In short
Podcast Summary: Making Money - Episode on Teaching Money Skills
Episode Overview
- Title: How do we really teach money skills?
- Guest: Vivi Friedgut, CEO and founder of Blackbullion
- Focus: Discusses the importance of early financial education, strategies for teaching money skills, and the role of families and schools in financial literacy.
Key Concepts Importance of Financial Education
- Early Start: The earlier individuals start learning about personal finance, the better their financial outcomes.
- Control Over Finances: Financial education is a vital component of taking control over one’s life and future.
Current State of Financial Education
- Systemic Issues: The current education system is not adequately preparing students for financial realities, often treating financial education as an afterthought.
- Statistics: Most schools provide only a minimal amount of financial education (e.g., one hour per year), which is insufficient.
Recommendations for Teaching Money Skills
- Family Discussions: Engaging children in conversations about money from an early age (e.g., discussing bills during family meals) helps demystify the subject.
- Habits Formation: Encouraging small savings habits, such as saving £1 a month, builds a foundation for better financial management later on.
- Practical Learning: Teaching children about money should be practical and relatable, moving away from complex concepts like pensions initially.
Key Arguments Need for Curriculum Changes
- Integration into Existing Subjects: Financial literacy should be embedded into various subjects rather than taught as a standalone topic.
- Real-World Skills: Education should focus on applicable skills like budgeting, saving, and understanding debt.
Role of Parents and Guardians
- Primary Educators: Parents should play a significant role in teaching financial skills, as not all teachers have the expertise or time to cover financial topics effectively.
- Community Influence: A shift in how financial literacy is viewed and taught can take place through community and parental involvement.
Discussion Points Current Challenges in Financial Literacy
- Commercial Incentives: Concerns about companies profiting from financial education and the potential conflicts of interest that arise.
- Student Debt Concerns: Discussion on the fairness of student loan systems, especially for professions like teaching and nursing, which are vital yet often poorly compensated.
Future Directions
- Promoting Financial Independence: Encouraging students to explore gig economies and entrepreneurial ventures as a means to improve their financial standing.
- Continued Advocacy: The need for platforms like Blackbullion to continue advocating for improved financial literacy to create a generation that is financially savvy.
Takeaways
- Never Too Early or Late: Financial education should start as early as possible but can also be effectively learned at any age.
- Learning Environment: An engaging and supportive environment—whether at home or school—can significantly impact financial literacy outcomes.
- Engagement with Financial Products: Students should learn about financial products like credit cards and loans in a way that encourages responsible use and understanding of risks.
Conclusion Vivi Friedgut emphasizes the transformative potential of financial education in empowering individuals to make informed decisions regarding their finances, contributing to overall well-being and success. The podcast advocates for a systemic change in how financial skills are taught, stressing the importance of practicality, engagement, and community involvement in fostering financial literacy.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:01You know what I love, Damo? Things that save me time. You don't have YouTube premium, mate, so I just don't believe that. Granted, I'll give you that one. However, I've got one for you. A great time saver in personal finance is Money Week magazine. They spend a lot of time distilling the biggest stories in personal finance down into consumable chunks, so you don't have to scroll and scroll. They give practical tips on savings, investments, pensions, the UK economy, the global economy. It's like your five a day, but for finance. If you want to give Money Week a try, you can get six issues in print and the app absolutely free by visiting moneyweek.com forward slash money.
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.
0:49What happens at the moment is you've got money over here and you've got your rest of your life over here. And that's just not how our world exists. VB Freegot is CEO and founder of Black Bullion, a fintech business that helps students sort out their finances. I think that we need to review what a 21st century education system looks like. So if you want to get more nurses, which we know that we need, and if you want more good quality teachers, which we know that we need, scrap the student fees for them because it's actually a tokenistic thing because they're never paying it back anyway. My family always said you just got to work harder than anyone else.
1:19And then you can change things, right? Nah, I just meant you just sucked on the teeth of Damien, mate. Get me going pretty well. Check, please!
1:32You started as a wealth manager, is that right? I did. Yeah. So how important do you think financial education is in someone's success outcomes? I mean, in terms of their success outcomes, it's one of many factors, but it's a huge data point in terms of your ability to take control of your financial life. It means that you can take better control of your life in general. Whether we like it or not, everything boils down to money. Managing your money and budgeting and being able to spend exactly what you earn every single month is great, but actually having some leftover and then what do you do with that leftover?
2:03That's the difference between being financially secure and not being financially secure. It's that differential and that's what we are trying to get young people to think about. So our objective as a business is to get people to learn and to start. So one of the pieces of advice I give all students is open a savings account and put in one quid. Like that's it. Put in two pounds a month, right? Cut out one cup of coffee. Like I know it's a big joke but students, if you go onto campus, people are lining up outside Costa, right? Don't drink one coffee and put that money into the savings account. Not because that two pounds is going to make a difference.
2:35It isn't. If you're lucky and you do it from the beginning, you'll graduate with 300 quid, right? Not that that's nothing, but you know, but it's getting into that habit. It's thinking about what money can do. It's thinking about how money grows. It's thinking about interest. That stuff turns academic learning into practical, real money. And that's where the difference is. You just got to do. You say students and young people, and we've had a lot of guests on here, obviously, and they talk about your money habits are formed like under the age of seven or by the age of seven. What age do you think it's, firstly, what age do you deal with students?
3:08And when do you think it's a good time to start your financial literacy? So I think you should start as soon as you can start walking. I'm very lucky when money was spoken about around the dinner table. So it wasn't creepy. It wasn't money. I use students and young people kind of interchangeably, which maybe I shouldn't do because it gets confusing. But not all young people are students and not all students are young people. So, you know, the demographics in the UK of students has dramatically shifted. We have a lot of postgraduate students and we've got a lot of, you know, full-time undergraduate students who are parents and in their 40s and 50s.
3:41So it's very difficult to kind of be really specific today. My general concept is it's never too late to learn, but it's also never too early. So just, again, just start. So we had conversations around the dinner table about, you know, electricity. Did your parents say to you, you know, it doesn't grow on trees, money doesn't grow on trees and turn off the electricity and all of that. If I left the light on downstairs, my dad would come into my room at like 2 a.m., wake me up and be like, go to the kitchen downstairs in your pajamas and turn off the light. And I'm like, you just came from there.
