Peter Komolafe on Crushing Debt and Levelling Up Your Finances

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

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello and welcome back to the Money Gains Podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and my guest this week is the wonderful, the legendary Peter Komolafe. I am absolutely buzzing to have Peter on the show. I’ve been a follower of his channel, The Conversation of Money, for a long, long time on YouTube, but also on Instagram as well, more recently. He posts some really great, thought-provoking content, super honest, super down to earth, and I absolutely love this channel. There’s so much to learn in this conversation. But if you’re listening on Spotify, please do whack that follow button, share this episode with a friend. Let’s get this podcast out to the world. And for now, let’s get started on the Money Gains podcast. So, Peter, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast, man. How you doing? You well?

[1:02] Peter Komolafe: I’m good, mate. I’m good. Thanks for having me, by the way. Yeah, as I said before, it’s a real honor. I’ve been following you for a long, long time. You’re one of the OGs in the space. And uh yeah, if you wouldn’t mind bringing the audience up to speed with you. Yeah, so uh my name is Peter. Um Komolafe is my last name. I’m part Nigerian, part kind of English and British. I was born in the 1970s. Um and yeah, um I’ve been in financial services for about well, I say f I keep saying 15 years, but it’s actually been like 18 years now, and that’s pretty nuts to me. But I’ve gone through retail banking, corporate banking, then wealth management, and then in 2020 I decided to leave my cushy corporate job and um just start a YouTube channel on a podcast. And this is kind of the fourth year in now, and um, I’ve been very, very lucky to do some really cool things along the way as well. But the passion really is to try and um share all the things that I wish that I knew when I was learning this stuff in in the bank and working for various financial services organizations, things that I wish that someone had you know taught me when I was 18, 19, 20 years old. So my podcast and all of my outlets, well, my company is called Conversation of Money. Um, and it’s because I want to have conversations with people that I wish someone had with me when I was 19, 21, really. So yeah, that’s how that’s where I’m where I’m kind of from when it comes to this content creation piece.

[2:26] Sammie Ellard-King: I love that man. And your story when you grew up as well is is incredible. I’d love I’d love to let the audience know about that because yeah, I think it’s super inspiring. Yeah, so like I said, I was born late 70s, 79, um, exactly. And back in the 70s, like the um it was very, very common. My parents are Nigerian, so it was very, very common for Nigerian parents to come over in the 70s. Um, they will come here work, and um, if they had children, they would literally put an ad in the paper and um ask families to look after their kids, and that’s what my parents did with me. So they had me in 79, and when I was three months old, they literally just dropped me to a foster family uh in East Sussex and left me with them pretty much for eight years, and I saw them once a year during the summer, during that eight-year period. So I didn’t really know them as my real kind of like parents. My foster parents were my real parents as far as I was concerned. So I will I was raised by that family, and then when I was eight years old, they had this great idea that I would go on a two-week holiday to Nigeria, and um that turned into a 10-year stint. Um, so stayed out there till I was like 18 years old, just finished my secondary school education out there when I was 16, came back at 18. And because I’m lucky enough to have a UK passport because I was born here in 1979, they kind of quickly realised that there wasn’t really that much opportunity in Nigeria for me, so they need to send me back. So as I turned 18, they gave me uh 50 quid, booked me a flight ticket, and said, by the way, just go back and go find your foster parents with no pre-warning to my foster parents that I was going to turn up. And I I found out a we uh about two years ago that they didn’t know that I had left for Nigeria when I originally went for that two-week holiday until three months after I had left. They just thought I was kidnapped and just disappeared or whatever. I found out that they found out through a friend of a friend of the family that I was in Nigeria. So if you fast forward 10 years from that point, where they’ve not heard anything from me, for me to then just rock up on their doorstep on an October afternoon, lucky they still lived at the same address. I rocked up on their doorstep and they still took me in. And so, yeah, my my early years, like formative years as a kid and then as a teenager, they’ve been just been very, very weird and just disjointed, generally speaking. Um, but I was very, very lucky that they still lived there. They took me in for a while. Um, they helped me find my feet, got me my national insurance number, got me my first job. Um, from that point, I was then out on my own, really. And I’ve been homeless through the journey, I’ve been in trouble with debt. Oh, I’ve had all sorts of fun, as they say. Um, but yeah, it’s been pretty wild.

