6 small changes to improve your finances in 2025

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0:34After your trial, you'll save an extra£5 a quarter on the subscription, which is exclusive to Making Money listeners. And that's moneyweek.com forward slash money. But there's a link in the description if you just want to click that. Before we get started with this episode, you probably noticed this isn't our usual day to post, unless you're thinking, God, it's Monday already. Well, that's because since January is a time, a lot of people are motivated to make changes to their finances. We thought we'd throw in some extra episodes to help people out this month. So enjoy.

1:042 % a year which sounds nothing created a 15 year difference that power of compounding really makes a huge difference. Lisa Conway Hughes is a financial advisor, Mensa member and friend of the podcast. What are the small changes you can make that could make a big difference to your financial future? You know the one thing this year I think that that's the thing. It's boring but Good financial planning is doing the right things regularly. So these little things that you can do do really, really add up.

1:40So we're going to talk today about small changes. I actually think they get a bit of a bad reputation, small changes, a bit of an eye roll. I think when people approach their finances, they want big actions. But what we're going to do today is talk about small changes that will make a meaningful difference. And I want to start by putting some numbers on it. So you had a look at Fidelity's, is it called the Small Changes Calculator? The power of small amounts. Okay, yeah. And it looked at, you know, what increasing your pension contributions by 1 % does, right? So can we go through some of these numbers?

2:12Yeah. So I did three different ones, a 25-year-old, a 35 and a 45-year-old. So if a 25-year-old was on 28 ,000 a year and they did just 1 % extra, which is going to cost them£6 a week, which I think is quite an achievable amount for most to cut back on, 72 ,000 extra in retirement, which that£6 a week translates into a huge number. And then 35-year-olds on a£45 ,000 salary would give them an extra£58 ,000 a year. And again, that's only costing you£9 a week to go in. And if you're 45, I put on£100 ,000 salary. So at that top end, still going to give you 59 ,000 extra as a lump sum and that costs you 20 pounds a week so even if you're earning a lot you might think god that thousand that um one percent is actually going to be a lot it's 20 pounds out of your pocket and it's not really out of your pocket because in many cases it's come in pre-tax right so exactly you know if you run it through the taxation the nine pound might only end up as six or five in your in your pocket certainly do you know what assumptions they were making in terms of growth?

3:18Yeah so they're not wild it's five percent a year and growth every year and that your salary increases by three and a half percent a year. Are people's salaries increasing by three and a half percent a year? I think there's been a pretty broad stagnation of incomes over the last 10 to 20 years. We've seen a big rise in pay in the last few years to compensate for inflation but it hasn't really taken you know it hasn't really got people back to where they are. I think most people will kind of scoff at the idea of this idea that you get 3.5 every year but I do think long-term incomes tend to track inflation otherwise people just get pushed into the floor.

3:55And also promotions are going to get you into that next bracket over your lifetime. It's big it's big jumps isn't it in pay what tends to happen is you earn a level and then you take a big step up through a promotion a pay rise so it's not 3.5 % a year is not going to be 3.5 % a year it's going to be I coast for 10 10 and then i jump up 20 or whatever um the growth thing is interesting at five percent because i know the calculator says it doesn't accommodate for inflation but five percent is a is the inflation adjusted growth rate of the global stock market for the last 100 years i think because i think it gets about eight nominal not beating inflation then well with this well five percent would be that would give you a figure that does accommodate for so because if the growth rate if the stock market is 8 % and inflation is about 3%, you would get 5 % real.

4:43So I think it's probably quite fair. Yeah, I don't think it's mad. I don't think it's like when you see these crazy numbers and the growth rate is 8 % or anything like that. When you forecast pensions, what does the regulator say you have to do there? 20%. You're on. I'm really cautious. I use a modelling tool. And I always do inflation 3%, investments 4%. Oh, so you're only doing 1 % growth. That's very conservative. Well, because I don't want ever to look a client in the eye when they get to retirement and the money plan's not worked. It's much better to celebrate there being more. So you get them to their plan with a 1 % real growth rate.