4:09He's like, well, electricity isn't free. So even if I'm out of my fence, he'd call me, you left the light on, come back home. And I'm just like, so I learned pretty quickly that electricity is not free. I'm trying to tell my partner and my kid that as well but then she just loves leaving all the lights on yeah because you know because it's dark otherwise but what so what my parents used to do is put the bill on the table and be like this is what it costs us so because i'm blessed with having two brothers and and the three of us were involved in family financial conversation so we'd go to the supermarket every once in a while and my parents would give us a shopping list and they'd give us whatever a 50 dollar note right grew up in australia they'd give us a 50 dollar note and go whatever's left over you can keep and what it does in the supermarket is it makes you think oh do I need the Heinz ketchup or can I go for the home brand stuff so just get your brain thinking and of course you know to have you know two dollars afterwards very exciting because you can buy some sweets but but we were you know we were like under 10 doing that so it's just about starting to get those conversations going and removing the fear factor from money people have this like approach avoidance with money everybody wants it but nobody really fully knows how to use it until they spend some time doing it we are not born with this skill we're just not so the sooner you start the better and there's little things you can do don't have to start with pensions in fact don't start with pensions terrible idea how do adults who are not good with money themselves have those conversations with their kids and that's where that's where the trick is right so one of my ambitions with um with my company with black bullion is that we become redundant which by the way you don't hear a lot of businesses saying but in my wildest dreams i would love for the next you know two generations of students, young people at university to gain the skills that they need to then be able to pass them on.
5:47Because my mum's mum was not financially literate. So my mother had to become financially literate. And as a consequence, I now teach it. So in two generations, you've shifted the finances of a family. So how can we get, you know, adults, let's call them adults, I'll be, you know, specific about the categories, adults who've got kids, get them involved in some of these ideas, There's, you know, you can learn, you can read. There's YouTube. You know, there's so many places now. There's no dearth of information. There really isn't. Some of it's not particularly engaging. That's a problem. But there's no dearth of information.
6:20So how do you, we were talking influencers before, right? Who do you listen to? Where do you go? Where do you start? Budget. Make sure you've got a little bit of money left over. Keep your debt low. Start saving. When you've got enough savings, start investing. That's the entire journey of money. It's not any more complicated than that. But there's so much information that does get complicated. Like, yeah, especially if you're a student. when I was a student twice, you just get hit with like credit cards through the door. They're like, oh, do you want to get your credit? I was like, sure, free money, why not?
6:45And that was a bad mistake because I went on holiday and spent it all. And then you get like, oh, invest in this, invest in that. And you're like a student who doesn't, might not have a good financial understanding. And instead of opening a savings account or doing an ISA, the first thing you do is, oh, I'll buy these stocks or I'll buy this crypto or I'll do this because someone, an influencer or a company has reached out to you. And you're like, that makes sense, why not? And then, so yeah, it's kind of hard to know where to start by going online. A hundred percent. And one of the things, again, we're constantly trying to encourage people is A, read the small print.
7:16B, assume that if it's too good to be true, it is. And I'm forever saying to students, if I drove up a Porsche outside and it looked perfect and I was like, you can have this for 50 quid. You know something was wrong, right? Because it doesn't pass the smell test. You'd know. Well, you'd like to think. I'd probably still take it to me. For 50 quid, I'd probably still take it. But you'd know. Where is this Porsche? Why is this force? Just outside the door. But you'd know. Your smell test would be like something's dodgy. But if somebody says, oh, buy this crypto and it'll go up 1 ,000 % in a week, somehow people don't equate that with, well, hang on a second, something doesn't feel right.
7:50So that smell test gets developed over time. And that's why learning about finances when you're a kid at the dinner table, at school, at university is such a great time. Early things have huge impact later in your life, right? So a plane that is off, I'm going to get this wrong, and somebody will no doubt fact check me. But if a plane is off by one degree, then after 16 miles, you're one mile off course, right? If you start at the beginning because the distance starts to do that. Why can't we do that positively? Why can't we shift people's trajectory early in a positive direction? So start saving early, start putting away a little bit of money, start reading about investments, start reading some books.
8:27There's so much knowledge out there, like grab some of it. Why learn everything yourself? You mentioned that you hope the business becomes obsolete. do you feel then that you provide a service that should be provided by say the state or by the education system? So it won't surprise you given our conversation before we started that I'm not that confident in the state's ability to do well any of this kind of stuff. Part of the challenge that we have again is that there is a dearth of information. The problem isn't a lack of information. The problem is a lack of engaging and practical and actionable information.
9:02Government tends to not be great at this stuff. So the reason I hope that we can become redundant is because this is one of those skills that people should simply learn. Teachers are incredibly overwhelmed at school. Are we really going to ask teachers who are already like doing so much work in hours, out of hours, additional subjects to also get confident about money enough to teach like young people about it? I'm just not convinced. I would prefer that it was taught by parents and guardians at home. That for me is the ideal because it's the best way to do it. It's super early foundations. It's a way that you can have some of the later conversations in a better way.
9:37But I'm also unfortunately not optimistic that we will be redundant. We've been telling people not to smoke for 50 years. Yeah. So if it's not the government, it's parents, but the parents aren't, they don't know themselves, so they can't. So you rely on commercial entities. Correct. What about the incentives there though? Should companies that teach people about money be making money from that because then they're going to probably push people towards outcomes that suit them absolutely depending on what those outcomes are so we're a commercial organization we charge money for what we do part of the reason that we do that and i've got enormous enormous respect for charities i worked in the charity sector not-for-profit sector for two years money has to come from somewhere if you want good quality material and good quality people you have to pay them money if you're not charging for your service It means you're waiting for donations or you need to get some sort of, you know, grants and the rest.
10:27Some of that will come from government. But when I started the business, a very, very large payday lender who has since disappeared from kind of the face of the financial services sector offered me a lot of money to advertise to students. If we weren't a commercial organization, that would be very tempting because how else do you pay your staff? So I don't think that there's a problem in commercial organizations charging. What I would urge all people to do under all conditions with all things is figure out if that company, how does that company do well? Where's the alignment? So the only way we can do well is if we're helping students become smarter about their money, because universities pay us to support their students.
11:03So if all of those students were then taking out payday loans and using loan sharks and going to crypto and getting constantly in debt, university wouldn't pay for our services. So our objectives and our finances are completely aligned, which is why we just got our B Corp certification, right? If we screwed people over, our business model simply doesn't work yeah but that's not everyone that's not everyone no it's not it's it's more uncommon especially within my space you find that a lot of the content is paid for by platforms like brokers or something i made the decision to not be sponsored by brokers and it costs seven figures yeah yeah no totally but but but what that means is that i can sit here and be impartial yeah but this is why i asked you the question because i think a lot of the time people can consume information and think it's in their best interest whereas actually the incentives or the motivations of the company saying it are very different.
11:53I totally agree. And I think that leaves a challenge for people like you and me. Why can't we, while we are doing our job and hopefully generating revenue and creating great businesses, why can't we lean into a different way of creating business? Why can't we be the kind of businesses where other people are like, oh, not only are they making money and hiring amazing people and doing incredible things, but they're really moral and ethical. Why can't we be the vanguards of a new kind of business? Like I'm a huge capitalist. I'm a free market economist. Like this is where my economic like view of the world lies.