[5:14] Sammie Ellard-King: That is insane, man. Like, just to have that kind of moment as well, and you’ve only just found out that they like I can’t even imagine like how that must feel from their point of view, just seeing you turn up on that day, and then but they had that feeling that you were kidnapped as well. Like, that must have been so wild, and you’re you’re just like, hey, after 10 years, yeah, yeah, yeah. To be honest, mate, I was really, really lucky. I was so lucky that they still lived there because you know, this is 10 years later, they could have moved to a different address, and like bearing in mind, uh, when I was 18, I was excited to come back because I’m like, okay, I’ve always I’ve been in Nigeria for 10 years and I daydreamed every single day of coming back to the UK. And when they put me on the plane and gave me 50 quid, I wasn’t thinking, oh, what if they don’t live there? What am I gonna do? I adrenaline’s pumping in me the entire time on the flight over. Is when I landed, I was like, holy crap, like what if they don’t live there? What am I going to do? And it was it was dread and panic the entire way that I was the entire time I was on the train and journeyed down from the airport to where uh to where they lived in Hastings, it was panic. And when I got there, they weren’t actually in. Because I arrived, like I think it was something like 11 o’clock in the morning. I got there, so they’re at work, and I didn’t know this. They’re at work, I knock on the door, nobody answers. So I’ve got my luggage, and I’m like, I I have nowhere to go, I don’t know anybody, I’ve only got 50 pounds in my pocket. What do I do? So I waited in the hopes that they still lived there, and then one of the neighbors kind of recognised me from like, and bearing in mind, I left eight years old, sure. I come back at 18, I look different, but recognise me and goes, you know, are you Femi? Because that’s my Nigerian name, Femi. And I said, Yes. And they took me and said, Look, come and have a cup of tea, come and warm up and stuff like that. And lucky they still live there. So I mate, I’ve I’ve count myself extremely lucky in that instance.

[7:15] Sammie Ellard-King: Wow, what an amazing story to hear. Like, it’s just incredible. And obviously, you’ve gone on from there and gone out into the big bad world and and and had to face it head on. Um, you know, you mentioned homelessness and uh and debt there. I think with your story, there’s so much in there, but I suppose my next question really is like, having gone through what you’ve gone through, do you feel like anyone can get a handle on their finances at any point, no matter what they might be facing, basically? 100%. I mean, look, I’m not, I say this all the time. I count myself as being quite clever, but I’m not as clever as some of the dudes and people out there right now. Absolutely not. You know, I’m not the cleverest person in the room. Uh, so I think if I can do it, anyone can do it. I think when it comes to finances and money, though, I think the uh the point of inertia that people initially have is that they don’t necessarily kind of know what to do and where to go. And then beyond that, we have this weird thing when it comes to money where we we’re quite harsh on ourselves. You know, we think, oh, I I’m an adult, I should know this. Well, actually, no, you shouldn’t. Like, you weren’t taught in school, unless you were taught at home, you probably weren’t taught in school. So, with that being said, you know, if you make mistakes because you’re now in debt and you took out an overdraft or a credit card and you didn’t really understand how it worked, or like, guess what? I’ve been there. It’s not your fault, it’s just that’s part of growing up, that’s part of being an adult, right? We trial and error a lot of the time, unfortunately, when it comes to finances. So the only difference with me is that I finally had to bite the bullet where I was like, okay, I need to sort this stuff out. And then fortuitously, I found the job in financial services as well. So all the stuff that I know, I know because it was my job to know. But even then, in the early years, I didn’t apply any of the stuff that I knew because my mindset wasn’t right, and I think that’s the other thing that people often have to um contend with. Is your mindset right with the um choice that you have to make to really address your finances? Because there’s a lot of behavioural psychology when it comes to money and finances. The the reality is, mate, the money is 20% of it. The mindset and the mentality, the behavioural psychology is 80% of it.

[9:40] Peter Komolafe: Oh, yeah. And I and people don’t often realise that. And if you can really get behind your first memories of money, I talk about in my book, my your first memory of money. If you can really think about what does that memory, how could it have, you know, imprinted maybe some beliefs, some money scripts that then inform your habits, because those habits are informed by beliefs, and your beliefs are you know implanted from your very, very first memory. So if you can figure that stuff out, you’ll you’ve got a greater chance of being better with money because you’ll know what your triggers are. It’s so interesting you say that because I like really similar to you in a lot of ways, I had to go through it because my parents were lovely people, but they did never taught me the value of a pound. And I was a spender, so I had to go out and went to uni, got the overdraft, got the credit cards, racked up the 20k of debt, you know, that and then suddenly was like, hang on a sec, like what am I doing? And it was only once I had that moment, and that was that mindset shift, but all of that stuff before was just imprinted on me from a young kid because my dad and my mum live paycheck to paycheck and spent everything they earned. So I just thought that was normal. Like I never knew or understood anything different to that. So it is a lot about mindset, and often we have to teach ourselves, which can be a struggle for some people because they can get utterly overwhelmed. Because when you talk about personal finance, you know, there’s debt, credit, investing, ISAs. It’s like, whoa, where where do you even start? And I suppose my question really is for you is like, you’ve been in this space for years, you must have come across so many people and so many questions, which the one thing that you feel like everyone seems to just definitely always struggle with.