5:20I try to. Wow, that's amazing. That's amazing. You're like the best salesperson ever, like under-promised and over-achieved. You're like, yeah, you'll get 1%. Oh, you've got five. Well done. I think clients think I have this personality disorder because pre-retirement I'm really mean and telling them always to do more and it's never enough. and then after retirement they're like what and i'm telling them to spend lots so they have to get used to the new me in retirement so i mean that can we can we acknowledge though that for some people the pushback will be that what even one percent is not affordable you know do you well then do half a percent do do a five or a month whatever you can do because i i tend to um when i increase my pension i always do it to amount that scares me and then i find that i adjust my lifestyle around it um cut back on those things that I could often do without but if things are really tough then you just do what you can manage I definitely feel like and for me personally it's um like we're discussing whether we should go to send our kid to nursery school or not because it's so expensive and like is it worth it should my partner go back to work or all these things so one percent for I know like me and a lot of my friends this year we've been like damn everything's so expensive so like one percent feels like a lot um but in other times it doesn't feel like a lot so it feels like cycles.

6:38And also don't forget in that stage of your life pensions can be your secret tool depending on your earnings because doing pension contributions can reduce your salary down below that 60 ,000 mark for example and allow you to get then the full child benefit or if you're earning over 100 ,000 for those lucky ones you can use pensions as a tool to get below the 100 ,000 mark so that you're getting more contribution from the government to your nursery fees. So how would that work with people just is that essentially people put money into their pension as soon as they get paid? Yeah so say I'm earning 65 ,000 I want to pay 5 ,000 a year extra gross into my pension so my real earnings are 60 ,000 and then that allows me to get the child benefit.

7:21Yeah because the tax traps that exist so past 100k the marginal rate shoots up to like 10 ,000 % if you've got three kids or something, because you lose all of the child-related benefits and incentives, so nursery can cost an arm and a leg. So, yeah, and a small action is if you're in one of those tax traps, they move the one... It used to be 50 ,000 to 60 ,000, and now it's 60 ,000 to 80 ,000. So if you're at, say, 62K, you could pay an extra 2K into your pension and you might even be better off because... Yeah, I think child benefit works out two and a half grand for the first kid, so you'd actually be better off in your pocket by putting that 2 ,000.

7:56It tapers, does it, between 60 and 80. But it's worth... Yeah, so I'm wrong there. You won't quite be better off, but long-term you will be. Yeah, yeah. Okay. I mean, I'm doing a talk at a company on Wednesday, and we're just talking about, you know, getting the most out of your pension and stuff. And the employer matches 5%. So, you know, they do the bog standard of 4 and 3 and all that. But if you put in 5, they'll put in 5. 90 % of staff don't go to that. So that 1%, again, like you're saying, And if there's an extra match, it doubles again. So the 70 grand that you're talking about would be 150 potentially in retirement.

8:31I think my main aim is to go in there and just beat them over the head and say, just bring it up by 1 % because it's... Yeah, I did an article for a newspaper a few weeks back and we looked at the company pension scheme. And there were three types of pensions. Everyone just went into the default. and all three of the journalists whose pensions I analysed, not a single one had read page two or page three, so they didn't realise that by putting in that little bit more, the company would actually double what they put in. So just by putting in extra one, they were going to get an extra six. Wow. And by switching, so you've got to just read or ask your company to explain to you the way the pension works and if there are different types, the benefits of each.

9:14Do you find that companies aren't forthcoming with that information then? or is it i think they assume you'll um read the handbook because it's a big benefit right yeah it's very important and and also i think companies have a responsibility to get it right a for their staff but also for you're investing a lot of your own money the company's money into the pension i think client um employee education is really really important because some people just dismiss it but actually it can be a huge benefit and a big attractor of the right type of talent as well I'm seeing a big shift now with people online that basically saying I just you know when I go for a job I'm asking them what pension provider do you have who is the default you know because if it's x I don't want to work here because their fund choices and fees are horrible and why you know what's the much contribution and I think you know I think that's brilliant yeah it because it is money and it will make people change it will make employers change if they're in a pension scheme that's not doing so well or it's just a bit lazy and things could be done a bit better um then i think it will make change so the more people that ask that the better yeah because if you if you actually think about it if you've got a job offer one's 45k one's 50k but the 45 does six percent for everyone you put in they're paying you more money you know you can get to a point where they pay you lots more than the 50 exactly do you think over time this is going to get more kind of honed and more people will know about it because obviously this auto-enrolment was quite fairly new.

