Adulting - #36 How To Get Your S*** Together with Caroline Hughes

Episode Date: June 30, 2019

In this episode I speak to the co-founder of @lifetise. We discuss the importance of saving and investing, especially for women, the stress of the biological clock and so much more.Lifetise helps you plan how to afford big things in life, like buying a home or having kids. https://lifetise.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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and someone said podalters over on Twitter. And I do quite like that. So we'll go with it unless I get a complaint. And this week's episode is brought to you by Clarence Court. Now, I am a little bit of an egg snob. And if you follow me on Instagram for a while, you might remember that for some time, my feed was mostly just yolk-borne and egg puns. And got pretty good at it and nowadays I am I'm one of those people that if it's not a Clarence Court egg I can get a bit funny about it I really have to say they are exquisite and revolutionary if I'm honest if you haven't seen

them they have the most vibrant orange yolks and just so full of flavor oh they are my favorites I cannot believe that I'm collaborating with them on this episode because I'm just blown away. Can't believe it. Just so pleased. I absolutely love them. But onto the podcast, episode five, I am talking to Caroline. Caroline is the co-founder of Lifetize, which is a new startup company designed to help people figure out how to make those big financial decisions in life, whether that's buying a house, having a baby, figuring out how you're going to take maternity leave. It's a really clever and smart platform for people who maybe don't feel that informed when it comes to money and finances, which is definitely me.

I think you'll really enjoy this episode. We go into so many different areas and actually it ends up being quite a personal one because I guess money is so personal and such an emotional thing, but we don't really talk about it. So I do hope you enjoy the episode. And as always, please do rate, review and subscribe. And thanks again to Clarence Court. Bye. Hi guys and welcome to Adulting. This week I'm joined by Caroline who is the co-founder of Lifetize. Hi everyone. Do you want to give us a little introduction as to what Lifetize is? Yeah so basically Lifetize is a website that helps people figure out how to afford those really big, important life events. So things like, how do I afford to buy a home?

Can I, will I afford to have children? And how do I kind of piece it all together? So it's creating like a blueprint for people, for people under the age of 40 who don't really have the same lives that their parents did. Yeah, totally. And I think, I'm glad you said

under 40 then, because I think one of the biggest things that impacts people of my age is I'm 25, and I'm just earning money where I finally got a bit more financial freedom. I can have the independence I want. I can buy myself little things and go on holidays. So then for someone to come in and be like, right, you need to start putting money away. I'm like, no, don't take away my freedom. I've only just got some. I've only just got away from living month to month. Yeah, exactly. But I know that a lot of what you talk about is how it's so important, especially for women, to be starting to put aside here and there where you can. Yeah, it's huge. And I think it's one of those things that for me, and it was really the catalyst

for me in starting Lifetize was this idea that women aren't really taught about their financial lives and actually when you look at it our financial lives are so different from men's. And we've had this whole shift where women are in the workforce, we have careers, we have all these choices available to us, but nobody's really told us what that means for us in financial terms. And so it comes as a bit of a shock for people. So I quite often give talks to groups of women. And at the beginning, I show them this slide, which shows them how

different their lives are. And it basically shows them that they're likely to be earning less coming out of university if they go to university. And there's a whole feminist question in whether is it that women gravitates to lower paid jobs or is it just that those jobs like caring professions just attract less money because there's more women in it, right? There's a whole question around that. And then obviously if you choose to have a family, you're likely to take time off for that. And they say that the motherhood tax equates to about 33% of your earnings and it could impact you for up to 12 years after you have your children. So it's enormous. So you're, you know, here you are,

you've got your career. And as you're saying, you know, you're just starting to feel like you're getting somewhere. And now you're having to think about, but hang on, do I want to have a family? And what is that actually going to do for both my career and also my finances over that time? And I just think it's a real shame that we don't talk about it enough in advance because we feel like we have all of these choices. And actually, quite often we hit these crunch times where we feel like we have to make quite difficult decisions. It's a choice between career, children, or it starts to feel like that.

And certainly, so one of the things for Lifetize for me was a lot of my female friends are actually the breadwinners in their relationships. So they earn more than their partners. And we're seeing more of that. I think statistically, it's about 41% of women in the UK are the breadwinner. But that has an impact then on household finances and things around when you choose to have kids. Because if you're taking maternity leave and you're the one earning most of the money, you suddenly get into things around, well, how am I going to pay my mortgage in that time that I'm taking off? And I think there's just a lot of emotional stuff around this for women in terms of choices we make, timings and things like that, that we don't really think about enough in advance or we're not told about enough in advance. Yeah, I definitely think it's the latter because for me,

I've only just started to, of my own volition, try to learn more about finances. But all the men in my life or the guys I went to school with seem to have some preconceived understanding of money, of saving, of the importance of putting money aside and me and all my girlfriends a lot more kind of live fast be generous go out and enjoy yourself let your hair down and the boys seem to be more selfish with their money and I don't think that that's just me gendering it I really do think that at some point I don't know whether it's in magazines and culture or the way that things pitch things to us I've just missed out on years of learning about money that my guy friends are so far ahead of me. Yeah, that's really interesting. See, I think there's a couple of points. I think there is a gender lens to it for sure. I think the way that women are spoken to in the press about money. Yeah. And I think Starling Bank actually did a

really interesting campaign around this about a year or so ago, looking in the press and seeing the different language used to men versus women. And they saw that women are taught very much things around the language uses like splurging, how not to splurge or, you know, how to kind of save pennies. So we're pushed towards quite small incremental things around budgeting at a very small scale. But we're not really taught to try to grow wealth. No. Whereas men, you know, every advert you see for, you know, even if it's cryptocurrency or investing, until very recently, it was always aimed at men in suits. Yeah. We didn't see ourselves. So if you don't see yourself reflected in any of the advertising or any of the educational stuff that's going to help you learn about how to get into investing,

learn about how to build wealth. You're not going to do it. Totally, yeah. And I think also there's the other idea that if you don't have a lot of money to start with, then you can never build money. But I've come across now, and other people might sound really silly, but I had no idea about compound interest. Yes.

Could you explain that in a good way? Because I found this fascinating. I was trying to explain it to my girlfriends last night before we watched Love Island and I absolutely butchered it. It is. So I think it was, was it Einstein who said that it's like one of the wonders of the world. So compound interesting is this idea that you earn money on your interest. So say you were putting aside £100, right, and you got an interest of 5%.

So over that year, you're going to earn £105. And as long as you leave that money in and don't take it out, as long as you keep that 5% on the next year, you're then earning 5% on 105. And the way that it works is it creates like an exponential curve. So at the very beginning, it doesn't look like it's going up very much at all but the effects of it over time is that all of a sudden you get that hockey stick curve towards the end and I actually read a really interesting article the other day that talked about you know Warren Buffett's fund so Berkshire Hathaway and this example was saying if you had put like x amount in in say 1990 you

would now have like 24 million or something. But the effect of the compound interest means that you would have earned most of that money, most of that 24 million in the past five years. Right. Because at some point you're almost like double and double, don't you? So you're kind of like kicking it up and up and up. And so the way that investing is one of the things actually that I find more and more women talking to me about.

But again, going back to your earlier point, they come at it and they say, I don't know where to start. I feel embarrassed and I feel worried about even doing it because I don't want to get it wrong. Yeah. And I don't want to embarrass myself. And I don't think men have that sense. I think they're more willing to just kind of give it a go. Totally. Either for bravado or because they've got enough other people amongst their peers who are already doing it. And women, I feel a lot of the time, hold themselves back from

trying it because they're like, I don't know. I don't know. We're trained to take less risk. Anyway, as women, we always approach things with much more caution and try to make sure that we can do it 100% right. And hilariously, women are actually better in the stock market. So great. This is the hilarious thing. So we don't do it to the same extent that men do. I think the stat is like still 70% of women don't invest. So that's 70% of women who are just keeping their money in cash, which is what I did.

I didn't actually put any money into the stock market until I was, so I'm 41 now, two years ago, because I was nervous about it. Like I didn't have anybody in my family who'd ever really invested. So I didn't have anybody to learn from that I felt comfortable with asking those sort of dumb questions. And I felt it was too risky. You know, I come from, I think a lot of it, so there's a gender lens, and I think it also comes back to your background and your upbringing. So there's many, many people who feel much more comfortable

with investing, with buying property early, all of these things, because it's what they've seen happen in their family. And so it's very natural for them to model exactly what their parents have done or the brothers and sisters have done. Whereas I think if you come from a background like mine where we didn't have very much money growing up, I've got a whole different level of risk tolerance. Totally. I'm just more scared about doing something where I might lose money.

Yeah. Yeah. I think I went through a period as well where like my dad lost his job. So I remember being times at home when I heard my parents having conversations about money. It was really stressful. So I'm quite scared. I've never been taught how to be good with money.