[11:25] Peter Komolafe: The biggest there are two actually, to be fair, but one of them is a symptom of the other. The biggest thing I find people struggle with is debt, but the reason why they struggle with debt is because the money management and financial control, the budgeting isn’t in place. And I’ve been there. That’s how I got into debt. I got into debt because I could not budget to save my life. So before I even got on a plane, before my parents even gave me £50, I never had my own money ever. Ever. I never had like a pound of my own money. So then to be given £50 and be like, get on a plane, and me not really fully recognising the full weight of the situation, the full gravity of the situation. Like you could go over here, by the way, and your foster parents might not be there, and you’re going to be absolutely screwed. Now, luckily it didn’t work out like that, they were still there, but this was back in 1998. 50 quid was a lot of money, but it wasn’t a lot of money. It wasn’t that much money to tie me over. No, it’s not. And if you think about it, if I think about the first, and I talk about this in my book, the first thing that I went and bought when I landed, waiting for my foster parents to come home, because I was fat as a kid, I loved chocolates, fiending on chocolates. I went and bought Mars bars and Snickers bars. That’s what I that’s the first thing I went and bought, and all I had was 50 pounds. That tells you a lot about how well I but knew about budgeting and what I knew about budgeting. I knew zero because I just wasn’t prepared for it, right? And so if I fast forward to being homeless, I was homeless because I couldn’t budget properly and didn’t realise I’ve got to pay rent on a particular day. I got kicked out. So that then spirals into, oh, I need money, so what do you then do? Well, I’ve got an overdraft. Overdraft, or I can apply for a credit card, credit card, and then it spirals. And so I find that the biggest, the biggest thing people struggle with is debt. But when you really dig behind, like peel that layer, the onion back, it’s fundamentally because the budgeting isn’t in place, the financial control isn’t in place, and those two things you can’t divorce.

[14:25] Sammie Ellard-King: And actually, before that, it’s the mindset to even be able to sit down and just take a look at it. Because people much rather brush things under the rug and kick the can down the road to actually then address it and deal with it, and often it’s like a piece of self-awareness that you have to go through to then just go, okay, all right, it’s time for me to like get my SHIT together. Because like often that’s the moment often people need to like have with themselves, and even then they might say it to themselves and not truly be ready because that has happened to me a million times along the journey. Yeah. You know what? It’s very, very interesting when you think about um the behavioural psychology of this, and I’m fascinated with it. There is a very well-known study done by um professors at the Cambridge uh Cambridge University, and it says that financial habits are locked in age seven. So when I work with people, I often ask them, what’s your first memory of money? Because your first memory of money is quite innocuous, quite harmless at the time, but it’s very, very detrimental when you’re an adult. And in my book, I talk about my first memory of money. My first memory of money was fostered in my foster parents’ house, my next door neighbor Glenn, his mum was a fabulous cook. The dinners they would have had smelt amazing. Like Gordon Ramsey or Nigella Lawson was in there, amazing. And like he’s having lamb chops for dinner and steaks and all this kind of stuff, right? And subconsciously, when I’m like six years old, roughly, I can smell what he’s coming, and you know, you play when you’re with your mates, and you’re like, Oh, you get the call, come in for dinner, they’ll open the door, and you get this waft of just like lovely smells and lamb chops for dinner. And then I look at my plate and we’re having like beans on toast and fish fingers and baked beans, right? Subconsciously at age six, I’m thinking Glenn’s got more money than we have because he can have better dinners, and that’s completely harmless at age six. But as you grow up, what it did for me is scarcity mindset. You don’t have a lot of money, so money is quite scarce. It’s not something that is plentiful, and what that did for me is when I fast forward into my career when I’m working in Canary Wharf, doing really, really well, that scarcity mindset comes back and bites me in the proverbial because I’m not really thinking about money in the right way. I’m thinking it’s scarce, or I’m just going to spend it on the things that I always thought that I would never have, boom, boom, boom, I’ve wasted a load of money. And so this idea of psychology mindset and really digging deep into what your first memory of money is, what kind of habits or beliefs does that inbreed in you? How does that manifest in your patterns? Like, do you imp are you an impulsive spender? Why is that? Is it because certain times of the month you feel a certain way or you’re with certain people? Where does that all come from? Asking those questions is really important to get you to better understand what your makeup is. And simply just acknowledging and realising, well, actually, yeah, I normally impulse spend because of this. There’s a pattern. Just knowing the pattern means that you’re able to subconsciously or consciously do something to know actually, this is happening again, so you can input an intervention of some kind.

[17:58] Sammie Ellard-King: 100%, man. Understanding spending triggers for me was the biggest thing. And I realise now that my spending triggers have evolved as well over in my years. Like before, it was very much like when I was bored and lonely because I was in my 20s and you want to be social, and that’s fine. And so I got over that one. And then as I’ve got into my 30s, it’s like farm shop Saturday morning splurges and coming out with six items that are 85 quid, and you’re like, what on earth have I done here in the farmers market? Like, you know, got some got a couple of steaks, and that’s about it, and maybe some weird chutney, but it’s like now I know that about myself, so I have to rein myself in. Um, and my partner’s the same. She now I I openly talk about my spending triggers with her so she can then keep an eye on me, and vice versa, when she’s doing her ASOS splurges, and like that’s just the way that we’ve got to be. And often understanding and knowing is that piece of self-awareness, just uh like tapping into who you really are, um, which people struggle with, and and I get it. And for me, a lot of the time as well, it’s understanding credit and how to use that correctly. And credit cards is a massive one. In your eyes, like, what is the way to use credit cards correctly?

