S1E10: FSCS - Are your savings and investments protected?

28:43So there are certain things that we can and certain things that we can't cover. And it's really hard to give a kind of yes or no answer until something actually happens because everything has to be investigated on its own kind of merits at that point. What's the scariest word in the English language to me? Tax. How does it make you feel, mate? stressed sweaty palms squeaky bum time don't like it mom's spaghetti yeah exactly you got one shot one opportunity to not go to jail for avoiding tax like yeah i don't like tax it's scary tax can be really stressful which is why we're excited about our partnership with tax app they started in ireland and now they're in the uk and they make self-assessments way less scary what i like is how quick it is you just enter your info connect your bank and it helps you do your expenses to reduce your tax bill.

29:30You suddenly know exactly what you owe, no waiting around for an accountant to reply, and you can file in as little as 15 minutes. Yeah, and it's built for all kinds of people. Company directors, freelancers, the self-employed, side hustlers, or even people who work full-time who need to do a self-assessment. For example, anyone who needs to claim back high-rate tax relief on their pension at work. The HMRC recognised, so they're safe to use. Plus, TaxApp flags reliefs and benefits you might miss, so you're not leaving any money on the table. And they're really reasonable too. So from just£89, you can have your self-assessment sorted.

29:59If you've got to do one this year, check out Tax App. You can get 10 % off as well using the code in the link in the description. The code is MONEY10. So that's M-O-N-E-Y-1-0. Okay, T, talk to me about your attitudes towards risk. I mean, I like a bit of risk in my investments, but I definitely would say since the podcast, I've toned it down a little bit, not quite as gung-ho and like carefree as I was in risk. So yeah. Yeah, shooting from the hip all the time, weren't you? Yeah. I think personally that you should take risks, but it should always be in areas where you have a unique skill set, an edge, expertise, like your job, things like this.

30:34One area that I wouldn't take any risks is compliance. Yeah, the risk changes you grow in business and you need to be on top of it, which is why we partner with Vanta. Vanta automates a lot of risk processes and helps you see your risks in a centralized platform, so you know what really needs your attention. Besides risk, the main thing Vanta does is automate compliance with security protocols you need to scale, like GDPR, HIPAA, ISO 27001, and SOC 2. The beauty of Vanta is they make it easy to prove you're compliant with these standards, saving you up to 90 % of the time it takes, and on average, half a million dollars.

31:09If you know what these acronyms like SOC 2 are, you probably need Vanta. You can book in a demo at vanta.com forward slash making money. There's a link in the description. One area that's clearly a lot of people are losing a lot of money through all different means is cryptocurrency. Yeah. And that doesn't fall under your space. No, it doesn't. Could you ever see a world where that was caught under that umbrella? Because if you treat it from a perspective of where the people need to help, that is it. Yeah. So cryptocurrency as an asset, absolutely not covered because it's not regulated in the UK.

31:40If you were advised, again, by a regulated advisor to invest in crypto, that is absolutely something that we could consider because we're not looking at the crypto, we're looking at the advice that you were given. And that's the activity that we're concerned in. So in some respects, I think a lot of it boils down to making sure people are getting the right advice. And if they are able to use a regulated advisor to make big decisions, you know, you're not going to do that if you're putting a few thousand pounds into something because it's just not going to be financially viable. But yeah, what we cover and what is regulated is constantly under review, I think.

32:16And I know there's a lot of different bits of legislation going through Parliament and things at the moment. There's a new Financial Services and Markets Act. I can't remember the name of it, but a new equivalent of that that's currently working its way through Parliament that might change things in the future. Last year, funeral plans came under regulation and became protected. So things are getting added all of the time. And I think there's always that gap, though, isn't there, between what consumers are doing and what's available and how fast policy responds to that. And also, people are just speculating in that space and you don't protect against losses from speculation.