Yeah. And the attitude that I had, the reason I brought up compound interest just as a nugget there was because I was talking about this last night with my girlfriends and the one thing they all said was, I don't want to start doing it now

because I want to enjoy my life but the point is you're not doing it so that you're it's it's a really small thing now the point with saving and managing your money is the earlier you start it it's always going to be better even if it's not a lot yes correct and this is the thing right so the magic of the compound interest and I really recommend everyone just like get onto YouTube and like Google it because once you actually kind of see there's loads of animations and stuff that you can look at and it it just shows you that that graph and you're suddenly like oh yeah okay and just by seeing that makes you go okay I'll just put a little bit in now because if you start early then exactly as you say you only need to start with a small bit and the same

is true for investing so whether you decide the compound interesting will work, whether you put it into a savings account or whether you put it into the stock market, right? The difference will just be the amount of interest you can expect to earn on that. Right. So savings accounts for years and years and years now have been very, very low interest. The banks don't make money on them. They don't. It's a weird thing.

I think a lot of us are brought up to think that the way that the monetary system works is that banks have this stack of money that you've paid into the bank, right? All of your savings sit in the bank and then they loan that money out to you. And it's actually quite mind-blowing to learn that that is not what happens at all they loan money out that they don't have yeah they just create loans and it just creates like a line in their sort of in their ledger that says this loan is to and on the end here we go and she's got this thing and she'll pay it back they don't have to have the same amount of savings to offset it matt told me this the other day and i literally was so shocked he was like they're trading money that's the whole

point because i'd always wondered how banks made money because I was like well they just have the money that's your money and then he explained it honestly I felt like such an idiot no but but it's not even taught this way so I'm so my background is law right I'm not a fine I don't have a financial background I've had to kind of educate myself in order to be able to do this startup and but there's this really interesting group called Positive Money. And so I first found out about the fact that the financial system does not work in the way that I thought it did. Here's a pot of savings, here's a pot of loans, and they match, right? Yes. No. I realized that the banks are sort of creating money out of nothing

and totally blew my mind. And from that point, I was like, ah, okay then. So that's wrong. And now I have to try and educate myself a little bit better to understand it. So banks don't care about your savings because they don't make any money. They make all of their money from debt products, right? They make their money because you take out a debt, whether it's a mortgage, a loan, or a credit card, and they get to charge you fees and interest on that. Yeah. That's how they make their money.

And obviously they also make their money sort of trading in markets and stuff. But from a consumer perspective, they make all their money on the debt products that you take out. And I just think it's like, it's really interesting for us. And I think with your generation particularly particularly so many of you have grown up with student debt yeah that wasn't a thing for me you know I just missed that bit I didn't have to take out student loans to the extent and you've also grown up in the financial crisis so you all kind of come of age in a time of financial panic and so everybody I speak to is just really worried about debt right and I completely understand it so everyone's thinking I've started out my career and I've got tens of thousands of pounds of

student loans and I get that statement that comes through the door that reminds me every month or whatever every quarter that I owe all of this money. Yeah. And I think it puts such a different complex on how your generation thinks about money and the level of risk and the level of comfort you have. I also think the other weird thing, which is true for every person in their 20s, is that it's the first time when you're not on the same playing ground. So when you've been at school, everyone's kind of on a level. And when you're at uni, everyone's on a level.

And then suddenly you go into the workforce and you might have a friend that's earning 100k in their first year and another friend who's on like 18,000 but has got money from their family. All of a sudden, the playing field becomes really uneven and it becomes quite tricky because all of us were broke at uni. I used to make £100 last, honestly, a month. I don't know how I did it. I'd go on a night out with a 10 pound note yeah and survive all night long and then all of a

sudden it's become a bit more certain friends might have been given investments from their families to buy houses or like other people have credit cards and I think it's that sense of like oh shit when you when you realize that you're no longer on the same playing field as everyone else and there's not that much literature that's easy to consume about what you should be doing and and there obviously is no right age because again it's that idea of like we've all got different scope within what we're able to do some people might be able to save and some people might not have any ability to save whatsoever yeah it's really interesting you say that because that's the so when we built Lifetize, we spent about the first year just talking to people about money, like their personal situations. But more importantly, how they felt about money.

Because for me, money isn't just this abstract thing. It's so tied in to us as individuals and how we feel and like hopes and dreams and all of these things. Totally. And I was having an interesting conversation actually with a woman the other day who says that wealth and money is so tied up with people's self-worth. Yeah. And we're not very good, again to your point, in helping people kind of separate the two things.

So when you do have a group of friends and one of you is earning a very sort of entry-level salary, either because they've gone into a sector or a job that they really want to do, but just the pay is just not great. And then there's other people who've chosen a path like I did, which was can I make a decent amount of money relatively early and have that financial stability, which was kind of what I craved with my background. And you're absolutely right. And the things that came out of all of those interviews with people was overwhelmingly this idea of one, people saying, what should I be doing? What am I supposed to be doing? And the second one was, and particularly people when they kind of get to age 25 about was I feel

like I might be behind yes totally I thought it's so interesting that you said that your thing was that you wanted to earn money I still now find it really hard to um I have to unchain because my learned behavior is to not want money it's to not want to earn a lot of money one I think it's partly because I recognize my privilege and then think god I don't deserve to earn loads of money because my life's fine as it is and the other part I think is a gendered thing where I think for instance again I think because my family's quite medical so we don't have anyone really that's in the city but I when girls at uni were like I'm gonna apply to work at EY yeah I was like really I had no idea and they're like

you can do that you've got an English degree I actually went along some talks I'd know that whole world to me was just foreign and I would never have even thought about income and in a funny way it's it's a testament to my parents being like do whatever you want to do but also that's really unhelpful because they never kind of were like but you're going to need to make x amount of money to to live so it's that weird dichotomy of like, it's lovely to be able to do what you enjoy, but everyone needs to pay bills. Yeah, and it's, I guess for me, it really does,

this is why I kind of say that so much, but it does come back to childhood for people. And then you see how it kind of plays out. It's almost like a mixture of childhood plus personality plus opportunity that kind of sets people on the different paths so mine was you know I'm the eldest of like four girls and my dad left when I was eight and so all of a sudden here's my mum as a very young so my mum was only 18 when she had me so here's my

mum aged like 24 with four daughters no, no job. Oh, my gosh. And my dad just wouldn't pay any maintenance. So she had to like chase him through the courts to get any money for us. And that massively shaped everything for me around money because I had such an early awareness of what it meant to not have any money and how precarious that was. And just the kind of terror of week-to-week living, never knowing if you're going to have enough. And so that's kind of like baked into me, and I've had to do an awful lot of therapy and work

to move myself past that mindset. So for me, it was very much like, okay, I'm the eldest, I'm academic, I'm going to – I had a thing of do I become I loved writing so do I become a writer or a journalist yeah or do I become a lawyer and I was like one of those paths leads to more financial stability not just for me because I'm like you money doesn't drive me yeah myself at all I'm not driven by money or status in that extrinsic sense but I'm very much driven by a sense of responsibility and wanting to look after my family yeah and that's huge for me and it still drives me yeah totally but I think also I think that's so important but I think that's

the problem I think we're shown that money is either success excess and sex and wealth and all this stuff but no one really teaches you that money is fundamental and I know that money is either success, excess, and sex and wealth and all this stuff. But no one really teaches you that money is fundamental. And I know that money can't buy you happiness, but I'm starting to learn that money can buy you a lot of things that you need. I was so in that. And I don't know if that's a generational thing as well, but like in that idea of like, I don't need money. You do.

You really, you literally do. Like you could, they can't get away from it. We live in a capitalist society. I know. So until we move past this yeah um yeah we do and it's and it's it is a really interesting thing because when I speak to groups of men versus groups of women men have no problem wanting to just build money you know build wealth grow their money women tend to attach something else to it. So when I talk to women, particularly around investing, they want it to have social impact. Yeah. Which I'm like,

that's brilliant because that's going to change the world. Yeah. And I'm thrilled about it. And you see it kind of top down. So you see it with people like Abigail Disney, for example. So you have a lot of women in the kind of like 0.1% who have inherited wealth and who are now in charge of, say, their family offices and who are getting to decide where their money goes to for philanthropic causes and stuff. And they're all suddenly starting to say, no, I'm not going to just put it into oil and gas. I want it to go into something that is actually benefiting society. And so you're seeing actually quite a huge shift from the very wealthiest women and I also see that echoed a lot with just us yeah women I speak to you on a on a daily basis who say well I do want to invest but I'm not comfortable investing

in stuff which I don't believe is okay really yeah do you think there's another it's a really positive thing but do you think it might come from a negative again a conditioning of women have to be so I agree someone said to me what would you want to do and I was like I would love to have a company but I would only hire people who didn't have the privilege I have or who are single mothers and I was like almost making excuses as to like how could I be worthy enough to make a lot of money if it ever happened like a big big income then I would have to make a lot of money if it ever happened, like a big income, then I would have to offset the guilt of having earned that money by making sure that it had a positive impact. Obviously, that's positive in the outcome. But do you think that maybe it's interesting that it does, do you think it comes from that conditioning of like women have to

nurture? I think it's that good girl conditioning. I don't know if you've read any of like Tara Moe's. She's got a brilliant book actually. So for anybody who is thinking of like setting up in business or who's just wanting to kind of accelerate their career, she's got a brilliant book called Playing Big for women. And it talks a lot about the conditioning that kind of keeps us playing small. And I think sort of attitude to money can be a part of that yeah that it's um the good girl conditioning means that we have to always do something that is not just for ourselves yeah that does sound I feel like I'm having money therapy sorry no but it's so important like I think it's really important to unpick your I think we all because it is so emotional because it is so tied to our self-worth and our identity and what we can do in life, what we believe we can, like, I think it's more perception.

