Rob Dix: Why Playing It Safe With Money Is Costing You

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

[00:00] Rob Dix: Most people who are watching this or listening to this will pretty much know like what you’re meant to do. Saving 10% of what you earn, putting it into a track of fund. Everyone knows that pretty much. The reason I wrote this book is I feel that there is a gap for people who’s like, cool, yeah, I get the basics, I’m doing that, but I want a little bit more. The type of person who is able to retire in their 40s or even their 50s is probably not also going to be the kind of person who’ll happy happily sit on a beach. No, I’ve got 30 plus years. I know so many people who bought somewhere in, say, their late 20s, and I think there’s a time in your life when having that security is probably going to be what most people want, but that’s not everyone all the time. And I think it can actually hold you back, and you can end up missing out on opportunities if it’s like, well, I can’t go and take that job offer in Australia or whatever because I can’t sell my house. Yeah. It should be a decision to make, not just a default belief that this is always the best thing, and I have to get on the housing ladder, or prices will just run away from me.

[01:02] Sammie Ellard-King: Welcome back to the Money Gains podcast. We are joined in the hot seat today by a very special guest. His name is Rob Dix, and we’re going to be discussing all about his new book, Seven Myths About Money. We’re talking housing, we’re talking inflation and what that really means, and plus some really cool ways to manage your money and build wealth called the three buckets of wealth. But for now, let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast. So Rob, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast, man. How are you? Great, thanks. Really good to be here. I was introduced to you by a good friend of ours, Andrew Craig. And then I’ve been like deep diving into your books over the last couple of weeks. It’s been a real pleasure. Yeah, I watched your interview with Andrew. Um, always, always great. I love when he gets angry as well. You did quite a lot in that. It was really good fun.

[01:50] Sammie Ellard-King: I was actually worried that one wasn’t like gonna fly, and then it’s just gone wild. And people are just like, even the clips, people are just so on it. And it’s actually a little bit about some of it, what we’ll be talking about today, because it’s kind of been amplified even more in the latest news which is going on as well. But I wanted to start somewhere which I think will set us up for the conversation, and it’s actually a quote from your new book. Um, you said playing it safe financially isn’t safe at all, it’s a slope after mediocrity. Yeah, the the kind of core concept is that I think most people who are watching this or listening to this will pretty much know like what you’re meant to do. Like the the whole thing about saving 10% saving 10% of what you earn, putting it into a tracker fund, all that kind of stuff. Everyone knows that pretty much. And there are plenty of people who don’t listen to stuff like this who won’t know that, and so that message needs to be out there. But for those people, I just feel like there used to be a time when if you just kind of did that, if you just followed the herd, you did what everyone else was doing, you did the simple basics, and you got an average result, then that average would be pretty good. But over recent years, the average has just been getting worse and worse and worse in terms of living standards, which means that more and more people, I believe, will aspire to do better than that. And that is naturally a hard thing to talk about, give advice about, write about, because it’s not this templated, oh, just do this, this, this, and you’ll be okay kind of stuff. But I the reason I wrote this book is I feel that there is a gap for people who’s like, cool, yeah, I get the basics, I’m I’m doing that, but I want a little bit more. And that I think we’re gonna see more of those people in the in the coming years, but there’s just not that much out there for them. No, totally.

[03:38] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s interesting you say that because I mean, like, if you look back like a hundred years ago, quality of life today is astronomically better. So when you say living standards have have fallen, what what do you mean exactly? Yeah, it’s a really good question. And something I say in the book is that the the world that we live in has got better in so, so, so many ways. I wouldn’t choose to go back at live at any other point in history in terms of convenience and comfort and all these things. And all these different measures in terms of um the how long you live for and health outcomes and the things you can have, it’s amazing. The technology is incredible. But all of those things have got better, but money touches all the things that are left over, and money, uh most people’s financial situation has got worse in terms of like if there was a time when if you just had a job and you did that job from when you left school, didn’t need to go to university, you could just go straight from straight from school into a decent career, stay in that your whole life, and then you’d have a guaranteed pension at the end of it. You would retire knowing how much money you’re gonna have forever. That’s not there anymore. And people you used to be able to, not in all jobs, but in many kind of average sort of jobs, sustain a family based on one income. You can’t do that anymore. And so all these all these ways in which you’re if if you’re just kind of getting that average result, you can see where it’s slipped over the last 40, 50 years. And then even in terms of how long you have to work for, but obviously the pension age has gradually gone up. Yes, every time it goes up in France, there were riots about it and stuff like that. Um, but more and more people are gonna have to be working well beyond the pension age, though I can’t remember the stats, but it’s in the book, the proportion of over 70s in the workforce is going absolutely through the roof. So it’s like, well, okay, so you’re having to, you’re you’re not getting your pension, you need all the you need your dual income, you’re gonna be working for longer. And well, what if you want more than that?

[05:32] Sammie Ellard-King: Do you feel like it’s a combination then of rising costs versus them or lack of knowledge in the personal finance space and not making decisions before realising it’s too late and the combination of those two are factoring into that? I think it’s just becoming structurally more difficult. I think people are finding it harder, not because people have got lazier or anything like that. I think it just has got harder. And that’s it’s hard it’s hard to see that changing as well. And there’s always there is an element as well, as I think, of we’ve got become accustomed to to more and and you know, the age of social media and everything, you can see what it’s possible to have and what some people have, and you become very acutely aware of what you what you don’t have. That but there’s there’s a perception that wages have um fallen, have not kept up with inflation over the last couple of decades. Actually, since 2008, um, they’ve pretty much stayed flat on average. Some jobs will be far above and below. But they’ve stayed flat. But that means that like all the productivity gains we should be having, all the innovation, all the everything else, as your average worker, you’re not seeing the benefit of that. So, okay, you’re not falling behind, but you’re not getting any further ahead either. I think there used to be this idea that you’d sort of end up better off than your parents, but who in their 30s or 20s now feels like they’re going to be better off than their parents, looking at them with their paid-off house and everything else, going, when am I ever going to get that?

[06:58] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, because they bought the house for the price of two blueberries. And exactly. Yeah, it’s uh I think like it’s and it’s such an interesting thing that you say there about the wage versus inflation things because that’s had such a large disconnect, especially since sort of COVID. And I feel like there’s been a big narrative around that. And I feel like that’s a lot in the case of when it comes to to money, people look at the two, three, four years behind and don’t press max and really look at this over a longer period of time, which is actually going to be much more beneficial for you when you’re sort of looking over life spans. Definitely. Yeah, you’ve got you’ve got to look at it over the long term, which people are extremely bad at doing in in all respects. And even even me, like knowing all this stuff, I still have to really push myself to kind of go and think in those, in those multi-decade terms. But but that’s another thing as well, that people’s people’s lifetime, investing lifetime, their actual lifetime, uh people are at different stages, right? And I think a lot of the advice that you see out there, it was if you’re reading the get reading this advice at age 20, fantastic. You can like go, you can start your pension, put money in the markets, and you’ve got all this time. There’s a famous stat about Warren Buffett made like 95% of his money after he turned 60. That’s because he’s 95 now. He’s had another 35 years of compounding. He’s actually older than that now. So yeah, of course, if you’ve got time on your side, then you can just kind of follow this path of, yeah, but you know, put in a bit and away you go. But there are a lot of people in their 40s, even 50s, just kind of waking up to this stuff now and just starting to get interesting. And that’s that’s not that helpful if because they might only have 20 years until they would ideally like to be retiring. And that’s really not long enough for this compounding effect to get going.

