first pension I I ever had. And those pension transfers went through but unlike something like this um the current account switch service um there is no I only learned this recently there’s no set time frame on which a pension transfer needs to be executed. So there are currently various groups at the moment trying to um like lobby for like a like a dedicated pension transfer service. But we can expect this conversation to to continue as time goes on.

[31:44] Sammie Ellard-King:

100% um we had David Henderson from Penny on and they were talking about like um the government working on pensions dashboard so you can actually see where things are and straightaway and actually have like log in and it’s there and you can go and access them and it’ll tell you the provider and exactly how much is there which is amazing. Yeah. Um which is like I think it’s brilliant and then he was saying development of that as like commercial platforms which will be much more widely used. Yeah. That’s been quite heavy in in Sweden and Norway I believe and uh Scandinavian countries in general they’ve been doing this and it’s worked and I think that’s such a cool thing because you just log in and be like I’m rich I got money.

SPEAKER_00: So it’s like, yeah, auto-enrolment. Pre-auto-enrolment pension adoption rates were fairly low. Then with auto-enrolment we now, latest data, 88% of um employees contribute to workplace pensions so it’s gone up and then it’s created the new problem of yes there are high percentages of people saving but it’s happening in the background and they don’t know. So just one of those things where like you solve a problem but then like a hydra it creates like three more yeah yeah yeah well they’ll get there eventually I think they’ve they’re working on it which is great to see anything to add though Laura at all?

[32:59] Laura Ann-Moore:

Not really actually I think you literally covered everything. A fair plan I’ve got two pensions I only had one basically job before I did before I sat my business. It was like one job that I had when I was 19 and then the only reason why I ended up with a second pension is because that business closed down but I went with the boss and we ended up in working basically together again. So that like I’ve literally got two pensions with not loads in it so I didn’t really need to do anything with it. But I get asked all the time about pension consolidation. Yeah and like I think it I guess what I will say is it’s one of those tasks that I think gets put on people’s lists and people really like um what’s the word like the opposite of excited like then they couldn’t think of anything worse. So it just gets pushed along and it pushed along people are like oh I’ve got to sort of my pensions and that one and it’s like it probably is quite long especially when you’ve got a call them up and you’ve got a I had a friend do it recently and he was actually you know what it actually wasn’t too like as hard as I thought it was going to be um but I would say is if you are in that position where you want to consolidate your pensions each time you have a money day every month, just try and do one of them. Like break it down into smaller tasks. If you don’t want to go through a service where um a company or a brand is doing it for you and you move everything there and you just want to look into it yourself, just task yourself with like one’s calling one you know one company each money day or something so that you can get through it without feeling like you’ve got to dedicate like three days of your life to it.

[34:26] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah it did take me a while. It was a good few hours of work and then as well with Nest, which was an absolute ballake like send you a letter in the post, you then have to like fill out the form, send it back to them in the post, they then send you back the number then you put that through then that takes three weeks I was just like oh my God, surely that need this needs this is one of those things you’re like just get it online let me put a number in and let me move my money out like you can in a bank but it was a quite a long process some were a lot quicker. It was literally a phone call it’s like okay where are you moving it here’s your number I’m done for some quite archaic um but hopefully Nest have changed that uh now not calling them out at all um the only thing with that as well I would add is um it can pay off to consolidate and because of the default plans um default plans might not be as suitable for you. So we did a calculation so my mum found £65,000 in lost pensions. Love um she did quite good out of it was literally from when she was working in her 20s and it’s gr it grew massively um but it was sat in a default plan and we worked out if even if it was in a slightly more balanced plan she would have had a she so from the £65,000 she would have had just under £110,000. Wow so that’s one small switch basically throughout her like key years the in her late twenties to early 50s she’s now in her early 60s like would have been a 45 grand.

[36:05] Sammie Ellard-King:

Wow.

SPEAKER_02: So it’s quite a lot of money. Um so I think if you are happier with it being in a slightly more balanced or even more adventurous approach especially in your key compounding years it may be beneficial for you to sort it out and get that money moving in a direction that’s a little bit more beneficial.

