Ken and Mary Okoroafor of The Humble Penny: Building Financial Joy as a Couple

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

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Money Gains podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and today my guests are Ken and Mary. It’s actually our first time having a couple on the show, and they have a business called the Humble Penny. And if you haven’t followed them yet, you really should do. Their YouTube channel is amazing, packed full of fantastic financial content. And they also have lots of things like courses, and we chat really about financial well-being, their investments, and their journey. We also chat about managing your finances as a couple as well. And some important things that you should do and look out for when managing your finances together. But if you’re listening on YouTube, please do whack that subscribe button. And if you are on Apple or Spotify, please do leave us a review. It really does help the show. But for now, let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast.

[0:50] Ken Okoroafor: The Money Gains Podcast, the financial guy, no rap. Let’s make some work for the 247 post. So, Ken, Mary, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast. How are you doing? Yeah, we’re very good. Thank you for having us. I’m absolutely so excited. I’ve been really looking forward to this one. I’ve been following you guys for a good few years, and the journey of the Humble Penny is amazing, and I can’t wait to get stuck into it. But if you wouldn’t mind giving the lit listeners a little bit of a 411 about you both. Yeah, so we are a husband and wife team. I’m Ken and Mary. And we’ve been running the Humble Penny since 2017. Um where we’ve been married as a couple for 12 years and we’ve got two children. Um, but the Humble Penny was just a passion project. We both had our corporate jobs that we did. I worked in finance as a chief financial officer.

[2:00] Mary Okoroafor: Uh, and do you want to share a bit more about your worked as an e-business analyst for five years before leaving to help run a family nursery business, which I did for seven years whilst raising our two young boys. Yeah. Um, and then I then left that nursery business to work on the humble penny full-time in 2019, and then Ken followed suit in 2020 during the during COVID. And we’ve been doing it full-time since. Yeah, exactly. And it’s been interesting running a business as a couple because we we’d always wanted to do that, but we didn’t really know what might be the opportunity to actually do it, you know. Uh so the humble penny just happened to be one that we both are strongly passionate about, the subject of money and personal finances, and trying to what Mary and I describe as creating a life of financial joy. How do we help you know the people who follow what we do? How do we help them design that life of financial joy? Yeah, that’s become you know our kind of a core mission uh on this journey.

[3:04] Sammie Ellard-King: One thing that I noticed with your content is that you do bring that joy and that fun, and there’s always smiles with everything that you do. You know, finance and money can be, you know, smiles upside down a lot of the time, or quite serious in a lot of nature, and you don’t, you guys aren’t like that, and I love it. Thank you. Thanks so much. I think it definitely helps to bring that, I guess, humour and reality, um, relatable stories, I guess, to situations that can be, like you said, topics that can be really, really serious. So yeah, we try to have that balance of like informative, educational, content, but also entertainment. Yeah, I think people need that as well because I just feel like life is so if you turn the news on, everything’s so negative all the time. You don’t really hear positive news, and I just feel people can easily get dragged down by negativity. And for us, we always believe a good starting point is by default, just assume things will get better, you know, and if you start from that place, you’re you’ve almost won half the battle.

[4:10] Ken Okoroafor: Yeah. Because then, you know, everything else is about strategies, about tactics, is about just diligence with your finances. But I think the mindset of and that mindset actually comes from a place of abundance because a lot of us operate from a place of fear and scarcity. But if you are, if you almost reframe that and gradually program yourself to operate from a place of abundance, not always driven by scarcity, you’re much more likely to think positively and to think with a lot more gratitude, which I think is actually very important on the on the money journey. I think it’s something that gets left behind with a lot of the conversations around money is your mindset and you know, if you and self-awareness as well about how you feel and how your triggers operate, your spending, your overspending, you know, all these different or how you even feel about yourself when you come to make money decisions. And often getting that right first is often the best approach before even taking any steps with your financial situation. What do you think about that?

[5:19] Mary Okoroafor: Yeah, we we couldn’t agree more. I mean, you know, Ken’s already you know touched on that, but the mindset is so important first because if you get the mindset right, everything else should hopefully follow through. Because a lot of people they make the same financial mistakes over and over again. But that, you know, and no matter how much they read or how much you know how-tos they kind of educate themselves on that change won’t really happen until they realise that what is the cause of their behaviour, like what is the recall? Can they actually change that behaviour? You won’t, it’s like you said also you need to be self-aware. You know, have you picked up some bad money habits from your parents um or from what you’ve seen growing up? And it’s just all for your environment, exactly. And it’s so subconscious doing these things that you don’t, it’s not even like you realise that you’re doing it. So it’s so important to be self-aware, but also work on you know that mindset.