32:49No, we absolutely don't. But there is a lot of scams in that space as well. And there's a lot of - Scams are really frustrating for me personally because we can only cover you if you dealt with a regulated entity. If you're scammed and the person that you've dealt with is completely unregulated, there's literally nothing we can do. And that for me personally is really tough. It's horrible. Because we see so much of it. Yeah, because I worked in the credit card industry and obviously there was protections there. You could be pretty confident that if your credit card was, money was taken off it, you would have that money back pretty quickly.

33:21That was part of the perks. But at the same time, there's an argument of, it kind of means that people become a bit sloppy because they know that they can just call up the card company and it can be reversed the transaction. So I don't know if you're bailing people out everywhere, they get scammed, it would be, does that promote more scammers into that place? Because they know that they can. I don't know. I mean, some of the things that we see are basically people impersonating regulated firms or impersonating the FCA have got a page on their website that's constant warnings about impersonation and like copycat.

33:57Do people steal your logo and stick on their website? Yeah, 100%. That's so easy, isn't it, right? Well, I get that through my YouTube channel. People just take my profile picture and message, I'm going to clone my Instagram, message people and say, I'm Damien, invest in this cryptocurrency and people fall for it all the time. It's so easy to do. I got my Instagram hacked I've got about eight people pretending to be me. My friend's like, vote for me for this influencer award. I'm like, sure, I click the link and then it's like, you're locked out of Instagram. And I call my friend, they're like, that's not me.

34:22That's like a duplicate profile. So it happens. It's so easy to do in today's day and age. And it's really, I say for me personally, it's really frustrating to say, because I mean, there are some scams that you look at them and you're like, oh God, that was so obvious. Why did you fall for that? But now they're getting so sophisticated. I was reading something a couple of weeks ago about how, do you remember even just a couple of years ago, like spotting a scam was all about, you know, poor spelling, you know, whatever. Chat GPT is changing how scammers are behaving like overnight because they're able to pump out really realistic sounding promotions.

34:53People who can barely speak English. Yeah, they're able to just turn something out that's much more convincing than it was. In French. Yeah. Right, Mia Fann, you are, yeah. It's scary really how easy it is for people. And I think, I mean, I always say to my parents and, you know, friends and family doing your research is so important and i know um the fca have talked about bringing things in like um kind of cooling off periods and things like that and i i personally think there's a great idea because that's something a scammer wouldn't do right they're not going to have a cooling off period in a investment or anything like that because they just want your money and they're gone and i think there's kind of the as you say with things like crypto people are being speculative there is a bit of a maybe fear of missing out and wanting to kind of get involved in something that looks pretty lucrative yeah and you can make snap decisions that are possibly not the right thing to do and that's where scammers are rife right because you make that one snap decision and if someone does get scammed can you help them if they're with like a bank so you know sometimes they call up old people and they say oh uh we need your card number because some an amazon purchases and then they go and give all their details if they then get scammed i guess the bank will cover that yeah so we because we can only step in if the bank's gone Okay, so the bank would just come for it.

36:06And if the bank, if they response from the bank, they weren't happy with, they can take that to the ombudsman. But if the bad advice came from an advisor who was qualified, you can step in, but if it was a scammer pretending to be that person, you can't. Yeah, we can't. And that's the difficulty because there's no regulated entity there for us to sort of pin that claim against. And it's only going to get worse, as you say, with technology. I mean, I think it is. Yeah, personally, I think it is. But securities can also get better with technology. Like for this transaction, do a face scan or like, you know.

36:34But I think it's really hard for people trying to get into investing. You know, like if you, I was like this a couple of years ago. I never invested. Everything was in cash. And mainly because I was scared because of what I'd seen working in finance. And I was thinking, goodness, it's so hard to get in. And if you can't afford financial advice, which is expensive, it's not really viable if you've got a small amount of money to invest. How do you get into investing for that first time? And I know, again, the FCA are consulting on a new kind of part of the advice regime that is going to allow simple advice to get into a stocks and shares ISA for the first time.