Yeah. So it's very much like what we believe we can do in life or what's our place, right? And there's, particularly in this country, there's a lot of class issues around stuff as well. And I know this personally. So I went from a very normal, slightly stabby state school for all the way up to GCSE. And then I got given a scholarship to a very lovely, very academic private school. And we didn't have any money. So I got like a full scholarship. Mad, probably the equivalent of about £20,000 a year in fees. And all of a sudden, I went from this very normal, comprehensive school, very mixed academically, very mixed backgrounds in Watford. And all of a sudden, I'm in a school with like, I think one of the girls,

her dad was like the attorney general so the top lawyer in the country for the government another one's dad probably like ran Pepe Jeans or something and for me it caused quite a cry I only realize it now but it caused quite a crisis of confidence for me at that stage because I suddenly saw what money could buy you like the access to the better education the access to a peer group that was all going to rise to these kind of levels access to you know better universities and all of a sudden like a path that opens up in front of you which would not have necessarily been available to me or I would have had to work a lot harder to have and at the time it made me feel incredibly insecure because I was like I don't fit in here this isn't my world these aren't my people I'm never going to have what they have

and interestingly coming out of that and then going on to university and then kind of being part of those worlds I've almost had to train myself to feel that it is okay for me to be in this and and it's really when people meet me they would assume because the way I speak because of the fact that I was a lawyer that I've had a very very privileged background all the way through and I definitely did not in early life but I definitely did from sixth form onwards and it's a real shift in in your expectation of life in how comfortable you feel in sort of moneyed situations and I think it's a real shame because I worry about barriers for people. I worry about people thinking, well, I'm probably never going to have any money, so I shouldn't even bother trying. I wonder about that. I don't know.

It's so interesting to hear because I had the thing in reverse. My dad absolutely worked and still probably will work until he dies, I think, to pay for us to have all gone to private school. I don't know where he got this idea from but he wanted it my sister got a massive scholarship and then I went and we all end up getting scholarships which is great not full scholarships but I think I ended up having almost 75% off yeah and so I went from from year seven until sixth form and it wasn't until I went to university that I realized the bubble that I've been living in I just had no idea it was a boarding school but I didn't board and I didn't

have a wider conception of how much privilege there was I was amongst again like you said some of the richest people but we didn't really know again because it's a boarding school you kind of know their dads do that I didn't know that that's what money meant I went to these houses that look like home and gardens I didn't know that that was money that had that. That was just my friend's house. Interesting. Whereas I, coming at it late, went to people's houses that had like an extra wing attached and absolutely lost my tiny mind and felt terrible.

And to the point where, and I feel quite embarrassed and guilty about this now, but, you know, age sort of 16, you just want to fit in. Yeah. And so at the time, I chose to live with my grandmother because she had a much bigger house so that I could take my new school friends back to the big house instead of the small house where I grew up. Right? It's that pressure to kind of fit in. And I think money has such an emotional thing on you. There's so many things I want to say because this is so funny.

So I now could never afford to buy a designer handbag. And I went home the other weekend and I've got like four mulberry bags because when I was at school, I worked from the age of 14 and I spent all of my savings from working 12 hour shifts at this wedding place on bags so that I could take them into school and look like all the other girls who got bags for their birthdays and stuff. And I had it the other day and my boyfriend was like, Matt, I'm sorry, that's another one. I was like, I bought this when I was 17. I would never be able to afford that now. Wouldn't spend my money on it either, because it's just stupid, and it's that idea of fitting in, and the other day, like, another point that found interesting, I went to meet some girlfriends for a tea in Chiltern

Firehouse. I was like, can you just come in here? And they're like, yeah, you can just come in for a tea, and I was like, oh, that's so interesting, isn't it? Like, I probably would feel comfortable sat there, but other people in a different circumstance or from a different background would never just walk into Chiltern Firehouse for a cup of tea and realize you could work there you could probably work there all day and not be hassled if you just drank tap water but you would go I'm gonna go to Costa and I've noticed and I said this to the girls as I've got more elevated in my job and as I start to get more comfortable in what I wear and like that I'm living in London I've started to go to nicer coffee shops because it reflects my perception of how well I'm doing

by what I decide to surround myself with and this idea of not thinking spaces are available to you a lot of it is because we create these as you say invisible barriers and going to private school the thing it teaches you totally is how to network a room yeah and I went to an event with a tortoise thinking the other day which I really like it's like slow journalism but it is full of privately educated white middle-class people and so I sit there and feel so relaxed being handed a microphone and I can talk to all those people and I was like because this is my your space that's where I've been brought up obviously I'm so comfortable and people will listen to me.

But for a lot of other people, that would be the most terrifying environment in the world. And I remember, and I think a lot of it does come from trying to pass in whatever situation, trying to show that you belong there. As humans, we have such an evolutionary need to fit in and belong and not to be cast out and and all of that stuff and I definitely remember that like when I was a trainee lawyer I I bought a suit from Harvey Nichols right I went to Harvey Nicks and I bought a suit in the sale because I thought that's what you should do yeah right I yeah. Right? I've made it. I'm, you know, I'm on this path now. I mean, the rest of my suits I bought from like Mango and H&M. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because I've worked in H&M since I was 15. But I bought this one suit because I thought, okay, now you've got, now you've got, and I can't remember, I think it was like Charuti or something like that. So it was like proper designer label. But I felt that I needed to have that in or it was almost like armor yes to to allow myself to believe that I fitted into that sort of city law thing and I wasn't just a pretender and I think that that whole so I think a lot of my sort of insecurity of my financial background has played a lot into definitely the choices I've made in life, both money and other.

But money's kind of always flowing underneath that. You know, I still don't own a home. You know, I'm 41 and I don't own a home. And actually, partly that's because I've foolishly put all of my money into my startup um don't do that kids um but when I was looking to buy a home there would always be a reason I didn't and I looked you know I at the the time with my boyfriend we were we were looking and we probably spent about 18 months looking and it was at a time when almost every week it seemed like house prices were going up right and that made me panic yeah

this idea that we were always chasing something we would never quite catch it and we were always just slightly out of time and therefore sort of scrambling to to to chase something we were never going to get and and I just remember feeling every time I looked at a house, finding some reason to discount it, finding some reason not to buy it because fundamentally I was too scared. I was too scared to put that much money in something where it might not be the right thing.

And I'm a recovering perfectionist anyway, so I'm a classic overthinker around stuff. Yeah. But it's kind of like my perfectionism around wanting to find the right thing or wanting to do it right combined with insecurities around will I have enough money now and in the future have meant that I haven't taken the leaps into things that perhaps other people have. I think the buying a house thing as well is so prescient in this time because it's completely changed. The way that we view buying a house between my mum buying a house and me buying a house in the last 30 years is a whole different ballgame. It means a whole different thing. Especially in London, people literally laugh if you say, are you going to buy a house and my mum when I did a podcast with her she was like I was 21 had a house like that was just just was they

had a house in Herne Hill they bought for like 25 grand and then sold imagine I could be living there now but yeah it's the and it's now to me I honestly believe when you say you don't have a house it makes you so much better because I can't imagine owning a house in the next 10 years I don't know how that would happen it's really interesting so um with Lifetize we so we we basically build tools to help you figure that out right Matt did this with me how to how to plan for it because and but but the fundamental point you make is absolutely right that for a parent's generation things that were just very standard life goals were just achievable. They weren't easy necessarily. You know, they did have other issues around massive interest rates on mortgages and stuff. So it wasn't the case that just magically appeared for people,

but you could do it and you could do it on normal salary. So if you're a teacher, you could expect to have a house. You know, it wasn't just the preserve of lawyers and doctors or what have you. It was everybody had that expectation. And I think for your generation, there's a real, like, you've got, like, this combination of, like, the student debt point, which just feels like a weight on you.

