Neil Invests: From Homeless to Retiring at 50 Through Investing

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

[00:00] Sammie: Neil, welcome. Thank you. You spent four years at university and never finished the first year. You slept on your sister’s floor for eighteen months, living off Greggs sausage rolls, and you gambled away six grand on credit cards to try and pay for your wedding. And now you’re on track to retire by 50. Yes. What the hell happened in between?

[00:25] Neil: Yeah, okay, so it was a bit of a journey. So the journey in between is what transformed me. And there’s a few things that happened specifically around that. So the whole thing around the failure in university, um, there was a lot of shame associated with that and embarrassment. And so coming out of the other side of it, what I really wanted to do was rectify that, fix it, not just for myself, but for my family. So between coming out of university and now, I did spend 18 months on my sister’s floor. That was when I came out of university. I had nowhere to go, I had distanced myself from everyone, my family, my friends. It was a very isolating time in reality, because of all of the shame associated with it. And that meant I sort of regressed even further backwards and worse, and I refused to sign on just through my own pride, so I had no money whatsoever. The Greggs sausage rolls is correct. I used to try and save up, but this is when they were around 70p, 70-odd pence. I used to try and save up to get one of them for lunch. The main transformational thing that happened to me was I met my now wife, and that was after about 12 months on my sister’s floor, and that gave me a connection with someone, which I was missing because I didn’t have anyone at that time, because I’d isolated myself so much, and it gave me an opportunity and an impetus to try and fix things and get out of it. I didn’t want to be in the situation I was in, but I just sort of spiralled myself into that position through circumstance and through my own fault. And having met my wife, I actually still wasn’t in a position to properly fix myself, and she applied for a job for me, and that was the beginning of my career. So I had done a number of different jobs, I’d been a chef, I’d done some crappy bits for a few weeks here and there, but nothing that I stuck at. And then she applied for me on my behalf, and then the day before said, right, you’ve got a job interview tomorrow. That was at Molson Coors. I was like, oh crap, what have you done to me? And something just twigged, and I realised I don’t want to be on my sister’s floor for another bloody day, as grateful as I was that she’d put me up. And I turned up to the interview, very gratefully got the job. I remember when I got offered it because I was so desperate. This was 2005, so you can take inflation into account. But they said to me, how much, what’s your salary expectation? I had no experience of this sort of stuff. I said, listen, if you give me 12 grand, I’ll be over the moon. And the HR lady said, I’m very happy to say we’re going to offer you 16,800 pounds. I thought I’d won the lottery, right? My life changed immediately then, and I realised I’ve got to stick at this, I’ve got to make it happen. Six weeks after that, I got paid the first time, and it was six weeks’ worth of payment, which was enough to put down a deposit, what’s it called, you know, we deposit to rent somewhere. And me and my wife then, well, she wasn’t my wife then, we moved out, and then I just progressed from there. I just stuck at it, threw myself at it. I lost both my parents, my dad in 2012, my mum in 2017, and I had two boys, one in 2011 and one in 2013. And those four things, every time one of them happened, I just ramped it up again. The first boy I had, I was like, right, we’re not doing this any more. We need to do something about it. And I really focused on my career, moved right the way up to the top, to a point where I was head of packaging for a multi-billion pound business. My dad died, that affected me. I then had my second child, then my mum died. And every one of those significant things in my life just made me really focus harder and harder and harder on a desperation never to get back to my sister’s floor. That’s what drives me all the time. I was talking about this with someone the other day. When you come from a background of, you know, a traumatic background, you have traumatic experiences. A lot of people are actually driven by this. They’re desperate never to go back to it. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since. And that’s when I started investing as well. So I progressed a career, started investing, and then started a side hustle, which is now my career.

[04:32] Sammie: Mate, it’s inspirational, because a lot of young men and women included go through a seriously tough time and they have a decision to make, and the decision can be one degree either way, and it sends them on a completely different path, or it can be a full 180. You did the full 180, and you decided, no, I’m not going to accept this for myself, I’m going to build a life. What is it there that makes you do that? What pushed you towards that right decision? Was it the wife, or was it something inside of you that said, no, I’m meant for more?

[05:13] Neil: So when I look back a step further, so I was born in Ireland. Parents got divorced when I was seven, and I moved to the UK. Up until I was about eight it was a really traumatic time because of all of that going on. I remember coming in the car, we drove on the ferry to England. I remember saying to my mum in the car on the way to the port, oh crap, what language do they speak there? Do I need to learn a new language? I was a naive seven-year-old kid. And I’d lost all my family, they’re all still over in Ireland, all my aunties and uncles. And we were moving to a new life. And I did not enjoy that time. There was about 12 to 18 months of my mum and me living at friends’ houses, on floors and in spare bedrooms and stuff like that. But then from about 9, 10 to starting university, was the best life I ever had. Loved it. Really secure. Had my mum, my mum remarried, and I had a stepdad, and I just loved my life. So when I started to fail at university, I had that memory of what good could be: a happy home life, security, stable, a bed, not sleeping on the floor. And I was desperate to go back to some aspect of that. So there was actually quite a healthy childhood, a really happy childhood. And because I came from happiness, and the only trauma was the divorce, I didn’t have that baggage. So it was self-inflicted what I did at university, and it was just, I was just having a party every day, and I had different groups of friends that I could latch onto, and I just went wild. The first term of university, there was a fire in my parents’ house, and, well, the insurance paid out, and in my first term of university, this is a terrible thing that happened to me, my mum gave me my insurance payout, so I’d lost all my possessions, but it was three and a half thousand pounds. So I’m 18, I’m going wild, I’ve got a student loan, and I’ve just been given three and a half thousand pounds. By the end of the first term, it was gone, with the exception, I bought one guitar because I’d had four guitars before, I at least bought one, I’ve still got it now. And that just set me on the path to four years of destruction, wildness. So the key thing that really pulled me out of it, yes, was meeting my partner and my wife, but also recognising and knowing what a happy and healthy and normal and progressive life can be. So wanting to get back to that because I had seen it before, I wanted it, I wanted stability, I wanted normality. And for a number of years after that, I led a really boring, stable, normal, go-to-work, nine to five, play football with my friends life. And that was one of the happiest times of my life because I’d come out the other side of it. So it was that desperation to get back to that. Everyone wants to be happy. And I was actively destroying myself through the actions that I’d taken before, so I just wanted to get back to that.