SPEAKER_00: Do you know much about default plans, Timmy? Yeah yeah they, it’s almost the onus is put on the pension saver. So it’s like it goes into the default plan. But yeah you might want to take a more um what’s sometimes called risky or adventurous approach which essentially means that more of your pension savings are in um equities so stocks and shares than in than in bonds or or cash you may have ethical considerations around your pension savings as well which wouldn’t be um which wouldn’t be fulfilled by a default plan you may want to um or you may have certain like religious requirements um like an ESG or Sharia fund yeah yeah yeah exactly so yeah just your your pension savings it’s your it’s your money that you’re paying into every month via an automatic process and so it’s easy to not think about it but it is yours um we’re all living and working longer than ever before most of the people listening to this will probably spend a third of their life retired um so it’s yeah it’s worth it’s worth looking at and um completely agree with what Laura says if you have lots of pots then break it down maybe say you know you’ll make one call a week or one call a month technically speaking you have until the age of access to sort it right um which is uh 55 at the moment and it’s going up to 57 in 2028 so it’s like important even though it might not seem urgent.

[37:52] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah totally totally you can use great services Moneybox, Penny, etc if you want to as well uh obviously just be aware of their their fee structures and make sure you’re you’re happy with it with it before they sort of move that money around is what I’d say um but Ollie and Charlie from Gloucester um we’ve been really struggling with uh we’ve been sorry Ollie and Charlie from Gloucester we’ve been really struggling to get a hold of our spending as a couple lately it seems like every month we are adding to our joint account to cover extra food costs and general spending how can we get to a point when we don’t have to do this as we keep getting into arguments every month about money at the moment classic I think money is the like number one reason for arguments and divorce in the UK so it’s like understandable.

[38:40] Laura Ann-Moore:

I think it’s I guess what I would say is when you’re managing your money as a couple everybody does it differently some people keep their bills money uh keep put their bills money together but have their own spending some keep everything separate. I have friends that put everything together they just have one joint account between them. So you’ve got to find what works for you. And I guess before you even start to think about the practical stuff like as a couple you really need to understand what your own money sort of like habits, behaviours and relationship is because if you’ve got one person who’s a total spender and one person who’s a total saver, that just in itself causes problems. So I think being able to have open and honest, vulnerable conversations as a couple are really important. And then like you know in this instance who’s doing the overspending is it that you’re both putting in there but you’re both just overspending is it that one person’s really sticking to the budget and one person isn’t like there’s so many nuances to why it might not be working aside from the fact that everything is just so much more expensive now. So it’s like but then there’s also the element of like is your budget realistic like you could say oh we’ve we’ve set this budget for ourselves but the reason why we’re going over is actually because it’s just too small. And which I think makes it worse sometimes because if you set yourself too small of a budget and then you think you’re going to stick to it and then you go over it just because it’s like was inevitable, you actually end up upsetting yourself more or cause more of an issue in your relationship because you know it’s like oh well we’ve got to take money out of savings or we’ve got to dip into it. Whereas if you are a little bit more realistic, you might be able to set yourself a budget that actually makes more sense. So I think you probably need to identify what that actual issue of overspending is. Who’s doing it? Why is it happening? What is it going on? Are you being realistic and what your own individual personality is like with money.

[40:35] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah I like you said that yeah because it’s so like some it could be the girl’s putting in more or than the boy or vice versa and then that skews it and then someone’s overspending someone’s not or things have just gone up in cost. Who knows? It’s such a like crazy situation. Any thoughts on that, Timmy, at all?