The fact that house prices have just gone so, so far inflated compared to wages. And then there's also the fact that I think there's just this, the media constantly presents to you the fact that it's never going to happen for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like the negativity in the press is extraordinary. Yeah. You know, what you're constantly told your generation is, you're never going to own a home, you're never going to retire,

so don't bother even thinking about it. Yeah. And also that you're really feckless, right? You're told that it's your fault. Yeah. This is the thing

that really winds me up. Yeah, you've just eaten too many avocados. On LBC, they did a whole show. I love LBC and I think it was James O'Brien and he loves a bit

of an argument about millennials. It might not have been him, actually. They're basically like, and they're spending £4 a day on coffee. And someone rang up and was like, that's literally like £28 a week if they're buying one every single day. Which is absolutely nothing because they don't go out. They don't spend money on drink. You don't drink. We don't buy.

We don't even. People don't. I have a book club. I don't really want to buy a book. It's really expensive. Let's go and buy it in a charity shop. People are's really expensive let's go and buy in a charity shop people are thrifting i buy loads clothes in charity shop we don't actually spend we i do eat dinners out but really i think our spending is a lot lower the majority of people are like i can't afford to go and have after work drinks it's just not gonna happen we'll plan one night out every whatever so where we do spend

money it's because that's our bit of joy that coffee is like and and like if there's one thing that i say to people it's do not lose the joy in pursuit of what the other things are yeah work out what that joy is that you absolutely need to protect at all costs right those little bits of joy like there is absolutely no point saving squirreling away all of your money for like future you, right? Only to have the most miserable existence at the moment. Like there's always compromise.

There's always has to be some levels of sacrifice and it has to be, so I always think about it in terms of mindfulness, right? So I'm quite a hippie at heart. So I do a lot of yoga and a lot of mindfulness

to try to calm down my crazy brain but I think that it's the same attitude that you kind of need to develop towards money so that it doesn't become this thing that panics you so a lot you know when when we build our tools we spend as much time on the psychology of what we're building because I'm trying to get people over the fear and the anxiety that they feel of even engaging with their finances of even like looking at them more than you know occasionally when you take out some money like oh do I do I press to look at my balance or don't I right you know it's that kind of thing and so we spend so much time thinking about how can I make somebody be okay with even wondering if they might be able

to buy a home at some point right so our home finder tool is exactly that right it's designed to take you through this journey of what could I afford to spend on buying a home how long is it going to take me to save to get there and I just want to reassure people that we have many people using it who are looking five to six years in the future, right? So they're your kind of age and they're like, okay, let me see what I could do. And then, because we're of the opinion that if you start to plan for it, you've got a heck of a lot more chance of getting there. It might be incremental. It might be slow. It might might not always feel great but if it's something that you want and you can start on that journey those little steps feel far less painful yeah I know it's it's so true because I think the time just before we met I told you that I was getting

stressed about my tax I won't look at my finance I point blank won't look and that was like you just got you got to look and I was so scared about how much. I won't look at my finance. I point blank won't look. And Matt was like, you've just got to look. And I was so scared about how much I was going to have to save. And then we just added it all up. And I was like, oh, so all I've got to do is just put that aside. And he was like, yeah. I was like, oh, that's fine. But in my head, I don't ever look at things.

I'm very bad at breaking things down. And I just see lump sums or get very stressed about what might happen. It's a bit like we all get this thing where, I know it's such a, there's an amazing article about millennial burnout, I think it's a really generational thing, where we let to-do lists build up. It's like when you don't want to reply to an email, all you've got to do is ping an email back,

and it's a conversation that goes backwards and forwards. You don't even have to do all the work. It's not like that one email means you have to then complete the whole task they've told you. You just reply. But in my head, I'm like't I can't open that email because I can't I can't deal with it I can't deal with it but once you reply you're like oh all you have to say is thanks so much seen this and I'll get back to you next week that's all you've got to do

but it's that it's actually getting past that initial barrier yeah it's huge and it's huge and it's yeah and that's why I always want to reassure reassure people because I think it's crazy each of us is trying to figure this stuff out individually right and this is enormous stuff right it's not just you know it's it's not just oh do I have enough money to buy some milk right it's it's it's around what does my life look like in the future am I going to be okay like it's really fundamental like almost survival stuff for a lot of people gets worked up into this and elements of like control and choice and all of these things so it's when people say to me I exactly what you said I don't like looking at it because I I'm too worried about it I'm like yeah of course that's how most people feel you know most people until they get to a point where they really know it and it's all kind of being managed, most people shy away from it.

If they didn't, I wouldn't have a business, right? I wouldn't have a startup. If everybody knew how to manage their money and plan for the future and figure all of this stuff out, I wouldn't have a business. So I'm very grateful, actually, that nobody knows what they're doing. But I want to help. And I think you're right. Because the perception around money is always so scary, we don't feel that incentivized to do it.

For instance, like, exactly what you said earlier, my girlfriends last night, when I pitched, I did it, we need to start saving. They were like, I don't want to live a shit life now. But that's not what's going to happen. But also, the other incentive, I guess, for me, wanted even, especially in relationships, is my mom doesn't work now.

I wish that she works but hasn't and feels very much like she's got no financial independence from my dad so I always am trying to pay for stuff even when I can't afford it because I have a bit of weird control around I don't like people paying for me because I want to feel like I'm in control I'm paying for it and I'm not having someone else pay for me but when it comes to relationships luckily Matt and I are really open about money but I've asked some of my girlfriends they won't speak about money or they're too embarrassed but you kind of need to know like if your boyfriend or girlfriend's got a really bad credit rating or if they're in loads of debt like these these conversations are really important to

have early on because especially when it comes to like domestic violence with women or slightly more serious things down the line in terms of the power it can be really really dangerous and I think that's another part of the argument that we don't always hear about with money because it is so directed at men we don't don't realize how much you can actually get yourself in a bit of a it's kind of like how you should have an emergent I don't know you probably can explain it more no I think it's completely true it's it's. And because of my background and seeing what my mum went through and everything, like my driver behind Lifetize is

I want women to have financial independence. I want women to understand their money, to feel secure, to feel that they have choice. Like it's huge for me. Like you can probably, I mean, you're looking at me and I'm like, yes, like this is, this

is the thing that kind of gets me up every day. And it's like, I really need to get more women to be in a similar position to men. Yes. Right. That's what I want, that level of parity in terms of confidence, in terms of choice, all of these things. And at the same time, what you're talking about on the real negative side of that is also very true. You know, women more than men end up in situations, either through caring responsibilities,

through motherhood, or what have you, where either for a period of time, or for quite a substantial length of time, they might not be earning their own money and I'm incredibly independent my career is very important I don't have children I've made that choice and for me having financial independence has been one of the driving forces in my life for good and bad but always wanting to know that I have my own money yes and that therefore I'm okay. Yes. I, as an individual, am secure. I can make sure that I will always be all right. It has been huge for me to have that personal safety net. And I speak to a lot of women who, particularly when they go into motherhood and all of a sudden they've maybe had a career and now they're not earning their own money.

And the dynamic changes changes having to ask somebody else for money even if it's your partner is a huge thing and I have it in my own relationship you know so Nick my partner is also my co-founder and I do consulting work to fund life ties but that also funds him working full-time on the business so we have a similar dynamic and at the beginning it was incredibly hard for us because it was like I was giving him pocket money. Here he is, a grown man, and I'm having to give him some sort of an allowance. And my friends who have children have had a similar situation. Oh, interesting. Yeah. And even in situations where they've perhaps been the breadwinner, but all of a sudden they're now reliant on one salary or one salary plus savings, you know. But it no longer is their money coming in.

And the dynamic shifts so dramatically that they often tell me that they don't feel they have a say anymore. I think that this conversation is actually something that I'm starting to feel. Not so much with my sister and her friends because they're all in their 30s all getting married. And also I was just listening to Griefcast earlier, I don't you if you listen to it with Carrie Ed Lloyd it's about grieving but this woman was talking about losing her father and she went I've just had a baby so I had another grief which was stopping work and I never heard anyone say that before and she was like coming out of work it's one of it's like grief you it's one of those hard things to give up like she was like it was a part of my life so there's that thing of like realizing that actually we are shaped so much now by our careers careers becoming so

all-encompassing my career especially is from the minute I get up to the minute I go to sleep because unfortunately I kind of am my career and there is no possibility to switch off in a good way I could probably work with kids as well but the interesting thing is women now want to get to a really good point in their career so they want to have children later and then that's kind of disrupting family balances and then we've got all these conversations around kind of like fertility but also if we just had that equality of men being able to take paternity leave and if we had a better understanding of like it doesn't have to be a woman staying at home and then I think that would elevate so much stress and make it so much better but until that happens like I I want to probably work until I'm like 30 until I know that I'm financially independent financially stable earning enough money but I

don't even know if I'll be able to have kids by the time I get to that point because I we don't know what the what men will be allowed to do it's really really... And I think, you know, that's such a good point. And, you know, so we have, like, a childcare cost calculator as one of our products. And that came from my friend's situation of they hadn't really known how much childcare, you know, what does it cost?