[08:42] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah. And yeah, I heard you talk about this, and it I found it so interesting because of that kind of you say actually, even at 20 years, it’s still not kicked in. And it’s not when you look at the compound interest calculators. And I suppose people in that position there have to adjust expectations or perhaps take a touch more risk because they haven’t put themselves in that position before, which is quite daunting to someone in their 40s who has next to no personal finance knowledge. It is daunting, but I think the the message I try and get across in the book is that obviously get rich quick is not a thing, but there is a but you can change your financial trajectory quite dramatically within five to ten years, not just by like waiting for hoping there’s a boom or hope wait waiting for compounding because that’s not long enough, but in terms of the decisions you make, even if that’s got nothing to do with investing, even if it’s just finding ways to earn more or find a way of earning that is sustainable, that you would very happily do this flexibly, well past retirement age, you’d do it for fun, but you get paid for it. Sounds sounds i sounds idealistic and you’re not going to get there next week. But you can by taking ownership of this stuff and realising like what’s what the situation is if you don’t do that, if you just accept the average, versus what is possible if you just take ownership of your overall money situation, which for me is saving, earning, and investing, then even if you are coming to this stuff a bit later in life, you can still radically change.

[10:10] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, absolutely. It’s sort of that like 0.1 degrees turn of the dial, and where do you end up in your you know, Bermuda or Australia? It’s the and those those are the trajectories of life if you do take that turn of the dial. And you know, yes, your destinations might be different based on age and your time to do these things, but it just makes a massive, massive difference. Yeah. And I feel like you’ve that leads us on really nicely, like one of the sort of key principles that you you you’ve been speaking about. And um, I absolutely love it because it made me sort of reflect my own strategy quite heavily. Um, which doesn’t often happen because you know you see stuff out there and you’re like, you think you’ve got it like, yes, this is my strategy, I’m gonna stick with it. And then you hear somebody else speak about it, and you’re like, I have not thought about it like that. And it really spun it on its head for me, and that was the three buckets of wealth. Um, do you want to kind of give us the 411 on it?

[11:04] Rob Dix: Yeah, so I love this concept. I didn’t come up with it. Um it’s from someone called Ashvin Chhabra and like a very, very little known academic paper, but I think it should be better known, where he basically came, he sort of came to the view from he was working with uh people who were like super wealthy. And they if you’ve got a wealth man, who’s a wealth manager, if you’ve got a wealth manager, you’re doing all right. Yeah, family office. Exactly. Um, and but he found that these these people were they had enough money that they could just like stick it in a basic savings account, live off the interest, and be absolutely fine forever. But they weren’t doing that. And why weren’t they doing it? It’s but it’s not just because they were greedy, there was something wrong with them, it’s because everyone has these three separate drives when it comes to money. There’s obviously the main the desire to protect yourself. That’s one of the buckets, protection. So you want to make sure if you lose your job, something goes wrong, whatever, you’re okay, you’re not living on the street. Then there’s maintaining. So you want to take the lifestyle you’ve got now and you want to maintain that lifestyle into the future while eventually easing off on work and stopping work. You want to keep that going. And if you go and see a most financial advisors, that’s the kind of thing that they’ll talk to you about, those two buckets. Um, but there’s another one as well. There’s a desire to improve. And everyone, his insight was that everyone has all three of these desires in some combination. It’s different for every person. Some will be very heavy on the protection, some will really, really want to improve, but everyone has at least some desire to improve from where they are now. If you’ve got like 100 people lined up in order of wealth, you want to make a jump, jump up that. And that’s why these billionaires who didn’t need to take any risk whatsoever were still trying to improve. It’s because that drive was still there. And everyone has that drive to some degree. Um, it tends to get overlooked because it’s very hard to, it always involves taking on risk. You can’t get away from it. And it involves putting in some kind of effort and it’s different for everyone. So you can’t just give templated advice about it in the same way as you can, oh, just like save 10% or whatever. So that’s what gets overlooked. But once you appreciate that you have all three of these drives to some degree, once you can figure out for yourself what’s the relative balance of those, then a lot of investing decisions take care of themselves because any investment you can make will be serving one or the other of those. Right. So if you know, if you can, if you know, like, am I like, do I really want to make a big leap upwards? Do I want to play it really safe? Is someone in the middle? What’s the combination? Then the detail of what you invest in doesn’t make that much difference as long as you’ve got this big decision right.

[13:45] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s really interesting. How how would you go about that if you were starting today, like and you were just looking at this from the start? Like, how do I decide on how am I gonna do it? Because it’s so different. Yeah, it is really hard. And it’s the the ultimate answer is it all comes back to self-knowledge, which is the hardest thing of all. So, like, is it actually when you come down to it, like the money part, the investing part seems complex, there’s lots of acronyms or whatever, but it’s not that hard. It’s the it’s the self-knowledge to know what you really want and what risk you can take and all the rest of it. That’s the hard part. But the the way that I think about this in like really basic terms would would be like start with start with the protection. How much protection do you want or need? For most people, that will be um an emergency fund and it’ll be your home, which controversially I say is protection, it’s not about making you rich. Yeah. Um, we can come back to that if you’d like to. And then there’s the then then there’s like, okay, well, where do I where do I want to get to? If I just like do the whole compounding index fund kind of thing, where do I want to get to by the or need to get to by the time I get to this retirement age? That’s how much I’ll put in there. Then anything on top of that is left over for to looking at the improved side of things, those slightly riskier, more personalized kind of investments, if you want to. But some people are just super not interested in that kind of thing at all, in which case, no problem. You can just put more into the maintain part, into the compounding part, and get there, get there sooner or get get a little bit further.

[15:20] Sammie Ellard-King: So protection, house, cash ISAs, savings accounts, etc. for you, houses a bit debatable for some people. And obviously, there is an investment in property as well. Yeah. I categorize that differently. Yeah. Yeah. Um, okay, interesting. And then index fund investing.