37:08And again, I'm not involved in all the detail of that, but on the surface, that feels like a good idea to me because I do think people need help to get in and make that jump from cash to investing. I've heard about this podcast called the Making Money Podcast. I think that's a good way to get started in investing. But it is hard. I'm guessing you get a lot of people who... Yeah, well, I mean, I did an Investing for Beginners video that's got like half a million views and people just say like why is this not taught at schools why why is there not this open conversation why do I have to seek this information out or why do I have to pay hundreds if not thousands of pounds just to be told if you take a little bit of money and put it in this ISA like that that will change your life if you do that consistently over a long period of time but yeah the the broker point so I asked my audience for questions for you and there was a financial advisors asking me questions for clarification which I thought was interesting because I think there's just some kind of myths and misconceptions about what you do yeah they they were talking about if you have money on a broker um like a trade in 212 a free trade whoever but i then buy vanguard funds who where's my cover am i covered through vanguard because they hold the money or am i covered through my broker so depends on the type of company and whether they're regulated or not and what they're regulated for and it depends on what happens i guess so if you were in a platform like a couple of examples that you gave and the platform itself collapsed.

38:29Yeah. And like you said, but the fund you've got is with someone else, then the fund is still going to be there assuming that they did what they said they'd done and they bought those funds on your behalf. So that would be like the example I gave earlier where potentially what we could do in that situation is help you move to a new platform and work with the administrators to facilitate that. If the fund itself collapses underneath and the provider's still there, then it would depend again on the circumstances is whether that fund was, whether it was just poor performing and that's life investing or whether there was mismanagement there and whether there's a regulated company there to turn to.

39:04So it depends entirely on what actually happens. And this is why it is quite difficult to say, yes, that's protected and no, that isn't for anything other than deposits really, because it will so depend on who was involved, what happened and all of that has to come out in any investigation. But in theory, it could apply to either. So it could apply to either the platform or the fund under the day or indeed both so we've seen um you can have two or three different regulated parties involved in one chain um so i dealt with a case recently of a lady who came to us um who was uh misadvised on a pension she actually ended up over the space for a few years at making four different claims against four different entities she had incredibly bad luck but in part of her journey there was four different companies that had gone bust that had all done something not quite right.

39:53So incredibly bad luck, but you can, just because there's one event, if there's two firms involved and they both happen to be out of business that you can end up having claims against both. I know it's a feature of the fact that you only insure advisors, but it's also scary to sit here and listen to you say, well, you should get an advisor, but the advisors are aware of all the... They can charge your money and give you bad advice. You've got to put this into perspective, right? So we might be declaring, say up to 100 firms a year in default that's across a market of thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of advisors and a lot of times those firms that fail might only have a handful of claims so you've got to put it in perspective it's not um all of these advisors are human beings mistakes will be made throughout people's careers especially over a whole country 100 % yeah but that's why we're here right and we're there to be able to even if it's just one person that has had poor advice and that firm's gone out of business if we can prove that that's happened then we can help that one person and that's that for me that's really important what would you say is like a common misconception or like the biggest myth you hear about fscs like will people come to you say can you help me with this you're like no we can't we don't do that i think the biggest misconception um is usually about things like uh like when we can step in so all the different conditions that kind of have to be met so the firm has to have gone out of business there has to be no other kind of recourse for you to be able to follow up um and the fact that if you still trade and you've got to go to the ombudsman um i think the other misconception is is that people can't kind of make a claim themselves and we talked about this before but it's free and that's something we get asked a lot is do i need a solicitor do i need to use a claims management company or whoever you can choose to do that if you want to and they'll handle the paperwork for you but you can completely do it yourself i think for me the biggest thing that um and i see it a lot online and when i'm talking to people is and it's as frustrating for me as it is for other people not not being able to give you a categoric answer and say yes that's protected and no that isn't and that's just a function of the rules and i'll say all these eligibility criteria and things that have to be considered if a firm does actually go out of business and all that in kind of individual investigation that has to go on we call it like the invisible effort it's the stuff that we're doing behind the scenes to check that those claims are eligible and check that everything's um kind of okay to be able to pay compensation so people get really frustrated and sometimes a bit scared i guess that we can't just be like yes that's 100 covered it's a symptom of the times everyone wants like instant gratification they're like let me type in my details and just give me an answer now but yeah and you get it and we can give those category answers for deposits for the money in the bank we can give that category cancer for insurance they're weird about brokers they don't like me sitting there going this broker is covered because they're like well yeah it might not be all the investments might not be and that's exactly it there are so many individual circumstances that apply to every different transaction every different individual that's making those investments that it is really hard to give that category so as an let's say you're a retail investor and you're putting your money into a broker and you're trying to better your life but but you also wanna be conscious of just setting it up in a way that gives you the most protection.