[08:59] Sammie: When you first sent me that video, it really hit me. And the reason being is because I think there’s a lot that resonates there. I went through that period of being 18, being given money by the government, being given a little bit of money by my mum and dad as well, just to get me started at university, and it was gone in literally two months, and then I did the overdrafts, then the credit cards, and that whole cycle started for me at that really young age, but it was driven by self-sabotage and also peacocking as well. So you mentioned the friendship groups, latching onto them. I did the same thing. Someone was out on a Tuesday, I would be out on a Tuesday, then I’d be out on the Wednesday, find the people out on the Thursday, and I’d go round and round and round and round. And I did that for about five, six years. And the reason why I wanted to ask you that is because it’s exactly the same for me. I knew what the life I really wanted was like, but I was just caught up in this whirlwind of drink and drugs and all of this stupid stuff as an 18 to 24-year-old, and it got me in the pickle, and there was the moment that I talk about quite often where I realised that I was going in the wrong direction, but I was too far gone down the road to even really understand it. But I was still managing to do all right in my career, and then it was a friend of mine that put me on the right path, and I’m actually meeting him today, actually, after this, and I credit him for that moment, but it still takes a lot of brute force to turn your life around and go down a different path when it’s a coping mechanism. You’re probably dealing with something by doing that, right?

[10:44] Neil: Yeah, it’s escapism, one form or another. Everyone has different forms of escapism, and we all live with some level of fear and some level of shame when we do things wrong, and you can face into it, like now, we’re relatively rounded men, and we can deal with difficult things in life. But when you’re young and you might have come from some trauma and things are happening around you, you might not be able to. So you might find some escapism. That might be drink, that might be, you know, my mum was a therapist, one of the things she said a lot of people do is sleep to escape. They might sleep all day, go to bed at night, but sleep all day as well. It might be computer games, it might be anything. Some are more destructive than others. Gambling’s the worst, I hate gambling. But that escapism takes you away from it and frees your mind for a time. Now my escapism is being with my family, being in the garden, I love going to the cinema, love watching sports. It’s different to what it was then. But if you find a tool that helps you completely black out whatever it is that’s going on that you’re having to deal with, and for me it was a big part around the shame, because I did well at school, and once I started failing, I just cycled downwards, spiralled downwards, and you’re right, you either break that or you don’t. Just before we started recording, you said both of us probably could have gone in a completely different direction, and there are sliding doors moments in your life, aren’t there? Yeah. And we both faced them, we both went through that and we came out to where we are now. But both of us could easily not be anywhere near the situation we’re in now.

[12:19] Sammie: My uncle said it to me at a party recently, and I can’t get it out of my brain, and it really makes me think back and look back and go, wow, was I actually that far gone? Because he said to me, when I saw you at 24, you came round for this family barbecue, and he literally said to my auntie, apparently, who then verified this as well, I was like, you’re just saying this now, that he said, he’s not going to get to 27, he won’t be there at 27. Wow. And he was like, to see you now, and it brings tears to my eyes and stuff when I talk about it, but he’s like, he didn’t actually think I was going to get to 27, but now he sees me now and he’s like, your turnaround arc is nuts. And I think it’s testament to having that mental grit to go out and change your life at those points. Because this happened to me at 25, right? Some people this happens to at 35, 45. They have moments in their lives and they turn things around. I think everyone does eventually, to a degree. There are obviously some people that unfortunately fall foul to it. But it will happen to you at some point. You’ll get a moment, you’ll find a girlfriend, or you’ll have a child, and there’ll be something else that becomes more important than you, and you start working towards feeding that, I think.

[13:40] Neil: 100%. And it’s wild, and you’re spot on, it can happen at any age, and there’ll be people our age now, perhaps going through the same thing. And it is difficult to get out of. But for me, the biggest learning from it, like when I came out of and dropped out of university, so I had no degree, basically no qualifications and no experience. And there’ll be people ten times more qualified than I was then, now perhaps struggling still through whatever it is that’s going on in their lives. But it doesn’t necessarily mean, there always is a way out, even like on the YouTube video where I went over this, I described myself, the thumbnail says “from loser to almost financial independence”. I was a loser, a proper loser. But also I was terrified, terrified of the reality of the world. And anyone in this situation, when you’re in it, I remember having such little money, I honestly, I don’t know if I should say this, used to lie in bed thinking, maybe I should go and rob a shop. I don’t know how else to get money, I don’t know how else to feed myself. Maybe I just need to go and get a balaclava and tool up and go and rob the corner shop. I got to that point because I didn’t know any other way, and at that moment, there’s no way out for you in your mind, but there always is. There always is, and you just have to take the opportunities when they come up.

[15:10] Sammie: Yeah, I think it’s really important to say that, because some people turn to the worse of things in life to try and supplement that. That’s where you know you get…

[15:21] Neil: And if I was a bit more confident, maybe I would have done, because I was such a shy person when I was younger. Maybe I could have gone and robbed a shop, and then I’d be in jail, and then I’d spiral even worse, then I’d either be in jail or dead now. Well, that’s how you see that progression happen, right?

[15:35] Sammie: Yeah, those moments, you have choices to make, right?

[15:38] Neil: Yeah, you do, yeah.

[15:40] Sammie: You’re working up at Molson Coors and you start moving up the ladder there, and then you decide to pay for the wedding with, potentially, one of the worst decisions you’ve ever made, and you credit yourself for that. Walk us through that decision, because from the outside it sounds mad, but I want to know what’s going on to try and make that decision in the first place.