[16:22] Rob Dix: Yeah, any kind of like your your broadly diversified collection of financial assets. So some kind of mix of stocks, bonds, goals, etc., that kind of thing, um, in some kind of combination. Um, and there’s an interesting debate about like what the balance should be within that. But that whole but that whole kind of just like stick it in, put in a certain amount every month, and just with the aim of leaving it for years and years and years, that’s that’s the sort of part that’s fulfilling the the maintained part because there’s no way it’s gonna make you rich in the next five years. It’s just not gonna happen. But it will get you to a really great place in 30 years. It will allow you to it will allow you to uh maintain, hopefully, the lifestyle that you’ve got now without bringing any more money in. But at the same same time, it’s not gonna get you a private jet. There’s absolutely no way. The returns are within a sort of a fairly limited band. So if you do want to push the boundaries, then that’s when you get into more investments that have a different kind of character about them. Uh the way I put it in the book is it’s normally something that you have to put time into and you need to have some you need you need to be investing, not gambling, which means you need to have some like an above average chance of succeeding at whatever the thing is. So it could it could be investing in property, it could be picking stocks, it could be starting a business, it could be a lot of things, but they’re these are the investments that have a has the ability to give you super high returns, but they can also lose you money. So that it’s like the range of outcomes is bigger, and to do it properly rather than just going like, I’m gonna pick this stock because my mate told me it was a good idea. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Then then you have to you have to be putting your time into doing the research and everything else. But there’s at least the potential there if you put the time in.

[18:10] Sammie Ellard-King: Totally. And the reason why I love that was because a big part of what we teach is the 80/20, and so it’s 80% maintenance index funds, and 20% is your like individual stock plays, perhaps a touch of crypto in there if that’s what you want to add. Again, you’re higher, much higher risk with crypto or higher volatility, should we say. Um and within that, that kind of allows you to sort of have your play funds. But some people are just 100% index funds, um, but they then need to understand that there’s a limitation. Yeah, exactly. There’s it there will it get you to a certain point. But like I say, it’s just it’s not gonna get your name on the side of a building. You’re not gonna be building a hospital wing or anything. So it’s that’s fine. Most people don’t aspire to that, and I’m taking it to an extreme, but but the point is if you do want to make a big leap upwards and you want to make it happen quickly, so it’s like it’s not just like I want to go in five years, really. Yes, it’s not like I want to retire at six sixty-five and I’m 40 now. It’s just like, well, I want to be retired by 50 so I can go off and travel the world. I understand. Like that again, like you need a completely different um type of investment if you want to achieve. And you can never guarantee succeeding at it, but you if you want to get there, you have to try. And so the point of all this is then it’s like if you then all the detail about like, well, within my within my maintain portion, should I be 60-40 on shares or should I be 70-30, or shouldn’t should I have this, should I just be in a global index, or should I be overweight to emerging markets and all this stuff? It’s like it makes a bit of a difference. It doesn’t make that much difference compared to like if you it’ll either get you there, it’ll either get you to where you want to be or it won’t. And you I think rather than doing all the fiddling around, there’s a far there are far bigger wins to be had by either putting the time into taking the slightly higher risk approach or just earning more money, which is I was I was felt really strongly had to argue to get like a chapter about earning money into the book, because it’s just like you you can’t ignore that. Like your your earning potential is an asset in itself, and it just makes a giant difference to the overall picture.

[20:25] Sammie Ellard-King: It does as long as you don’t sort of lifestyle inflate along with that. Yeah. And if you then pre-proportion that money back down into what’s the wheel, essentially, then that wheel is going to end up moving a lot quicker. Yeah, exactly. But you even if you get some lifestyle inflation, like if you just imagine that with within Yeah, life can get better. Yeah, but with every pay rise you you get from from now on, if you just but like if invest half of it, or half of it going to regular investment, or the other half is pure lifestyle inflation, your saving rate still goes up and goes up quite a lot over time. Yeah, absolutely. We say like if you get a thousand pound bonus, invest 33%, save 33%, and enjoy 33%. Like, because then you know life’s for living at the same time, but you do need to sort of then try and move these multiple goals and short-term goals and long-term goals, and there are multiple things you need to be moving towards at the same time, in my opinion.

[21:18] Rob Dix: Yeah, and it’s really hard to get that that balance right because it comes down to personality as well. Like you get people who are just naturally extremely frugal, and I think are probably thinking about this stuff too much or trying to save too hard at a time in your life when it’s the only time in your life that you can be having certain experiences, you’re not gonna be wanting to like go clubbing in Ibiza and you’re 80. Maybe you are. But but most people but most people there’s there’s like a time for certain things. And so, like, if you’re it’s like if your if your savings rate is five percent higher, but you don’t have any fun, then what’s the point? Then that but then of course there are people who really struggle with that and are just like natural spenders or gamblers or whatever. And so trying to get to the the right point, like balancing the now and the future, is so hard. It’s like no one’s ever gonna get it completely right. No, totally.

[22:07] Sammie Ellard-King: And like one of the big things I think was sort of very good to sort of steer this conversation is is that impact of risk of actually not doing these things simply because of the big bad war for inflation, essentially, and your actual value of your pound that you’re working so hard for and where it’s just sitting in in cash and not doing anything else along the side of it, obviously, there is that protection element to that and that safety factor. But if you are not doing these things, then that’s going to have a massive impact. Definitely, yeah. I mean, you’ve got like definitely, yeah, you’ve got to have the emergency fund, that’s part of the protection. But then having too much cash on on top of that, you do. Up losing out. And this and it used to be really obvious. Like before 2022 or so, like when interest rates were pretty much nothing, your bank was paying you nothing. You knew we were getting nothing. So I guess so. It was like not a mystery. But now if you’re getting sort of like four or five percent in the bank, it feels oh, well, that’s that’s pretty good. But then of course, inflation is higher than it was, and it’s likely, in my view, to be higher in the next decade than it has been over the past decade. So you need to you need to outrun that. And so now the fact that you you feel feel like you’re getting something, you’re you’re gonna your cash isn’t losing value, but you are. So the urgency to invest and do something with it might not be there, but it needs to be there.

[23:21] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, we’re getting that a lot. Yeah, well, I’ve just got 5% at the moment. I’m like, yes, but and also it’s reported inflation figures as well, which is just so skewed for the everyday person. Because inflation, I think, is like personal. Yeah. It’s like what you what you actually buy and what I actually buy is different. Totally. So therefore, like your inflation figures are higher or lower depending on what you’re buying. Yeah. I’ve never done it, but I think it would be such a good thing to do, it would be to work out your personal inflation rate, which wouldn’t be that hard if you just know if you just know what you spend now and you write down the cost of it, then come back in a year’s time and do it again. I think it’d be super interesting. I’m doing a study at the moment. So I’ve tracked uh food shop spending for three years. Oh wow. So every single food shop. And there’s obviously key items within that that we always buy, you know, rice, milk, etc., and seeing what the prices of those are. And we’re gonna sort of put that out as a study just to see like from a personal inflation perspective, yeah. Um, what that actually looks like. So the difference is nuts. Like not really 2% a year, is it?