[6:16] Ken Okoroafor: I actually think that you can’t really know where you’re going until you know who you are. You know, I think self-awareness is such a uh a critical element of our emotional intelligence. You know, it’s on it’s not until you you deeply understand what your core motivations are. Like, what is it I want out of life? What kind of life do I want? And where is that even coming from? Is that something I saw on Instagram or like, is that something I heard from my friend? You know, is it really what you want out of your life? And a lot of that comes from like deep introspection, asking yourself some very simple, but actually pretty powerful questions like, what does work mean to me? What does money mean to me? What’s my relationship with money? You know, what are what habits are letting me down? So it’s not until people actually understand those elements and have almost self um, almost self-questioned themselves that they then start to think, well, actually, I’m starting to form my own opinions about life. I actually know what I want, you know, and I know what I don’t want, you know. And out of that, that you then start to think, well, actually, what does that now look like in numbers? What does that look like for my finances? What does that look like for my goals? So yeah.

[7:34] Sammie Ellard-King: How did you get to this point? Because obviously, you know, CFO and business analyst, it, you know, something tells me you were always good with numbers. Is that right? Is that the case growing up? Um, okay, you were always very good with numbers, weren’t you? Well, I was always good with I was always screwing I was always good with like, you know, like maths, and I’ve never thought I was a creative person. So I’ve always been good with like just the mechanics of stuff, but I’ve never known quite how to apply it to things that aren’t really that linear, you know, like because money is very emotional, you know, and it goes just beyond just the mechanics of numbers. But but being good at numbers though doesn’t mean you’re good at managing your finances.

[8:21] Mary Okoroafor: 100%. It’s so true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So so yeah, I had to learn the hard way because I’ve made so many money mistakes, so many that I can think about, um, even though I was good with numbers. Yeah. Um, for me, I I would say that I was just good with I guess budgeting from an early age, just learning from like my parents, having to um yeah, just fend for the family on a tight budget. And I guess I’ve always been made, I’ve always found different ways of making money and just saving, saving, saving. Um, but then it was on that journey to try and do something different to what I’d seen growing up. Um, just for context, I’m the last born of three older brothers, and so they have made some good money moves and also made some money mistakes, which I’ve learned from the benefit of hindsight. And so, yeah, I just was definitely a lot more aware of doing things differently from a young age, and I guess whilst on that journey to educate myself on um just basic, you know, finance and money, you know, literacy. I guess that’s how I met Ken, but that’s that’s not that’s a whole different story, isn’t it? It was kind of like a gradual journey, it was it wasn’t something that came natural to me or to you, I guess.

[9:37] Sammie Ellard-King: Do you feel like you have kind of different when you look at your kind of financial strengths as such, do you feel like you have different ones that complement each other as a couple?

[10:33] Mary Okoroafor: Um yeah, I’d say so. I’d say so, yeah, absolutely. I think I’m much more like I’m much more goal-driven. Like if I know what I want, yeah, I’m much more like I can see it, I can visualize it, I can I feel like I can touch it. Okay, this is what we need to do. Let’s go. Yeah, and and I’m much more likely to stick with it. Like my I was chatting to my brother yesterday, he was reminding me of like when I was a teenager and I had this vision of buying a fiat punto. Yeah, I’d print pictures of it and I’d put it up on the wall, I’d go to like Sainsbury’s, I’d buy magazines, I’d read up about it, I’d rip stuff out, I’d put it up. You know, I had this thing where I really wanted it. He said, Okay, remember Fiat Punto, you really wanted it, this is what you did. He’s like, remember you wanted that Golf GTI? Exactly the same thing, you did exactly the same things, you know. So he kept saying to me, see, your superpower is you’re able to like have a vision for something, and you’re able to just focus on it and actually do it. You know, you don’t like veer off it, but you actually carry on doing it.

[11:43] Mary Okoroafor: Yeah, that’s definitely true. Ken can be very tunnel vision and uh you know has his strength, yeah. And you know, we’re both visionaries, but I think what I like about Ken is that um he doesn’t complicate things. Like if this is what we need to do, let’s just get it done. You know, I could be a bit of a perfectionist and Ken, no, babe, just let’s get it done, let’s get it out. Done is better than what’s perfect. Progress over perfection. Progress over perfection. So yeah, yeah, yeah. I definitely like and and also you think out of the box a lot just based on like your background, you know, growing up, things have not been easy. Yeah, um, as an immigrant, you’ve always had to think out of the box. So when it comes to us um carrying out, you know, whatever vision we have, yeah, you definitely have have different creative ways of being able to execute that plan. Yeah, so you are creative.