[16:08] Neil: It is mad. I don’t regret it now. So what happened was, I got married in the July of 2009, and in the March, I was like, we’ve got to pay for this wedding, I don’t know how the hell we’re going to pay for this wedding, because both of our sets of parents weren’t wealthy, so there wasn’t money coming to pay for a wedding. We were going to get married, we wanted to get married. I was on, by then, 22 grand or something like that. She was on a similar amount. We’ve got to put a wedding on, what the hell are we going to do? And at that time, the decision was, well, we’ll just put it all on credit cards, the joint decision. And I was like, right, okay, we’ll do that and then we’ll pay it off. And I was like, I’ve got an idea. This is 2009, so just as gambling websites are coming up and starting to fly, I was like, I’ll win the cost of the wedding by gambling. I’m not, I’m no pro at gambling, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. So I signed up to a bunch of different websites and I just started losing, losing, losing, losing. And what were you betting on? First one I bet on was football. And I don’t know if you remember, it’s a famous game. I’m a Tottenham fan, don’t hold it against me. We’re staying up, I know, worst season ever. And it was when Harry Redknapp was in charge, and it was Tottenham against Portsmouth, and it was in the 90-odd minute, I put 250 quid on Tottenham to win, and it was nil-nil or one-one, it was a draw. And in the 90-odd minute, Darren Bent missed an open goal. It was the famous one where Harry Redknapp said that Sandra would have scored that, his wife. And I just lost £250 immediately. Is that the one where it goes through his legs and he misses it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Horrific miss. And I’m watching it live thinking there’s £250 quid on, which is a hell of a lot of money to me then. It’s a lot of money now. And that was the beginning of it. I was like, right, okay, well, we need to find some more football matches, and then winning a bit, losing a bit. It was Cheltenham Friday, and I put a tenner on Punjabi at 66 to 1. That came in. So then I’ve got some confidence, I was like, I can do this, I can do this. Then I progressed onto casino type websites, gambling things, and was doing roulette, and I was just trying to double my money, and it came to a head one night where I was already thousands down, and I did the old double it, so red, if it doesn’t come up, double it. So I did £10, it didn’t come up, £20, it didn’t come up, etc, etc, it didn’t come up, I don’t know how many times in a row, but until I’d lost another two, three thousand pounds. And by then I’m £6,000 in debt, all on credit cards. My wife doesn’t know anything about it. Oh, she didn’t know? No.

[18:51] Sammie: Okay.

[18:51] Neil: I’d maxed every credit card I could get my hands on out. There were the cards that were supposed to be used for the wedding. Yeah. Oh man. And then I didn’t have, again, I just reverted back to how I was before, the shame and the fear. So I didn’t have the balls to tell her. And then in the post comes the credit card statements, and then she finds them. And it’s three months before the wedding, and she’s like, what the hell’s going on? We still got married. So I managed to resolve it. Stayed with you. Yeah. That was nearly the end, right from the off. And I don’t, and I mean this, it sounds like I do, but I don’t have a gambling problem. Every now and again now I’ll bet on the Grand National or a football game, but I’m not on any websites. I’ll do it in the bookies. And I enjoy the odd one, but I do it very little, maybe 10 pounds a year.

[19:36] Sammie: So no one knows this, this is the first time I’ve said this to you. But I was 24 years old, I was working in a company called Ingenuity, I was doing a little bit of business development for agencies, and I just got into you know, Skybet type vibe, right? And a friend of mine that I lived with at the time was quite big into his roulette, little flutter here and there. He wouldn’t really care, and he was definitely like addicted, but not addicted, addicted. He had a limit, if you know what I mean, like he wouldn’t go past it. But I did the same as you. I was sitting on the toilet at work and I lost, and I lost, and I doubled, and I doubled, because I was trying to carry my little £240 that I had for the month to live, to double it to £560 so I could at least survive the month, because I wasn’t paid enough. And then I doubled it and doubled it and doubled it, and then finally on the 240, it came in. It came in. And I have never been so scared in my life, because the moment of not getting it meant that I was completely, and this was when a third of my wages were going on interest payments and debt as well. I was so bad. And it came in, and then from that day I have never played casino again online. I’ve been to Vegas and had a nice time and stuff like that, but never done it again, and it’s so scary. So I know exactly how you feel in that moment because I reckon my heart rate would have, if I’d been wearing one of these things, would have been off the charts. So I know how you feel.

[21:11] Neil: It’s one of the worst feelings in the world, not only for gambling with me, not only when I lost, but when I won, because there’s such a build-up of relief.

[21:22] Sammie: Yeah.

[21:23] Neil: And it’s horrible. I hate it. I think it is one of the most toxic things that exist in the world. I can’t believe the amount of football teams that take gambling sponsorships and the amount of ads you see. It is one of the most destructive things that exists, and it’s horrific.

[21:36] Sammie: But I do agree with you, like every now and then, the Grand National, I do it every year with my nan, and, well, she’s passed now, and I keep it up for her. She used to do the thing, she won like eight years in a row, and she’d put three quid on, you know, it’s three quid, and it’d just be like, yes, and it’d be a really nice day of doing that. So I do that to honour her, and I think that’s fine. And every now and then, if I’m having a fun day out with the lads, and we go in, I’ll put five quid in the bookies doing an accumulator if we’re all in the pub for the day or whatever. Like, that’s the only time, and that’s fun because it’s fun at the time. It’s when you’re betting on League Two games on a Tuesday night to try and survive, to try and survive.

[22:17] Neil: That’s what you were doing. So you weren’t in a position where you were like, right, I’m hooked on gambling, I do it all the time. You were just like me, trying to solve a problem and thought that might be an out, yeah. Dangerous stuff.

[22:28] Sammie: Yeah, yeah. Savage, man. So I know how you feel. But you’ve got, so that happens, the wedding goes ahead. Yeah, just about, she walks down the aisle, mate. Congratulations.

[22:40] Neil: The wedding was in my garden, then, as a result of it. Yeah, you did it, was it? Yeah, okay, yeah. But I loved it, it was great. Yeah, but it was low key, 50 people. Yeah, yeah. And it was great. Probably the best wedding ever, really, isn’t it? It was, yeah. You know, there’s a statistic, I should have looked it up, the less you spend on a wedding, the greater the likelihood of success of the marriage working.

[22:57] Sammie: Yes, crazy, isn’t it? Yeah. Really interesting. We went to a mad wedding, and the couple are very much living in different countries right now.

[23:05] Neil: So I shot weddings as a photographer for three years before COVID, and that statistic has come true every single time. When they’ve gone to the big lavish ones, they haven’t made it to now, to 2026, all of them. So mad, isn’t it? Yeah.

[23:21] Sammie: But hey ho, this is the world we live in. But what happens post this moment? Because this is where you’ve started to really build, and this is where I really want to talk to you about, it’s what you’re very well known for. All your social media has talked about is helping someone go from zero to one, just like you have, and that journey and that progression you’re on.