43:10Is there any best practices that someone could go through like places they can check the brokers, types of investments that they should stick to or - So the only thing I can give you here is my personal view, right? So I can't give you advice. I'm not an advisor myself. No, no, no. Otherwise we'll be seeing you in a couple of years. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She gave us this advice. Yeah, you would advise. Yeah, absolutely not. Let me write this down. She owes me 50 grand. I have considered doing the exams, you know, just to sort of live it from that side of it. And one day I might do that. But personally myself, I always check the company's authorised.

43:40So that's the first thing I will do. I go on the FCA register. I check that that company's authorised. I check that there's no clone warnings or any of this stuff. That's people impersonating them. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I go on, I check that, I check the details because the FCA register has the like registered number and the registered email address and the registered web address. So you can check that - You're using the right channel. using the right channels. So that's always my first port of call personally, no matter what I'm doing. And then I know this is kind of cliche, but I think about what my objective is here and how much my risk appetite actually is for this particular thing I'm doing.

44:16So is this a big part of my retirement fund? Is it a small part? Is it something that, like we said before, it's something new that I think, you know what, I'm going to speculate and put a little bit of money here. So I do have that proper conversation with myself about how much I'm willing to lose out of this money and that ultimately is very personal and that's very much each individual have a very different appetite you know I might be putting a thousand pounds into something and that's out of a fifty thousand pound retirement pot I might be putting fifty thousand in but my retirement pot is twenty million you know these are going to be very very different decisions so I always check the register I always check that they're they're regulated I will look at other people's reviews of them I mean I am guilty of that I know that it's not good to take advice off random people on social media, but you can see.

45:01It does paint a picture sometimes. Of course it does. Especially if you check multiple sources, which I do, I'm looking. And if there's 5 ,000 five-star reviews, you kind of - Yeah, you know, you've got, so I do do my, and I can never say this, due diligence. I do do that and I do check and look at what protection might be there. Personally, myself, I'm not that worried about firms going out of business. I'm not that worried. I think that's reassuring for people to hear. The biggest ones we see are insurers, but actually because they're, the way that that works, it's so easily resolved. Their individual detriment is not an issue with those.

45:35How does an insurer go bust? Is that they don't have enough money to cover the claims? Basically, yeah. Natural disaster or something like this pushes them over. Could be anything. So we had one not too long ago, maybe about 18 months ago, called MCE Insurance, which was a motor insurer. They primarily did motor bike policies and scooter policies and things like that. They had around 120 ,000 policyholders when they went bust. and exactly that they ran out of money right so they'd sold policies and we're getting too many claims and the premiums weren't covering the claims so very easy kind of column a didn't add up with column b if you insure a goes bust should you be pretty confident that that's going to be okay with that big quick resolution it's pretty quick so um typically what happens is the it's again not getting too complicated um the insolvency practitioners who are brought in to deal with the insolvent say they appoint what they call a runoff agent so it's someone to step in and manage the insurer while they sort it out and say what we do in that situation is we're either going to find you a new insurer and pay to move you over so your cover just carries on with a new insurer or if you were let's say six months into a 12-month policy and we can't find a new insurer they're not willing to take on those policies we give you that refund for that money that is left.

46:50So if you paid£1 ,000 for a 12-month policy, you're six months in, you're getting£500 back from us and then you're able to go and replace that policy. And we also cover the cost of any claims. So if you, in the case of MCE, there were people with active claims that their bike had been damaged or stolen or whatever and they'd made a claim, we then step in to fund those payments as well. So it's pretty seamless when it comes to insurance and they are the biggest ones we deal with, with the largest number of people. The largest ones. but like mainstream banks and big brokers are not that typical.