[19:10] Peter Komolafe: Oh man, I’ll I so I’ve got a book club at the minute, which is six weeks, and we last week was debt week. So we were talking about this last night in our on our weekly catch-up. I think credit cards are probably the worst, one of the worst debt facilities you can have if you don’t use it correctly, because they’re open-ended, right? There’s no end to this. And I will speak from experience. I had years of just rolling over the credit cards, making the minimum payments, and it’s so destroying. So I think it’s really important to understand fundamentally how they work, they’re open-ended. If you’re only making the minimum payment, you’re only paying the interest, you’re not really ever paying any of the capital off. And you need to be aware of that. You need to go into that with your eyes fully open when you take them out. Unfortunately for me, nobody really explained any of that. And I wasn’t, I wasn’t attuned enough to ask the right questions because I didn’t even know the right questions to ask. Like, I don’t know, make the minimum payment. Okay, I thought it was as simple as that, but it’s not, right? So I think using them appropriately is very, very important. Understanding how they work is very, very important. I think you can use them correctly if your intention is I’m gonna use it to build credit, for example, I’m gonna use them to collect points, Avios points, for example. Um, and your intention is, you know what? I’m gonna spend £100 or my my monthly shop on it, but I’m gonna pay it off immediately. I think that that is the most effective way of using a credit card. Spending a little bit of money, paying off the balance, not leaving anything on there. That’s that’s the utopia. I know that for many people though, that’s not the reality. Credit card is almost like in these days a lifeline. And over the past couple of years, people have had to use their lifelines because of energy bills and food costs, and you know, think about interest rates and mortgages, it’s absolutely mad. People are being squeezed from left, right, and center. And I was saying this in the group yesterday, you know, the banks to a certain extent, and I’ve worked for a number of them, they are relying on just your on human behaviour, on the human default behaviour where we don’t understand money, we don’t necessarily want to confront our psychological triggers. They’re relying on all of that to write themselves a blank check, particularly if you’re only paying the balance on your credit card, because it is a blank check. You can have it for six, seven, eight years like I did, paying the interest, and the interest is just their profit going in, and they are relying on that kind of behaviour. And so you you really need to get be in the right mindset to to use a credit card properly and intentionally.

[21:47] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, completely. It’s been a game changer for me, was when I hit zero, and then I had a little moment as well, late 20s, where I went back into it a little bit and was like, whoa, what am I doing? Pull myself back out of it. But now I have my business Amex and I put absolutely everything through it, and right clockwork at the end of the month, it’s a budgeted business expense that gets paid off, and I just rack up the air miles, yes, and which is great. I can use them for when we go and get away. And that’s that’s exactly what I do. That is the only card that I use. I use my uh I’ve got a platinum uh business um Amex card and I use it literally to get the air miles. I’ve not used the points yet, I’ve got like 130,000 points. I’ve not used them just yet, but I use it simply for that because at some point it will pay for flights for me and my partner somewhere, and it’s a business expense at the end of the day. So everything goes on that. But personally, I do have some cards, they are there, but I haven’t touched them for the best part of 10 years now because I’m just petrified of getting back. In a situation where I’m back into that cycle again. Psychologically, I’m just I’m just so done with it. I’m like, I just don’t wanna don’t want to be there.

[22:53] Sammie Ellard-King: Well, I I I I did the same thing. I open, so I’ve got one open. I think I might even be coming to the end of it now. It’s there if I really, really need it. Like it’s it’s got the five grand limit on it. It’s there for an absolute emergency. If I need to like suddenly, you know, someone drives into the house and we need to get the builders out, like, and we’ve got to pay for something, you know. We’ll we’ve that’s there. It’s there if I really want it, and that that’s the only reason. But I’m like you, it’s locked in a drawer, and I’m scared to use it because it’s like it’s just yeah, trauma, I suppose. But you mentioned there, we’ve been in a troubling period, I think for a lot of people tapping into credit. We’ve mentioned obviously, but you do a lot of content around this, so I really wanted to cover this. And um, we’ve seen Bank of England raising rates, we’ve seen inflation rates going up, we’ve seen costs of goods, cost of living increasing, the media pushing this mantra like crazy. Now, you do a lot around this space. So I’d love to get your kind of lay of the land, how it’s sort of feeling to you right now.