[24:22] Rob Dix: No. Um food is like you know, averaging about 22% at the moment. Yeah. It’s a lot. It’s a lot. And rents went up 9.1% last year. That’s a lot. So it’s like, yeah. So when you see 2.5, it’s like, you know, take that with a pinch of sore because it’s also semi-political in a way as well. Yeah, definitely. It’s um the art of inflation is like sort of keeping it at a level where it’s like without wanting to go into the pu into all the economics of it, like having some degree of inflation is quite helpful for governments to manage their own debts. Yes. Um, do you want to kind of keep it at a level where it’s high enough to be doing that job for them, but not so high that people start noticing. And so, like, obviously, when it gets to double digits like it was uh a year or two ago, people notice, people get angry. Like people are talking about inflation now. A few years ago, you never heard anyone talking about inflation ever. It wasn’t a conversation, was it? And it’s generally a bad thing if you’re talking about inflation. Um, but yeah, if you get it at a sort of like a three-four percent kind of level, it’s the level that people which people aren’t really going to be kicking up too much of a fuss about. Um, and of course, I don’t I don’t know that I’m not saying that the whole thing’s rigged or whatever, but it’s I’m sure there are ways of making massaging the figures to make them seem lower, and your in your your your personal inflation rate probably will be higher.

[25:37] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s sort of sort of compounded re within the last few days as well, because obviously um we had some sort of I would say market stir in the UK. Since rebounded, though, very quickly, which is super interesting, but the bond yields have been rising. And where governments are then taking out more debt, their inflation has to be a little bit higher, and also growth of the economy has to sort of match in with that. Yeah. Um, you had a lovely LinkedIn post about this. It was brilliant, but I’d love to sort of hear what your thoughts are on it. Yeah, the whole thing is just it’s so mad because if you I know like the government finances and personal finances are not the same thing, but there are enough parallels for them to be comparable in just and think of like the way the way that the economy is run is that the government has to take on more debt every year. Not for any kind of like ambitious investment projects or anything else, but just to pay for the commitments that they already have. And when we had this whole decade of austerity and all the rest of it, all that did was get back to nearly but not quite not borrowing money, more money every year just to pay for the everyday stuff. And obviously, as if you’re doing that as an individual, you would not expect that to end well. Um, they were doing all this at a stage where at a time when interest rates were next to nothing. Like from the 80s all the way through until a couple of years ago, there was a this secular decline in interest rates, meaning you borrowing got cheaper. It became rational to borrow to invest. The government was mostly not borrowing to invest, they’re mostly borrowing just to beat the commitments that they already had. So the problem is over this period, they racked up this giant amount of debt at relatively low levels. But now yields have gone up, and so people are wanting more money to lend to the UK. Every year, more of that cheaper debt rolls off and gets replaced with more expensive debt, which means that the proportion of tax revenue that is being used just to pay the interest on the debt, nothing else, just goes up and up and up. So, what does that mean? It means, well, taxes have to go up, or you have to cut back on your commitments. And neither of those things are popular. And there is a there is a limit. I don’t know if we’re at that limit now, but we’re probably close to it, where there is only so much tax you can collect. So the only way out of it is to grow the economy. But obviously, taxing more is not the way to not a way to grow the economy, and so they’re stuck in this really difficult situation. And so, yeah, the the the reason that we’ve had this huge increase in bond yields over the last month or so at the time of recording this isn’t just the fault of the UK government. Like this is a yeah, it’s a global thing, and it’s like there are lots of global factors why the cost of debt is going up, and everyone’s wrestling with this. There are certainly things that the UK government has done that are not particularly helpful, and they could possibly have done something better, but it’s something that everyone is everyone is wrestling with, and it’s not going to go away. I think the mistake and what I was trying to get across in the point post you referenced was I think it’s very easy to point the fingers at the current chancellor or the current party or whatever and just go, oh, if only this happened, then this wouldn’t have been the case. But okay, maybe it wouldn’t have been quite like that, but probab but nevertheless, this isn’t something where suddenly another chancellor’s gonna come in, another party’s gonna come in, a policy will change and it will all go away. It’s not gonna happen. This is something that we’re we’re gonna be living with as investors, in my opinion, for the next decade or more. So it’s something to get used to now. And we as investors can make different decisions as a result of that. The government is in a bit more trouble. They’re kind of locked into this now. So they’re wrestling with it, so are we, but we’ve got more options.

[29:39] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, totally. And I I think Rachel’s come under quite a lot of stick because she sort of perhaps tipped it over with that budget. And I think that that has then meant that she’s become the face of this problem, where naturally it’s a 10, 15 year kind of backlog of going in the wrong direction, essentially. And I do feel for her a touch on that. Um, and yeah, she’s certainly, certainly taken a bit of stick, and as a business owner myself, it’s it’s difficult to to sort of agree with a lot of the things that they’ve done. And you know, that it it’s very sort of left, left and right politics at the moment going at each other. It’s very volatile. So yeah, I do see how that’s become a bit of a problem at the moment. Yeah, it’s uh I’m I’m not here to defend the government. There’s lots of things that I think they should be doing differently, but it is just it is just a a fact that now we’re we’re in a world where they need to inflation is gonna become more of a problem. And that means that investors in government bonds or in anything where there’s a fixed rate of return are going to want a high rate of return to compensate them for the fact that inflation is gonna be taking a bigger bite out of their out of their returns. And there’s that’s just the way it is. And so it’s and these these kind of rates, the interest rates that we’ve got at the short end now, the the base rate is what, 4.75, whatever it is. And that is historically normal. Yeah, super normal. But what’s not normal is to have that when you’ve got this much debt. Yes. So that’s the difference.

[31:09] Sammie Ellard-King: And and you know, they’re saying 74% give or take rate cut in February, but it’s like how far can you go down from that point if inflation is 2.5, 3%, not much further. Yeah. So we are just gonna have to kind of get used to this environment. Yeah. It’s uh it’s tricky. I’ve it’s very it’s very easy to take pot shots at the government and the Bank of England, and I do, but it’s a bit, but it’s a bit one of those classic things like, well, what what where do you what what would you do? We’ll start. I wouldn’t start from here. Like starting from where you are now, it’s just like it’s really tough.

[32:48] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, yeah, of course. But they, you know, they’ve they’ve they’ve you kind of have to say like they did, they have got themselves to that point. And so you can’t defend them too much. Definitely not. But I think when a new party comes in and it’s all landed on their lap and then they have an episode like this happen, it was just frustrating, I suppose, because it could have gone the uh the other way. They could have done something completely different, they went the completely other way. And it was like, well, that’s tipped us over the edge kind of thing. Um, you said your own retirement is dependent on governments successfully adding new debt. Yeah. And it’s something that it’s it’s obvious, but people don’t think about it too hard because it’s not very nice to think about. But when you are paying tax today, you’re paying national insurance today, national insurance sounds like, oh, well, this is a plaque of policy I’m taking out for myself in the future. But it’s not. It’s being spent today like any other tax revenue is being spent on people who are receiving pensions today. So if you want to have a pension in the future, then that relies on someone else being around to pay the tax to make that happen. Or if there’s a shortfall. Please pay my tax. Yeah, exactly. If there’s if there’s a shortfall, then it means that the government needs to be borrowing money to pay you out. So I’m not gonna I’m not saying that you know people are not gonna be receiving pen, you know, if you’re 50 now, I’m not saying your pension is at risk in 15 years’ time or whatever. I mean, that would be a massive rug pull. They’re gonna do everything that you could possibly do to keep the system solvent. But nevertheless, if there is a if there is a gap there, then it is it is but it’s it’s tax and borrowing, and that’s that’s all there is. And it’s just it’s just so mad to think about that we’re the the way most uh cut countries are run, the US, the UK, many others are run, is it’s like you can only keep things going today by borrowing money every year.