10:44I mean, it's been going a while, but you're in the grand scheme of things. So over time, do you think companies will be a bit more transparent? I think it was 2012 the auto-enrolment was brought in. That's fairly new. Yeah. I think the downside to auto-enrolment is people think, well, that's that box ticked. I'm doing what I should. But I read, you know, in the back of the Sunday Times they do a sort of my life in numbers kind of thing and there was the guy who's head of phoenix life now and he was saying that he thinks that figure needs to be actually more like 15 16 percent well it was all the apathy it's created is is kind of damaging and i was reading um something from dwp at the time when they launched it and they basically said that the eight percent match contribution which is the bog standard plus state pension will get someone the minimum level of living standards as set out by the PLSA.

11:37So basically, you are existing, you know, you've got no room for manoeuvre, you're, you're, you're basically poor. And they then said, people will need to pay more or do more. But then they just stopped. And they don't really publicise that information. So I think a lot of people think 8 % has been created by policymakers. So it must be enough. I'm fine. I'll just coast on that. They don't have that conversation of no, this is just to kind of get you the minimum. Forget those policymakers are on defined benefit pension schemes. And people think that a defined benefit pension scheme is worth at least 20%.

12:12So they're saying 8 % for us, but their pension is much, much better. So maybe we should follow what they're doing with their own money. Not to get too political, but in the recent budget, I think I noticed that the inheritance tax rules also don't apply to defined benefit schemes. Is that correct? Well, they die with you. Okay, do they? So is that why they... Yeah, you can go to my SPAP. I wanted to ask you this. It can go to your spouse, but then it dies after that. Okay, yeah. So that's why there's not the rule there. Because I was thinking, have they just screwed everyone with a DC pension and the DB ones?

12:44Always keep your eyes open. Yeah, yeah. Because it's funny that, like you say, they're all the guys with the DB ones. Okay. So I do just want to touch on that point again. We know that for some people it is hard and 1 % might not be possible. so I'd like to look at other ways that you can have a small change with that doesn't involve more money and we've kind of talked around it there but the default fund point I think is an important one yeah it's really it's really important because you could be it's look of the draw which pension default fund you're in and if that's the difference you're getting the difference between well this is a very good example so last week I did I did a cash flow model for a client and at a 6 % return he had enough money till 100 for his lifestyle needs and as I was saying earlier I always do it at 4 % so then I changed it to 4 and then the cut off for when he'd run out of money was 85 so that's 2 % a year which sounds nothing created a 15 year difference this guy's in his late 30s so that power of compounding really makes a huge difference yeah i am so nest recently changed their fund lineup the sharia fund which is the one with um the islamic preferences yeah was the only 100 equity fund that they offered so they've got six funds and they've made it so that it's 30 bonds and something called sukuk which is like islamic bonds and i looked at this because I criticise them basically saying you don't offer 100 % equity.

14:16So many people use that fund for that, not because they're Muslim. And I backtested what the difference would be. It was 70-30 versus 100 % equity. It was about 1.8 % difference based on 100 years. Well, there you go. That's a 15-year difference in retirement. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, it was so 300 quid a month for the average rate of return if you were 20, so long, 46 years, it was coming out like 3.4 million but at the 70 30 was coming out 1.8 so it was costing like two million quid because they just tweaked the fund and many people in that fund won't know that that chain they don't know what that means you know they don't understand that when they say we want to make it less risky what they actually mean is we're compromised you know we're sacrificing returns potentially to reduce volatility because we don't think that people like a wild ride no Well, they're assuming for us, so that's why we've got to take control ourselves, I think.