[23:54] Peter Komolafe: Look, I think uh last week we had the Bank of England um announcement, didn’t they? So they kept the bait the base rate flat. And I’m always kind of keen for people to understand the reasons why certain moves are made. So why has the bank rate gone from where it was to where it is now at 5.25%? What was the logic behind all that? What was the causing factor? What was the you know the catalyst for all of that? So I think generally speaking, if people can understand the concept of inflation and how the bank rate is connected to inflation, because there’s a lot of disinformation out there, I think it allows them to better be able to understand the world that they’re in and therefore the implications of what those choices mean to them. Now, in the last one, I did I did Sky News last week and they were asking me, saying, you know, what is this going to mean for consumers that they’ve kept the bank rate at 5.25%? And I was like, well, actually, it’s not the point of whether they’ve kept the bank rate at 5.25%. It’s good news for those people who have been panicking about mortgage rates because that’s where a lot of people are, you know, there’s a real risk that once all of the interest rates start to bleed through, if mortgage rates don’t continue to go down, you’re gonna have households that on average you’re gonna have to find, you know, three, four hundred pounds extra a month. And who’s got that? Yeah, most people haven’t. So it’s great that they’ve paused it because there’s no additional pressure for mortgage holders. For savers, though, and this is the balance that they can’t quite always make, for savers, well, you finally got to a point where after 15 odd years, you can put your money in an account and actually earn some decent interest. That’s not really gonna change for them now. So for savers, well, if it’s not in a high-yielding account, you need to get it into a high-yielding account. So that’s headline stuff. But I think if you really think about the root cause, which is inflation, does it feel as though inflation is falling? It’s currently at 4%. They’re forecasting, I think optimistically, that it’s gonna be 2% by April. And I’m like, okay. But what does it feel like for people? I don’t think that for people it’s gonna feel like inflation has come down because at the end of the day, food is still expensive, fuel is still expensive, you’ve still got energy prices which are still going up, regardless of the fact that they’ve actually fallen from highs that push the energy prices to where they were. So for everyday people, nothing has changed. It doesn’t feel any different at all. And I think when you think about economics and definitions and Bank of England base rate and inflation, most people don’t care about that stuff. Although it is important, they don’t care. They care about what it feels like in my pocket. And for most people, it feels no different. I just had another notification saying that my my gas bill’s got to go up. And I’m like, as an energy prices just come down, and everything that’s happening geopolitically right now doesn’t necessarily help the entire picture. I mean, this whole thing with the US bombing uh Iran and Syria, I mean, Iraq and Syria, I mean, what’s the knock-on effect to that? You know, potentially energy prices, potentially, but who knows?

[27:01] Sammie Ellard-King: It is it is wild. Like, you’re so right though, like it is difficult for people to get their heads around Bank of England and inflation rates and how they’re connected. And yeah, like the media does push them their own mantra. And actually, you’re like my £50 shop that’s now 80 quid isn’t gonna suddenly go down because they’re pushing headline inflation rates are falling, it just means it’s going up small, like slow and less slower, yeah, less fast. Yeah, yeah. So it’s like you know, my £80 shop isn’t gonna become £60 or and like give me that £20 back, it just means that it might go to £82 a lot a lot slower than it was gonna go to £85, for example. So, like our and our if you look at the wage increases, I think I saw a stat, it’s like since 2020, wages have increased 1.6% as an independent, and that like if my food costs have gone up by nearly for 30-40 percent, my wages have gone up 1.6%. You tell me where the fucking difference is in that, yeah. Just how how do people how the how do we expect people to to live at the moment? It is it is wild.

[28:04] Peter Komolafe: Yeah, and this is this is what gives rise to a lot of the I guess the unease that people are seeing from on the political scene now as well. It’s like, you know, we need to change political parties, and I’m not this isn’t a political show or anything like that, but you know, it’s it’s weird because what they’re going to do, I don’t know. It’s not gonna change overnight, though. That’s the key thing. I think having to change in leadership is gonna be good for sure, just some fresh ideas, fresh thinking, but an overnight fix I think is going to be highly optimistic, highly optimistic. And you know, in the political sphere, when they’re talking about tax cuts in the m in March. How how are you gonna cost that? And it’s such a a weird political game that I I could see them actually doing it just to spike Labour and be like, oh, you deal with it. And yes, it would benefit the everyday person, but the fiscal consequences are a lot lot harsher, and this is where you know these are very nuanced conversations that as a nation we should be having more openly because the political sphere directly impacts our finances, and sometimes people can’t quite make those connections, and it’s really, really important to kind of be able to draw the line and identify the pattern.

[29:31] Sammie Ellard-King: I do feel sorry for Keir Starmer because he has almost got this kind of like Barack Obama-like responsibility when Obama came into power. Yes, we went through that kind of financial crisis, but we’ve kind of just gone through a COVID crisis and an inflation crisis, and this is a crisis which has been going on for three, four years, and we’re coming to this point now, this pivotal point. And when he does take over, because for me it’s inevitable at this point, uh, and he’s gonna have this like crazy problem. And if you look at the Obama kind of double reign, it actually wasn’t until like year four, year five of that reign where anything of he wanted to do could actually start to happen because he was basically spending the first three years fighting to get people on side and basically fixing what was going wrong. And I feel like that will what is what will happen with Labour the first two, three years is just going to be basically fixing what’s gone wrong for the Tories.