[23:40] Neil: Yeah. So, as I said before, I needed to spend a number of years sort of settling things down, just getting into momentum, progressing with my career, focusing on my family, obviously losing my parents. And between then, 2009 and 2020, 11 years, not much happened in terms of where I am now, in terms of working towards financial independence, apart from the fact that I just continued to really niche down into a very specialised area in industry. So at the time, before I got made redundant, I was one of the UK’s leading, I hate the word “expert”, but I knew a lot about, and this is an incredibly boring topic, ready meal packaging. I know a hell of a lot about ready meal packaging, that put me in demand with big food businesses, and I continued to move up and up, like I said, to the point that I got headhunted to be head of packaging. So it was a focus on family and career for 11 years. And the big thing that happened to me, I don’t know if it was fate or what it is, is it’s the one New Year’s resolution I’ve ever stuck to. I woke up on New Year’s Day in 2020, three months before COVID, and said, right, we’ve made a bit of a success of this now, I’ve spent years getting over all of the mishaps that I’d done, I don’t want to work until the day I die. I have never wanted to work, not because I’m lazy, it’s just that I found myself in corporate for 20 years and I’m not a corporate person. And in an office doing corporate type stuff, KPIs, team meetings, all of that sort of stuff, and I was like, I can’t do this for another 30 years, I cannot do it for another 30 years. I love being outside, I’m like yourself, we’ve talked about this on WhatsApp and stuff before, I love being in the garden, I love keeping livestock, I love building stuff out of wood, I just love being outside, I love cooking with fire, all of that stuff, my favourite stuff, it brings me absolute joy. And basically, what I wanted to do was work out, well, how can I do that more? How can I achieve that earlier, sooner, and do it more? And I became obsessed with trying to build wealth, not for the sake of building wealth. It’s really important when you’re investing and you’re building wealth to have a reason to do it, otherwise what’s the point? Number one. Number two, you’re less likely to stick with it because you’ve got no end goal or realisation of what it is you want to do. So those two things meant that on January the 1st, 2020, I woke up and thought, right, what are we going to do? Do I need to start a business? Do we need to start a side hustle? And I threw myself into everything, reading, learning. Do I need to buy pallets and break them down? How can I increase my income? How can I generate income that I can invest into the market and make myself free? And the one book that changed it for me, and he’s a controversial character, is Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Poor Dad. And I read that, and it’s a great book, I recommend it for anyone. That was the first book I read, and by the end of that, I understood, and it sounds obvious, but the difference between assets and liabilities. I’d been living my life just dealing with liabilities, mortgage debt, I never financed a car or anything like that, but the debt from the credit cards, all of the debt that I had before, I was dealing with all of that. And at the end of that book, I was like, assets, right, well, that’s what I need to do. I then went down the path of psychology and money, both Andrew Craig’s books. I threw myself into it, I became obsessed with it. There’s a few things I’ve become obsessed with in my life. One of them is investing, one of them was playing guitar, and one of them was gardening.

[27:08] Sammie: But I become two of the three, I can’t string a guitar, but I’ll sing.

[27:12] Neil: Yeah, exactly.

[27:13] Sammie: So there we go, we could make a band.

[27:15] Neil: Yeah.

[27:15] Sammie: We could call it Investing.

[27:17] Neil: We could do Up The Gains, The Investors. Yeah. Love it. Yeah, it’s not going to happen. And I became obsessed to the point that it was all consuming, and my wife was like, can you stop listening to podcasts and audiobooks, you’re not present. I was like, I’ve latched onto something, I’ve learned something here. And three months after that, so March 2020, I opened my first Stocks and Shares ISA. It was with Hargreaves Lansdown. It was February 2020, actually, because I lumped in my entire bonus, which I got in February, a paycheque, which was like two, four grand, something like that. So the 22nd of March was the day. What it was, February 2020, and a month after I opened the Stocks and Shares ISA and put all of my bonus into it, it dropped 40%. But because I’d become so obsessed with it and I’d learned so much, I was like, crap, this is brilliant, this is amazing. The world was selling left, right, and centre, but I knew right then this is an opportunity of a lifetime. And again, be it fate or not, I couldn’t have started at a better time. Now if I hadn’t done the learning and I started in February and lost 40%, I might have pulled out and never gone back to it. But I saw it as the greatest gift, and I lumped in, threw in as much as I possibly could, pulled back all of the spending, threw in as much as I could, and it was only about three or four months before it returned back to previous levels, all-time highs. And then it went on to all-time high, all-time high, all-time high. So I’d learned that investing was the way I was going to be able to achieve it. I understood the volatility associated with it, I knew that I was going to put as much in as I possibly could. I became obsessed with compound interest calculator sites, on it every single night. Well, if we get 8.5% instead of 8%…

[29:07] Sammie: What if I put £10 in for a month, mate? Constantly.

[29:10] Neil: I’d still do it now.

[29:12] Sammie: I know, I still do it now. 100%. Yeah. Someone sends me their thing and I’m putting £300 a month in, I’m straight on there, like, how much is that again?

[29:18] Neil: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And when I Google “calculator”, it says, “you visit this website often”. So constantly playing around with the numbers, working out what’s going on. And I understand, right, when did you start investing? 2016, 2017. Okay, so you were even better. So the last 10 years have been one of the biggest bull runs in a generation, right? There’s no getting away from that. We’re really lucky. I did a video yesterday, actually, a short form. If I’d started investing in 1999, I don’t know whether I would have kept going, because 10 years of negative returns. It hadn’t happened since the Great Depression, 1929. And it might happen again. We’ve been very fortunate. So again, whether it’s fate or not, I don’t know, I’ve averaged 19% per year since then. Technically, not every year.

[30:12] Sammie: Not every year since 2009 to 2019, is that what you’re saying?

[30:17] Neil: What do you mean, the crash?

[30:18] Sammie: I was talking about the 10 years of negative returns.

[30:21] Neil: Yeah, not every year. But if you’d invested £10 at the beginning, you’d have had just about £10 10 years later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you’d done monthly, you’d have smoothed the ride. And actually, with dividends reinvested, you’d have ended up slightly up. So the worst decade, pretty much in over a hundred years, you still would have ended up slightly up.

[30:39] Sammie: Yeah.

[30:40] Neil: Mad, isn’t it. Wild. So, you know what it’s like, we reach millions of people all of the time, and you get a lot of comments from people saying that, well, they just don’t necessarily appreciate the risk with investing.

[30:54] Sammie: Well, it’s short-termism.

[30:56] Neil: Yeah, it is. It’s really short-termism.

[30:58] Sammie: As in, they think that investing means that they need to be chart trading, and it’s installed into us by movies. And that’s how a lot of us understand it, how a lot of Japanese people speak English, they watch American movies, so we take a lot of that from there. We don’t see someone investing into their Stocks and Shares ISA in a low-cost passive index fund in a movie.