SPEAKER_00: Yeah it’s a really common scenario for couples and I love that Laura’s covered the kind of the mindset side and the conversations you need to be having coming at it from a systems perspective I just think you have things that you spend money on on an individual basis and then things that you spend money on on a joint basis. So when we look at things like taxes that is something that you have to pay um individually debt is something that is individual to you as well as your your credit history and there’ll be certain bills that’ll be individual to you maybe you have contact lenses or all that sort of thing. So I think the I don’t know why I was just like nah get someone to pay for your contacts everyone has things that they will pay for on an on an individual basis. So I’m a big fan of you receive income you get paid a salary get paid into your individual bank accounts that’s where your individual stuff comes out of but then and particularly if you live together there’ll be things that you pay jointly that could be groceries it could be the bills it could be like rent or mortgage your individual accounts then pay a joint account which then pays for the joint stuff. So you’ve got the individuals over here they pay into the joint and the joint pays for joint stuff. Now what if you what if one of you earns more than the other well you can top up that joint account in terms of percentages. You can split it any way you like whether that’s 50 50 60 40 70 30 and there are legitimate reasons for doing it that way because there are very many jobs that perhaps ought to pay more like maybe being a nurse or a teacher or something that just don’t but offer a significant amount of value to society. So there’s numerous like legitimate reasons why someone might not why there might be an earnings imbalance but I think it’s important to keep um expenses individual and joint separate. Not in the least because of you know the unfortunate fact that one in seven women in the UK will have experienced some form of economic abuse in the last 12 months from a current or former partner and that one in seven one in seven in the last 12 months. And you know if you’re in a shared account with the scenario you talked about where it’s just a couple just putting everything into one account because it’s a joint account you both have equal rights over that money. One half of the couple could just drain the account so it’s not that we’re trying to keep stuff from our partners I just think it’s important to keep individual separate from joint and you decide what what comes out of each.

[43:46] Sammie Ellard-King:

Yeah yeah I think we noticed that as a couple recently like we were doing that you know extra 100 pound would go in on the last week and we’d both be like put 100 pounds in or you know if someone’s over we we communicate a little bit as well around that. So it doesn’t tend to ever be an argument or anything. It’s more just like oh yeah you know like you you bought that X, Y, and Z thing would you mind popping a bit extra in this month? And I’m usually I’m just yeah cool. And you’re like yeah cool and that’s fine. Or if you know that person’s like running low money because they’ve had like loads of individual costs come out or they’ve bought something or whatever that might well be then you take the burden on for them and that’s totally fine. But we’ve just like rebudgeted completely because everything’s gone up in cost. Everything mortgage went up in costs you know we’re putting a little more food costs through because the food bills are through the roof. Yeah. And we it was just happening every single month. So we were just like okay shall we just increase by like £150 a month each and we’re just not going to have this problem because we were at a period of time where it was just like we were getting contingency and we were like we put there’s even in our budget is £100 contingency and we’re burning through that. So it’s like you know we’re trying to get to the point now but it has just got more expensive. So I think there’s something we just got to factor in that and that just could be the big reason. Like you might have to look at it and go, okay, what am I doing individually? We might have to sort of maybe peg back on some of the golf days or the trips out or whatever those might well be and that money needs to go to the run our life or you look at bringing some money in elsewhere to supplement that. But uh yeah.

[45:25] Laura Ann-Moore:

I was just gonna say I also think when it comes to managing your finances in a couple there just has to be a lot of trust there has to be a lot of trust in a relationship anyway right that’s just like the foundation of your relationship but finances comes into that as well. So I think um in that instance like you saying oh you know if this person had slightly more individual costs so I’ll track a little bit more in there’s the element of like being able to do that and wanting to be able to do that and knowing that life Life fluctuates, but the money in the joint account, what it is used for that you both trust each other to use it accordingly. I think that’s just a huge part of it.

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, 100%. You’re totally right. Um, love, love that guys. Well, look, hope hope that helps out uh your joint account problems and uh yeah, do let us know how you get on. Um so cool, Tommy from London.

[46:15] Laura Ann-Moore:

Tommy!

SPEAKER_02: He’s playing a millwall fan, you know, geezer. Um sorry that just popped my uh it was very cock me. The dapper laughs uh thing when he jumps in the uh ice bath and he’s just like he’s there, he’s like I’m a geezer. Sorry, just cracking me up in the air. Very funny. Um he’s I thought he got cancelled. He definitely did, and they came back again. Yeah, wow, like sober, completely gone, like teeth. Race his hand says, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, went for it proper and and is again very funny again now. So uh yeah. Back in the ditch. Um, so Tommy from London has said buying a house feels uh like a dream that I’m gonna be chasing forever. And I’ve just opened a lifetime ISA, but the same house I like is up by £50,000 in the last three years, and it feels like I’m on a never-ending treadmill trying to get to it. What’s your view on this, guys? Should I just stop and focus on investing or keep going and go for my dream?