[30:26] Peter Komolafe: Yeah, 100%. I think ultimately though, we do need kind of like we need some really good economic ideas, generally speaking. Um, because I just it’s such a difficult place right now, I think, from a from an economic point of view. Um, and we need we need to get more economic ideas and just you know be able to back ourselves a little bit more on the international stage as well. Yeah, I completely agree. Yeah. Well, let’s see, fingers crossed, things do start to improve for people. Um, you know, that’s what we what we want to see for everybody listening to this, of course. But I want to move on. Um, you talk a you do some fantastic work in the workplace, uh, specifically around financial well-being for employees. Um I really wanted to ask you what you feel like workplaces could be doing to better help their employees manage their finances right now.

[31:15] Peter Komolafe: So this has been a debatable topic, and it shouldn’t really be debatable. I do think that there are there’s a slew of companies or there’s a group of companies out there that realise, hang on a second, you know, where do we spend most of our time? Most people spend most of their time at work, and the there is empirical evidence now to say that if people are worried about their finances, there is a hit on productivity. And I think there and it’s quite a significant hit on productivity. And I think there is a group of companies that have definitely recognised that, and over the past two, maybe three years, certainly through COVID, they have definitely stepped up to kind of provide uh workshops, programs to help people be better with the fundamentals around their money, their financial well-being. And I think that is, I hope that continues. I still do think though, for some companies, could still like a box ticking exercise.

[32:07] Peter Komolafe: Oh, yeah. Because, yeah, no, uh, we recognise this is maybe something that is being spoken about, so let’s just do something, right? And there isn’t really any structure around it. But I do think that employee employers do have a responsibility because at the end of the day, you spend most of your time at home, at work, sorry. And if you are under financial pressure, you’re gonna take that to work with you. It’s just that’s just the way it is. And so any help that the employer can help you in terms of giving you a little bit of guidance, workshops, seminars, you know, tools that can signpost you, even to look, if this is the situation that you’re in, these are the kind of things we have. One of the quick things I’ll say to you know, a lot of these employees is you’ve got an employee benefits program. When was the last time you communicated very simply what’s in the employee benefits program? Because for a lot of people, if you’ve got a discount shopping section where they can get discounts at Tesco’s and all these other places, they probably don’t even know about it. And a lot of them may be struggling with you know the cost of their weekly shop. Well, immediately there’s a very quick win there. If you’ve got you know discount vouchers for childcare for parents, that is a huge cost, massive, massive cost, but you’ve not communicated communicated it clearly. So immediately that’s a very, very quick win there. You might have travel-to-work schemes. There could be a whole host of stuff that you have in your employee benefits package that would help your employers and being able to communicate those very, very clearly and simply for them to understand how it works and where they need to go to access it for a lot of companies is a huge, very quick win that they can literally roll out tomorrow if they have a plan.

[34:54] Sammie Ellard-King: Yes, absolutely. I really want to see a lot more happen. I feel like, yes, there are some progressive companies, as you’re right, they’ve seen the productivity go up if they look after their employees more. I mean, but essentially it’s like from a human level, you’ve got those people for a majority of your day, and so looking after them from a human level, and actually if they’re fundamentally not okay with their finances, as you said, they’re not going to be performing. And so I do feel like we’ve got a lot of work to do, and hopefully, employees, employers um help their employees a lot more as we move forward. Yeah, I think one thing that I found is that with employers, they get to a stage where it’s like, okay, we know it’s a problem, but we really don’t know how we’re gonna ask the questions. So maybe it’s not our place to do this because uh we’re in with the employer, we don’t want to tell people what to do with their finances, and it’s not it’s not even it’s not even about that. And oftentimes what I have also seen is that providers will just say, okay, here’s X amount of money, just don’t do something, and then they just do something random. And I’m like, okay, but have you identified the main thing that your staff are struggling with? Because if you do like a brief, and this is one of the things that we do, we’ll help people survey, right? So, what’s the biggest problem your workforce are facing? So when you identify that, you do something specifically for that because at least you’re solving a known problem. And that’s been something that has been missing with a lot of programs that companies try and implement that I’ve seen. They allocate a budget and they just you know send it to uh to whoever to do whatever, and it’s like, well, was it really targeted? Hopefully that changes in the you know in the coming months and stuff.

[36:44] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, to to an HR manager that potentially doesn’t understand what their employees need themselves from that side of stuff, so they’re not trained, so it’s very difficult. Yeah, it’s a tough one. It’s like you see a lot of um employers like you know, do the whole like, oh yeah, but we buy our employees pizza on a Friday, and they feel like that’s their uh their kind of well-being aspect to it. But then others will go the whole hog, and you know, that you feel like they actually got your back. So it really, you know. I suppose where do you work? Do you want these types of things? Do they bother you? Do these types of things bother you? And if not, speak up. You know, you do have a forum, especially with your HR team, to go and voice these things, you know. I I think we should be doing X, Y, and Z. So um, you know, challenge your work as well, is what I would say for sure.