12:26When people say capitalism is a problem, no, it's not. It's the people who run businesses that are a problem. Businesses are not entities that exist in and of themselves. They're run by people. So if there's more people, hopefully like us, who are saying, I want to be making a lot of money, not going to deny that, but I want to do it in a way that also is a good way of operating where I give everyone a chance, where we're diverse and we have diverse opinions, we take different ideas in and we only do well if other people are doing well why can't that become the norm why does it have to be screwing people over as the norm uk has a great history of enlightened industrialists like cabarees round trees these quaker led businesses that basically built whole towns to live to house their workers and i think you know i've always thought that business can be a net benefit to every stakeholder whereas it seems to be sometimes it's like how can i extract as much from my side but i think within within what we do especially within what i do content you can get away with that for a little bit of time but over the long time you know if you want to be martin lewis you need to be a net positive otherwise you're not going to survive 20 30 years in the game because the people sniff you out completely like you said the universities will be like everyone's got a payday loan so you're clearly doing a crap job exactly you you mentioned that like what the teachers are already overworked and they can't learn about investing in teacher students but like i don't think we should expect them to do it i'm sure they could i don't think we should expect it curriculums change at school right and why can't they just say okay if we teach every all the kids in school like 13 common entrants for gcse about investing it's going to have a net benefit on the economy of the united kingdom like and also the teachers will be like oh i've learned a bit more i can do this with my pension or i can do this with my investments why is that not just common sense because it's gonna it's gonna there's no negatives it's benefiting the whole country totally agree let's do it i totally agree here there's a couple of issues.
14:10So speaking about Martin Lewis, Martin Lewis was a big part of the drive towards the all party parliamentary group on financial education. These names are never roll off the time. I can't believe you did it. In my head, I was like, AP, PG. And they passed it, right, in Parliament, that there would be financial education in schools. You know, fantastic. That's great. They've done it. The average school does one hour a year. Yeah. Right. So that's great. But that's absolutely meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. I don't think and it's a little bit controversial and I say this in the in the fora that I get invited to about financial education schools I don't think it's a subject I think when we're teaching maths why teach about percentages why not just teach about interest rates that's not because maths and English are compulsory so why can't they just incorporate it into maths it should be embedded into the curriculum exactly yeah which means a lot more and it makes it real life because what happens at the moment is you've got money over here and you've got your rest of your life over here and that's just not how our world exists.
15:05So when you talk about history, you know, most wars have to do with land and money. You know, a lot of geography and a lot of policy decisions revolve around money. Maths. So what happens is you have a generation of young people, particularly women, who say, I'm not good at math, so I'm not good at money. And actually, those two things have very little to do with each other. Money is much more about psychology. So if we could embed it in the curriculum so that no matter what subject you were doing, there was an element of what we call financial literacy. You know, risk. Risk is a huge element of money.
15:34We never talk about it. It's got nothing to do with maths. So 100%, if we could do that, oh, sign me up. I'd be the first person to sign up for that. I think the challenge that we have with teachers is that we've already got a literacy and numeracy crisis in this country. And so if I was a parent, there's an element of, can we please teach my kids how to read properly and understand how to do basic mathematics? So to circle back to what we were talking about before we started, I think that we need to review what a 21st century education system looks like? What does a good student need in order to survive in this crazy changing world?
16:08And we're not doing that right now. We're simply, we're redoing what we were doing 10 years ago and 20 years ago. You know, the biggest changes in schools is we now have whiteboards instead of blackboards. Like it's a running joke in ed tech. Like that's just not, that's simply not good enough. But we can't expect teachers to make the change. We had whiteboards about 10 years ago in high school yeah it's not like it's anything new yeah we had them ages ago oh we're giving kids ipads like that's great but so what like it's not that's not whether so in an ideal world we'd press pause we'd get the smartest educators in the room we'd get some industry people in the room and we'd figure out what does a 21st century education system look like we had that opportunity during lockdown yes we did but we didn't really take it no we didn't same with health care it was a perfect opportunity to reimagine these things but we didn't and it's such a wasted opportunity i mean we can't even reform tax in the budget so uh you know yes you know what back to what you were saying enlightened enterprise this is part of how you make change it's part of how you make change so we i'm sure you guys as well we train on the job we employ a lot of young people like the majority of my team is under 35 you know we do training we help people you know i nag people to death about getting their ISA done with their permission they tell me they want to be nagged and then I nag them until it's done.
17:22But, you know, that's not scalable on a national level and not everyone's going to have an employer, you know, like us and not all employers think that this stuff is important. And then it becomes the haves and have-nots. And what tends to happen when I sit in these, you know, at the House of Commons and get invited to these roundtables and everyone's talking about these grand scheme ideas. Okay, but actually, you know, we've got 300 ,000 students on our platform out of 1.2 million possible. Like, you know, you can rely to a certain degree on simply being creative and innovative and then that has scaled because people like us build for scale and we think about what scale looks like.
17:55But change never happens because government decides to do something. They don't even... Sorry, you have a quarter of students on your platform. We have 300 ,000 students in our platform, 1.2 million a year. That's over the last three years. So it's 10 % of students. Yeah. Last time we recorded, Tamein, 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 yeah, they were charging me thousands.
18:27They 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. Whether you're self-employed like me, a freelancer or a director like Damo, big dog. Instead of sending endless emails, bills and spreadsheets to your accountant, you just connect your bank, answer a few questions that are only relevant to you and your tax return can be ready in as little as 15 minutes. TaxApp is really easy to use and it's HMRC-recognized software. So it's safe, secure and legit.
18:57The price is also decent. So if you're self-employed with one income stream, it's just£89 as a one-off fee. No big accountancy fees. And we also have a discount code, of course. If you need to file a self-assessment this year, give TaxApp a try. We'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 as 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.