[47:20] Rotimi Merriman-Johnson:

Yeah, it’s a really tricky one.

SPEAKER_01: It is a tricky one. I think the fact that so if buying a house is your dream, as opposed to just a goal that’s been pushed on you from society, then it kind of makes it a little bit different because the emotional factor is there.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Like I always say, if you’re saving to buy a house, is that your goal, or is that someone else’s goal that has been passed on to you? This dude sounds like this is a lifelong dream. Um, so therefore you never know though.

SPEAKER_02: People say it’s their dream and it’s not. That’s the thing.

SPEAKER_01: That’s true. So it’s like if you’re if you feel like it’s your dream, really question that and say, is it? Is it is that my dream? Like, you know, to own my own place, to be able to decorate the walls how I want, to have, you know, my own, you know, especially if you if you were raised in a really like toxic household and you want somewhere to call your own, like that really could be something that really feels like a dream. So I think questioning it is really important. And if the answer is yes, that is also okay. But if the answer is no, you could say, okay, maybe I could put my financial efforts somewhere else. I think that, yeah, there is a real big issue in the UK with housing and pricing, right? Like it’s just it’s through the roof, man. It’s through the roof, it’s so expensive, it’s not as affordable as it used to be. Um and, you know, you could look to invest the money that you want to use for a deposit for your house to try and, you know, grow it and have more, but you have to be aware of the risks of, you know, your capital, the market going up and down. And maybe you say, right, I’ll do it for five years and hope that actually I’ve grown that money and I have enough. But you run the risk, you know, we could have another pandemic. And then suddenly that money is, you know, maybe the the stock market’s on a downturn and you have way less than you thought. So I guess it also depends, a, how risky you’re feeling, how risky, you know, your risk tolerance. Um, and also who knows what the property market’s gonna do. Like, I don’t know. I don’t I don’t I I don’t know. No, I don’t have an answer for that one.

[49:18] Rotimi Merriman-Johnson:

I think the simplest thing I can advise this person, I think I think their dream is completely legitimate. Um I’ve lived in over 20 houses in my lifetime. 20?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, wow.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: Actually, I’m to be fair, I’m not that far away from you actually.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And I would say in the last 10 years, I probably moved on average like once a year or something like that, maybe once every couple of years. So I get it. Yeah, I’m probably about the same as you. Yeah, yeah. Like any van.com. Like I should have shares what I mean. Um, so I get it. Um, the most useful thing that I can advise them is get a mortgage broker. Um, they don’t always charge you. Like the mortgage brokers I’ve worked with, um, they get a commission from the lender at the end of the day. They’re worth their weight in gold. And I would have a conversation with them and say, look, this is my dream house. I want to buy it. What government schemes, what lenders, and what like other strategies can we use to get me on the property ladder for this particular property? And if they’re a whole of market mortgage broker, they’ll have access to certain deals and rates to be able to help you. Yeah. Um, I do think that um, like if if it’s truly a dream, then I don’t think that they should give up on it. Um, with investing, it doesn’t need to be either or you can keep your lifetime ISA savings and then you can invest a small amount of money every month. But getting on the property ladder is difficult. Um, we know what’s happened happening with property prices and what has happened to them over the past 20, 30 years. So um you will have to be patient with this one. Um, but there’s also no rush, you know. Like they they have um well, they have until they buy a house to to like find the right one, essentially.

[51:19] Laura Ann-Moore:

And I would also add, I was just thinking when you were saying about like government schemes, if the dream is like if it’s that big of a dream, this might be controversial advice, but like we don’t know where this guy oh wait, we do know where he lives. Where does he live?

SPEAKER_02: He’s from London.

SPEAKER_01: Okay. Yeah. Just in London. So what I was gonna say was if buying a house is your dream and it trumps everything else and it’s really important to you, you could look to move location.