[12:41] Ken Okoroafor: But I think it’s interesting because I was listening to some research around creativity, and they were saying how like as young children, you you basically start off very creative, and then as you get older, that creativity disappears. And the reason they said it disappears is because as young children, you play with other young children, so you’re always swapping ideas, you’re always sharing from a good place. As you get older, it just becomes about your job and you’re paying your bills, so you become a lot less creative. And your interactions is over the phone, WhatsApp, it’s not really face-to-face. Yeah, yeah. That’s interesting. It’s it’s crazy how life changed even in the past like five, ten years now, people, you know, smartphone industry has completely changed in the way that we think for the better and for the worse, I think, in a lot of ways. I was going to ask you, um, you know, it’s the first time you’ve had a couple on at the same time, and I think it’s a really nice question to ask. So um, how do you guys in the household, how do you guys work on your finances together? Um, what what sort of steps do you take to be open and honest with each other about about your you know finances together? Sure.

[13:52] Mary Okoroafor: So we um we have a money day, which we do often together. And you know, a lot of people ask us this question, and because it’s usually the case that you have one partner who is either really good with money and saving and and investing, and then the other partner is a spender. Uh so you know, one thing that we always tell, you know, people is to come together and come have like a regular money money day. Money day. Yeah, yeah. And it shouldn’t come from a place of judgment, yeah, it should be or shaming or pointing fingers like you did this, like how much did you did you buy that? What it’s it’s more from just a place of sitting together and deciding what are our goals, what are our common goals. And so one thing that we’ve always done is that we’ve always had something that we’re both working towards together. Um, we also have our individual goals, but we always have something that we’re working towards. And you know, it could be either, you know, what’s our goals for our monthly investments, you know, what do we want our investment pot to look like? What do we look want our um pension pot to look like and our savings and our you know emergency funds? Um, what holidays do we want to go on in the future? Uh what’s what’s on our um vision boards? Like, for example, on our vision board for 2020 was that we wanted to do at the door. That’s really expensive.

[15:19] Ken Okoroafor: We’ve only just finished finished. In fact, we’ve got builders now actually wrapping up in the garden. Yeah, we have to I saw the pictures in Let’s go. It’s coming true now, three years later. So this is all fun things, right? And so then you work backwards. Okay, so how much do we have? Um, how much can we allocate towards these different things? We if we don’t have that money, how can we get that money? Where can we cut back? And so this is where we also talk about our budgeting, how much we allocate to different things, um, like education, fun, giving, you know, saving. And yeah, it’s just a fun sit-down, you know, we have drinks, we have nibbles, and you we talk about um our investment so far, what we’ve like, our net worth. Exactly. We always track our net worth and see how is it how it’s improved from the previous months.

[16:07] Ken Okoroafor: Yeah, and just one thing I want to add is there’s a fundamental element of our finances that might m other people might not might view slightly different or even unique or unusual, you know, depending on how you look at things. Mary and I combine everything to do with our finances. So there’s there’s no concept of my money or Mary’s money, it’s just our family money. It’s literally like, you know, everything that comes in is just household finances. And what that does is it means that we have a household vision for what we want for our family, then we have our household investments and you know, pot, and then out of that pot, things then go to different places, whether it’s our pensions, ISAs, you know, to you know, pay for you know things for our children or whatever, or food shopping and and so on. So I think that’s actually quite um some people might find that a bit weird because not everybody really combines their money like that, but we don’t really like it’s always been how we’ve seen things from when we met. We still have individual um bank accounts, obviously, but we we operate from a place of unity, which we just find a lot a lot more transparent.

[17:20] Sammie Ellard-King: Hey guys, Sammie here. Just a quick one. If you wouldn’t mind heading over to upthegains.co.uk, hitting the subscribe button in the top right hand corner, and entering your email into the box. For your troubles, you will receive a free net worth calculator worth £25. Now, this net worth calculator, if you enter your assets and your liabilities, will tell you exactly how much you are worth today. Now, what you can also do is set yourself some financial goals and track your net worth along the way using this tool. It’s totally free. So head on over to upthegains.co.uk, hit the subscribe button, pop your email in, and you’ll be sent straight to your inbox in a matter of minutes. Now, back to the podcast. I love that. Um it’s very similar to um me and my partner. I think it grew with us over time. You know, now we put a lot more of our money into the joint account. Before it would just be covering bills and very like serious expenses. Now we have, you know, emergency fund, joint pots, sinking fund, joint pots together. Um, we have a new house fund because we know when we want to go into do something, we’re like, right, yeah, we want to have some money to buy a new bed, new sofa, etc. So we’re doing a lot more now, and I I think that it comes with growth and it comes with trust. And I think something certainly unique with you guys is obviously you run the business together, and there’s so the money coming in is is you know both of yours, you know, and so I think that makes it um probably a little bit easier for people to for you to approach that. But there are certain things, and since we’ve done this, and since we’ve been much more open, you know, we talk about where we’re at with our money and our goals, etc. Life changed for the better. You know, I felt a lot more comfortable um with where we were going, and it deleted all of those kind of worries and and issues that we that can to stem from from lack of conversation with your partner, and I really do believe it’s so important.