15:13Do you have any advice for people that may be in a default fund of how they look at that fund and make a critical assessment of, is this good? And then how they then go, OK, what fund is better? So it's sort of a three or four step process. So you want to look at the fund on something like TrustNet. And then there'll be a graph that comes up. There'll be two lines. One's you, one's the average. and the benchmark that's been given. And often that benchmark isn't a great benchmark to compare it to. So on that sheet, I'm going to look at the costs. So I want to compare the costs versus what are all the other costs of funds that I could be in.

15:53And then I want to look at returns. So if I go down then to the bottom of the page, there's a pie chart. And in that pie chart, if I added up the amount of equities, let's say it was 40 % equities in the fund, I'd compare that against the Vanguard Life Strategy 40%. If there were 60 % funds, I'd compare it against the 60%, 80 % against the 80 % and so forth. If you're a bit between, you can just estimate the difference between the two. And that's going to give you an idea of what has the market done, which is the Vanguard, versus what you've done. And if you look at a Vanguard fund, let's say it's costing you 0.2 % for the fund alone, your work pension, what's it costing you?

16:36Has it under or overperformed? I think that's a really good acid test to see how you're doing. So you think the benchmarks they use might be a bit not amazing? It's why I have tears. My benchmark makes me look great. Good morning, mate. Welcome to the party. Yeah, I do. Often I see that the one benchmark that's chosen is pension specialist. And I don't even really know what that benchmark means. And I don't know how those benchmarks get put on. Rather than going, here's a gold standard fund, like a Vanguard fund, which most people would say is low cost and tracks the market very well. So it's a fair representation of the stock market.

17:19So if they've got a fund, you mentioned life strategy funds, if they've got a 60-40 fund that's 60 % equities, 40 % bonds, it achieves that mix well. They're picking some other thing to track. And maybe that's because it's a bit more flattering. Yeah, maybe. I don't know what the motivations are, but I think you just need to look behind that. against the first impression that you see. And if the fund is more expensive and performing better, you want to do a price-adjusted return so you can see, after all the costs and charges, how would I have weathered and what are the benefits of the extra costs?

17:59And when you're looking at these funds, does it depend on what stage of your life you're at? So if you're in your 20s, obviously it's going to be very different if you're in your 50s. Yeah, so when you're in your 20s is probably the time when you'll be able to take the most amount of risk with something like your pension. As you get closer to retirement, what we usually want to do is separate them into short, medium and long. So what of that pension are you not going to spend till your 80s and 90s? With that, you can possibly afford to be a bit more higher risk. With the money that you're going to spend in your early retirement, it's probably volatility that's really important to you.

18:34and looking at say the alpha of a fund to see actually what the fund manager's adding. Yeah I think one way that I think people should look at the default funds is so 90 % of people in these work-based auto-enrolment schemes are in the default and you've got if you line up 15 million people and say you've got to create a fund that fits all of them what kind of fund are you going to make it's kind of like Goldilocks isn't it it's not going to be too hot it's not going to be too cold it's going to be in the middle leaning towards colder than hotter and I think you know for most people if they actually sat down and thought what do i want how much risk am i comfortable with a lot of these people will be in a stocks and shares ice listening to this with 100 equity exposure but then will be 70 30 in their pension because they just haven't engaged in the fund even though that's the pot of money that has the longest time to run so can take the most yeah and i think what's great about looking at it now is we can still just about see those covid numbers in the graph so we can see when it's bad really bad how far is it going to fall um so you can actually see the good and the bad in the graph right now we always you know when you see on content online where people are like stop eating avocado toast and it's like you can buy a house in london and it's almost like piss off you know it's almost insulting but what you pointed out was when we're talking about nine pound a week it is it is like that it's not like Like, oh, you can buy a, you can get a hundred grand together if you stop eating avocados.