[34:37] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, it’s just nuts. It’s like i if when you think about it, you just they have to do it. It’s uh and I just like people don’t they think oh the debt is going up and up and up, and then when you get this whole crossover where the debt’s more expensive, then that’s where it becomes worrying. So that kind of brings that uh that that part, I think, nicely to to a close. And I’d love to sort of move on to some of the myths in the book, because uh they’re so interesting. And you start with a savings myth, what’s that? So I’m not saying that saving isn’t important, saving is fundamental. Like if you’re spending everything you’re bringing in, you’re it’s not gonna end well. Um so you have to save. But it’s this is something we talked touched on earlier. It’s just like I think people almost feel comfortable with saving because you can’t go wrong. But you can go wrong because ultimately you’re losing purchasing power most of the time. Like as of today, I think you can get a rate of a rate of interest in the bank which is higher than the supposed rate of inflation. Your personal rate of inflation might be higher. But the point is, if you just k if you just save and do nothing else, you’re you’re not gonna get to where you need to be. And I believe that people are people fixate on saving too much relative to investing and to earning in particular, because there’s only so much you can save. You can’t cut back to zero and you can make yourself very miserable in the process, but you can earn a potentially infinite amount. And so there’s always going to be a higher upside there than there is on the savings. So, what I talk about in the book is going through a process of what I call conscious spending. So spending, kind of putting some things in place. So you are budgeting if that’s helpful for you, or not budgeting if you don’t find that helpful, but just putting some things in place where you’re spending your money in a way that you’re you’re getting something for it. You’re feeling good about the decisions you’re making, you’re not, you don’t just have money going out the door for stuff that’s not making you happier or where you don’t even know you’re spending it. So get to the point where you’re somewhat optimized and then just leave it. Leave it on autopilot and go off and focus on something else. Because the difference between like saving an extra 20 quid a month or something is going to make no difference in the grand scheme of things. If you put the same amount of mental energy into something else, then you could get far better returns for it. And most people, unless they’re maybe people watching this are a bit weird because they’re choosing to learn about this stuff, but most people have only got a certain amount of mental energy to dedicate to this topic. People have got other stuff to do. And so, like, you need to make sure that that energy is going into the highest leverage place.

[37:23] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, a hundred percent. And it’s uh for me, I like I’ve like hit that threshold. So I’m like, oh well, my emergency fund is there, and like I’ve got a bit in the savings account. We’ve we’re saving to a few short-term goals for like new furniture and stuff like the house or whatever. Uh, but apart from that, like kind of done. Yeah. And it’s like, well, the only thing I’ll do is like if inflation massively ticks up, then I’ll top it up a little bit just so it’s like not getting totally eaten away, even though the number stays relatively still. Um and that’s it. And then like once you’ve done that, for me, it’s kind of doesn’t need to be rethought about. No, and you’ve got a business, right? So the any time that you put into your business that allows your business to earn more will be worth so much more to you than a then increasing your savings ever so slightly by going and trying to renegotiate your car insurance for the millionth time or whatever. It’s like, yeah, you don’t be spending money willy-nilly, but there is only there’s it can only get you so far. And I think because it’s a comforting thing to think about because it’s pure wins. Like you can’t go wrong with it. Whereas with with other things, you can you can either lose money or you can put the work in and not get the result. But in your case, you’ve got a very easy one. Like you’ve got a very you’ve got a lot of control over your earnings. Someone in a job might be going, okay, well, great, but I’m earning what I’m earning. But there might be ways, everyone’s different, there might be ways that you can by either learning new skills or finding a finding another income stream or finding a new job or whatever, you can sort of make quite a big jump quite quickly. And that again is just like it’s pure win. And that the upside of that is always going to be bigger than this the saving that you’re making.

[39:11] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, 100%. Something you said there was that was really interesting, is like budget if you want. And like I just can’t get my head round it. Like, I I do one and I might look at it again every sort of six months, 12 months. But I just find a lot of cases that for me, doing it month by month, it would just drive me nuts. Yeah. And I I just like, oh, as long as I know my bills are covered and I’ve got extra, you know, bit of money for spending and I’m kind of okay with that. For someone that struggles with money, that like perhaps gets themselves into debt or hasn’t got good money habits, then monthly makes sense, right? Yeah, I think so. Um like the like the real the piece of personal finance advice that’s from over 100 years old and it does still work is pay yourself first, yeah. Um, which really, really works. Because like if you do, like you sort of take what you want to you you kind of do your mental budget or whatever, whip the rest away. So that’s all you’ve got to work with, and you have to make it work. That’s that’s great. But I think there are situations where uh active budgeting is useful. I think if someone’s very stretched, then they need to do that to make sure that they don’t go over what they can afford. And some people just find it, but some people find it helpful. And I’m not saying don’t do that, but some people just don’t find it helpful. And this is where it comes into well, just if you put that same energy somewhere else, it could do so much more for you. So something that I sort of offer as an alternative is instead of budgeting, just track your spending and ideally track your spending manually. So you can get things that like hook into your bank account until you give you a breakdown, and that’s cool. But it’s far better if you actually have to write down every time you spend something, just go into your notes app, note it down, because what you’ll find it’s the same as if you’re trying to lose weight, if you just track your calories, you will end up eating less. It’s like you just will. And even if you’re not trying to, is just the way it goes. And you get into this, like you start kind of projecting forward. Oh, will I feel good about writing this down in a couple of minutes’ time? And it kind of curbs your it curbs the worst excesses of your spending and helps you make better decisions without having to like have a firm like, well, I’ve got a 10 pound coffee budget this week. So do I want that today or tomorrow? But you can do that if it’s helpful for you, but it never really worked for me. For me, the whole the tracking approach worked so much better.

[41:28] Sammie Ellard-King: So just actually like putting, oh you know, Starbucks, £5.60, and you’re like, oh, that annoys me and I’m not gonna do it. Yeah, exactly. And and just being and just being it develops a consciousness of where your money is going. And that doesn’t help you out with the big stuff, that’s a separate step to deal with all the recurring stuff that you only see in your bank. But the but the day to day and it’s like if you if you are someone who could easily pop out at lunchtime and spend 50 quid at the shops, then I think that would be a very effective way of not doing that or not doing it to that extent. But if you’re the kind of person who would not you’re just you would never do that, that just feels unimaginable. But you might like have a coffee once a week and like buy your lunch rather than bringing it in once a week, then it’s like, well, like if you is it gonna make that much difference.

[42:16] Sammie Ellard-King: No, no, you’re better off putting that mental space in something else, yeah. 100%. Now, my favourite chapter was early retirement. Yes, it was my favourite one just because I was like, he is speaking my language. I just find retirement like when we do so. We did a um a survey of our audience and we asked them that question, um, what do you want to do when you retire? And then 90% of the answers was sit on a beach with a pina colada. And I found that like quite eye-opening, which for me just means I don’t know. That’s really that that’s programmed into their head, and so they don’t actually know. But I think once they actually do that for a year, they’ll be like, right, what’s next? Yeah. And so retirement for you is is completely different, right?