People don't think about it. Everyone just goes and has kids, right? That's so true. What does it cost? People don't think about it. Everyone just goes and has kids, right? Yeah, that's it. FanDuel Casino Daily Jackpots. Guaranteed to hit by 11pm with your chance at the number one feeling, winning. Which beats even the 27th best feeling, saying I do. Who wants this last parachute? I do.

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that seem to impact women more than they do men. Obviously, you know, the money has to come from the household pot. Right. But traditionally what's always happened is that it has been the woman who has taken time out of career to have the child and then has gone back on a part-time basis yeah and then the money for child care comes from from that and they figure it out and I looked at that and went hang on a second that's that's that's so many huge assumptions yeah into that and we're still effectively telling women yes you can be

self-actualized you can have a career you can have all of this but if you also want children you're then going to have to figure that piece out for yourself yes and we don't tell men that that doesn't that that it doesn't affect their careers in the same way and so when we designed our child care calculator we designed it on the basis of I'm not going to assume that it's the woman in a heterosexual relationship who's going to stay out of work or go back part-time I'm going to let people couples explore how many days might each of them want to work yeah that's what does that look like can we start to try and build in some flexibility for men as well because all the guys I know they want to have as much input or at least

some input into child raising they're also caught in this trap of okay I'm the one that goes out to work like it's still so outdated and it's also that companies will punish people who choose to take paternity leave i've spoken to guy friends who like we have it available but if you take it they are literally like well you can jog on because we can get someone else who would be happy to work those hours so it's even though we're definitely making strides forwards the attitude unfortunately still being instilled by the same people that grew up in that jolly hockey sticks whatever kind of era yeah and um the other thing that i find really interesting if we're talking about fertility and babies and stuff is we obviously know that one of the best things we can do for the environment and for the

economy is to educate women and girls about contraception and um health care and those things and one of the ways to make sure that happens is to make sure there's more women with more money dripping more money back into the economy and you spoke about this bit before with me when we went for coffee about that female-driven economy and how much you brought up a bit earlier. But could you explain a bit more why it's so important that as women, even if we feel like we don't deserve that money a bit, like I was talking about before, how much it actually greatly impacts

if we rebalance or redistribute how wealth sits in gendered spaces yeah it's it's enormous it's you know I've I've spent quite a lot of time looking at this one because I'm sort of a bit of a geek on stuff but also because I'm I'm only ever attracted to doing businesses that have like enormous social impact yeah in my small way right what can I do that could maybe start to create ripples? And so I look at, I think about money, not just in terms of it on an individual level of, you know, how can I help each person

become more financially capable, more financially secure, but what does that look like kind of writ large over a society? How can we maybe change a capitalist society from a different gendered perspective and what would that look like and and can you know can we and what are the steps to do that and it's really interesting so I I went to a talk the other day with Mary Portis um who people might know and she's doing a talk, she's written a book called Work Like a Woman, all about how she changed her company around to be, I guess, more female friendly, or how would they build a company from scratch, designed in a way to support women

as much as men, right? And she took her company back to profit neutral and, you know, sacked off loads of clients that they didn't like. And then went about thinking about, OK, so what sort of policies would we build in to make this a better place for everybody to work, but particularly focused on women's lives? So allowing women to take time off to have children and then how do we support them coming back into the workforce so that they can maintain some of that financial independence and maintain their careers? And how do we juggle that? And she's now incredibly profitable again. businesses in terms of paying people fairly, having policies around things like shared leave, supporting people coming back to work, shows you how this can start to be done. And then there are tons of initiatives at the moment, which are very late, very overdue, but I'm very grateful that they are, around women funding women in business, right? So I think that the stats at the moment are that about between two and three

percent of all venture capital in the world goes to women-led businesses. We get about three percent. So think of all that, I mean, you must know tons of people who've got their own businesses, who are starting businesses, who are starting really incredible businesses that have huge potential. And yet, yet again going back to these sort of invisible barriers that we talked about on an individual level so we have them on a huge structural level when it comes to women being able to take those kind of leaps into business on the global stage so when i went to that talk i think about with Emily Bellet who've um created Vestpod she had four five women maybe on a panel who had gone through her like workshops and basically one

of the women was saying she'd gone to so many investors she'd spoken to so many men in suits and none of them wanted anything to do with her they said come back to me when you've made this money she was like no the whole point is I'm going to an investment so I can make the money eventually she crowdfunded it and made the money she needed in a week. It was all crowdfunded by women and she's making a huge turnover. And it was just the idea that if we knock on those conventional doors and they are telling us that you can't do this, it's very likely that, as you say, these incredible businesses, which really do need light of day, won't get seen. And it's that annoying argument where people go, people go it's the best person for the job it's not because the people who are picking these jobs have a very small-minded opinion of what's

neat it's backable it's like how every office temperature is set to the temperature that men need to be in a suit yeah we're freezing yeah and women's bodies temperatures are naturally lower than men's and we tend to wear like less layers and so that's why women in summer will have blankets on because it's so cold in the office it's just those even though that's really small if you think about how many things like that are just embedded into into these generically men when i did a retreat actually interestingly last year i was at the airport in sardinia and a lot of women who worked in the city and they were talking about how they went to work in investment banks, went to work in these jobs,

but they really didn't enjoy the fact that they were meant to go out drinking with clients from 11 a.m. or doing drugs with them or whatever. And they were like, we just want to go into work, get our job done and leave at five. Whereas the men loved this, like, obviously massive generalization. But from what they were saying, they really enjoyed the camaraderie and, like, the making the fact. And they were like, we could get this job done in five minutes. I just need to set a proposal up. You agree.

We say, yes, take you on as a client and I'll get the work done. I don't want to do this. I don't want to drink in the daytime. I don't want to ruin my livelihood. I've got friends outside of work. And what it is, is before that, like men have been doing business over beers since the beginning of time, but women weren't allowed access to that. And now that is actually changing. A lot of those corporate companies don't allow those things to go

on as more because women have come in and been like you're literally pissing around like what are you doing and I actually find that mind-boggling when you think about it that that is how business has been done and it's not to say it's wrong it's just that in this climate it's so interesting that we haven't yet thought that women probably have quite viable and great ideas yeah and it's um so i am like a member so i've it's interesting actually because when i started out doing startup stuff so 2012 was when i first allowed myself to dabble so i i um i quit my then job um called myself semi-retired, which was brilliant. I was like semi-retired for 18 months before I remembered that I lived in London. And therefore, like my burn rate was insane.

And I didn't have like loads of inherited wealth. So I was probably going to have to like do something about it. But during that time, I allowed myself to start dabbling in startup stuff. And I found that I was actually really resistant to going to female-focused business events. I had so much ingrained patriarchy. Internalized misogyny. I really did around, oh, that's not where the serious stuff is happening. And I have to really, like, have to be very honest about my attitude then. I was like I'm not sure and I had a lot of internalized misogyny around how around do women actually help women because I guess in in some of

my experiences in law and stuff it had seemed like it was a bit of a competition rather than collaboration and what I've seen hugely in sort of the the past sort of five to seven years is structurally those things are changing. The amount of support that is out there for women wanting to start their own business to get funded is growing and growing and growing. You know, you have everything from the Albright Members Club,

which was, you know, the first one that's all women over here. And I think the wing is coming soon. And then you have groups of angel investors, you have groups of VCs now who are focusing on funding women and other minorities. And so you're starting to see a bit of a shift, but it's still tiny in the grand scheme of things. And so what I would love to see is, so I talk about having something called like an equal system so like you know a play on ecosystem and the equal system says that we need

to have a funnel from those people who have great ideas and who want to start their businesses and a way for them to find education support access to money so that we funnel them to find education, support, access to money, so that we funnel them to these things that become their scaffolding effectively. And then we also need to have people in positions of power within the media to actually amplify what's happening with these businesses. So I'm starting to get that a little bit with mine. I now have found the women who are in various publications, who are interested in what we're doing, who are happy to kind of amplify what Lifetize is. And we're starting to see the benefits of that. Yeah.