47:21No, not at all. You said the phrase too big to fail. Do you genuinely believe that like still exists? Personally, I do. I say very personally I do. Because like Lehman Brothers and then more in crypto, that's not regulated, but like FTX, like recently they collapsed and like Lehman Brothers. So do you not think that wars or like different circumstances or quantitative easing orders, printing money can affect the economy so badly that a bank can go? I think banks can fail. I mean, the regime is designed so that you'll see things from the Bank of the Treasury. They say it's not a zero failure regime.

47:55It's not nothing can fail. We said before, personally, I wouldn't feel uncomfortable holding large amounts of money with large banks, but it is very personal. It's up to every individual to decide on what their risk appetite is. and say with your money in your bank, if you do believe that there are no firms that are too big to fail, if you believe that every bank's at risk - I'm a little bit skeptical now after the last decade. Well, if you are, then you can make that decision to split your money around, right? And you can make that decision to manage different accounts with different money in it, right?

48:26You can make that decision for yourself personally. I think that's the key thing is that there is a solution to that. If you are worried about a large bank and you're holding more than 85 ,000, then split it. that is pretty, nowadays, pretty easy to do. Pretty easy to open account with another provider if that's what you want to do. What about investment products like pensions, which will obviously have significantly over 85K in value? Yeah, there's no real easy answer to that. So again, it's about your personal risk appetite. If you really want to take it all and put it under the mattress, then you can do that if that's what you personally believe.

48:56There's no real answer to your own risk appetite and what you're willing to do. Personally, I educate myself. I read a lot. I listen a lot. and I try and make decisions that I'm personally comfortable with and allow me to sleep at night. And for me, that is a fairly standard workplace pension, a couple of personal pensions that I've opened over time, some money in different banks and a few basic investments. I think I'm sure a lot of your listeners and viewers will talk about this, but it's all about personal risk appetite, diversification, spreading your money about, do things that make, say, you can sleep at night doing um that's all i can really say i guess but the the people who are the last port call like the people with the safety net are saying they're not too worried well you're saying you're not too worried personally do you know with some people that are like oh my god we're doomed it's like personally i don't but it's funny because i get a lot of friends and family who will come to me and say it's it's interesting how different people can influence each other right so i had a friend recently messaged me um she's not a particularly close friend but a decent friend and she was like you know what i've always taken investment advice from a guy at work she's like i know i know maybe that wasn't the right thing to do but i always have i've trusted this guy i've worked with him for a long amount of time and he's turned around to me this week and told me to sell all my stocks and shares ices and buy gold what should i do yeah and that was my first reaction oh god is he regulated well clearly not it is just a friend at work but how normal is that realistically you know it is very normal that people trust someone that they've worked with or a friend or family member that they trust in other aspects of their life.

50:30So she's always followed this guy's advice. And he's not regulated. He's just a guy she works with. And to be fair, the advice he'd given her in the past was decent. She'd opened her stocks and shares ISA. She'd been putting money into that. It was very mainstream, very retail investor, all fine. And suddenly he's panicked. And it was so interesting how quickly that had spread to other people. And I said all the same things I've said to you. I was like I can't give you any advice that isn't my job I'm not a regulated advisor but here's some things you need to think about you know you need to think about if you're putting all your money in one asset what that means and and I kind of educated her on things like you know if you buy gold you have to store it you know it's not if you're physically buying gold either someone has to store it for you and you have to then trust that person so if you're doing this because you don't trust well are you going to keep it in your literal house like what is this and it was kind of like opening those questions up and those kind of discussions was quite interesting but I found it really interesting how quickly that worry can spread amongst people.