20:19Not 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 Vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description though, so you can just click that. they don't they don't even understand what young people want that's i mean like i get it all the time i meet policymakers and they're like yeah but kids just love short clips i'm like you're speaking to a guy who's got a podcast that's two out and like people watch i've made a video on the budget and it did 250 000 views in 24 hours that's amazing don't tell me that people just want clips people want detail they want they want people to explain to them they're like they're smarter than you think it's and the policymakers haven't even caught up with that they're just like oh ticky tocky you know the tick tock yeah yeah yeah well you and i mean i was just listening to a joe rogan episode on the way here and like joe's episodes are three hours long and he's talking deep policy and you do it so but they don't they don't understand and worse than they don't understand they don't understand that they don't understand that's why i bang my head against the table because it's like you don't even know how people want to consume the information the fca will be like influencers are bad they should read a press release no one's reading in your goddamn press release do you mean work with the go to where the audience is not don't force them to go on your like weird website oh if it was up to me so much of this would be different i agree i mean i can't i can't i can't disagree with anything you've said so okay one one thing i want to look at then because we talk about education we focused on free education but your your realm is in paid for education as in your students as in post like graduate and students don't pay universities pay no i mean you're you operate in a world where people are paying for their education oh correct we're not we're not talking about the freeze because we focused on the free school curriculum there as in you know juniors and high school but your business targets university college yeah so what do you think about the the cost of education you've said like education is important in terms of financial outcomes how do you see that system i mean this is probably one of the most controversial things in the country that only people like us are talking about, right?
22:31Yesterday, government announced that they're increasing the fees, the tuition fees, maintenance, which is actually what students are concerned about. So for anybody who doesn't know, our system is split into two. You get a loan where half of that loan goes to the university that you're studying at in order to pay for your education, and you get what's known as a maintenance loan to pay for your rent and your food and all the rest of it. And yesterday, government made an announcement that the full-time fees in England are going up by£280 pounds a year, which arguably is very little. And maintenance is going up by 3%, which arguably is very little because inflation is running higher than that.
23:07So actually, so that's, you know, and that's the only policy discussion that there is at all about higher education in this country, which brings in tens of billions of pounds in international students, in enterprise, in startups, and all the rest of it. Do I believe that education should be free? I don't know. I really don't. I think that education should be a manageable expense, but there is a reality on the ground. The one is that we make education completely free, in which case you have to look at how many people are going to university. And a lot of, you know, older folks who went to university pre-fees are like, when I went to uni, there were no fees.
23:43That's true, but 15 % of students went to university. Today it's over 50, post Tony Blair's whole thing. So first of all, we've got 50 % of students who are going to university. That costs money, buildings and electricity and teachers and research and all of the rest of it. So you can make it free and you reduce the number of people, which inevitably means elite students going who've got parents who've got money. Or you charge for it and you've got a more diverse range and higher social mobility opportunity. Social mobility for students who go to university is dramatically higher for lower socioeconomic students.
24:18So if you come from a low socioeconomic background and you go to university, your social mobility skyrockets. If you're a middle class kid who goes to university, your social mobility goes up a tiny bit. That's what happened to me. I come from inner city Birmingham. Right. Went to Durham and it completely changed my life. Yeah. No, because you met me. And I employed him. That's how his whole life changed. That's how his whole life changed. But that's exactly it. More than it just opened my eyes, I was like, oh, okay, people have money. I thought like, you know, a guy around the corner with his dad had a beat-up Mercedes.
24:50I thought they had money. Then you come to London and go, whoa, 100%. And it's networks. And I'm forever saying to students, the network that you build at university will in many times in your life be more valuable than a piece of paper. A piece of paper is great. It gets you through the front door. After that, it's all about your network. And I've got a mentor who's worth about 800 million pounds. He probably owns a beat-up Mercedes. And he said to me a few years ago, we were talking about networking and how important it was and how much easier it is today than what it used to be. And he reckons he can draw a direct line between a half a billion pounds that he's got and the fact that he went to Harvard Business School.
25:28Not because he went to Harvard Business School, but because when an opportunity comes up in his class at HBR, that HBS, Harvard Business Review has been on the mind, um that whoever that person is will first call all of the all of the school mates so it's just money attracts money so building up the network while you're at university is absolutely crucial are we really going to make it only rich kids and kids who come from more privileged backgrounds being able to go to university like what happens to all the other kids so but can you make it completely free you can but then where does the money come from and let's also as a final point remember that the fact that fees are wiped out for 50 % of students today, it means that we're paying for that as taxpayers, right?
26:10So on the one hand, the future economy is all about the knowledge economy. On the other hand, it's hard to argue that some courses at university contribute to that knowledge economy in meaningful ways that the taxpayer might be satisfied with. So as always, you've got to take from one to give to the other. You've just got to decide who you're taking from and who you're giving to. A lot of people don't understand the loan system and actually that it's quite progressive and really if you have a bad outcome from uni you won't even pay back correct what you what you borrowed it's the people who have good jobs who pay the most they're the people where they go okay your education has cost you over 100 grand but you know you've now earned a load of money yeah absolutely and so we're always telling universities and this has been a shift in their narrative don't talk about the 45 000 pound average talk about the 20 quid a month because if you are graduating into a golden circle law firm at the moment and you come from a good university you can start on 150 grand.
27:00That 22-year-old who's now sitting on 150 grand is not begrudging spending 200 pounds a month and paying back their student loan. The amount of debt you have is irrelevant. It's the amount you pay back a month over the time period and your lifetime earning potential, really. 100%. But if you go and it's bad and you end up on 25 grand a year, you won't even clear what you borrow. Well, bad or you go into one of the caring professions like nurses and teachers who we simply do not pay enough, in which case, and I've made this point in these meetings, stop charging them, stop charging them fees. They're not paying that fee back anyway.
27:29So if you want to get more nurses, which we know that we need, and if you want more good quality teachers, which we know that we need, scrap the student fees for them because it's actually a tokenistic thing because they're never paying it back anyway. Increase the fees on students like me who studied economics, for whom that piece of paper made a significant difference in graduate potential. And don't even talk about the fees. You know, use the mechanisms of the tax system, use the levers to get the outcomes that you want. Instead, you're saying, oh, nurses have a half a million pound debt by the time they graduate.
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27:59Well, yeah, but they never touch. So it's just a rubbish narrative. Yeah, and like you say, you can incentivize the behaviors you want. So if we need one year, we need doctors. It's like, well, it's free for doctors this year and you'll get a big flood of people go that way. Exactly. Use the tax system. I know it's really geeky, but like we've got so many levers in order to create the society that we want, but instead we don't use them. So as you said, like one year we want a lot of doctors, So this year we're going to give, we're going to double the maintenance for doctors and we're going to halve the student loan.
28:27And then as you said, you're going to get this massive ramp up. So it's just not, we're applying blanket rules to everything. The people who need to worry about their student loan is anyone earning over 65 ,000 pounds. If you're earning over 65 grand, you're going to pay the whole thing back. You're going to pay back three times more than you borrowed. That's for sure. If you spend your life on 40 grand, you're going to pay, you know, 20, 30, 100 pounds a month. I'm not saying it's not money, but it's hardly catastrophic money for anyone on a decent salary. It's a graduate tax, right? 100%. And what you need to do is, the question is, should I even go to uni?