[43:05] Rob Dix: Exactly. I think there are there are examples of people who retire and say their 40s and then never do a day’s paid work in their life ever again, and they’re super happy because they’ve got lots of um very enriching hobbies and all the rest of it. Those people are out there. Um but in the majority of cases, when I looked into this for the book, it’s when the type of person who is able to retire in their 40s or even their 50s is probably who who’s worked, who’s like got the skills and the work ethic and the discipline and all the things you need to do to make that happen is probably not also going to be the kind of person who’ll happy happily sit on a beach for 30 plus years. I’d literally go mad. And even and retirement is like retirement is getting longer anyway, as like lifespans has increased. Like lifespans have actually started depressingly coming down a little bit over the last couple of years, but in general, they’ve been going up. And so now a a a woman who dies at the most typical age for a woman to die today, which is 89, could spend a third of her life in retirement, which is just like wow, that’s just it’s mad. And that no this is going to be looked back on as like a super weird time in history when that was the case. Because obviously it’s just not sustainable on a social level, but it’s also, I don’t think, desirable on a personal level to be going like work, work, work, work, work, stop, nothing. And so the what I encourage people to think about is well, how can you be in a position where you don’t have to have this cliff edge where you just stop working and earn nothing ever again and find ways of earning money that are enjoyable for you and flexible and that you can keep doing it forever? So as a as a business owner, that’s probably quite easy to imagine. There’ll be lots of people in jobs that they don’t enjoy very much where that just sounds like absolutely ludicrous thing to say. And yeah, today maybe it is, but this is my thing about it. You can change course in five years quite a lot. So maybe, maybe you’re not good, you can’t get there today. But what how what decisions could you start making differently today to start to work towards putting yourself in that position? So by the time you are 60 or whatever, you could start to ease off, you could go part-time, you could do freelancing, you could have like some kind of side business or whatever. So you’re bringing some money in, you’re sort of satisfying that part of yourself that like gets some, gets, gets a mental reward from doing that, but it also solves the money problem because it means you you don’t have this thing where like I have to have accumulated this much by this date. Yeah. And then it has to, and I have to be dead by 92, or it’s all over. It’s like one to my 30%. Yeah, yeah. That’s it. Yeah, yeah. But if you if you’ve got if you’ve got some of that, some money coming in, it doesn’t have to be a full time salary, but some time some money coming in. For much, much, much longer, then all the calculations become way easier.

[45:56] Rob Dix: Yeah. And obviously, like you don’t, there are plenty of ways to get a satisfaction in life without working. I’m not saying everyone should work forever, but most people are who are good at doing something and are earning money for doing that thing, enjoy that thing. We tend to enjoy what we’re good at. And so if you can just find a way of keeping that going, it just there is so many benefits to it. Yeah, 100%. It’s like you can just turn up the dial on that side, hustle that you’re doing, or or whatever that might well be, or even just like a passion project. Like a friend of ours, uh her father’s just retired, and immediately he’s like itchy feet, and he’s now gone and like become the treasury for the local football club. And so he’s like actively back into something else, and then he’s like super enjoys it, right? Because he’s down there all the time, and like he’s just immediately back out of quite a big role that he had before and just couldn’t stay still. And actually, it’s probably been worse for him mentally, right? You’re just gonna deteriorate if he’s just sitting around and he just can’t do that because he’s not that type of person, he’s always on the go.

[46:57] Rob Dix: Exactly. And I can I can see why if you’re in like a really high-pressure job and it’s one that it’s take it takes up all your time and you you you’re it’s always in the back of your mind. Maybe you kind of enjoy it, maybe maybe you don’t. I can completely get why you just want to be like done with that and doing the exact opposite seems really appealing. But for most people, I think that that’s that’s got a that doing nothing has got a shelf life as well. And so finding finding that middle point is just so much more desirable. So I kind of talk in the book about different methods of getting there and like frameworks for it. But it’s it’s hard because ultimately everyone’s gonna have a different answer. You can’t just say, Oh, just do this, this, this, this, because like everyone’s got their own skills and preferences and abilities and everything else. But again, if you just start thinking about it, because it’s not gonna, you’re not gonna get there overnight. But if you start thinking about it now, you could end up in this far better position in the future.

[47:50] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, 100%, 100%. I I don’t think we’re gonna have time to go through all of them, but I would love to unpack home ownership with you just because we’ve got to do it, haven’t we? Because it, I mean, UK, we’re obsessed with property, right? Yeah, we’re ingrained into our system, go to school, get a job, save for a house, get the house, get the wife, get the dog, get the two kids, and tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and pay it off over 30 years. Yeah, but there’s a there’s another side to this, and we’ve been doing some content on the other side of it as well, around the renting side, and getting an enormous amount of traction just because people were so vocal about it. Yeah, yeah. Where to start with this one? It’s um so I’ll start with kind of consigning it to the protect bucket because it’s like the central thing is like your home is not going to make you rich, and that’s the key thing. Because let’s say you buy a house for £100,000 and at some point in the future it’s worth a million pounds. Wow, that’s amazing, but it’s doing the same job for you as it was back then, and you can, of course, downsize and release some of that cash, you can move to a cheaper area. Um, but most people don’t, most people really struggle to do this. And um, Rory Sutherland, who’s got a quote in the front of the book, he talks about this a lot and he’s got a bit of a B in his bonnet about but about how people are just like sort of like hang on to the family home and stuff. So, like, yes, you can end up realising the gay the gains of that. But firstly, the only way to do that is to disrupt your lifestyle, which is kind of makes it a suboptimal investment in that respect. But also, that’s not unique to your home. If you’ve taken the same amount of money that you’d invested in your home and you invested it in anything else, you’re still going to have some gains. Will it be more? Will it be less? I don’t know. But you’re it’s not like you’ve got it’s your home isn’t anything magical and special. The reason people tend to do well from home ownership is it forces you to buy something, hold on to it, so but it’s a forced savings plan because you have to pay off some of the capital every every month, and eventually you’ve got this asset. So it’s a way that you it’s kind of it’s an easy way of doing that, but you can do that if you can maintain that same discipline by investing in something else, same result. So I choose to rent my own home, but I own investment properties, and so it’s it’s the same thing. So you use it as a vehicle rather than yeah. So it’s like I’m I have exposure to property. So if I believed that property was going to like do uniquely better than any other asset, which I don’t, but if I did, then I’d still have exposure to to that, but I’m just not living in it, because for me, the the flexibility of um it works out better on the numbers as well. But for me, the main thing is it’s like I want the flexibility. I don’t know where my family will want to be living in five years’ time, therefore, having all the stamp duty costs and everything else and all the hassle of buying somewhere then having to sell it again. No, not for me. But for other people, it’s completely the opposite. Like they just want they just want the security of having their own place. Renting is a pretty terrible experience for in the in the UK. I’m not gonna not gonna deny that. And so they want that security. Um but that’s I think a lot of people get pushed into because, like you said, because of the obsession, because that’s the template that you’re given growing up, you get people get pushed into that. And I know so many people who bought somewhere in say their late 20s, and maybe it’s a one-bedroom flat because that’s what they could afford at the time, or it was near where they were working, then they met a partner or had kids, or get a got a job opportunity somewhere else, and they will then end up basically having a rental property anyway, except to rent out that property, and then go and rent somewhere else themselves, or it’s because yeah, so I think there’s a time in your life when having that security is probably gonna be what most people want, but that’s not everyone all the time, and I think it can actually hold you back, and you can end up missing out on opportunities if it’s like, well, I can’t go and take that job offer in Australia or whatever because I can’t sell my house. Yeah. So you’ve gotta you’ve got to have assets, but you don’t have to live in your assets, is what I say. And so and and I’m not saying that it’s the wrong thing to do for for for everyone, it’s the right thing to do for most people, but it should be a decision to make, not just a default belief that this is always the best thing, and I have to get on the housing ladder or prices will just run away from me. Totally.