[19:21] Ken Okoroafor: Can I just say one more thing about this? So we’ve been doing this since we began, uh, since we got married in 2011. Uh, we’ve been doing this now. Part of the reason why is um is you know, particularly for people who might want to have children and that kind of stuff, is there is this, you know, almost unfair bit that exists where a woman takes time off to have children, and obviously doesn’t bring in as much income as she might ordinarily do, and you know, a guy in the relationship, and this is not with every relationship, obviously, but in its traditional sense, a guy might be the one making most of the income, and there might be that that kind of almost unequal contribution that might might appear in a in a family’s household. So for that reason, Mary and I thought, you know what, we’re all playing different roles in our family finances. Mary was doing a lot of the looking after, a lot of the you know, looking after raising our children, whilst I might have been going into town, going to work, and she was working as well. But our incomes were vastly different, you know, in terms of amounts. So we felt a really good way of removing that, you know, thing where you might feel, oh, I’m earning this much and you’re earning that much, was just to say, look, do you know what? It just goes into one pot and that’s it. That’s our that’s our money. And then out of that money, we would then like pay for stuff, you know, and we would equally pay into our pensions, we’d equally pay into our ISAs, we’d equally pay into anything we’re doing. And that for us just removed pressure, you know, removed this thing that I think exists for some couples where you know there’s this ine almost inequality in I don’t know how to describe it, like their finances or something.

[21:10] Mary Okoroafor: Yeah, and because we did everything so jointly, it meant that we could live on one income. Yes. It was something that we decided to do. So with one income we lived on the other income we used for investments, um, to pay down a mortgage, also to say, yeah. So invest in a stock market. Invest in a stock market, which meant that we were even more kind of strict about what we did with the money, how we budgeted. I absolutely love it. One of the things you said there, which I think is really, really important to touch on, is the pressure that comes with it as well. Like the pressure is often the the bit that tears everybody apart. And and being open and honest is is just paramount. I believe in any relationship financially, you need to have that aspect of it. And it doesn’t have to overweigh onto you. And if you do have that divide, you know, do things like you know, Ken and Mary do the money day. I love that. You know, we we do we do ever we do a Sunday lunch and uh you know, we cook Sunday lunch and we sit down and we look about what we’re doing and we look at our where our funds are at and our you know, okay, cool, we’re gonna allocate a bit more to this because we want to try and maybe book a holiday in a few months’ time or something like this. So we’re talking about these things regularly, but we don’t do it as fixed as you guys. But some people need that, some people need that like sit down, let’s talk about this. And if you do it, if you make it a nice pizza cup, you know, maybe a bottle of wine or something, it can be a nice, nice experience rather than uh, you know, uh uh uh one guy sitting on the end or the lady sitting on the end sweating because she’s making money on Uber.

[22:40] Ken Okoroafor: So absolutely. So talk to us a little bit about the Humble Penny and and sort of what is it at its core? Yeah, so the Humble Penny is a personal finance and you know financial wellness brand, basically. That we started as a blog. That was it. There was no like big strategy and vision and all this stuff. It was just literally like let’s buy the domain name and we bought it for 99p and let’s create a blog and start writing about stuff. And then who knows where it might take us. But we’ve been growing since then as we were responding to people who were starting to find what we were doing interesting and useful. Um, and over time it’s grown into different platforms. So you can find us at the Humblepenny on YouTube or at the Humblepenny on Instagram. And we also run a sister brand called Financial Joy Academy, which came because um many people kept messaging us saying, Oh, can you guys offer me some of the you know like advice and coaching and what have you? And we couldn’t really speak to so many people at the same time. So we thought a good way of doing that was to create a sister platform that was much more cost effective. Um, and that’s where Financial Joy Academy was born. But ultimately, the humble penny is there to help people take control of their finances, grow their money, and work towards becoming financially independent. But when you encapsulate all of that, Mary and I refer to the phrase we use is we’re helping people must create a life of financial joy. And what that means is it’s essentially wealth and well-being coming together. So rather than just focusing on just, I’m trying to become financially free and like, you know, you know, you’re working, you’re working so hard at all costs, at the cost of your health, your well-being, and everything else, we actually say no, no, no, no. That that’s almost missing part of the whole point of money because money is meant to be a tool for something else. So financial joy brings those core elements of your finances and the things that bring joy to your life together into one place. So so yeah.