28:56I think, you know, for, we did like, I did a finance degree at Durham. Do I need to go? I worked in sales after that. I probably could have just got into sales. You know, you sat next to a guy, the best guy in the room never went to uni. He dropped out of school at 15. He just knows how to sell. And I learned more off him in 10 minutes, you know. And the network, amazing. But, you know, we were also paying three and a half grand, not nine and a half. You know, and so I think for me, I think that's the conversation. don't worry about the debt go should i go to uni could i get a grad scheme or an apprenticeship and get into work that way and if you make the decision just forget about the amount yeah and also don't be so scared of making the decision and this is the other thing that i'd want to say to anybody everybody seems to be under this impression you've got to get everything right right off the bat and the truth is i mean i started in i started in sales i studied marketing couldn't get a job in marketing got to final round couldn't get a job ended up in sales where i was paid nothing except that I was great at sales, so made a fortune, went into the not-for-profit world, got headhunted into banking, and now I'm doing this.
29:57So I've had like five professions. You're not going to get everything right. You don't want to get everything right. Try. Do, you know, nothing's permanent. Like my network from Durham is amazing, like Damo and stuff. Obviously. But like the MBA network is like very, very - How many of them are paying you to sit? Yeah, all right. The MBA network's amazing, isn't it? Devo's got a sensitive ego. Look, you're the most important person I've met in uni. How about we start with that? Obviously. Goals without saying. I thought you would already know that, buddy. Sheesh. Some people got to stroke that ego.
30:31But with my MBA class, we've got like a WhatsApp group with all of us, 130 of us, and they're all over the world. And anyone who's like, oh, does anyone know anyone in J.P. Morgan? I'm applying for a job. Yeah, sure. I used to work there. So I work there, or my dad works, or my friend works there. I'll give, I'll put in a good word. So it's like the connections they can give you in ways you don't think about, and the job opportunities, and like the exposure, and different kind, like being, because it's a global MBA, you've got people, I go to America, I've got like four people, classmates there.
31:00So it's kind of the access it gives you to other parts of your life. Cannot disagree with that. Somebody asked me recently, what does social capital mean? And I was like, how many people do you need to call to get what you need? That for me is what social capital is. and you guys are too young to remember Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. No, I know what I am. Okay, phew. I'm feeling like an old lady. And since Marvel came out, that whole thing has been screwed because of the ensemble. But anyway, but how many people do you need to speak with if you need to get somebody at JPM, right? And the bigger your network is, I always say to students, think of yourself as a spider and like the bigger the web is that is around you.
31:35And they don't all have to be amazing connections, but you jump onto LinkedIn and you can drop somebody a message because they're connected to somebody. And actually, people are quite generous with their time and they're quite generous with their connections. If you're authentic, if you're authentic, if you're trying to BS people, as you were saying, people see right through that today. But networking today compared to 50 years ago, your dad had to work at JPM. Otherwise, you were not getting through that door and he had to play golf with the chairman, right? Today, I say to students, pick the kind of job that you want, find the 100 people doing that job, drop them each a message on LinkedIn and just go, hey, your career is super interesting.
32:10Can I buy you a cup of coffee? I really want to pick your brain. Ego is amazing. And of the 100, 40 people will say yes. All 40 will then pay for the damn coffee. But this is how you build a network. And you've never been able to do it the way that you can today. You just never have. Even just liking a post. In the past, it would be you'd have to go through your little flick book of numbers and call people. And, you know, you basically had to pick your eight people and hope that they did well. Now you could just wish happy birthday with one click of a button. And someone would be like, oh, you say happy birthday to me every year.
32:39yeah you could i'll give you a minute 100 and i just think we just need people are just people my first ever boss in sales i'm sure you had a similar experience when i was like terrified of picking up the phone he was like can i swear am i allowed to swear yeah yeah he said to me um don't be scared of anyone everyone gets up in the morning and does a shit and i was like it was the best advice i've ever gotten in my entire life i was like 21 years old it was the best advice ever people are just people people are just people everything that you want is at the end of a phone call an sms a linkedin a tweet whatever it is but the network is the sooner you can build that that web the bigger that web and the confidence to tap into and ask because i think that's a completely different skill set you know like that like confidence to say i need this or i want this will you give it me absolutely and like the answer is typically yes but absolutely think about the most embarrassing horrific vile thing that's ever happened to you it turns into an anecdote years later like things are only scary at the time i called off my wedding waiting before i can whip mine out as an anecdote i called off my wedding 12 hours before i was due to get married oh yeah so it's a wild story but it it was the most horrific thing in the world today i literally start presentations about fear with this because what's terrifying for you at the time later on you're like well i survived that i can certainly drop someone a linkedin message that's true i lost eight grand in crypto and i kept it a secret for like even my my fiancee doesn't know like yeah no she knows she knows now but i kept it a secret for like two years and one day on the podcast like it just came out and i was like oh it's actually i can look back on it and like kind of smile now but at the time i was like i'm an idiot you've ruined your life what is wrong with you why did you listen to this guy but but then like time heals always you look back okay it's a learning lesson and like you can yeah you can take but i think the best part about uni apart from the network is just the time to be yourself and like discover yourself not have stress of well some people do but like kids work like mortgage already like just be free make mistakes learn who you are develop as a person make mistakes like get some skills you know get more confident in yourself and be like okay i like this i don't like this find out what what floats your boat and what doesn't try things meet people talk to different people talk to people that disagree with you meet people from different countries like yeah you might grown up in birmingham or somewhere and then you meet different countries yeah meet somebody from leads no then you meet someone we don't like people from london grab in a different country no and then you meet someone from japan you meet someone from japan but you're from burmy yeah burmy is like a different world i love london sorry i just don't like this guy oh that class must have been fun with you guys did you um did you know your ex that you still put the altar oh no we're not this this is uh yeah it was um it was all very peculiar but it's a it's a great story today i'd like to think that like somewhere he's giving a presentation going i was stood up on the old time wasn't stood up he wasn't stood up but it was but it was it's amazing how many things in our life are like deeply deeply traumatic and deeply deeply terrifying and any decision that you make I truly believe any decision that you make within 24 hours seven days one month one year you realize was absolutely the best decision you ever made I was made redundant it was horrific at the time within two months I was like actually this is brilliant that's why I started my business like you just if you chalk up everything that happens to you as a learning opportunity as a way to become who you're meant to become nothing is scary like my dad always says if you're not dead and you haven't killed anyone everything's reversible and i honestly believe that yeah my dad's full of like these little things that he drops in but it's true like so you lose money right today you look back eight grand's a lot of money but today you know that that's not catastrophic money whereas when you're 15 you know it would be we interviewed um someone the other day former editor of the ft and he wrote a book on masayoshi's son who's lost 250 billion over his career.