Because otherwise, how do consumers ever find out about it? Totally. find out about it totally right so you need to have the whole thing from the business owner all the way through to the consumer with all of those steps that have been traditionally filled with white men yeah and we now need to have them filled with diverse people who can make different purchasing decisions yeah and I think it always comes down to this for me every single thing always comes down to inequality it's just it's just unfair but the other the other thing I think is recognizing as you say that education around money can be as little as realizing you are you are just as capable and just as able to earn and save money as anyone else you just have to realize that you can do that because I think there's so many statistics to say that the less you have the more you give away because you've never understood hoarding wealth or keeping money because what

what would that be for and I've seen it before I do think that I I even knew it with my friends who are more rich we'd be like they're so stingy well that's probably why they're really rich and lower socioeconomic groups do tend to they will look after people in their neighborhood. Like it's a more community sense, which in some ways is actually really positive. But it's the retraining of understanding that money isn't just for white men in suits. It is really important that we all see its importance. Does that make sense? Yeah, and I think it's probably helpful if I kind of run through a few things like practical things that people can actually do because I think there's

often it feels very overwhelming it's just this like big mass in front of you and you're like where do I even start and I always think the the key bits are starting to get a handle on where are you putting your money to work like what people talk about jobs to be done like you have to give your money a job and then if you give your money a job then you're sort of parceling it out to different things and you're not having to think about what is this money for so I think the kind of the cognitive load around what should I be doing is enormous when it comes to money because we talk about that emotional thing. But if you effectively give each bit of your money as it comes into your account a job, so you say, okay, so this amount is for my bills. This amount, and you can parcel it down as,

you know, into little minute things. This amount is how much I have to spend on social stuff. This is how much I'm going to put away into my pension or into savings. Once you start giving it jobs, that cognitive load disappears and the money is just funneled into what it should be doing and you don't have to think about it so much because the thing that we get told all the time is, oh, God, I just don't want to think about it. Yeah.

I really don't want to have to think about it. And we're very lucky now with the technology that's available. So it used to be that you had to do it on a spreadsheet, which even my friends who are accountants, like, you know, take them out of their day job and they're like, nope. They tend to be terrible with their personal finances because they were like,

I've been staring at a spreadsheet all day. The last thing I want to do is create a spreadsheet. So budgeting is a horrible word I think it strikes I think it just makes everyone think oh I don't want yeah budget that's like the fun police I don't want to but now with the various apps and things that are available it's much much easier so for people starting out you I would say you have sort of a choice of two routes. You either use one of the apps where they show you where each bit of your money is. So they'll show you what's in your current account.

If you have a credit card, they'll show you the balance on that. If you have a pension, they'll show you it. So they're able to plug into all of your various different pots of money, whichever company or bank those pots of money are with, and they can show it all in one place. Yeah. And this is like magic anew and has only been available in the past sort of year. But you have apps like Yolt or Emma or Money Dashboard,

and they'll combine, they'll do all of that work for you. So you just have to like plug in your various accounts, tell them I'm with this bank and I've got this and then they'll pull it all together and just show it to you on a screen. So you don't have to worry about that. Also, anyone that's feeling scared about the pots of money thing,

there are so many people who are my age who don't have anything apart from their income that goes out on the rent. Just because I know when I first heard this, I hadn't put any money aside in savings. I've only just got a pension with a different company because I'm freelance. So all of this to me, I literally would have any money aside in savings I've only just got um a pension with a different company because I'm freelance so all of this to me I literally would have the money come into my account it would go out and that was it and there was never any anything in there so so there's an

interesting thing so if you if you start and I think you have to be realistic about that right if you are particularly if you if you live in a major city and you are in your first or second job, the chances are you're going to be pretty much living paycheck to paycheck. Yeah. Right. That is just the reality. And you shouldn't feel bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. About that.

Right. You can look at what these apps are quite good at, though. And same with, say, if you use a Monzo or a Starling or one of these new banks where they track all of your spending. It's really good for you to start to get a handle on where is that money going. And so if you are the type of person that uses a card to pay for things rather than cash, definitely get either one of these apps or one of these new banks where they are literally tracking every single transaction that you are doing and categorizing it for you so that you can see I spend X amount on subscriptions, whether it's Netflix, Spotify, whatever. I spend Y amount on going out. And you can start to ask yourself, is that what I want?

Yes. Again, it comes back to the mindfulness. Being able to see it in a granular detail is the first step to being able to decide. And so you're not putting any judgment against it. You're not saying, oh, I shouldn't be spending that much. But you're looking at it objectively and saying, okay, do I really want to be spending that much on going out? Or do I want to be putting some of that into a savings pot? The judgment and mindfulness are two things I think are really key because I think another thing that happens is we live in such a spendy era like Instagram and social media and influencers I hold my hand up and people who are selling you things constantly the tube this advertisement galore so it's really hard to be in a world where one you've got to have a new outfit

every time you go out and new things on the one hand and then you've got as you say every media outlet slamming millennials spending money and so I think we live in this tug of war where you're kind of like but I'm supposed to be how do I keep up with the joneses or keep up with my friends or try this new restaurant because we are the way that millennials experience everything it's always through this like experience thing of like I want to try that new restaurant or eat this new food or go to that new place and so I think we can find a disjunct between that and being like oh my god we're adults we have to save but as you say it doesn't have to be you suddenly stopped doing all those things it's just like you didn't need the last Aperol spritz yeah because that's 15 pounds in London and if you're putting that away every week you know it will amount to something eventually. Yeah. And it's so there's the sort there's a for people who are wondering how much should I be putting into each kind of thing.

Right. There's a people follow different things. But one of the easiest and the one that I follow is one that's called like the 50 30 20 rule, which is, and you have to, again, adjust this for your own situation because, again, if you're living in London, chances are your rent is going to be absolutely astronomical. So the 50% of your take-home pay, so whatever you get in your bank account from your salary or from your freelancing or whatever 50 is supposed to go on your essentials so what are your things for survival so you know it's a roof over your head and it's food and it's transport to work and things like that it's probably not netflix i know some people would

disagree with me but it's what are those essentials for living some people that's going to be over 50 by the time they factor in their rent right and that's going to be over 50% by the time they've factored in their rent, right? And that's just the reality. So you just adjust the percentages to reflect your reality and you don't worry too much about it. So 50% on essentials and then 30% goes on the things that you want to do. So that would include like your Netflixes, that would include your going out, that would include non-essential clothes, you know, if you want, you know, include you're going out that would include non-essential clothes you know if you want you know if you're doing an asos spree or whatever that's 30 and then 20 goes into like for future you so whether that's savings pensions investments and the idea being that so the way i do it is whatever money comes in at the beginning of whenever i get paid i automatically parcel that out so i have one current account that it all comes into,

is my primary account. That's the one that I pay my bills from. So 50% effectively stays in that account and all of my direct debits and all of my essential stuff gets paid from that one. And then I have a separate Starling account for my 30% that I'm going to spend on right like my spends that's what it is then I can track it and so it only so I only have that 30% I can't spend more unless I

mindfully take some money over and also I'm keeping track of where that goes and then I can decide you know keeping track of it means I can decide do I want to spend that money on that extra cocktail? Or actually, would I rather keep it back for something else? And then the crucial bit is, and people describe it as paying yourself first, that 20% that you want to set aside or whatever that percentage is that you can afford to set aside, you take it out at source. So as soon as your paycheck comes in, that money gets pushed out in a standing order a direct debit into either your pension or your investments or your savings pot so you don't even think about it yeah I think it's that thing of if it's not there because I think this is me my government's always talk about this and we need to slam this now but I'll be like I can't say because I'll

always spend I used to always spend whatever came in so I was like well I can't possibly save it but if it's not there whereas I've started putting away I have to always spend whatever came in. So I was like, well, I can't possibly save it. But if it's not there, whereas I've started putting away, I have to, some freelancers have to put away 30% for tax, whatever. So when I put that money away to be safe, I then will just, you just automatically spend whatever you've got.

And we were trained to do it at uni. As I said, like I was able to live off tiny amounts, but I think it's that suddenly coming into an income and you're thinking, oh my God, I'm actually, like I've've got a bit of also I won't even factor in my rent sometimes I'm like oh my god I've got so much money in my account and I think oh shit no I don't got to have a rent so I think it's just it is that concept of you will be able to adapt it's just it's just learning it's managing isn't it it is it really is and it's but if you do it if you kind of do it that source if you do it at the point of if you do the point that you get it and it's parceled

out and off you go and then you've got your 30 or whatever your percentage is to spend that suddenly has no guilt attached to it or any strings attached to it because you've already made that decision that that's okay yeah you've already worked you've already calculated for you that with everything else you need oh actually that's that's guilt-free money and I can actually enjoy it. Because that's the thing. There's always, like you talk about the tension between the conflict between wanting to spend and have things and do things. And then the worry of, but hang on, can I actually afford it? By doing it this way, it takes a lot of that away because you've pre-decided what those amounts are.

And then that is just your spending money and you figure it out. And by doing it that way, you also can slightly start to manage any bumps in the road. Because one of the other questions I get asked an awful lot from people is they're starting to move away from that paycheck to paycheck anxiety to having a bit more money and thinking, okay, what do I do with that surplus? Should I be investing it? Should I be saving it? What should I do? And again, the rule for that is that you want to build up, say, three months worth of salary as your emergency fund, right? On the assumption that if you were to lose your income, it may take you up to three months to be able to to get another job and to replace it how long would you because

emily said this as well then she said she'd also have a pot with six months salary and everyone in the room was like because how how long um feasibly or usually would you say or is there no real set amount of time like how long should it take you to save three months salary it's going to depend it's going to entirely depend on how much surplus you have right if you are if you've got a low income it's going to take you a lot longer and you shouldn't panic about this you just want to be again trying to save it it's just it's just starting yeah it's and it sounds so so simple but it's putting away say you know starting to put away like 20 quid a month to just get you started on it. Great. Yeah, it's so true.