[31:11] Neil: Exactly.

[31:12] Sammie: So they don’t, and we chase thrills, it’s the gambling mentality, it’s the fast Porsche 911, that’s what we’re after.

[31:32] Neil: But this stuff is slow. It is slow, but, you know, no one knows what’s going to happen going forward. But my favourite thing is waking up in the morning, and the first thing I worry about is not my portfolio, because I’m 90% into global ETFs. I used to hold some wild stuff. The one I always and always will hold is Virgin Galactic, I’ve still got it in my portfolio now, it’s worth a tenner. I don’t know how much I put into it, it’s a lot. But it’s 90-odd percent down, and it’s in there. So I do portfolio reviews online as a reminder, every single time I open that app, there’s Virgin Galactic, 99% down, don’t forget that. So I keep it in there for that sole reason. But now the thing with investing is that if you can focus less energy on investing and more energy on increasing your income, you’re going to exponentially outperform those that are trying to outperform the market. Increasing your income means you’ve got more capital to put in and you’re going to get average returns. Now, average is exceptional. So if you continue to get 9%, that is exceptional returns, that’s what certain markets have done for a very long amount of time. Now if you can continue to do that for decades, you’re going to be okay. You’re going to be okay. So I modelled that in 2020, I started with a couple of hundred, I started with my bonus and then a couple of hundred pounds a month. Then I increased that to 400 pounds a month. I caught back on a few things, I was like, right, I need to max my ISA out, how am I going to do that? Now, I know I’m in a very fortunate position to be able to max out my ISA, that’s £1,666 every month. Most people aren’t in a position to be able to do that. But because of my obsession with it, I was like, how can I do that? And I was like, right, I need to change company. And I did that twice, and both times I did it, I increased my salary circa 30-40%. And that put me in a position where, by the time I got made redundant last year, I was on well into a six-figure salary, and I hadn’t changed my lifestyle at all.

[33:28] Sammie: And you didn’t change it, yeah, right, you didn’t upgrade.

[33:32] Neil: Didn’t upgrade. I sacrificed the company car and took the car allowance instead. I invested every single penny of that. We go on holiday once every couple of years, but everyone in my house, all the bills are paid, three meals a day, we’re all clothed. There’s a certain level of money that gets you to happiness. It used to be 50 grand, but I think it’s up to 100 grand now. If you have a hundred grand a year, more money’s not going to make you happier, because what’s it going to get you? An ever so slightly better steak, some ever so slightly nicer clothes, a Porsche instead of my 10-year-old Mondeo, those will give me short-term bursts of happiness, but then those possessions start to own me more than I own them, and then I resent them. So even if I was to become a multimillionaire from investing or content creation, I don’t think my lifestyle would ever change. I’d have more extravagant holidays, I think, travel. But if I want a steak tonight, I always say this, I can afford a steak tonight.

[34:33] Sammie: I think I would do anything, like for me, I have the goal now from building these businesses and investing and all of that, and my plan is to buy the farm, and I want the farm, and then obviously I want to see my friends and family and it’s fine, but I don’t want to see the corporate grind and world, I just want to grow stuff, host really cool weddings and banquets, and tuck back into that side of the hospitality stuff that I love, which is putting on the events and having fun with it. That stuff I used to love, I didn’t love the fighting fire stuff, that’s why I got out of it. And that’s it, that was my goal, and I can still do that now, so I’m doing it now with a smaller vegetable patch and doing the outside and having fun, right? So I’m leaning into it already. I just want to go up, I want to do more of it. I just want to have more and more fun. I want to grow more things, I want to try out different stuff.

[35:37] Neil: And so you have a purpose then as well, that’s why you do a lot of what you do. I know you’re a very hard worker, I know you are, I’ve seen what you’ve been up to. I know you’ve got podcasts, YouTube channels, bloody building apps. I know you’re a very hard worker. But you’ve got a team helping you with that too, by the way, because I couldn’t do it on my own.

[35:55] Sammie: But it does.

[35:56] Neil: But this is your purpose, this is what you’re striving towards, and listen, I’ve only just learned today, having spoken to you about this, um, both with the university and the farm, we’re basically the same person doing the same thing.

[36:05] Sammie: I know. Yeah, it’s wild, isn’t it?

[36:07] Neil: Yeah, that’s my dream, then, that’s all I want to achieve and make happen.

[36:12] Sammie: It’s fun, for me it’s like a larger plot of land. And I was looking at it with the missus the other night because I actually want to know how much it really costs to do it, because now I’ve planned it all out, because I’m a nutter, and I’ve got hyper ADHD, so I just go down a rabbit hole, and that’s me gone for four hours, and I’m like, come back to the missus with a whole financial plan, and this is how big the land line is. She’s like, right, move, bookmarked property, and I walk her through the reality of it, so, yeah.

[36:38] Neil: She’s like, oh god, here we go.

[36:40] Sammie: Yeah, but this is the thing, it’s actually a lot, so this is why I always say to people, design your life and work out how much it costs, because it’s always a lot less, especially when you start investing, because you think I need three, two, three, four million quid, and actually it’s a lot less, it’s always a lot less. It really is, and you can get there. You did this video the other day for Coast FIRE, which is really interesting. What is that for the average person that doesn’t understand?

[37:09] Neil: So Coast FIRE is when you get to a point where you have enough invested through your pension, general investment accounts, Stocks and Shares ISA, that means you no longer need to invest another penny. And by the time you reach pension age, you will have enough money to support your lifestyle. Pension age for me is 57. So the video you’re talking about is one I did a couple of days ago where I said that I’ve now reached Coast FIRE, which means I don’t necessarily need to invest another penny from now. I’m 43, and by the time I’m 57, I will have a seven-figure portfolio, just carried around, if it continues to grow at around seven or eight percent. And that’s what Coast FIRE is. And a lot of people get to that point and then they think, right, now I can start spending and enjoy some more of my money, if that’s what you want to do, buy the cars, do whatever it is you want to do. But I don’t want to do that. I want to be done by the time I’m 50, which is seven years before, which is only in seven years’ time.

[38:15] Sammie: In order to do that, 43, Jesus, I thought you were my age, how old are you?

[38:19] Neil: 36.

[38:20] Sammie: People often say I look a lot older.