36:19It's like, if this man can lose a quarter of a trillion, you can take a little bit of risk. A little bit of risk. Yeah, my eight grand's not looking too bad right now. He's still going as well. And he's worth like 35 billion now. So he's, yeah. What's 250 million? I always think like, anytime I'm thinking, oh God, like this is going to cost 10 grand, I'd be like, what would Masa do? Yeah. Carry on. Yeah, yeah. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. It's the only trick. We always laugh that, in my family, we always laugh that you can win just by being the last guy standing. You know, you see those Olympic races where like everybody falls and there's just like the idiot at the back who was the slowest runner ends up crossing the line first you just you you literally just have to keep going everything in life is an endurance battle it just is that's just the reality keep jumping the hurdles yeah just keep going what's the worst you'll meet amazing people you'll do incredible things you'll try new stuff you'll fail loads if you're doing life right you're failing loads you're just getting it right more often that honestly I just I just don't think this stuff is that difficult surround yourself with great people ask a lot of questions be humble Be humble.
37:14Assume you know nothing. It's much safer. Yeah, I definitely know no much. I was ready for you to jump in. I was this close. You got there first. I'm nice and humble over here. Yeah, yeah. Occasionally. On the university point, do you think that all courses should be the same price? I mean, logic would dictate that it makes no sense that that happens, right? But unless it's legislated, quote unquote, in some way, everyone's going to take the maximum they can. but we know that to train a doctor is going to cost a very different amount than to train somebody who is an anthropologist or a job i'm an anthropologist did i know that no i don't know asking why i picked anthropology why did you pick anthropology oh don't do me like that well honest honest answer grenades honest answer um i want to do sociology my dad's like sorry for anyone who does sociology my dad's like that's not serious enough you need to do a more serious degree do anthropology so or do something else so i looked around anthropology this is not the reason and it had it was like 95 um women on the course so that's a good enough reason it was a great i was networking away he's playing the arts i respect that i respect that i liked it you know what as long as you know what you're trying to achieve out of it why not yeah go where you gotta go but it's probably a cheaper degree than medicine in terms of executing on it so if you could it would make sense but if but if you do then you use medicine becomes elite right if you say that medicine is 200 then people won't do it absolutely and that's and that's why there's never a simple answer because every lever has you know there's a there's a downstream impact of everything i like what we were talking about earlier which is about using the levers in order to shift the dynamic of graduates yeah you could say okay we've had enough doctors now so it becomes more expensive exactly or you massively skyrocket the price of the degrees that you think are less valuable to society and you drop the ones that are more valuable to society so you charge a lot more on i don't want to get in trouble with anybody but you charge you know you charge a lot you charge a lot less on doctors than you would charge on something like maybe fine arts if anybody wants to yell at me like they can so i think we just need to be open to having the tough conversations even just as an intellectual exercise what does a 21st century education system look like like let's just have the discussion you know and then how far are we from that yeah like and then you should common sense should dictate okay this is what it should look like and this is where we are all the way back here right maybe we should try and bring them closer together right and and how do we get there and how much money are we willing to spend and where are we willing to make so i just i just would love us as a society to just be talking more about the difficult things and we just don't because everyone's scared of saying the wrong thing and upsetting people and we shouldn't be upsetting people deliberately but if we disagree we're naturally going to get upset so let's have some debate yeah yeah we get upset about things anyway exactly things that don't matter well apparently about not being loved and not being my favourite university networking friend I thought we established that I was are you saying that that might not be the case no you're the creme de la creme don't worry you're still up there you're still number one I think we need some community notes permanently attached put it in writing sign here docusign on its way bringing this back to students then sure because I love talking high level but I think we want to make it quite like yeah let's do it or just for young people what do you think some of the worst kind of myths about money that you see these people believe?
40:32That you can't do anything until you've got some. I don't think that's true. I think there's a lot of foundation work that you can do in terms of, like I said, the two quid, open the bank account. Like the hardest thing about saving is opening the ISA. Not because opening an ISA is hard, but there's always something better to do. Think about the last holiday. I'm always saying this to students. Think about the last holiday you took and how much time you spent planning the perfect hotel, the perfect outfits, the perfect flight, who you're going with, right? You two looking at each other because you spent on a big holiday.
40:58I outsourced it all today. He's smart, smart. But when people do that about money, not so good. But like how much time do you spend thinking about holidays? But then with money, you don't think about it at all. So you think about the huge purchases, right? But you don't think about the, it sounds really cliche, but you don't think about the three pound cup of coffee and the two pound magazine and the five pound pint and the, you know, a couple of takeaways in the week. That stuff really does, it actually really does add up. So you can do a lot before you have a lot of money. I would say to students to focus on what's right in front of them and not worry about the future so much.
41:31When you're studying, you don't need to worry about your pension. You don't need to worry about credit scoring. There's plenty of time for that stuff. Life is a really long game. So like set yourself up really well at the beginning and then worry about it later. So those would be my tips to students. Think about your money. You can only spend it once. But the second you graduate, start saving, start investing, put your pension away. Like the sooner you can do that, the better because time is your best friend when you're young. you say that you tell them not to worry too much about the future but do you find that they are worried about the future yeah the students today are worrying about everything in a way that we didn't well certainly we didn't worry about at all we assumed we would get a job afterwards we were also willing to take any job that came i mean i started on a thousand dollars a month like that was my salary which even by today's standards pretty crap um we knew we'd get a job we were willing to work really hard and we were willing to you know if my boss said anything my answer was yeah of course bring it on today it's not so much you know you want days off and there's mental health days and that's not in my job description it's a very different way of looking at the world you know i think that they're right to be concerned about certain things but i also think they're very easily resolved these problems work hard assume that you have no power at the start of your career you're there to learn that's your job yeah i always had that attitude yeah i'd like i was just there borrowed time almost just gotta prove why you're there yeah and learn everything you can right this is the problem with university from my perspective was it gave me too much confidence in my own ability and then i entered the real workforce and they were just like you know nothing mate you know absolutely nothing like shut up like literally it was like a humble slap absolutely because you know you come from uni and you're like oh you know i can drink 10 pints of beer and be okay i might tell you yeah yeah i wrote i know how to row and be over into shabar like that's what it was like you're in the workplace you're like what do i do yeah but smart people are like this is my time to really prove myself and when you're when you like you were saying like you've got no responsibilities you've got minimal responsibilities um you've got all the time in the world when i was in banking i was doing 14 hour days you would not hear me complain if my boss needed anything i was the first one to volunteer and you know you can say well you know what about your mental health what about your social that was not what i was worried about i was worried about how quickly can i get on the property ladder How quickly can I get an investment portfolio in?