[37:30] Peter Komolafe: Absolutely. So let’s talk about the book, man. But we’ve mentioned it a few times in the podcast. Um, love to hear a little bit more about you know the inspiration behind it, and yeah, hit hit us with the 411. Yeah, so the book, um, it’s almost a year now. Uh it’ll be a year in March. And um the I wanted to do something that kind of like finance books are generally speaking quite dry. Like when I first said I wanted to write a book, and you know, to I said to one of my friends, oh, what would it be? And we were in a circle in a mix of our friends, it would have said it would be a finance book. And they’d be like, I wouldn’t be that, it’s boring. And I’m like, okay, that’s that’s normal because people it is a little boring. Let’s be completely honest. So I wanted to write something that wouldn’t necessarily just be boring and dry. I wanted to bring a little bit of my own kind of like journey into it and talk about the lessons that I’ve learned. Um, and again, going back to why I started my company to have conversations with people that I wish that I had someone have with me when I was 1920, you know, bring to life that I’ve made all these mistakes and this is what I did to kind of try and fix it, but do it in a way that is formulaic. So um the book is called The Money Basics, and BASIC is a is an acronym. So it stands for the five things that I think are crucial for you to have uh to build some form of financial security. The first one into budgeting, you avoid debt, you save early, you invest early, and you take care of your credit score. So basic, five key principles. And all of those things are intertwined and they’re they’re put in that in that um sequence for a reason, because one builds upon the other. And so the book basically goes through my journey with budgeting, my journey with debt, my journey with not saving early, not investing early, finding out about investing in my mid-30s, then you know, trying to fix my credit score after years of being in debt and just being on the floor. And it offers practical tips in there. So I am a qualified financial advisor, mortgage advisor. So there are some exercises that we used to do with with clients when I was fine when I was a financial advisor doing financial planning. Those are in the book at the very, very beginning to kind of get people to think about, you know, what do I want to achieve? What is my why? Uh along what timeline would I want to achieve my goals and what comes first and what comes last. And through doing that, it’s the book is formulaic, but it also gets people on to the course of taking action. So you complete the tasks and it moves you along. So by the time you get to the end of the book, you’ve got a great idea of you know your goals at the very, very beginning. You’ve got a budgeting formula, you’ve got a formula and a approach to be able to deal with your debt, you’ve got a system which feeds back into the budgeting around how you begin to get the habit of saving early. So you can get some emergency funds, that kind of stuff, which is perfect just as you jump into the world of investing. We talk about investor and how that all works and the basic stuff that you need to know. Then in the credit score stuff, it talks about what is in there, the difference between a credit score and a credit report, what how the information is all sourced, how to boost your credit score really quickly, uh, some quick wins and how to challenge certain things in your credit score. So it’s very, very practical across the book. And I wanted it to be that way because I didn’t want people to read it and be like, oh, that was a good read, but I remember a few things but didn’t really do anything. I think it’s more about doing than reading. Um, so yeah.

[41:06] Sammie Ellard-King: Wow, it sounds super interesting. I would love to like get a copy of this myself, actually, and just kind of unpack it because I’m sure I’d learn a lot. And I feel like this is the thing with finance, is that sometimes you just need it by a pathway laid out for you. And that that that is when you can you can easily follow with practical steps because everybody learns differently, and sometimes having it just kind of like a nice roadmap really takes that pressure off us. Yeah. I mean, the feedback that I’ve had from the book has been amazing. Like it’s almost every day or so that I get a message from someone saying that the book was amazing and stuff. And one of the bits of feedback that I got that was more common towards the back end of last year was we’ve read the book, the exercises are great, but it would be amazing if we could if you had something where you took people through all of the exercises. So this year I’ve launched the book club as well. So it’s a six-week book club, and we don’t get together and just read the book. But what I basically do is I take people through the practical exercises, and then there are behavioural, um, behavioural assessments that sit behind them as well. So, in addition to going through all of the exercises in the book, we’re delving into the behavioural psychology. So we’ve got things like spending habits assessments, we’ve got debt perception uh assessments in there as well, we’ve got money personalities, financial advocacy assessments, just to kind of get behind the psychology and the patterns and the triggers, so that as people go through it, they can start to identify well, hang on a second. Yeah, I recognise this. And then naturally, when you recognise it, what to do next becomes more apparent. So the book club is designed to kind of take people through it in a more proactive way, but also have me as a guide as well. So I can lean in, provide some you know, expertise. Everyone gets like um a free 30-minute session with me as well during the the six the six-week period. We’ve got a massive uh members area that I’ve built in the background as well. Uh they get some freebies. It’s it’s really, really cool.