51:32Yeah it's interesting that the paranoia and fear around banking collapses which the media pushes a lot you know they're like oh the next 08. The journalists have a lot to answer for definitely right but that's their job isn't it their job is stories. It sells a headline but then actually what the biggest threat to people is is making bad investment decisions by listening to people who don't know what they're on about and you know as a social media person i i am part of that right like if you look at the youtube space people click on negative things people that's just and if you're human nature isn't it yeah it you know you you're drawn to them and what people don't understand about youtubers maybe is that that is their main source of income and that's how they pay their bills yeah so they have an incentive to be negative and that can then feed into people like you say and that guy might have watched a video that morning where he genuinely believed it he genuinely Someone's got to flip everything into gold, but that guy won't be doing that.

52:21He's just doing that to get his cash in from his views. And then that feeds out. There's a lot of responsibility, isn't there, on the media shoulders. That's a bigger threat to your finances than your services ever needing to come into play, essentially. Personally, I 100 % believe that, yeah. I thought when I started working at FSCS that exactly as you say, I might think, oh no, I've seen the inside now. I'm really scared. It's absolutely the opposite, yeah. I've invested more since I've worked here than I ever have before I was expecting you to sit down and be like the men in black like we've saved the world 10 times today you don't even know before you had your breakfast do a little flashy thing just like a wheel come out and it's like what day is it don't get me wrong like the work that we do is absolutely important and I see people I see cases day in day out of people that have been misadvised and have lost pensions and we are able to step in and it's great and we do help a lot of people we help thousands and thousands of people a year but it I think we said before we're a small organization, we're 250 people.

53:19The scale of this is not massive. It shows that there's not that much inbound traffic versus say when we used to deal with citizens advice and they would just be getting thousands of calls a day. So the fact that you've got 250 staff shows you're not getting billions of calls. No, we are the safety net, right? And we operate like that, but we're not, as you say, we're not having to save the world every single day. It's not that kind of situation at all, no. If there's someone at home now listening who thinks I got advice five, 10 years ago that I don't think was right? Like what do they do to get in touch with you?

53:50Really great question. So how our service works is we investigate, we can't investigate every single firm that goes out of business, right? Because first of all, we don't know if they ever gave any bad advice or did any bad work. They might have had a complete clean bill of health, but also the amount of companies that are folding and say for either because they're insolvent or just because the person's given up that business or whatever is huge. so we rely on former customers coming to us and saying i actually think i had a bad experience here so on our website there's almost on every page there's a button that says check if you can claim what you need to do there is you go into that it asks you a few very very basic questions and who the firm was so it's really useful to know the firm reference number so their fca and firm reference number and you say what kind of product it was pension investment funeral plan whatever and the dates that you dealt with them so roughly if some people won't remember but you can put in a rough date and all that's doing is checking that at the time you dealt with that firm they were regulated so it's just doing a really basic check on has that firm gone out of business has it did you deal with them at the time when they were regulated if it says gives you a nice green tick and says yep that firm was regulated at that time and you're able to make a claim you then register an account on the website and you can go ahead and make a claim with those the process can be fairly lengthy because we need to see some evidence you know we need to see some sort of paperwork that you dealt with that person obviously and but once you've made an account you can start your claim and go in and out as many times as you like you can kind of log out leave it come back do whatever you need to do and what we look for to start a claim is just some really basic evidence that you dealt with the company maybe you've got emails or paperwork and people can just take photos and attach them they don't have to be like original copies at this point or anything like that but every product has a slightly different application form online we do have paper application forms but i think it's like 98 99 percent of people do it online nowadays and it's much easier to do but we do have that option if anyone ever needed that um and yeah people go in fill in all the things that we asked for and submit it and off it goes and then we if if that firm has already been declared in default so maybe another customer has already complained about that firm it'll be a bit quicker because all the kind of investigation of that company's done.

56:08If someone claims against a company that has never been investigated by us, we do have to start that process from scratch and it can take quite a long time. Will you investigate any claim? We'll investigate any claim that comes in. So it's not like we need 10 before we take it seriously? We only need one valid claim to declare a firm in default and be able to pay out. So it can be that. And often it can be that one person that tips it over. That's all it takes. And sometimes we only ever pay one claim. that might be the only one we ever pay well you know i've always said on my channel like this exists it's great and it's a lot it's you know a lot of countries don't have this yeah a lot of countries don't a lot of countries only do deposits so very there are not many that do kind of all the different products the funeral one's really nice because you think about how heartbreaking that must be for a family if they're especially if their nan has paid into a funeral product to cover their funeral they die and then it's like oh no we're gone bust the money's How quick are you on that?