Because that's better than nothing. Yeah. You know, it's really like the, so many of us, because we can't do the whole thing, don't start with the bit that will eventually get us there because it feels pointless. That's exactly it. Putting 20 quid a month feels like, oh, but I'm never going to have enough. But you will and you'll just start putting it away. Yeah. Don't think about it.

Just start putting it away. And then when you realize you can do a bit more, add that to it. Because I think what I would do initially when I first started to try savings is I'd try and take like 500 pounds straight away and be like, I'm going to do that, that, that. And then I'd end up moving it back because I couldn't save that much. But I just wanted, I was like, well, what's a good amount to have in a savings account? I was like, I want like to do that. And then I'd end up moving it back because I couldn't save that much. But I just wanted, I was like, well, what's a good amount to have in a savings account?

I was like, I want like a thousand pounds in this. I'll put 500 pounds in now. And the next week I'd have to take out 250. And then there would be nothing in it. Whereas if I'd only put, have a match in in the first place, like 20 quid or whatever it was going to be, even if you're doing that every week or whatever, that would have been fine.

But it is that idea of like, immediately you suddenly it's all or nothing yeah and there's some interesting apps i don't know if you've heard them that kind of do that whole rounding up thing so that you don't so that when you spend money they'll round it up to say the nearest five pounds or nearest pound and you're just putting that money away so there's um and they use very clever ai and stuff to do that. So there's one called Clio and there's one called Plum and I think one called Chip. And they all kind of, they help you figure out how much can I afford to put away in savings so you don't have to work it out for yourself. And some other people, if they want to start investing, will use something like Moneybox, which again does the same thing where it just drip feeds little amounts into investments for you.

And psychologically, the benefits of some of those is that you don't notice it. You don't feel any loss. No. Because as humans, we're very primed to notice loss. And it kind of goes back to your grief point earlier. And it's if we feel like we're putting something away that we no longer have access to, that can feel, that can create anxiety whereas if you're just drip feeding you don't actually notice it when I it's funny because I did clear

and I really enjoyed it but then I don't get paid regular amounts it's never regular times so I couldn't do it and that made me feel quite stressed and going back to the emotional point last year Matt and I went on holiday to Greece on the flight home and I cried and I said I'm not doing this anymore can't do my job I absolutely hate it it's like why do you hate it we're trying to figure out what it was and it was that I hadn't been paid for four months because people hadn't been paying my invoices that when you're freelance people are really bad so I hadn't hadn't I'd luckily had enough money but I was just getting to the point where I really was like struggling and I got paid and I was like love my job and it was it was amazing all it was was

financial stability I don't think we give it. And it was amazing. All it was was financial stability. I don't think we give it enough credit sometimes. It wreaks havoc. It can cause so much stress. And that's why like the idea of being in debt and you have to be so careful about taking out loans. Because it really does. Like that emotional thing, I hadn't really thought about it. But it's so true.

I'll realize that when I get a really good job in and I know I'm getting paid, I feel really fine. And I'm actually better with money whereas I get a bit scatty when I get worried that I might not get paid again because I'm like this might be my last paycheck yeah and it's and you are not alone and again this is a whole new generational thing that did not exist you know the previous generations had job for life there was an expectation that they would do maybe one two jobs in their career and that would be it yeah so they had and and also quite a steady career path so you could see the person in front of you and roughly know what they had earned over the course of their career so know what that path looked like for you and we of all we're looking ahead going I don't know oh my god no idea so

we've got you know we've got not just kind of freelance so I'm also freelance and it's taken me and I write about this quite a lot it I always say it takes you at least two years of freelancing to have any real sense of what your income is going to look like over time um i think the first couple of years you either scramble to take on any work that you can for fear of a drought yes um and that is very panic inducing or you don't have a sense of how frequently people are going to pay you and it's true freelancers are paid appalling like so late yeah i think and i think it's really bad of big companies that we're often at the bottom of the pile. Yeah.

And yet they know that we're individuals and they know that we have to pay our rent. It's always the big, whenever it's a new brand where I've struck up relationships with them, they're always amazing and they pay me really soon. Luckily, my management now actually will automatically pay me three days after a job completes if it's with them, even if they haven't been paid. But I've had it before. Honestly, it's one of the most stressful things. I've paid invoices for like, sent out this invoice months, and they just don't care. They won't answer the phone. And these are huge,

multi-million pound companies that can't be asked to pay. And I think this is, again, I think the defining features of your generation are this, you know, the student debt, which feels like this weight that will never be lifted and makes you very nervous of taking out any debt products, which actually could be helpful in some circumstances. And this shift towards freelance, gig economy, or just generally a career where you might be doing lots of different things at different stages

and therefore it feels harder to work out what each of those stages might look like and kind of plan far in the future we've never had this before like that um i read something that said that this generation is closest to kind of a generation that went to war for the level of uncertainty around some of these things. Yeah. And yet we massively underestimate the effect that that has on emotion, but crucially the effect that it has on choices. So people will be holding back doing things or not committing to things or rashly committing to things because you don't know what you should be doing. There isn't a blueprint for you. And one of the things that we've been looking at with Lifetize is how do we help freelancers or those who have got hybrid you know hybrid jobs you know you've got a salary but you

might have a side hustle or people or people thinking about moving from salary to freelance or starting their own businesses work out what that path looks like financially for them so that they feel they have some security as they go through. How do we show you how to even out your money over, you know, bumper months and then slightly leaner months and things like that? Because, yeah, we just haven't had this in the past. And I think it's that move away from, again, I think it's that um move away from again I think we do fundamentally are quite disenfranchised with some of the systems that are in place in companies so for instance I have a lot of guy friends who work in the city you're happy to get

into work at 7am and not leave till 9pm I will never do that I don't care how much you'll pay me I'd rather work six different jobs and maybe be working those hours but we're're doing it in Spain or like, you know, doing things I really enjoy. And I think that we've lost that sense of I just can't believe that companies will contract you nine to five and make you work. I find it really upsetting. I think a lot of people do. But then you're right, doing this like multi-hyphenate thing. And we all downplay it as well because all the jobs seem really fun. But I actually do have like six streams of income, if not at any one given time and it's so interesting yeah talking about

that with people because it is it is just a whole new it's not month to month anymore I don't know when payday is someone would be like let's go on payday I don't know when that is no idea it completely changes and and also it it again going back to you know we at Lifetize build everything around sort of life events. And interestingly, the two that we started with, buying a home and having children, are still very traditional. Yeah. But still ones that have a huge emotional pull. Because for a lot of people, that represents life stability.

Totally. This is what I want out of life. And the interesting bit for us as we build build more products is what does the new blueprint look like what actually do people of your generation want out of life and it is it's different in many ways it is there's a lot more flexibility built in and that has obviously pros and cons attached to it and how do we help people model what the new life with these different elements look like and it's going to be fascinating for us so the bits we're building at the moment is this overall life planner piece so you know if you think about it at the moment we've got these little snapshot things of okay I want to

buy a home and then maybe I want to have children and we show you how to afford each of those yeah it's so cool but the next bit is I want you to tell me what are all of those elements of your life that ideally you would have. And I'll show you how to fit all of them together and afford them over time. Right. Because that's the bit that people don't know. I want to help people answer the question, should I do this or should I do that? I'm giving a talk in September about those kind of sliding doors moments because it is, it's life choices and I want people to have as much information

so that they feel like they're making a choice understanding what it means for them now and in the future. And it's kind of like um that black mirror uh netflix bandersnatch but obviously like much better and not not with it not with not with only terrible outcomes for people but it is it's about how can i show you you know if you're thinking about um i'm doing a job i hate i'm gonna see if I can either switch career or go freelance or start my own business most people don't know what that looks like no you're having to guess at

how to make that work financially and that is huge I mean you know it's hugely pressured there's a you feel like a ton of pressure on trying to work it all out for yourself and I think that's mad so I want to be able to show people how other people have done it. And I want to make it easy for people to kind of see what those calculations look like so that they can plot a path and feel like I can do this.

But it's so true. It's just the knowledge of understanding. I think it's even like when people first go to the gym, if you look around that gym, you'll think, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I remember feeling so scared. I'd go with seven girlfriends and make them watch me do one exercise and we'd be Googling it. And now I walk in, I know my way around the'm supposed to do. I remember feeling so scared. I'd go with seven girlfriends and make them watch me do one exercise

and we'd be Googling it. And now I walk in, I know my way around the gym and it's habit and you just do it. And it's the same with anything. It's just that money, especially for women, I hate gender so much, but I really do think it is just we've been told and conditioned, it's not for you, don't worry, you'll push a little head about it. And actually it's really empowering.