[25:55] Sammie Ellard-King: So you you’ve got you’ve obviously got the the blog, and that’s where it started, and you’ve moved into a lot of different courses, I notice now as well. You have different styles and for different people. And I really like the um the one grand plus idea. That was super cool. I was watching the video uh before this, I thought that was a really interesting take on learning. Because it’s not just about investing, it’s about increasing income for some people too. And uh, you know, and there’s the well-being aspect of it too, which you know you guys uh have taken on. What what do you feel like is the kind of what what what if if I I suppose what’s the best seller, I suppose, and what’s what do people gravitate most to? What do you think?

[26:43] Ken Okoroafor: Probably you should notice that. I think I think I think it’s I think it depends because everybody’s on a different is that is that a different stage of the money journey. Yeah. And some people I I know for sure most people are interested in things that help them grow, grow what they have. So whether it’s that they’re trying to grow their money or they’re trying to grow their investments, you know, but and this is why we comes back to Financial Joy Academy, yeah, because the reason I bring that up is a lot of people might have these goals of like, I’m gonna grow my money, I want to make more money, I wanna, you know, but there are so many underlying things that are necessary for someone to actually take the step. So you might say, Oh, I want to make a grand a month extra, yeah, but you have no accountability, you have no like other people who you can learn from, or so there’s so many aspects to the journey, basically, that I think are necessary. So that question is a bit a bit trickier to answer because I think for everyone it it differs, but from what we’ve seen, I’d say it’s probably more people who want to grow their wealth, isn’t it?

[27:59] Ken Okoroafor: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and we’ve had you know quite a bit of interest in our academy as well. Um, because like instead, there was different elements that appeal to different people, like the courses, the masterclasses, the accountability. Some people just want accountability. Yeah, um, some people just want um accountability in the morning, so they join 5am club religiously, um, or they really valued being able to see us and ask us questions fortnightly. So we have the coaching course, all of this within um Financial Joy Academy um platform which we run. So, yeah, like Ken said, because it varies, we have things for different people on different stages, different journeys with their you know financial um life. So we’ve got um DIY stuff, we have spreadsheets, we have courses where there’s no one-to-one interaction, they just watch videos and they carry out tasks. Um, and then we have the more kind of face-to-face group, community, um academy, financial joy academy. So it just depends on where people are on their journey.

[29:02] Sammie Ellard-King: The reason I asked that question was because um when I got when I went on there and I had a look through some of the things that you offer, uh, what I came off thinking was that there really isn’t any, I don’t feel like you’ve left any gaps there because you’re right, like as you were saying, you’ve got something for everybody in a way that they feel like they can learn, you know, even whether that’s 5 a.m. or in your group discussions, or they just want to, you know, watch you on YouTube and learn. You’ve really covered everything off. And I think it’s um you’ve done a really great job of it. And it like I, you know, I was I was almost dropping my $29. No, thank you. And this I’ve got to say as well, like it’s you know, it’s always e it’s always easier to look at where people are at the moment rather than where they’ve come from. You know, I always think everything takes time, you know, in life, whether it’s your money goals, whether it’s how you’re building an emergency fund, or whether you’re trying to create a side hustle that makes some money, everything takes time, and so has the humble penny, you know. Like everything you see on there, each one has taken like six months, or like do you understand, to to research it, to validate it, to see if this is what people actually are interested in, you know, and to create the you know, the the product and you know, all of all those things. So I’m saying that just to encourage anyone out there who’s trying to begin something, because I think everybody should be starting something on their own, you know, separate to their jobs, you know, um, that gives them an option, something that just gives them, you know, that diversifies their income somehow, because as we as we’ve learned from COVID, as we’ve learned from, you know, the state of the global economy and the UK economy, there is no permanence in any jobs anymore, really. You know, they’re mass layoffs from tech companies, it’s just like you don’t really know what’s coming around the corner. So you always need to always have some kind of insurance. And I think beyond your emergency fund, starting something of your own, not only does it empower you, but it really like gives you an option. You know, you can do how do you know how satisfying it is to create your own income? I mean, that’s such a uh um a really worthy thing to do, to learn how to do over time. So I’m saying all that to just encourage anyone who’s listening. Like, even if you’re not if even if you’ve never done it before, there’s a lot out there to kind of help you uh kind of get started. So yeah.