19:58What you're saying is find nine pounds extra a week and it can add a few years to your retirement. Or if you're really nervous to do it, play that psychological game with yourself. Set up a savings account for the first three months and do nine pound a week into it and see if you really do miss it. And then pay it in as a lump sum and start the monthly direct debit. But on the first of every month, I always do my little sort of sanity check on my money. And yesterday I did just up my, I just upped my amounts that I save into my savings only by 20 quid here and there, just to see if it ever feels painful.

20:37Last time we recorded, Tomei, and you were having some real dramas with your accountant. So how's that been going, mate? They're sacked. So drama sorted. They're a big corporate firm. They didn't really reply to my emails very quickly, like took a week or two at times. And they charged me way too much. I mean, I've got pretty simple taxes and they were charging me thousands. They saved me some money, but yeah, I had to move on. Slow and expensive. Pretty much, yeah. This is one of the reasons that we're really happy to be partnering with TaxApp. It's a tech platform that makes self-assessment simple.

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21:37We've left a link in the description and use the code MONEY10 for 10 % off your first tax filing. That code is MONEY, M-O-N-E-Y 1-0. so mr carolet i hear you are a salesman elite salesman yes one of the best they say i've got a little bit of experience in the game yeah i could say you've done a few deals uh bill a bill what what would your compliance team say about you they will say that i am always nagging them and that um essentially i just have i have beef with compliance i love the team compliance slows down all my deals because every time i get to the finish line they've got to check documents kyc GDPR and it's just a nightmare it slows the deal down by like two three weeks it's always on both sides as well isn't it sometimes it can be blocked on the other side exactly well that's where today's sponsor can help indeed Vanta helps companies of all sizes get secure and compliant fast and they stay that way they do it by automating compliance with over 35 security and privacy frameworks like SOC 2 ISO 27001 and HIPAA yeah all of them and this saves businesses so much time and money According to a recent IDC study, Vanta customers save over half a million dollars a year in costs.

22:48Not bad. And they also help you complete security questionnaires up to five times faster, which is great because everybody hates filling out forms. If you're a business that needs to prove security and compliance, visit vanta.com forward slash making money to sign up for a completely free demo today. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. i think the scary thing for a lot of people with the pensions is once you put it away you can't access it again so like you said you can put it in the savings account and if it works out you can just dump it and if you don't miss it but if like me your car is in the garage again then you need to like you might need emergency funds or if something some you have a medical emergency or something you suddenly need a lot of money you can't touch that pension so i think for people in like cost of living it's a bit scary I mean like I'm doing okay now but if I put away this money what if I need it so yeah then maybe do half half I think you've got to always have your emergency fund first and then do your pension um but I think give it a go because you can always stop it and um I made a lady I hope I didn't embarrass her I felt like I embarrassed her and I hope I didn't I did a talk a few weeks back um and the lady was really nervous about putting her money in pensions but she'd already told me earlier at the dinner that she was 53 and so I did actually remind her that pensions are no longer her long term because she could touch it in four years so maybe you've put pensions in that long-term box but maybe you're in your 50s so maybe pensions are becoming that shorter to medium-term accessible pot and we saw last year in the budget that the rules are making us want to change the pensions I imagine people are going and want to be rather than pensions being the last thing you spend you need to switch that order to pensions being one of the first things you spend in retirement yeah and i hate to break it to people but you will get old you know like it's going to happen and there's a much more chance of you getting old than dying young um and what you're going to do when you get there i don't i think you know people often say to me oh i don't like pensions because i can't touch the money and i'm like that's the point that's the benefit not not the not the curse you know that that's the whole reason you put it in there because how many people will sit there and go oh if i'd only just tucked away a bit more money in my 20s or 30s or 40s i'd be better off now pension that's the way you do it because you can't get you can't get out and i am i use the royal london um calculator to see what's the percentage chance of me dying before retirement and it was two percent which initially you think that's a very low number but actually it's a bit higher that's quite high i I was thinking that's low.