[52:24] Sammie Ellard-King: There’s an opportunity cost in buying the house, like you and you have to be okay with that. But some people they just want, they’re desperate to knock down walls and do up the kitchens and etc, etc. And like you can’t do that in a lot of rental properties and unless you’ve got a sort of very lovely land. I’d say most you can’t knock walls down, yeah. Yeah, kind of bloody hang a pitch up in the ones that I used to live in. Yeah, what unless you have to like repaint the walls, the amount of costs we got for for doing those types of things. But that that’s the game you play. And you know, that that that you have to be what we said in the video was run the numbers and work out for you based on where you’re in your life right now, where you’re at in your own personal finance situation as well. Like, do you have money in investments? Do you have your savings sorted? You know, and if the answer is no, then buying a house at this time might not be the right decision for you. You should probably get the that game sorted before, um, in my opinion. And or, you know, you might get lucky and find the you know the worst house on the best street, and it might just be an absolute no-brainer for you with a little bit of cosmetic work, it’s gonna massively increase in value, and it could be a great decision.

[53:35] Rob Dix: Yeah. Exactly. Um, but it should be it is a decision to be made, like I say. And the you make a really good point about running the numbers because there’s this whole myth that like renting is just throwing money away. Yeah. But it’s not like that you’re always gonna have housing costs. Always. Even when, and it’s getting a bit abstract, but even when you’ve paid off your house, you’ve still got an opportunity cost. Because you have that £100,000 house that’s now worth a million, well, that’s a million quids worth of opportunity costs because that’s money that you’ve got that you can’t do anything else with without moving out. And so you’re always gonna have housing costs of some kind. And in the early, in the early days of a mortgage, because of the way repayment schedules work, like you’re basically swapped renting from a landlord from to like renting money from the bank.

[54:20] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, it’s exactly the same thing. So yeah. So yeah, it’s like money is like I said, money is not the only factor, but there are situations where renting is actually cheaper, and there are situations where it just makes more sense for you. Like if you again, if you’ve got this really strong improved drive, then you’re probably gonna be better off. Like if it’s a case of like putting money into starting a business or whatever it is, of course that’s a lot more risky and it’s not for everyone, but you’re gonna get that’s gonna get you to where you want to be compared to owning a home. And well, I’d love I’d love to start the business, but now I’m worried because I need to be making my mortgage payments, that kind of thing. Yeah, and you’ve not gone and done the thing because it it’s holding you back in other areas of life. I I completely agree. Like, even me, I own my own home, and you know, we I see that happen sometimes, you know. You have to sort of go, okay, well, I’ve made that decision now, there’s no going back. Um, but a big part of what you do alongside that, and obviously, guys, like there are some other amazing myths in the book. I picked my favourite ones because I’m like I wanted to discuss them with you, but I definitely go get the book, it’s it’s a really great read. Um, but not a big part of what you do is property investing, and you have a whole business, Property Hub. Do you want to talk to us a little bit about that? What why for you is property the way that you go with your investment vehicle?

[55:43] Rob Dix: What do you think? It’s a really good question. Um, but I think property is great in a couple of different ways. It’s like it’s quite a good gateway drug because I think property is something that a lot of people understand and kind of feel naturally comfortable with. It’s really easy, and you don’t have the visible volatility that you’d get from the stock market or crypto or something like that. So, so it’s very easy to just buy and hold forever and have these kind of like good um habits around it, because you can’t just like panic one morning, see a bit of bad news and sell your house. You can’t like so it takes six months to sell your house. Um, so it kind of ingrains good habits. So it’s so it’s like a really easy behavioural investment for people to make because it enforces good habits. It’s also got the benefit of leverage, which is huge, in my opinion. So obviously, like so leverage in the form of a mortgage, you’re borrowing money, that introduces risk because, of course, you could have the asset taken away from you if you don’t pay the mortgage. Yeah. Um, but it also gives you a giant upside because if you imagine that you’re putting in 25% of the money to buy an investment property and it goes up by 2% in a year, then that’s effectively an 8% gain on your money because you only put in a quarter of it. Yes. So you’d you’d the real- You’re realising the gains on the full 75%. Exactly. Yeah. And so as time goes on, that you’ve got this debt, which in terms of pounds is just static if you don’t pay, if you just pay the interest and nothing else, you’ve got a debt that stays static and an asset value that goes up over time, even if it only goes up because of inflation. So even if you are like property prices do not outpace general inflation at all ever again, if they just go up in line with inflation, your asset will go up and your debt will stay the same. And so you’re it’s kind of a bit of a cheat. Like it, if you look at the um the stock market versus property over time, it’s debatable about like which ones had the higher return. But with property, you can buy four times as much of it because you’re using a mortgage. So it’s a bit of a cheat, really. So property always comes out ahead in in that regard. Yeah. And obviously, you can take out leverage against the portfolio of stocks, but for most people it’s not a good idea because of volatility, et cetera. Totally. Um, so it just happens to be an asset where you can borrow large amounts of money relative and um and then you just sort of you then you just hold on to it forever and you end up doing well. And so if you and if we are in for this inflationary decade ahead compared to what we’ve become used to, but then well, that’s that’s to your benefit as a property investor.