43:45And then once all of that was done, then it was like, okay, now what? Not that my investment portfolio is so big, but like financially I was then more stable. I could start the business and all of that. And I don't feel like that's the attitude now. I feel it's very much like you are lucky to get me. And it's like, actually, like if you left, I could replace you in two weeks. Like relax. So it's, you know, I just think there's a little bit of humility that's needed. And I think universities, and I say this publicly at university conferences, I think we're infantilizing students. I think we're treating them like children in a lot of ways and that's not setting them up for success beyond.
44:17Oh, yeah. I think so. Oh, 100%. 80 % of students on campus say that they have a mental health issue. 80%. There is an element of we have to protect students. We have to look after students. Now, some of that is right. Some of that is right. But there is an element of, well, yeah, dude, you've got the Monday blues. We all get that. Like get over it. You don't have anxiety. You don't have social issues. You just don't want to get out of bed because you had a heavy night last night. We've all been there. so I think again I just don't think we're setting them up for success the real world is not like that we should be teaching students to be anti-fragile I don't know if you're familiar with with Taleb's book about this but the idea that if you take a hit not only do you not break but that hit makes you stronger going forward which I think certainly from the conversation we've been having I would imagine both of you lean into as a concept right like bring it on like I can take that I can take that and the idea that something happens and you need two days off to recover and process you know it's you see all these these like reels like videos and it's like eight 90s babies they like hit their arm on the door they just keep walking then you see like 2 000 babies they hit their door like oh that hurt then you see like nowadays then they like they like brush their shoulders like mama they're like rolling on the floor crying and i'm like you see this more and more but do you think it's actually it is people are getting softer like it's not just sent our generation saying oh everyone now every generation says i think the only generation who can say it were the ones that were in the war they can say everyone after us was soft yeah and i think there's an element of that that's true but how many people do we see when you flick through you know reels and tiktok and instagram and the like and it's people who've set up their camera and then they're crying into the camera that is so frustrating oh my god you're so cringe yeah they're in their car and they're like record he dubbed me and you're like oh my god you literally are going live while you're crying so you had to set up the camera and then it's so embarrassing yeah it's things we would never even think of it and i would never want to be on camera crying and i just think we need intentionally we need to be really careful of generalizing a whole demographic as like these few clips that we see i'm just not sure that like i bet there's 18 year olds out there now that are like ready to get it you know and they're not you know they're not all thinking i need a mental health day or whatever and i've got a bunch of members of my team who are in their early 20s who are far more sorted in their lives than i was far more sorted i've got a i've got a member of staff she's uh she's i think she's 22 23 she's bought her own apartment with her fiance so sorted i was never that sorted at that age the problem is people do generalize that that is a reality so you know we're making a bit of a bit of a joke about it but you know i would like to think the majority of my team are not like that my family always said you just gotta work harder than everyone else and then you can change you can change things right i just meant you just sucked on the tee of Damien make, get me going pretty well.
46:53I mean, that is not an image I needed, but thanks. That was traumatic. We've got a calendar. You want to say. We've got a calendar. Now I'm going to cry into my phone. Oh, my God. Check, please. You guys are so scary. I love it, though. I think, you know, you're broadening your economic horizons by going into calendars. I think that's fantastic. I really admire that. Making money diversifying. Let's go. Diversification is very important. I bet the calendar game's been hit a lot in recent years, to be fair, through technology. Yeah. Although the fireman's still doing that. Cliff Richard's just like, son.
47:28How is that your default go-to? No, he's big in the calendar game, is he not? I'm a fireman girl, so I don't know what to tell you about. Fair enough, fair enough. That was not a great image in my head. Really, that was traumatic. Let's talk about your business a little bit then. So what was the leap from Wealth Manager into the space that you've gone, and then why did you target the student market? Yeah. So I don't like it when people go, I'm passionate about. I think it's like really, I'm obsessed with financial literacy. So passion is like way back in the station. So when my mom was 11, her dad was reading her bedtime story and had a massive heart attack and died in front of her while he was reading her bedtime story.
48:08And the reason that's relevant is he hadn't signed life insurance papers. And this is 1950 South Africa. And my grandmother obviously had never worked because women didn't work. And financially, the family went from being, you know, pretty solidly upper middle class to being in financial distress. And my mum, you know, at 16, you know, started to work and became an accountant by going school. You want to talk about discrimination? My mum was one of six women out of a class of 850 men back in the day. Today women outnumber men in accounting. Not an anthropology class. Not an anthropology class.
48:40No, no, no. This was like need money, need to pay the family bills. And so my mum became very, she herself became very obsessed with the idea that money is power to have choice. And since then, of course, we hear a lot about, you know, people who stay in abusive relationships because of money and things like that. So that was really ingrained in her and she, as I described, you know, really ingrained it together with my dad's full support, ingrained financial literacy into us as kids. And so I've spent my whole life with friends going, how do I invest? What does this mean? What does that mean?
49:08But there was no business to be made. so I actually started my first business when I was six um but um but uh what you know when it economics and when sales and when and then when I was made redundant from the bank I was like let's give this thing a go I got a payout um I was like let's give this thing a go and when it fails I'll go back to Australia and go back to banking that was the theory and I started I called a bunch of universities and said your students are terrible with money uh I can teach them I mean you can see my personality right so I'm I'm a decent presenter and um and these kids loved it and I was going in being to 200 students about debt.
49:40I mean, rock and roll stuff. But they loved it. And the universities kept paying. And I did that for a couple of years. And then I pulled my back out on the train back from Aberystwyth, which took me like an hour to figure out how to spell it and pronounce it. And I pulled my back out. And at the time, I had an offer from JP Morgan. So it's funny that came up to go back into wealth management because there were no women. So you could write your own ticket. And I was like, do I go back into banking or do I give this thing a go? and I said to the universities, if I build a tech solution, I knew nothing.
50:07I still know very little. If I build a tech solution, will you pay for it? And three of them said yes. And I said, can you pay now and I'll deliver in September, which I didn't know you're not supposed to do. And they said, yes. So I called an agency. They built the most embarrassingly terrible platform you've ever seen in your life. There was the best thing in the market. And that was seven, that was nearly seven years ago. So fast forward and we deal with universities who make us compulsory for their students or voluntary for their students. so we've got a learning platform we cover 85 different topics we've built out a bunch of tools last year the year before last the end of end of 22 i bought a company in the middle of a seed round that was a hell of an experience um in the u.s the scholarship market corporate scholarships is worth about eight billion dollars in this country it was worth one million pounds um so it's a huge like job of work to be done with that so bought a company started to build that out then we launched our app a few months ago so it's been a very fast evolving business but nobody thought we could do this like nobody thought we could do this even you no oh six months I was giving it six months I'm going back to Australia there was no way this was like a scrappy idea universities don't buy stuff the sales cycles are crazy long um students don't engage with learning about money it's like really boring and struggling to go to lectures let alone go to extra exactly exactly um but it turns out we were the right product at exactly the right moment um students are less likely to need emergency funding they're less likely to to need mental health support towards the end of their um towards the end of their uh loan drop we work with amazon with nationwide providing corporate scholarships tens of thousands of pounds worth of corporate scholarships so it's been an amazing ride but it i never thought we'd get this far i could have used this in uni it's a bit late now so one day we don't have i had credit cards coming through my door and i'm like okay cool that's what i had so students don't use credit cards anymore it's really interesting and only 34 percent of students use their overdraft wow I started my overdraft when I got to uni.