25:28Yeah, yours would come back at like 19. You're burning the candle. 19, 19.5. You're just melting the candle. It just made me think of like my year group at school. There's probably 150 in my year. So three of those people aren't going to make it to retirement. So in one way, that shows why life cover is needed. But it also shows why we can't just sort of live, what's it called? Live young, live hard, die. Live fast, die young. Whatever, we know what we're talking about, but we can't have that mentality. We do need the pensions and or other assets for our safety net. Yeah, because, you know, two in 100, but 98 don't, you know, so the chances are still on your side to live a bit longer.

26:12One thing that I did, the roundup features, when I was reading the notes, I've got this roundup thing that just sucks a bit of money off every time I spend. And it's just a pot of cash. And I was like, I've got that. It's about£40 a month built up in there. And I put that into the calculator and I was like, oh, that's, you know, tens of thousands of pounds. Do you have any other ways that people can kind of find that money in their life? Well, if you're truly honest, are you really organized with your money? I think is the first thing, because if you're not organized, you can't really answer that question, whether you've got spare money or you don't.

26:44So I think having a plan that suits your personality, your mindset is going to make you more efficient when it comes to money. and I think so for me as I've said before on previous podcasts if I've got money in my account I'll spend it so mine truly has to go out the first day of the month so I can spend whatever's left but some people it's seeing the goal and how close you're getting towards that goal helps them squirrel away the more money every month so yeah I think you've got to work out what's going to motivate you and then put it in place in a sort of a system using direct debits or roundups or whatever it is that means you can play yourself off, if that's the right way of saying it.

27:28But you can just, you can get the most out of the money that you earn. If you've got a limited company, then maybe it's about feeling quite frugal on a monthly basis with what you pay yourself. So you build up a lump sum in the business and then you whack a lump sum into the pension just before the end of your tax year. I think, yeah, there's lots of ideas, but you've got to find out the right way for you yeah I after our first ever chat you said you know you push people to put a lot into their pension and I build up cash inside of my company and I think a lot of it was panic about it might end but now what I do is I just reset to zero every year and then it kind of puts my back against the wall again makes you scared makes you work yeah and it's so tax efficient to pay into the pension it's it's really good what kind of personalities do you think exist because one thing that I had in the past was I thought the fact that I blow all the money in my account was like a thing I needed to stop rather than work with if that makes sense you know I tried to beat that out of me yeah well I think it's got to be about what makes you happy so if I were to suddenly become frugal I think like I reward myself you said that like you wanted to spit on the floor and you said be like frugal you've got a lovely belt on by the way Nice frugal belt choice.

28:48I think it would just, I think it depends what motivates you. So my money is an incentive for me to work hard that month in the office. And so I treat myself the following month depending on what goals I did or didn't hit. And that just suits me to a T. And maybe it's a luxury of being self-employed or running your own business that you can do that. but different personality types there's the warrior so there's people that squirrel away so much cash and don't allow themselves to live a little I have a lady at the moment who I think I've mentioned her before but it really I feel sorry for she's got plenty of money but she won't have a shower because it costs more than a bath and so things like that you get money can get people wrapped up into this negative cycle of thoughts which I think is something that you need to to disregard but then I have people who are in complete denial and worry me because I've been trying to beat that denial out of them for say five to ten years in their 30s let's say but as they get to their 40s and 50s if I can't change their mindset into being sensible they're not going to stand a chance of achieving their goals like if you're not sensible in your 40s you're not retiring in your 50s are you unless you're in the lottery or you've suddenly got an overnight unicorn business um but yeah so I think you've got to be realistic about what you what are your thoughts so therefore what are your habits and therefore what are your what's going to be the outcome that you have I think that's um I like your idea if you work for one month then you reward yourself the next month because I think before you talked about budgeting and it sounds great on the podcast but me i earn a certain amount one month and less next month so more than next month so i can't really budget because i had plenty of money i pay him to be here and he's doing all right he's doing all right so it goes up and down but i'm like dame as well if if i've got money in my bank i'm gonna spend it so we went to oktoberfest in germany and i had like an oktoberfest budget and i'm like okay every all the money my bank account is getting spent before i get back to england and it all got spent before i got back to england so for me it's like if you have i think i like the idea of at the end of the year you then take everything you've got and then you put it in the pension because month to month i find it really hard to budget but would you have money left at the end of the year probably not i don't think you would well you spend and then work yeah you know like that's you're like the opposite to lisa and i do like i do like quarterly invest like not quarterly random sporadic investments so like this month i might not invest anything next month i might not then the month after i might put like four grand in well i met you i I met you invest everything that you earn from the podcast.