[58:22] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh, yeah. That I love that you put it like that because £100,000 in stocks is £100,000 in stocks. Like you’ve got to put that money in from your own bank account. Whereas you can do their $25,000 in, $75,000 from the bank, and then suddenly you’ve got an asset which could be then either paid off by tenants, right? And that’s what is that similar to what you do, or do you do commercial as well? The pure residential, and commercial is a perfectly good um um asset class, but it’s quite a different asset class. And I think for me and for a lot of people, residential, it’s like you feel like you understand it because you you live in a house, you kind of know what it what it’s all about. Yeah, and it’s also just got this insane supply-demand um aspect to it as well. Like there’s more to the price of houses than supply and demand. But when you look at rents, and like a big part of the reason that rents have gone up 9.1% over the last year is because the population grew by like 700 and something thousand last year, the and it’s done that, it’s gone up by multiple hundreds of thousands in pretty much every year. But the supply of investment property has not increased since 2016. You’ve got the same number of investment properties today as you not the same proportion, the same number as you had in 2016. Why is that? Because of the the the people that are taking the properties and then the increase of in the It’s but no, it’s because um there’s been so much done to discourage property investment since 2016. So there are some big tax changes announced in 2015, and like various other things have happened as well. And as a result, you’ve got a lot of people who still got into buy to let in like the mid-2000s who’ve like ridden the capital gains and there’s they’ve gone like this has been lovely, but I’m off now. Right. And um, and so there are there are people coming in, like we work with lots of people who are getting into it now. Um, but as for all those people coming in, there are people going out, and so the overall supply hasn’t increased. And so, and and and even if you like forget that and just look at like the general level of house building, like Labour has got these plans to build all these million homes, but actually the economics of it is almost impossible. Every housing target that every government has had since we’ve been talking about this stuff, which is 12 years, has been missed by quite a long way. So it’s just like you’ve got the that that’s in your favour as well. And so for so just for me, because of that, it’s like I just find this really easy to get my head around. Whereas if you’ve got a commercial unit, then it’s just like, well, you know, will there be demand for this particular type of thing that we’ve got permission for on this particular street? And like if you get if you get a vacancy, it can be way, way, way longer.

[60:58] Sammie Ellard-King: And there’s rental holidays at the start to get that business off the ground and all of that stuff. Exactly. So there’s there’s advantages to it as well, but it’s just a lot more to it’s uh it’s more specialist in my opinion. Whereas with with residential, the kind of stuff that we do. Put a family in. Yeah, and just let and just and just leave it. And I’m not you can’t be casual about it. You could you could have been like 15 years ago, you could be super casual, not really know what the hell you’re doing, and just like buy a property and uh get away with it. Now you have to be have a bit more of a professional approach to it. There’s a lot more regulation, as there should be, and you have to, you have to like the tax situation is more complicated. So you need to do your research, you need to put the time in going in. But if that’s something that you are interested in doing, and uh no one should force you force themselves to do this stuff, but if it’s something you’re interested in doing, then for me it’s an investment that is it’s got it’s got the characteristics of this improved type investment that we talked about.

[61:56] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah. But it’s like it feels more achievable to a lot of people than oh, just pick a winning stock or oh, we’ll just go start a business. Totally. I I think for me it’s a form of diversification, like we’re at that key point now going into the property side of things because we’ve built the stock portfolio up and that’s just going to carry on ticking over from income going into it. But then it gets to the point where hang on a second, like, you know, then I’m 100% equities. Like what then happens then? And you know, owning my own home, as we’ve said, isn’t the investment. So I’ve realised that after, you know, learning about this a lot lot more, because it’s a whole other asset loss completely. Yeah. And then it’s like, oh, okay, well, do I want to then go into the property aspect of it? Because it has so many challenges in itself, like even just the maintenance is is wild because you’re responsible. Yeah, exactly.

[62:48] Rob Dix: If in if the whole thing just leaves you completely cold, you just like it feels like a chore, then you don’t have to do it. There’s lots of other things you can invest in. But if you do have if you do have the interest in it, and it works well for business owners in particular, especially if you can get to some kind of scale, if you can get to sort of to like three or four over time, you don’t have to be there on day one. But if you can get think you can get there over time, then all the upfront work of learning about it pays off more than if you just own one, and you can start putting systems in place to make sure that you are not the one getting the phone call about the broken boiler or whatever it is. That’s exactly what we’re looking at. We we we’ve got a meeting next week to ensure that doesn’t happen. And uh, you know, but then you have to realise a slight loss on the amount because you get somebody else to do it for you. But that that’s the game you play.

[63:37] Rob Dix: Exactly. So and I I’ve now my portfolio is now managed in it takes me less than an hour per month because I’ve got a part-time PA who specifically looks after that. She’s the middle person between the the agents or the tradespeople or whatever. I just answer the old WhatsApp and it’s all taken care of. But obviously, you there’s you can’t do that on day one. You it doesn’t really make sense with one property, and there is a cost to it, and so it does it each into your returns, but you can you can get around it. Like I completely understand why all the maintenance and everything is really off-putting, and it can be. Um, but there are ways to make it less painful. Do you do it in London or do you do it all around the UK? Started in London, um, but then London prices just went absolutely bonkers. Like London bounced back really quickly from 2008 and like raced ahead of everything else. Um, and so it got to the point where I couldn’t make it work anymore. So I started going investing further afield. But now as a business, like we build portfolios for our clients, we’re doing that exclusively outside London because it’s just where we’re seeing not only the best rental returns, but the best growth potential as well. Because like London’s already had its growth. Yeah. Everywhere else is going to close the gap between the two. 100%. So we’re doing loads in in like the northwest and the east midlands and places like that, where just the opportunities we’re seeing are so much better.

[64:53] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, we’re that’s where we’re we’re looking at ours, like the you know, Leeds, Derby, Manchester kind of vibe, because they’re all on the up. There’s loads of investment being pumped into those cities. It’ve got fantastic universities and makes a lot of sense, right? Because London is London. Yeah. It’s a world of its own. Yeah, and there’ll there will come a point where like Lond London’s actually the numbers are getting better because it’s kind of stagnated where everything else has kept pulling ahead. So there’ll come a point where London’s appealing again, not but and it’s got the benefit of it’s always going to be in demand and it’s the capital city and all the rest of it. So there’ll come a point where it’s a good entry point again. But for me, it’s not a good entry point right now. Well, the thing is as well, like some of the properties we’ve been looking at, they’re like £150,000 versus the same property in London when you’re looking to be in five, six hundred grand. So the actual capital to get started is enormously low.

[65:41] Sammie Ellard-King: Yeah. And so the risk for you putting your own part-earned money into that is a lot lower too. Totally, yeah. And that’s the thing. When pro property, that’s the the one of the drawbacks to it, is it’s lumpy. Like you can’t just like put in 100 quid and see how it goes and test the water. Yeah, it’s a big commitment. Yeah, £100 a month is my my property index one would be lovely. But um I’ve really loved this, and yeah, I feel like we could sit and talk about this stuff all day. Um, but definitely encourage people to go out and get the book. Uh, where is it available at the moment? It is available everywhere. You can find it in Waterstones, you can find it on Amazon, or if you want to go to my website, robdix.com slash myths, so you can get a trial chapter there. Try before you buy. Oh, cool. Um, but yeah, um, I’ve loved the chat. Thank you so much. Uh, you’re welcome. We’ll leave links to the show notes below. And yeah, thanks so much for coming on, man. Thank you. Wow, what a conversation that was with Rob Dix. I honestly feel like I could talk to him for hours. So interesting to hear about how he’s managing his property portfolio and how he treats his own home not as an investment. It’s actually in his protection bucket. That was so interesting to hear, something I’ve not heard before. And guys, make sure you’re tuning in every single Wednesday. We’re back next week with another killer episode. And I’ll catch you guys on the next one.

[66:54] Rob Dix: Peace.