[38:22] Neil: I get it too, you get roasted on TikTok, way, it’s just the way it is, I get it.

[39:26] Neil: Short form, they’ll always find something to comment on. It’s always the ones with no pictures as well, by the way, in the usernames, and they’ve got really crazy usernames. It’s like, oh, here we go, here we go. I don’t know, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest any more. Once you’ve had it enough, I don’t know, maybe it affects some people, you just get used to it, not bad.

[39:43] Sammie: No, no, no, I don’t care. There’s a, yeah, I so don’t care. The missus is like, have you seen what they’ve said about you? I’m like, honestly, it’s about a hundred times a day right now, so I’m used to it. Yeah, yeah. You just have to turn off. But this is really interesting. So you’ve built it up to this, you started putting this bonus in, when did it really click for you? Like, when did you start going, Jesus, this is actually really insane? And I didn’t think I would ever be in this position.

[40:11] Neil: When I crossed six figures, so when I crossed 100k, I’m being really transparent and honest, because I am on my channels. I know a lot of people don’t necessarily talk about the numbers, and I am. I’ve told you my background, you know my background, I’m not from money, I’ve done all of this myself through my own earning. And when I was starting out, I was really inspired by people with portfolios and watching them grow, so I do that, it helps people to see what’s possible from an ex-loser, right, anyone can do it, a university dropout. When I got above six figures, which was only about 18 months ago, people talk all the time about the fact that once you go above six figures, things blow up and go insane, and I was like, yeah, well, we’ll see. But I happened to go above six figures at a time when the market went up another 30%. So over the last 12 months, I’ve made more from my returns than the UK national average salary. I made £38,000 just by holding a global ETF, because I got above that six-figure threshold, just by owning it. Yes, and also the best thing ever happened, April 2025, tariffs, market dropped 20%, new ISA allowance, I lumped in. So I took advantage of that. Beautiful, wasn’t it?

[41:24] Sammie: It was the best. It’s probably the most insane amount I’ve seen my net worth go up, because I just went big, I was ready as well. I had built up a really decent, sizeable cash position ready to drop, because I like keeping a little bit in cash in my portfolio, but I could see things going one way at that time, and we hadn’t really had a correction in a while, so I started building on it, and I was ready, and I’m talking ready. And I’d also sold some of my individual stock, so I had that ready to go, I was waiting to deploy it, and it just happened, and I was like, it was the best.

[42:00] Neil: But even then, and I need to go back and look, I did loads of content about it, and probably about 15 to 20 percent of the comments were, we’re never going to recover, this is the end, this is the end, it’s never going to come back, move to cash, move out, put everything in crypto, that’s the one I get a lot. Not so much any more, interestingly, over the last few months, considering it’s down. But yeah, that was great. But that’s when I really noticed things starting to take over. But a really important time for me was the COVID drop, was a few months. But 2022 was the first red year, a full year in the red, and I learned a lot about my stomach during that. We had inflation, we had Russia invading Ukraine, those two things meant the market dropped, I can’t remember the exact number, I’m not going to quote a number, it dropped anyway over the course of that year. But I stayed consistent and I kept going and I kept going. So I’ve done a year, what I haven’t done is a prolonged period, three, four, five years of declines. And I like to think I’d be able to cope with it, but you just don’t know until you go through it.

[43:10] Sammie: It’s a tough one if you’re coming up close to needing the money, etc, but you’re moving into things where, with global equities, trying to build portfolios, most of the audience listening will be in that position too, trying to accumulate rather than protect. But if that happens, you have to take a second and press max on the chart, and doing that is going to open your eyes and you’ll see the 2009 period, and you’ll go, oh, well, that’s really tiny on the chart. It always is tiny. And it’s that monthly approach, because if it does go down and there is a downturn, and you invest all the way down and then all the way up, well, those down points, when you bought at that down point and it’s now up here, well then actually that profit margin between those two is much larger than the one where you bought way before, when it was at its all-time high.

[44:02] Neil: And that’s what got me through 2022. I was dollar-cost averaging then, putting a certain amount in every single month. So I knew I was buying cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper every month. Have you ever got to a point where you thought, I’m worried now, do I need to sell out and go to cash?

[44:19] Sammie: Always. Yeah, still now. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I still play with it. I don’t think you ever get past that. I think you’ve trained yourself to know that it’s not always the best idea. So I’ve built cash positions before and been completely wrong, and then got fed up and deployed it, and been glad that I did deploy it, and got annoyed at myself because I was four or five months too late.

[44:41] Neil: Yeah.

[44:41] Sammie: So I always keep a bit in cash, always, just because, and I might be wrong for that, but one day I know that there’s going to be the absolute mother of all crashes, and I know that I’d be really annoyed if I have nothing there to deploy.

[45:00] Neil: But even when that happens, pulling the trigger at the right time is almost impossible to do, because the market doesn’t drop by 30% in one day and then slowly recover.

[45:12] Sammie: Well no, I went early on the tariffs, I went early.

[45:16] Neil: Yeah, that was a lot of things.

[45:17] Sammie: I went two days early, but it still went down a hell of a lot more, two days more.

[45:22] Neil: Yeah, were you annoyed then? Because, okay, as long as, so if you can go, right, it’s dropped 10%, might drop another 10%, but you’ve picked it up 10% later.

[45:32] Sammie: And this is where I think it’s important to have people in the space that understand and talk about this stuff openly online, like following the right people, and Damien is fantastic at this, there’s videos he does where he talks about the moments of dropping and investing at all-time highs versus all-time lows, etc, and I think they’re really important to understand. But I have some friends in the space as well, and there are moments where they go, I’ve just gone, that’s when you go, you’ve just gone, yeah, okay, fine, I’m going.

[46:09] Neil: Yeah, but even those pros, there’s a guy, I won’t say who it is, but there is a creator who’s very knowledgeable in the space, ex-investment banker, who used to message me all of the time saying, you need to sell out of the S&P 500, you need to get out of it. But maybe two years ago he’d be telling me all the time, he hasn’t said it since because it’s gone up 40%. So the most knowledgeable people get it wrong too. And I can’t be bothered to deal with the aggro of having to worry about, I need to sell out now and buy now.