SPEAKER_03: Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: Like there are so many, you know, I’m I live in London, I don’t want to move out of London because my work is here, my friends are here. Like right now it makes sense for me to be here. I can’t afford to buy, so renting is fine. But if you’re like, no, no, no, getting on the property ladder is so important, there are so many places that you could look to move outside of London, especially if he’s on a London wage right now, and that money that he saves might not be able to get him a London property, but it might be able to get him a property, I don’t know, actually can’t even say, like, I don’t know, up north or somewhere else to get on the property ladder for a few years, get a bit of equity, you know, get the ball rolling, and then you could move back. For me, when someone suggests that, I’m like, how dare you ask me to move away from my friends and family? But some people don’t care. Like, I know loads of people who have bobbed around the country so that they can get on the property ladder. So yeah, I think if the dream is really big um and you can use your London wages, you might be able to get on the property ladder and fulfill that dream by moving around.

[52:42] Sammie Ellard-King:

100%. That’s exactly what we did. So he’s like, we looked at a few places in London that were tiny and very expensive, and then for yeah, it worked out, yeah, just on just over 50 grand less, we got our house to get on the market. But the sacrifice was a 45-minute train journey into central London. But that 45 minute train journey allowed us to make that thing. So there is some element sometimes of sacrifice in depends, like if you’re like, I want to live in this area and that is it, and you know, I’m not doing it, then you’re more restricted. But if you are open to home counties, then you can find some really good opportunities around and around.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. And what’s happening in London is just some to I really don’t want to turn this into a like um sinking ship content because like I go on my YouTube and there’s just loads of like, oh, the UK’s on fire, it’s time to leave, da-da-da. So I don’t want to turn this into that, but we do have a tricky problem in the UK around like just the immense amount of private ownership of properties in the country, um, a severe lack of like house building, but then also the fact that because this person’s from London, right? Like London we call we call the UK the UK, but really the UK is a donut-shaped country wrapped around another country called London, which does a quarter of the UK’s GDP and has 13% of the population, and nearly 10 million people living in it. There are more people in London than there are in like some small European nations. The more people you have in a space, the more expensive that space is gonna be, both the housing and the public services and the transport and stuff. And this is why I think making different parts of the UK viable to live in is really key for like managing the cost of living. Because if everyone just piles into London, then it’s not gonna be affordable. There’s just not gonna be enough London to go around everyone.

[54:45] Laura Ann-Moore:

Not enough London.

SPEAKER_02: No, no, no. And it’s gradually just sprawling out and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, but yeah, looking elsewhere is a good place to start. And even if that isn’t you right now, just have a look because you might go, oh. Like you might be quite shocked and go, oh look, like this is what I actually can get for my money. And I don’t mind doing 30 minutes or 40 minutes, and trains are getting so much faster now, like especially on the Lizzie line. You know, you can get in the Liz into you know from Reading, you can be in Paddington.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that’s a good train.

SPEAKER_02: It’s 24 minutes, yeah. Yeah, which is pretty nuts, right? So and in Reading, the price is gonna be a lot less than they are in London. So it’s something to think about, even though, in my opinion, Reading’s a bit shit. But sorry, guys from Reading, you’re listening to this. Um, but uh look, I it it it’s not easy, let’s be honest. But Lifetime ISA is definitely gonna help you and get you get your deposit up. And you know, if you can, if you maybe look to invest with uh a partner or a friend, then again you can bring those deposits together and get somebody there. Buying with somebody else will will help you. Um but guys, I’ve loved this. It’s been a lot of fun. Um thank you so much for coming on. And um, if you do want your question answered by me, Timmy, and Laura, then you can email invest at Up The Gains and we will answer your questions live. But um, where can people find you, Timmy, if they want to connect with you?

[56:10] Rotimi Merriman-Johnson:

I’m at Mr. Money Jar. So that’s like a jar of money on all social media. Nice.

SPEAKER_01: I am Laura Ann-Moore, pretty much everywhere Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_02: Nice. We will leave your links in the show notes below, guys, but do give us a follow and share this episode with a friend if you feel like they would find it useful. And yeah, we’ll see you on the next one. Thank you so much.