[31:31] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s been a big thing for me that I’ve been saying a lot, a lot, a lot on on this podcast, on on guest guest appearances is about the second income thing because that moment I think for everybody where there was that period of about eight to nine days where we were all locked in and but they hadn’t announced furlough. And that period of eight to nine days of not understanding or not knowing and having zero backup, which you know I I I luckily had a little bit, but the other half had none. Um and a lot of my friends and family nothing. And so that opened my eyes, and I felt like that moment could happen to anyone at any point, as we’ve seen, but also you know, business is changing, technology’s changing, and you know, people would be handing being handed redundancy packages left, right, and centre. You just have to look at the news at the moment. Um, you don’t know whether that’s you, so why not create something, you know, an hour, two hours on the weekend if you have a family, a couple of hours a night if you’re a single guy, you know, you’ve got time there, utilize it and create yourself a financial blanket. I I think it’s so important.

[32:47] Ken Okoroafor: I think do you know what? I I always give this example that Mary and I had a bet when we started Humble Penny. The bet was we’re gonna create the Humble Penny with two hours a day. That was it. Because we understood understood the power of compounding and how compounding worked, as far as we were concerned, if we could put two hours a day on average into something, that energy, that that flow that’s going into this one idea would build and compound, will build and compound over time. You know, so I hope that encourages someone. Even if you can do 30 minutes a day or one hour a day, you know, but the key is the consistency of saying, do you know what? Even if this thing’s not making me any money, uh, I’m passionate about it and I’m bringing some skill set to the game, the key is the consistency, because today’s technology, you know, you go and watch, you go on the internet, everybody’s watching 15-second videos, which means we’re being programmed into thinking very short term, right? But if you can think, well, actually, I’m gonna give myself six months to a year to make this one thing work, it’s much more likely to be successful, you know, because of that.

[33:58] Sammie Ellard-King: I completely agree with you. Side hustles and get rich, you know, get rich quick schemes, they don’t exist. Those words really those three words really shouldn’t be in the same sentence because it’s not true. Um, you know, the only get rich quick scheme is playing the lottery, and you’ll know what the odds are there. Um, you know, and so and the house always wins on those situations. So, you know, that’s that’s something you’ve got to be aware of. And you know, jumping into a side hustle for six weeks is not the game. Yeah, if you’re willing, if you if you’re willing to do do this, make sure you’re ready to go six to twelve months. Because you know, uh Up The Gains didn’t start making money until November of last year, and that was a few, you know, bit few, few 20 quid here or there, and then and then suddenly it shot off. But all of the work I’d done for the previous 11 months before that was meant that it was making the money that allowed me to sell my business and go full-time on it. But if I hadn’t done all of those hard nights and early mornings, it was just, you know, I would never be sitting here today. So I’ve just got to be willing to go on those journeys.

[35:10] Ken Okoroafor: Yeah, and I think that’s the thing. I think the more people hear this, I mean, the the the better because there’s so much information and misinformation out there that encourages encourages people to think, oh, you can make 20 grand in like six days, you know. Um when in actual fact, like they don’t tell a full story, you know, which is look, like when we started Humble Penny, like we didn’t really start getting really uh the site uh generating any income until about nine to ten months after we actually started, you know. Yeah, that meant daily, um weekly publication, about three times a week, just constantly putting time in into this one idea. You know, so if anyone can last for six to twelve months, they’re almost outlasting the competition because you know, most people fall off because they just can’t like even keep up for 12 months, you know. If you can’t do that, then you know, like yeah, it’s not really worth trying.

[36:12] Mary Okoroafor: You know, yeah, and like you said, and you mentioned Sam when you spoke about you know the power of compounding that you noticed with your um business, which enabled you to then sell your, you know, the business that you’re working on. And I think for people, sometimes they see our platform or they might see your platform and saying, Wow, you know, I want to create a personal finance, you know, platform, but gosh, seeing a humble penny, seeing um your other gains, like, wow, okay, where do I even start? But actually, we started somewhere, it was small, but then we continued with consistency, and you know, but people don’t see that online, they just see like the finished product and not really necessarily the journey. Yeah, so but we love talking about the journey. We started off, you know, two hours like instead of a day, and now you’re seeing a compounded effect, you know. But we had to be consistent in order to get there.