[46:45] Sammie: And listen, by the way, we’re talking about this because we both got this bit right, I’ve also got an enormous amount wrong, I would have been better off doing nothing and sticking £250 in my global ETF, probably way more, and if I worked it out, I probably would have made more doing that than doing what I did. But also, I think with this stuff, you have to make your own mistakes and you have to try things out and test them. And as long as you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and completely lose your mind thinking the world’s going to blow up, then, having a portion of your money, like 70 to 90 percent, in index funds, and then having some play money that you can mess around with for the enjoyment, so long as, so there’s an inverse correlation between the amount of work you put into investing and the outputs you get.

[47:53] Neil: It’s the only thing in the world where that’s the case. The fact of the matter is, if you could just, and it is really simple, set up a Stocks and Shares ISA, automate into it, keep it globally diverse, do that every single month for years, you will outperform everyone. Very few people actually, actively do that. Even me. So I have some individual positions now, I’ve got lucky with some of them, but I probably would have done better. I was telling the guy before, I opened a junior ISA for my kids and put it into an all-world fund when I started investing. And after a couple of years, me doing stock picking with a little bit of an all-world fund, thinking I was doing brilliant, I looked at their returns versus mine and they blew me out of the water. So my seven-year-old was a better investor than me, trying to do individuals.

[48:39] Sammie: I know. I say to people though, because I’ve had a couple that have carried me a bit higher, if you do do individuals, stay in your lane. Do not think, I’ve done it, I’ve done the biochemistry, you know, Cambridge study group that’s come out with this new cancer cure that’s gone into trials and it’s going to 20x, and two days later it’s 98% down, and you’re like, what the hell have I done? I’ve done it, and you know, it’s a lesson, right? But with that, you didn’t do the whole bag, so that was the important lesson. But essentially, when you’re doing it, now it’s finance, tech, e-commerce, literally 95% of the companies I own. A bit of Nike, because I love it, and I thought it was going to be a really good investment. It was for a period, it’s now burned down a lot. Cheers, Nike, but it’s a lesson, right? But I understand Nike deeply as a business, I’ve gone so heavily into it, largely because it’s partially an e-commerce business, so it’s crossed over into that realm. I really understand those businesses. You won’t catch me in EVs or businesses, I just couldn’t tell you anything about green energy. I can’t tell you anything about it, I don’t understand it. So I think if you are going to do it with a little bit of play money, stick to that.

[50:05] Neil: Yeah, I get that. And it’s just that it’s play money. So I think there’s a lot of people who think that they’re experts in tech, they’re also experts in pharmaceuticals, because they read tech news and a couple of influencers, yeah. They think they’re an expert in consumer goods, but the reality is, and what taught me about this is I looked at my own business that I was working in, a business where I knew the management, I had the insider scoop in terms of how we were doing as a business, I knew the structure, I knew the profits, I knew the targets, I knew the competitors, I knew everything about the business I was working in, in the sector I was working in, in a very niche area. And even then, I was like, I don’t know whether I know enough about this business to invest into it. And I’m spending 40 hours a week in it, on the earnings calls, on everything, and I still wasn’t confident enough that I knew enough about it to invest into it. So how can you have a portfolio with 30 different businesses across multiple different sectors and expect to beat the markets? It blows my mind.

[51:13] Sammie: Yeah. And by the way, the only reason I’m saying this is a thing, I think for 99% of people in this country, just doing a standard, passive approach is probably the best way.

[51:24] Neil: It is, and there’s a real fear in the UK, we’re really risk-averse. I covered this recently, I think the 2008 financial crisis made people so scared of investing. Over 50% of people in the US are retail investors, it’s something like 15 to 20% in the UK, and I think we’re incredibly risk-averse. Now, the problem with that risk aversion is there is nothing without risk in finances. Holding cash is risky, owning property is risky, having a job is risky, everything, owning a property is risky, everything is risky. And it’s about understanding what that risk is and whether you’re prepared to take it or not. And once you start to explore that a little bit, people will be like, I have no interest in investing, I’m incredibly risk-averse, I’m just going to hold everything in cash. That’s one of the worst things you can do, as we know, because of inflation, you’re taking on much greater risk than you probably even realise. But it’s an education piece.

[52:17] Sammie: If you could sit down with yourself at 21 or 22, when you’d just come out of that university stage, and you’re sleeping on the floor, then looking back and knowing what you know now, what would you tell him?

[52:29] Neil: I, listen, you have to go through your journey in order to come out the other side, don’t you? And I think a lot of people who go through really tough times are, one, some of the most interesting people, because they’ve been through such horrific experiences, and two, often some of the most successful people, because they’re so desperate. What drives me above and beyond the farmhouse is not the farmhouse, it’s a desperation never to go back to that place again, never to find myself in a situation where I can’t afford a sausage roll and I’m thinking about robbing the shop around the corner. So if I could go back, I would just, I have to go through the journey in order to get where I am, but I would like to tell myself, it’s going to be okay, it is going to be okay. Because I was in such a dark place, I felt like I had no options whatsoever, I thought my life was over, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do. So just, and I had no one prior to meeting my wife, I was just completely alone. I would just say, you will come out the other end of it, don’t worry, and just take some of that weight off. It was a horrible time.

[53:31] Sammie: I think when we’re young like that, we think that what’s happening to us at that time is it, it’s our life. And I think with time, when you look back, those core moments, they are massive in our hearts and in our minds, but they seem very small in terms of time frame, because we go through such seasons of life, right, where things are good and bad, and you learn to roll with it and start running with the punches a little bit more. But at the time, when you’re young, you’re 18, you’re feeling it, and your hormones are kicking up, and you’re looking at the world, it can feel like a totally different experience.

[54:08] Neil: Yeah, it really can. Yeah, it’s a wild time.

[54:11] Sammie: Well, testament to us both, here, two absolute nut-job losers now, absolute idiots teaching finance content, wicked, love it. What’s on the cards for you at the moment then, what are you working on? Anything you can talk about?

[54:27] Neil: There’s a couple of things I probably can’t talk about, but the focus at the moment is YouTube and Instagram. TikTok is a nightmare at the moment, it is my biggest platform, but I’m just struggling with it, bans and restrictions and all sorts of stuff going on there. So trying to get a consistent approach to getting content out. And since being made redundant last year, I’ve just really enjoyed myself. And I really like doing the things I like to do. So I am spending more time than ever with my family, cooking, being outside. What I’m not doing is having multiple different fingers in different pies, trying to push myself to make as much money as soon as I possibly can. I’m making okay money, I’m on track to do what I want to do by the time I’m 50. I’m keeping it simple and I am loving my life. And that’s the priority. That means I’m enjoying it. I’ve never been happier. I have a level of financial security, I’m feeling comfortable, and continuing on with that is my focus. I will explore other things, but I’m keeping it pretty simple, to be honest.