I'm really excited. My girlfriends yesterday were absolutely getting so pissed off at me. I was like, guys, we're going to save us. I actually feel really excited that I can have certainty about I might actually be able to put this money away. It makes me want to cry because I do read those articles and I think, well, that's me. I won't buy a house. So then to think that just little things that I could do now will hopefully enable me to have more freedom it's so empowering it's just about choice it's just and it's it's asking yourself what do I want and therefore what am I prepared to do now

to get what I want yeah it's and I and yeah so it is it's it's and it's not a question of I think too often people try to do it based on willpower or something you know it's a little bit like trying to give up something you know just do it you know you're just doing it entirely based on willpower yeah that doesn't work no willpower alone like they've proved it scientifically that humans we're not good with willpower we can't do it we're not wired that way we have to we have to be shown why we have to be shown how to do it but we also need to be shown why there has to be a motive yeah and a real tangible incentive and it's got to feel emotionally right for us otherwise we're not going to do it so you know there's there's so many there's so

much information out there and there's so many practical things that people can do but then you have to ask yourself why aren't they doing it yeah and it always comes down to fear it always comes down to I don't know how or I don't want to try or I'm because I'm not sure what the outcome is going to be and I when I talk to people I'm just like just do this one little bit What is the first little bit that you could do today, for example? So could you have a look at your, could you either get one of these apps that shows you where your money is? Yeah. Okay, do that.

That's step one. And it's so true. Done. This is why Lifetize is really cool. So Matt did this with me. He was like, imagine we'll put your salary in. And he was like, I don't have, I'll never have any money. I don't have like inheritance money for a thing.

And he was like, imagine that you then save this much or I help you with the deposit or something and it was just it was just knowing where you stand like what your money can buy because it doesn't really matter because we all catastrophize anyway so I catastrophize everything I'm like I literally nothing happened when you know it probably will actually be a bit better than you think it is if you're like me and you're like like, oh, that's not that bad. So I've just got to do that. And so I think that you're creating a tool that is going to empower so many people just to even just checking in on it and being like, oh, that's good. That's improved.

I had a really bad credit rating because when I went to Thailand when I was 18, someone was siphoning money off my card. They copied my card and I didn't know. And I went to fly to Australia and my bank was like minus 800 pounds. And I rang my mom and she was so angry I was like it's not me and they did like whole forward investigation and they were they just gave me the money back they're like someone who copied your card but from that point it still impacted my credit rating because my card had been overdrawn for so long so I never wanted to look at my credit rating since then it was awful and I literally the other day and it's good and I was like oh thank god but I just wouldn't look that was so stressful because that wasn't my fault

but also like I I look at stuff and there's I think one of the price comparison sites at the moment has this big ad campaign

around checking your credit score because of like fear you know don't be don't be so afraid you know you're going to have

loads of anxiety if you don't do it and I really I don't like fear based marketing around money because people are desperately anxious about it right people most people feel some level of unease and anxiety around it and I just think don't don't make people feel worse about the things that they're not doing already out of fear but um credit score is an interesting one because it's such a dark arts thing like nobody knows how it works because

it's made up um no it is it's just made up by these companies and uh so there's different companies that do it um like experience yeah equifax and stuff and they all have different scores so they use different numbers. Oh. And basically, the basic gist is it's supposed to be a reflection of your credit worthiness, right? How, if a bank was to lend you some money, how likely is it that you're going to pay it back? But it's this weird catch-22 situation where you only get a credit score if you've ever taken out debt. Yeah. Some sort of debt product. And that could include, say, if you have a mobile phone on contract and things like

that. So a lot of people now, because of mobile phones, do have a credit score. But if you're the sort of person who doesn't like credit cards or won't take out a loan, then you could be in a situation where your credit score is really low not because you're a credit risk and you're not worth taking the risk but simply because you have never taken out any debt. Well I don't want a credit card I know I should get one because for the credit score thing

I'm like but that's never been something I'm not ready for that. I just shouldn't trust myself. So why not? So what's the so do you feel that you might just spend spend spend because you've got this free money? Maybe but I also think for me it's the uncertainty of like if feel that you might just spend, spend, spend? Because you've got this free money. Maybe.

But I also think for me it's the uncertainty of like if I said I'm going to spend this much in a month and then I did that thing where I don't get paid and then obviously I have to have the, so I think I'd have to have all my other finances perfectly in check, really well balanced and like have all my savings because it is like I had a job that was meant to be paying for certain things and that will just fall through. So then I'm, if I think I've had the added pressure of I'm in arrears for my credit card and that's unexpected and I haven't yet got that 30% of my salary saved, for me it would just be too, I'm very scared of the idea of getting into debt and it's spiralling.

I've got a really big fear of that. So I don't want any at all. Yeah, it's really really common uh amongst your generation it's really interesting so I'm I'm just on the edge of like um generation x and we were just brought up with like credit cards go for it no we were we were absolutely you know from uni onwards just like pushed on us yeah so I have several um but the but what I hear from from everybody is exactly the same. Too scared, too scared, worrying that it will spiral.

And because of interest rates and credit cards being so high, it is something that I recommend people don't take out unless they feel comfortable. The one thing I would say is if people need to build up a credit score, then that 30% of our 50, 30, 20, say your spends, what you could do is get a 0% credit card. Yeah. Because then you're not paying any interest on it. And then you could use that to pay for your spend stuff. So you always know that it's never going to be more than you can pay off every month.

You set up your direct debit from your primary account for that 30%. You spend that 30% on your credit card and then pay it off automatically each month. And that will really boost your credit score. But only if you can get a 0% credit card and just do it during that 0% period. But that can sometimes give you like two years of paying no interest. And that can be quite helpful. The other thing for people, if you are too scared of getting a credit card, but you do want to start building up a credit score, there's new systems where paying your rent can count. Because that's the biggest thing for most people. And it should count, you

know, theoretically, it should count. But in the past, it has never counted. But there are a couple of companies, I think the one in the UK is called Credit Ladder. I think your landlord has to agree with it. But if it's something, you know, if you look at your credit score and you see that it's low and you want to build up, then that would probably be an alternative that you could do. And then you don't have to take on any debt. I think what I'm getting out of this, or I think what the take home that I find really important is, I think it's what I said kind of at the beginning, but in your 20s're going to have such a big scope of things I've got some friends who are amazing with their American Express gold card and they're constantly getting like points and then I've got other friends like me who were like I don't really get how credit card works or I've only just

started and the point is saving isn't only accessible to your friends with the American Express gold card it's for all of you whether or not you're earning 16K or whatever. It's just scaling it to you. I think we all think we've got to reach a certain pressure point. And once you get to that, like once I'm earning 50K, okay, then I'll put money aside.

But that's not, that doesn't have to be that way. The best thing is just to start. No one's judging you on, no one actually gets to look and see how much you're putting. No one gets to tell you if how much you're putting no one yeah exactly no one gets to tell you if you're doing it right or not you know it's it's just for you yeah and so

there is an element I think it's really important that people do talk with their peers about money and ask questions um particularly if you're feeling less confident and you see somebody who's very good at it ask them questions yeah but then apply it to your own situation I think there's a lot of pressure around comparison yeah and I think you have to you have to just try not to compare yourself totally and it's very hard it's very easy to say that and hard to do but it's your situation is your situation there are only certain levers that you can pull in terms of getting a higher salary or, you know, spending less. And I think we have to be very kind to ourselves about what's realistic. Yeah.

And not add that judgment on top of things. Because it's that judgment that stops us taking action. Well, that's exactly, I guess, Lifetime's point is just to give you a realistic understanding of where you're at and what your ability is and it's just it's just giving you a little tool to be like okay I can take charge of this rather than feeling like it's a big yeah scary thing horrible overwhelming terror um so I've literally loved this conversation was there anything else specifically you needed to add or say no I think that's it I think you know we have a lot of we have a lot of articles and stuff on our site if people want to people want to learn about you know some of these topics you know we have things around how to pay off debt there are a couple of specific ways around paying debt that have been proven to

work really well for people so if that's a an issue for people and they can look at that and we're always happy to kind of take questions for people on their specific circumstances. We have like an agony aunt column where people can write in about specific issues that they're facing and we try and give them some advice on that. Amazing. And then if people want to find you or can they come along to talks that you're doing or is there anything you want to plug that you've got coming up? Yeah, so basically lifeties.com is where you'll find all of our tools.

They're completely free to use. You don't even need to create an account. If you do create an account, it allows us to send you more good stuff. And lifetize.com forward slash events is where you'll find all of our upcoming events. Amazing. Thank you so much, Caroline. And thank you guys for listening. Thanks for having me.

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