52:01They're like, oh, here's a Barclays student account with like a two grand overdraft. I'm like, sure, have some of that. I had two. Two? Yeah, yeah. How did you do that? I opened them both within 10 minutes of each other. Okay. That's my boy. Yeah, he's a hustler. He's a hustler. I mean, he had to hustle, I had to pay him back. It wasn't exactly like a clever hustle. But you got them. But you got them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so students don't use overdrafts. We get a lot of calls from students who've blown through their overdraft going, why isn't it reset? It's like, okay, let's explain to you how.
52:31Come on. But this is exactly the thing. We laugh about it, right? I keep refreshing it. They're like, but where's my two grand? I'm supposed to have two grand. It's like, but you've spent it all. But this is the problem is they don't know. They don't understand. So they use buy now, pay later. That's the default credit facility. Like Klarna. Instead of credit cards because credit cards are not time bound. So because it's not forcing you to pay it back within a particular time, they're very uncomfortable with credit cards, which is really a complete shift. Complete shift in behavior. But I mean, when I worked in debt services, like the buy now, pay later was predatory.
53:03It was like Bright House and things like this. Like the Christmas ones. Yeah, the catalogs, like Littlewoods. And then you had like these shops where you could go in and it'd be like, oh, I was so for a fridge, a TV. And it'd be like, oh, it's five pound a week. And before you know it, you've got 100 quid a week, but it's over five years. And if you look at the APR, it's like a payday loan. And if you don't pay it, they take the stuff. So we would get it all the time where I would say to people, we can get rid of all of your debt apart from that because if I wipe that debt through insolvency they're going to clear out your house and they'll take your fridge they'll take your tv they'll take the kids bed like you know everything people don't understand yeah the weekly payment stuff so when I see Klarna and they're like we've revolutionized payments I'm like you're just using an old business model there that's there was we basically shook it out of the UK because it was so predatory yeah so Klarna is a little bit better if you use it as it's meant to be used it's interest free because it's interest-free but if you miss a payment or you're late then they get you this is credit credit cards are amazing for the 90 % of people who pay them off but the other 10 % pay for everyone else to have it for free absolutely there's someone out there that's getting rinsed by it you know and this is why we said like right at the beginning when I said look at how a business if a business is super successful what do they have to do to get there and for a company like Klarna and they're very similar to everybody else the best way for them to make a lot of money is for people to get heavily into late fees so it's again it's a misalignment but credit cards are fantastic i mean i've got i've got a credit card that's that's kind of bouncing i bounce it every 18 months onto another zero percent just because my money goes into you know business and whatever um and people don't even know that zero percent cards exist but you've got to have a good credit score so if you don't have a good credit so again as long as you don't need the money there's plenty of money out there for you so you need the money you can't get ads on any of it being a student and getting a credit card is the worst time you get it because you don't have like a regular stable income and you don't really understand all the connotations and i was out in israel taking stuff out the cash machine with my card and it's just like you don't really think oh this is going to cost me way more than just take it out with my debit card so absolutely with a 25 % APR yeah yeah 100 % I also want to say don't take out two student overdrafts in 10 minutes yeah you're not you're not down with that idea anymore I've realigned my efforts like I was safety you know like I put I put the hustle into like because I was like oh so it takes a couple hours to log on the system so if I just hit both banks at the same time they're not going to know that I've got another one i'm so proud of him i'm so proud to know you this is the guy i met this is the guy i met i like you and then i took one of them i bought i went into a bar and bought everyone in the bar a drink and blew they would have loved you this is why we became friends we met in the club it's the free bar it's the free drink i love it i love it but this is the thing today with these with these students as well as you can make a lot more money than you ever used to right gig economy is huge we're about to do a um a piece of learning about drop shipping which is huge with students you can be doing consulting work you can do freelance work you get onto fiverr and up like there's a lot of ways to make money that we didn't have we had none of that we were i was at one point we were trying to import saffron to sell saffron that was as good as it got very random because we were just like what what can we move it's like no way we were doing shilajit as well post uni but no that when i was at uni me and my mate were like we painted golf balls um and we were like why don't go why are golf balls why why don't we like make them so they're like dead colorful like It's stupid.
56:16Did anybody go for that, though? No, I mean, we didn't go much past that. And then we just resorted to the standard student thing of arranging nights out. So we were just like, you know, promote it. Right. Because we were at Durham and we just organised a trip to Newcastle. But it's great if it does what it needs to do. But that's what you have to do. You have to provide like a physical service or good. Whereas now it's like you say, you can do it all on your laptop. Yeah, yeah. And all universities now have enterprise hubs where you can start a business while you're on campus. They've got advice for you.
56:44There's money usually available, not huge amounts, but enough to get started. Uni is such a huge experience if you use it well. You can really squeeze the gut. I always say to students, do everything that's free. Get everything that's free. Get all of the support. Go to every single session. Go to every single speaker. Join every society that doesn't cost you money and then select the ones that do cost you money. University should be the greatest time of your life in terms of discovering who you are and making your friends and trying new things and all of that. It's a great experience. Yeah, I didn't get the most out of the services at all.
57:13But you met him, so you're good. You had a good time. You had a very good time. And you had saffron. So quite frankly, I don't know what else you're asking for. Mad about saffron. It's the most random, although we were talking calendars before. I'm not sure it is the most random thing you said. Well, I also was in one of them at uni, the rowing calendar. I was naked in the rowing calendar. There's naked, there's saffron, this podcast has everything.
57:39Please remember, this is not financial advice. Like we say a lot on the podcast, investments can fall and rise. In fact, it's pretty much a guarantee. Past performance is no guarantee of future results. So your money is at risk with investing and other fees may apply. As with everything financial, please do your own research. We really encourage that because no one cares more about your money than you. I'm Damo. Banty. This was an episode of Making Money from Our Company Most. It was filmed and edited by the team at Flow Spire, Jack and Ben. It was produced by Ruth Edwards and brought together by Will Stallerman.
58:09What about Ruth and Toothless a dog? Yeah, shout out them too.
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