[55:33] Sammie: I think it’s a really important thing to do. I’ve been redesigning my own life around that recently, putting myself out of certain processes, or just being like, okay, that’s not the opportunity for me right now. And I know that’s a bit rich coming from me, because I’m an absolute lunatic doing a podcast, a YouTube channel, a bloody app, and a social content business. But hey ho. Even so, with that, I’m still designing time to step away. And since I’ve stopped working nowadays, since I’ve started focusing a little bit more on life, family, health, and being outside in nature, I’m just better at all of that too.

[56:13] Neil: Yes, you become more efficient. And are you enabling yourself to do it without feeling guilty?

[56:20] Sammie: Yeah.

[56:20] Neil: Yeah, because that’s the important bit. Being able to stop, so I’ll often stop at two or three o’clock in the afternoon and go, right, that’s me, I’m going outside.

[56:28] Sammie: Yes. So, I’m up really early, I’m a weirdo, I was saying to Jack today that I was up at 4:14 this morning. Why? My brain goes bing, wake up, and I have no opportunity of going back to sleep. I don’t work like that. I wish I could stay in and sleep, I just can’t, but I’ll be out like a light, like nine, nine-thirty, completely gone. And I will hammer, hammer, hammer, and then I just wait until I feel my brain hurt and get a little bit foggy, and then I’m like, okay, that’s you done. You can’t push through, and then I go and do something, like I’ll go off to the beach for a couple of hours, or pop out with the dog, and then I’ll go and do some work in the garden and some house shopping, bit of prep, or whatever. And sometimes I go back in and do another three, four hours, sometimes I don’t, sometimes I do a little video, sometimes I get a massive spark of motivation, go and record a video or whatever, and I think designing my life like that, that’s how I’ve designed my life now, it’s just awesome.

[57:31] Neil: Yeah, it’s so freeing, isn’t it? Tomorrow’s a Saturday, but if you wanted, on Monday, you just go, I’m not doing anything.

[57:39] Sammie: I did it on Monday, I did it with a bank holiday, normally I’d work the whole week.

[57:42] Neil: You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission. No, you don’t have to book a day off, you don’t have to check if you’ve got KPI meetings. You just do it. It’s unreal. And the beauty of what we do as well is it’s something that is, I honestly believe, positive into the world. You get so many DMs from people saying, watching your content’s finally twigged, you’ve changed my life just by simplifying the things that I’ve learned.

[58:06] Sammie: And that fills up my cup so much differently. I say this all the time, I used to send people home pissed in an Uber, and now I literally fill up their bank accounts and change their life, get them to the goals they want to live. And there’s reward in putting on a great hospitality venue and throwing great parties and having fun, there’s reward in that, but it’s so short-lived because the next day you’re doing it all over again, and you’re literally only as good as you were yesterday, that’s how short the timeframe is. Whereas taking someone from debt to getting them on the housing ladder with a bit of an investment portfolio, that’s an entire person, not just them, it’s their kids, it’s their wife, it’s their friends and family around them, because they’re way more present, they’re feeling good about themselves. And so that, for me, is really rewarding. It’s mad, isn’t it?

[58:57] Neil: There’s thousands of families that, through your content, you’ve had a positive impact on and changed their lives. And you don’t even know who, it’s wild, I love it.

[59:13] Sammie: I think that’s why I’m doing the app, because it’s the culmination of that, it’s to put it into something which people can use every day. And that’s the only reason I’m doing it, and also, because we were speaking about this outside, you kind of get content fatigue a little bit. I don’t know how long I can carry on putting myself out on the internet and showing up on camera. There’s only so many times I can have a bad comment or an off day with it, or you say the wrong thing and make a mistake on a bit of content, it happens, right? I’ve been doing this five years now, and it’s a long journey. And so the app for me is designed to help way more people at scale, but I don’t also need to be as present publicly for it to work, because it does affect you at the end of the day, and it probably affects my family and stuff, you know, you have people looking you up online and stuff that you have to deal with.

[60:07] Neil: There is that side to it, and that is a challenge, it’s the nature of it, isn’t it? I don’t think, knowing you and myself, I don’t want to be famous. I mean, I’ll do multiple millions of views every month, but it’s not a desire to be famous. And a lot of people have been asking me recently, what will you do when you reach 50, are you still going to create content? In my mind, I was always like, once I reach 50 and reach that goal, I turn everything off and disappear into the world that I want to lead.

[60:40] Sammie: Dude, I’m 100% starting a gardening channel.

[60:42] Neil: Yeah. The problem with that is one of my friends said to me recently, you need to do a gardening channel and more pizza oven stuff and all of this sort of stuff, and I was like, no, because that is my escapism away from content. If I turn that into a job as well, I know.

[60:58] Sammie: I think I’d do it more as a joke, just put the camera there and have a laugh with it rather than it being a business in any way, shape, or form. That’s the way I’d look at it. I want to help you grow the best tomatoes.

[61:11] Neil: Yeah.

[61:11] Sammie: That’s what it is. It comes from a place of help. And I think that’s what we both do, both of this now is coming from a place of, how can we help someone get from zero to one? And it just so happens that the more people I help, well, it helps me get towards where I want to be too. So that sounds awesome to me. Symbiotic. Let’s help loads of people, and in turn, it helps me too.

[61:32] Neil: Absolutely, 100%. And yeah, I’ve noticed as well, by the way, every time I do a piece of content in my garden or with the pizza oven or something, it’s the best content in terms of views.

[61:41] Sammie: Love the one you did with the building, with the bottles and the clay.

[61:44] Neil: I think some of the audience are sick of hearing about stocks and shares ISAs as well.

[61:47] Sammie: Yeah, mate. Yeah, tell me about it. Yeah. But look, honestly, it’s been a real pleasure. You’re an absolute gem, and it’s been a real pleasure to go through this today. And I think we’ve both got a few demons in our closet, we’ve come out the other side. And yeah, I think it’s a pleasure to see. And thank you very much for coming on, man. It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks, Neil.

[62:05] Neil: Where do you want to send people? Look up Neil Invests on YouTube and Instagram.

[62:10] Sammie: Wicked. Thanks, mate.

[62:11] Neil: Cheers. Cheers, man.