[37:01] Sammie Ellard-King: They say overnight success takes five years. It’s like one of those things. I I um I love your approach to it though, because you know, it can it can show that people can go out and create these things with just a small amount of time a day, and and and if we can allow ourselves to do that, we all have 30 minutes. Most of us, if you live in London, are for 30-40 minutes on the tube. If you’re writing notes on your phone and putting your ideas down that you can utilize and upload on your laptop later, or or um you might be selling something here or there, and you’re trying to get your products right, and you might be doing designs, etc. These are so many different avenues, and you can use your time in different ways. Um, I wanted to ask you about your investments um, because we’ve mentioned it a couple of times already, obviously, clearly investing, and what’s your approach and and and that and yeah, how do you go about it?

[37:57] Ken Okoroafor: So, our investing um approach is that we like to keep investing as simple as possible. So, when we began the journey of investing, when I when I say investing, I’m gonna focus for one on the stock market because they’re different areas of investing. Um we began by by actually picking individual stocks. That was our approach to investing. Um, and that’s mainly because we were just learning and we were experimenting and trying stuff out because you know, not many people in our family had actually been investing money at all. So that became a way to go. And we made some money, and we also lost quite a fair bit of money by doing that until we learned about just uh diversifying our investments by looking at passive investing. So today, the vast majority of our investing happens via low-cost, globally diversified uh index funds and ETFs. That’s mainly what we do when it comes to stock market. But beyond that, we invest in other areas, whether it’s um that we invest in, say, uh other assets, like look at property, for example, as an area, from a business perspective, we run a nursery business uh with broader family, all these things I’m mentioning are much more broader family focused, uh, more joint venture type things. Uh, and we invest in businesses, you know.

[39:22] Mary Okoroafor: So we also allocate um five percent to like speculative investments, so your cryptos or um maybe startups, but we usually say no more than five percent, and we only invest in those, you know, as much as we’re willing to lose, basically. Yeah, yeah. And it’s at most five percent, I should say, because uh and again it’s more experimental just to see again to learn stuff and all but also to um you know see what might lead to something else, you know. So yeah, it’s also learning for us, yeah. Learning, yeah. So uh well we we’ve gotta we’ve gotta talk about it, and so someone’s gonna ask us eventually, we better know, right?

[40:07] Ken Okoroafor: Yeah, exactly. What do you think about it? Yeah, exactly, because you can’t you can’t talk about stuff anyway. That’s us anyway. We don’t talk about stuff we know we don’t know stuff about, you know, because I know a lot of people do, but we talk from uh lived experience, you know. Um it’s like for example, premium bonds, you know, we all know what not everybody does, but a lot of people know what premium bonds obviously are. But again, we can’t talk about stuff like that until we’ve actually done it, you know, so we’ve actually got money in premium bonds, and you know, as a way of um learning how you know that whole thing works, but at the same time, um speaking from experience, you know. So yeah. I um I can relate there, really. I put 20 quid on premium bonds just so I could write the blog that fancy. That was all it was like that was it. It was just like, okay, right, I know what this is now, I’ve read about it. But that’s you know, I agree with you. It’s really difficult to talk about these things. And you know, people are uh someone asked me all about ESG investing the other day, and I’m just like, look, I I’m honestly not the right person to speak to about this, and you know, and they looked at me like, come on, you surely you know the answer, but actually I don’t feel comfortable talking about it. Um, but I I I can really relate to you guys. Um with your speculative side of stuff, I’m the same. I have about two and a half, two percent um give or take in speculative crypto or or um you know investing in percentage in a friend’s business, etc. I keep those really low because they they’re the ones that could fly to the moon and fantastic if they do, but also they could go to zero just as easy. So um I I I’m I’m not willing to risk my life and my partner and my family’s life to to be able to do that. It’s just not fair on on me and all the work that we’ve put in, you know. So yeah, I would hate that.

[41:57] Ken Okoroafor: I think I think your point you make that’s actually really important. It’s about risk management because we’ve come across people who basically that speculative element is their main, is their main hustle, you know. You know, like 50% and above of their money is in those areas. Yeah. And you know, and you could lose everything, and that could be a massive knock on one’s confidence, and yeah, uh a massive it could even lead to divorce, you know, where uh you know a couple feel like you know, uh they blame you know pointing fingers at the other person. It was your fault for doing that, you know, and it could cause problems. I mean, money is a big reason why a lot of couples go their separate ways. So you need to be really careful, careful speculative investments, yeah. Definitely very careful.