[43:09] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, that’s so cool, man. So if someone’s say missed the first week, but is listening to this and thinking, how do I get involved? But can they listen back or will there be another round? How are you gonna work that? Yeah, so at the moment we’re doing it in cohorts. So I want to keep the groups relatively small. So cohorts of 20. So the first cohort is full, the first cohort was entering its third week this week. So last week was debt week. Um, this week we’re talking about we’re moving on to the save early part of the book. Nice. So I call it financial goals for the um for the for purposes of the book club. So we’re talking about, you know, how do you build the financial goals? Because in week four, we moved to investing. Um, so it’s a cohort of 20 each time, run for six weeks, and then what will happen is I’ll take a two-week break, and then we’ll start another cohort shortly after that with another 20 coming through. Um, I don’t want to run the book club at 50 and 100 because you just can’t have the impact. And it’s, you know, you’ve got the members area, there’s a journal that I’ve created as well where people can, you know, use that to go through and document their thoughts and their observations and stuff. But we also get together every week on a Sunday evening for 90 minutes and the sessions are recorded. So for anyone who can’t attend, they can log into the members area and they can just access the replay for that session that they missed. And again, because we’ve got a WhatsApp group and a Facebook group, they have direct access to me to ask questions and you know, kind of fill through things. Um, so the idea is to be as practical and as hands-on as I possibly can be to really move people and actually make a difference because that’s what it’s about at the end of the day. It’s not about you know doing 50 people in the group where you can never really have that impact. I mean, it’s amazing. One of our cohort members last last week was debt week, and um man, there was about 35,000 pounds worth of debt across credit cards, credit cards, and I know how crushing that is. And um, she booked some time with me and we went through like, look, what’s the situation? Like, talk to me about your timeline for in in week one, and talk to me about the budget, talk to me about the things that you wanted to prioritize, and you know, you sit down and you have a look at it and say, look, okay, so what does this debt do to you achieving the goals that you put on your timeline? And you quickly come to an agreement that actually I can’t achieve any of that until I get rid of this. And it’s a very subtle thing, but psychologically it’s powerful because a lot of people with debt, they just don’t want to mess up to make it worse. And for her, it was like, okay, let’s go through all of the options that you have. You can consolidate. That’s probably going to be the easiest thing for you to do. And when you look at the numbers, over a thousand pounds a month on debt, every single month. She consolidates yesterday. She went for the application form, accepted, saves 600 pounds a month. That’s real, real help, real change. That’s what it’s about. That’s what I’m here for. I, you know, social media is great because you know, being an influencer and people can make a load of money, I don’t necessarily care about that. I want to be able to impact people tangibly, and that is a prime example of it is about doing good work because money generally is a byproduct of good work, at least that’s my belief.

[46:26] Sammie Ellard-King: I love that. It’s so refreshing to hear someone say that, to be honest, mate, because yeah, you’re right. It you know, there is some and let let’s not be wrong, there are some fantastic people on online and doing some great work on social media, but often it can feel a very sort of glitzy glamoury. Like, how much are you actually impacting that person’s wallet? And are you sending out them out into the world with more money than they had yesterday? And if you are, then you’re doing your job correctly and actually doing those cohorts. I just love that idea because it’s not just a book club, it’s a real like practical element, it’s almost like a crash course with you, which is like, but you’ve built it up as a book club, which is very familiar to people, so they feel yeah at home and their guards come down, so it’s like a really nice thing because they can talk openly about how they feel, which is what you’re supposed to do at a book club. So it’s quite cool.

[47:13] Peter Komolafe: And like within the book club, because there’s a cohort of 20, it’s like you know, it’s about becoming like camaraderie within that group because you’re all here for the same reason, you’re all here because you want to be better with your money. It might take a different form, but actually knowing that you’re not alone in whatever struggle that you’re facing is actually quite powerful because it makes you feel like actually it’s not just me. And it it relieves that air of blame that we often have with ourselves. Actually, it’s not just me. There’s other people who are in the same position. So, okay, it’s okay for me to share where I’m at and to ask questions and to open up where I’m at because actually, this should just this is a normal thing. Everyone’s in the same boat, but we’re all taking action to do the same thing. I mean, my dream for the book club would be to be able to run like a proper boot camp where you can do it in two days. So we have like, I don’t know, a little location. Yes, you pay a fee, but you come along for two days, we work straight through it, and everyone leaves at the end of the weekend on say a Sunday evening, Sunday afternoon, feeling really like energized and better about their finances, and they have real action plans or things that they’re gonna take along. That’s ultimately what I would love to build up to, but it’s gonna take a little bit of time to get there.

[48:22] Sammie Ellard-King: I love that. Yeah, sign me up for a retreat, that would be a lot of fun. I think crash courses often some people do need that, you know. Let’s let’s give you everything you need and send them away. But Peter, this has been an absolute pleasure. I’ve really, really loved this. There’s so many questions I didn’t manage to ask you, but um yeah, hopefully we’ll get you back on in the future and get to ask for it. But where can people find you? Yeah, mainly I’m on Instagram. If you type in my name or just Conversation of Money on Instagram, on YouTube, type in my name, um Peter Komolafe or Conversation of Money should still come up with the channel. But those are my two main outlets, really, where people can find me. Ah, lovely. Well, we’ll include all the links in the show notes below for everybody. If you want to get Peter’s book, The Money Basics, or join his next cohort, you can. Um, but yeah, thank you so much for coming on.

[49:08] Peter Komolafe: Cheers, mate. Thanks for having me. The Money Gains Podcast.