57:02So£1 only came into regulation last July, so July 2022. So we've not had a failure yet. Really? No failures? Yeah, we've not had a failure. Now, bear in mind that to get authorised, there was a lot of providers dropped out at that point. So I think about 26 made it through and became FCA authorised. So you cleaned up the market? Well, the FCA did. That definitely wasn't. I'm going to take credit for that. But it essentially will have cleaned the market up because all the people that were like, oh, we're not going to try and get regulated are the ones that probably are a bit dodged. Yeah, so the process did filter out a lot.

57:30And I think there was a couple of big ones. One was called Safe Hands that were in the press around that time because they didn't meet the criteria for authorization. They weren't good enough. Can they still sell the product, but they can't get a stamp of saying this is covered? I know, I think that's it now. I think they can't sell the product. And then old plans were kind of moved over to different providers and things like that. I worked in the debt management industry when that went from unregulated to regulated. And it was like cowboy industry prior. like before I got there but like five years before it was wild what was going on in that probably before I got there yeah yeah I was like the new sheriff riding in like this is all gonna change yeah do you think since you started working at the FSCS you started I know you nailed it FSCS do you think you got better at with money better with investing or do you think you were always good with money you said you feel more confident because you said like it made you more confident since you've been working there I think I got better at it I think I thought about it more because I'm surrounded by it every single day right so I had worked in financial services before but I'd worked in like retail building society type environment so at that point I'd gotten really good at savings mortgages because that's what the building society did but I never really thought about investing advice because as I say it isn't taught at schools it isn't something that necessarily people are exposed to day to day but because I'm around it now every single day and I work in communication So my job a lot of the time is trying to simplify things and explain things.

58:55It's naturally I've had to get really involved in the detail. And that has, like I say, it's reassured me. It's made me feel much more confident than I was. And also that kind of education I've given myself over the kind of three years I've now worked at FSES has really helped me personally. And it has made me think about things like why isn't this more available to people? why aren't what is it that we're missing what is that trick that we're missing in this country that people aren't confident enough to invest safely and sensibly and having to you know people like yourselves having to fill this gap really and yeah i shouldn't have to exist realistically it should be provided by the government in terms of financial education but it's not and it allows this market to operate that actually is not regulated which is kind of dangerous in a way isn't it like i would like to think that i have good morals and i'll sit there and say what i do and won't push people into bad things but i know that people do because they get offered money to to do that and that exists online and yeah if you regulated it and gave quality advice from the government none of that would need to exist it would do but you kind of um i do have these kind of moments where i sit there and think but the way humans are there's i think there's always going to be something that's not there's an inherent lack of trust yeah and even in your you're there to be this insurance and the questions are people like yeah but who's paying for it like where what are they in their pocket and that's really hard to get around isn't it there's a lack of trust and that's kind of why we wanted to bring you on to sit here as a human you know and say like i work there and i trust the system and i'm happy to put two million my two million quid in the future it's coming it's coming yeah and i am and and i say if anything it's it's done nothing but increase increase my kind of trust in how things work.

1:00:42But it's such a personal thing. And like you say, all people can do is try and expose themselves to as much information as they can absorb in and listen to different views and ultimately make that decision up for themselves on what they're comfortable with. Well, I hope that's reassuring for people listening. Yeah, I hope so too.

1:01:02To get a bullet point summary of this episode, which I definitely want, there was a lot there, sign up using the link in the description. And finally, what do you want to ask us? It can be about money, of course, but also anything you're interested in. Send your questions to makingmoneyatkindling.media I'm Tamayna Karolay, and I hosted this episode with my slightly shorter friend, Damian Jordan. Get better soon, mate. The episode was recorded by Jack Hobbs and edited by Johnny Hunter. Music is by Felix Taylor. It was produced by Ruth Edwards and brought together by Will Stollerman.