[42:44] Sammie Ellard-King: So you mentioned individual stock picking. Uh is that something you’re still doing? Um, or have you changed that quite a bit? So we still hold the some of the individual stocks that have done well over time. So, like, I mean, not a recommendation to anybody, just mentioning some of them. So, Apple, for example, and Amazon and uh stocks like that, we still hold today in our pensions because, like, you know, we’re not touching those for quite some time. So they still remain in there as um you know, as uh as investments, and the same with our children, actually, funny enough, because we co-invest with our kids. Uh, so they still have some of those individual stocks that we bought as like birthday presents or whatever back when they were born, they’re still there, so um, so yeah, but but beyond that, we’re not uh actively trying to pick out specific uh um individual stocks, except there’s a core. So, for example, if it’s a dividend-paying stock that we’ve researched really well and it’s part of our investing strategy, which it often is, then it might be something that we look into.

[43:52] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s really interesting. You’re the first, you’re not the first, that’s a lie. You’re the first person that seems to have a really similar approach to to me. I have a portion of wealth in individual stocks, a large portion of it in in in um a larger portion of net wealth in in um in index funds because they’re safer or ETFs or trusts actually as well. Um and then my individual stock picking is kind of just me having a bit of fun. Like I that’s what I really enjoy doing. And you know, I love the researching, I love seeing how that company’s gonna do. And um, you know, some people enjoy that side of stuff, some people don’t. Um some people like buying what they love. And I also think that’s a great strategy if you’re putting money into that business every day, then you know, maybe you should own a piece of it too.

[44:40] Mary Okoroafor: Yeah, yeah, no, that’s really good. And you know, but for I would say for beginners, newbie investors, definitely, like you said, a larger chunk on the index funds and ETFs is something that they should do, unless they’ve got the time to be doing all the research and exactly and constantly looking at the fund, seeing how it’s performing over time. But if you don’t really have the time for that, then definitely index funds and ETFs. Keep it simple, yeah. Set it and forget it almost in a lot of ways, right? Yeah, it becomes just like your automatic uh direct debit, pull it into it and just just crack on with your life if you don’t want to learn about deeper investing and and finances because you don’t have to, but you can still be an investor. Yeah, absolutely. Um guys, I’ve absolutely loved this. It’s been super cool having a couple on. Thank you so much.

[45:29] Ken Okoroafor: Thank you. No, this has been fun. This has been this has been really good. You’ve asked some really super interesting questions, and I love the style of it as well. This podcast is very, it’s very like casual vibes, but speaking about some very important topics. So absolutely. Yeah, no, thank you. I really appreciate you coming on, guys. Um, where can people find you? I know the Humble Penny, of course, but where what what’s the best place to come say hi? Yeah, so we have a blog, thehumblepenny.com, where we publish blog posts once a week. Um we also have a YouTube channel, also the HumblePenny. Um we have fun on Instagram, so also check us out the same handles, The Humble Penny. Or you can check out our system brand called FinancialJoyAcademy.com. Feel free to check it out. It’s where we have a platform. Well, our mission there really is to help at least 10,000 people to become financially independent in the next decade. So we’re having fun with that challenge, but it’s actually it’s actually pretty uh we feel very proud of what we’re doing there, so feel free to check it out if you can.

[46:33] Sammie Ellard-King: I your Instagram basically annoyed me for a good month with like all of your beautiful holiday shots. I was like, oh my god, these guys again, they’re on the beach. I was like, wow. It was I wouldn’t say annoyed, I was just very jealous of you because it was freezing here at the time as well. We have a thing where because because our core message is of financial joy, we like to actually live what that joy means to us, you know, and for Mary and I, a bit a big part of it is travel. We do we do love to travel, uh, but it’s all carefully planned, even up to two years ahead. So, for example, now in 20, I don’t know, this year, we’re already thinking about what’s going to happen next year, potentially the year after. So that way we’re able to try and collect all our travel points, our Avios points, our companion vouchers, you know, all those things that will make it really affordable and also book in advance so you can get the best deals. So these are the bits that I think make it fun. So it’s not just even just the holidays, more like, yes, I got it cheaper, you know?

[47:39] Sammie Ellard-King: Hustling for that hundred quid off and those Avios points. It’s gotta be done. Absolutely, it’s part of the joy, right? Yeah, but yeah. Guys, thank you so much. Um, it’s been a real pleasure, and yeah, look forward to carrying on um following you and seeing your incredible journey so far. Awesome. We appreciate you, Sammie. Really, really appreciate the invitation to your podcast. It’s been an absolute honor. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks, guys. Take care.