31:35Yeah. So that fills your eyes. Yeah, it does. Yeah, he's a good friend. He knows I'm not disciplined like that. I mean, the way is to do that is your money in account is not your spending account. So your money in account, maybe it could be a regular savings account, maybe. And then you pay yourself out of that a fixed amount. So you feel like a salaried person to get rid of your boom and bust mentality. I just love the numbers going up. Like I'm addicted to the whole, you know, I'll put a little bit more in and watching it grow. And I just, that to me is like the best thing in life. This is like really.

32:12Yeah, but I like liquid money. I like to be able to dip into it. Oh yeah, but I just like the security and kind of freedom of knowing it. And it's there and, you know, the numbers going up. And in a way that if I stopped right now, I would be okay in 30 years. And I've got myself to that place really in about six, seven years. of work you know just through you know but I think that's what it is that it's boring but good financial planning is doing the right things regularly and those right things are boring they're not anything to show off about in the pub they're not going to get you a bestseller it's just saving investing and putting money in your pension regularly month in month out it's certainly boring for the first few years but then once you know when you're at a point after say like a decade or so where the growth on your portfolio is significant.

33:06You're thinking I'm earning like a wage here. Exactly. It will become where your investments are earning more than you are if you do it right. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I think by then you'll be like, okay, let's keep throwing more petrol on the bonfire kind of thing. The way I achieve it is through paying myself first is what I would call it, which I know is thrown around a lot but is that something that you encourage of your clients or damn what is the concept of paying yourself first i bet you first i like that concept yeah yeah uh it's just i mean it's like a it's just a when you when you receive your money you just carve out the bit that's for savings and the idea is that the only money that you truly earn is what you save because everything else is just money that you're passing on to other people right so for bills and things it's like flows through your hands so pay yourself first when i take money out of my company or when i earn a wage the first thing i would do is carve out my savings rather than this idea of whatever's left at the end of the month i'll pay myself so yeah do you is this something that you do with your clients or is it yeah i do because the direct debits to their investments and pensions go out usually on the first sometimes the 15th but predominantly the first of every month do you get people that come in that say i i you know So, I mean, I know your client base is of a certain kind of position, but do you get people that come in and go, oh, I can't really save, and then you put that in and then it works for them?

34:35Everybody, regardless of what they earn, says they can't save any more than they already are. So I've actually just forked out for a new bit of open banking that fits into my client's account where we link it to the bank account so I actually can see. You're in there. But they truly have to. That's funny. You're going to be like messaging them going, what are you doing? So for those who are ready to be exposed, they can do that and really learn about our money habits. And I think it's exposing when you're in that accumulation phase. And it can be it can be exposing for lots of different reasons.

35:15But one that we saw last week, one of the first ladies to actually try it. the things that were important to her were actually the the things that she wasn't spending her money on and so then we start to change we well we are going to start to change and think about where she's putting her money needs to be switched to the things that are important to her which are holidays and seeing her family around the world this is what i said to you i was about to say this echoes demo a budget isn't a restrictive tool it's a tool to say this is the life i want and that's where i funnel my money and i think people think oh budget like i don't want to to be that restricted it's i know it's freeing it's these are my for me it's my son it's holidays you know it's growing my business so i can define that within the budget and then funnel the money there otherwise you spend it all on takeaways and mars bars you know or whatever and pasties pasties yeah you have pasties pasties you love a pasty yeah i'm not anymore mate but also it's That knowledge is power because when you get close to retirement and you're guesstimating what you spend, that can make you feel really nervous.