S1E6: How economics really affects you

29:46They'll look at what inflation is doing at the moment, what's driving it, and look at other indicators of the economy too. They'll think about wages, how fast they're going up. Are they keeping up with inflation or not? They'll think about the unemployment rates as well as the employment rates as well. They'll also look at other indicators. Things such as second-hand car sales are a good indicator of how well the economy is doing or not. And then the committee will kind of sit together, trawl through all the data, have a long discussion about what they think it means for inflation in the future, as well as growth, and then make their decision based on that.

30:25So, you spoke about second-hand cars there. Can you just explain why they're a good indicator for the health of the economy? Yeah, it's mainly about confidence. So, if you're confident in the economy and you think it's going to grow, you'll kind of switch into kind of newer cars, but normally second-hand. So, you'll kind kind of trade your old one in for a better secondhand car. And what's funny is that sometimes you might see sales of secondhand cars going up while kind of new cars remain flat or go down. And particularly we saw this during COVID. So a shortage of kind of new cars being made.

30:56And so lots of people had to rely on just using secondhand cars. And so the kind of price of them skyrocketed. You could sell them for more than you bought them, couldn't you? Yeah, yeah. And so it's really interesting. But there are kind of other kind of more quirky indicators. So one that we talk about in the book, which is a favorite of Alan Greenspan, who used to be the head of the US central bank, the Fed, is sales of men's underwear. So he found that during kind of recessions, men would stop buying new underwear because no one would really see it because people cut back on essentials. And so you'd actually see sales fall.

31:30And during kind of good times, they'd kind of recover again. Stop going commando.

31:45What'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 is spaghetti. Yeah, exactly. You've got one shot, one opportunity to not go to jail for avoiding tax. 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.

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32:46If you've got to do one this year, check out TaxApp. 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 skillset, an edge, expertise, like your job, things like this.

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33:55If you know what these acronyms like SOC2 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. You know, if you watch the American kind of the same version with the Fed, they're very much like, we are raising these rates, like prepare for pain, like strap yourselves in. And then the UK message seems slightly different at times. Hawkish and dovish, they call them, don't they, in terms of their approach. I was wondering, are they thinking about sentiment? Are they thinking about people and how they're going to react when they're making these decisions?

34:32The Americans seem a lot more direct. Yeah. So I think that comparison with the US is important, but it's a slight kind of misleading one because the reason they're coming in a different place is not necessarily because of sentiment or because they're hard-nosed and we're kind and cuddly. It's the kind of the economic picture is a bit different. but like Rupa and I have both been in the room with these policy makers when they're making these decisions and I can tell you firsthand, like not one of them kind of has their eyes closed to the fact that the decision they're making is going to affect the ability of people to kind of afford to put their electricity on to like keep their houses warm, to buy food for their kids.

35:10Like all of them have that in their minds. I think the trick and kind of the bit where you kind of step back a bit from the sentimentality of it is that you have to know that, or you have to trust in the fact that the kind of the medium and longer term consequences of not doing that action are worse. Yeah. And we'll, you know, although it might not be as intuitive, it is worse for those people. Like we know inflation hits people lower down the income spectrum much, much harder. We know that people that don't have lots of assets are the ones that are worst hit by kind of when inflation goes up too high.

35:46And so, although you're kind of, you know, you're making a decision which is tough when you put it in the context of, you know, people not being able to put their lights on or being able to kind of afford kind of nutritious meals or something, you kind of have to say, right, but what's the alternative? And, you know, I think they kind of, they use sentimentality in that, right? It's, you kind of, you have a bit of a science and, you know, you use that Keynes kind of quote, right? You have like a bit of the science that he talked about, which is okay like we know this is kind of the best thing and you mix that with a bit of the humanity which is okay and it's the best thing because over the longer term it's going to be best for more people yeah okay you spoke about policymakers there and obviously we it's interesting to talk about politicians and your kind of relationship with them and how they when they come out and they say things i think a lot of people wonder have they actually spoken to anyone who kind of knows what they're on about here.

36:41If we look at like the mini budget, I know they refused the OBR report, didn't they? Or something at the time, I think. But do you think politicians understand what you do?

36:53I'm not sure if it's for us to comment on. So maybe a better way is, would they liaise with you in terms of like their policy? And do they sit down with people like yourselves or the Bank of England and say, we want to do this and this is how we, and then you go, well, if you do that, we think this will happen. So we have a lot of communication with what is kind of working level people, right? So we have people that do the similar kind of job to us at the treasury and all the different government departments. And they are like us, you know, they're like economists that understand kind of how it works.

37:25And they're there because they want to kind of serve public service and things. So we have a lot of conversations with them. But a really important part of the way the whole system works is they are free to make their decisions. And we are free to make us and we don't interfere with them because if we start interfering with them, they'll start interfering with us and we just need to keep that all separate. So we do talk and we do say, look, if this policy comes in, then we might have to do this with interest rates, right? If something happens, I think it was really obvious kind of a few years back, people were talking about fiscal spending, right?

38:04If the government's going to go out and spend a lot of money. and if they do that that will you know that will support the economy that will increase demand in the economy but that will also have consequences for inflation and push inflation up so the flip side of that is okay well then what is our natural decision well we have to combat that so we choose to put interest rates up a bit more yeah and like everybody understands that dynamic but we won't say to them don't do that policy because we're going to put interest rates up and they won't say to us but don't put interest rates up because we're doing this policy like it just doesn't work It can seem frustrating at times where it feels like you're pulling away from each other, where especially maybe with the Quartin mini budget felt like they were going one direction when the Bank of England were trying to go another.

38:44I mean, obviously, this is as a layman just sat there. It just seemed that they were maybe pulling apart and people were like, do these guys talk to each other? Because I get what you say, being separate is good, but you would also hope that we were all part of the same team and that there was sensible conversations around these things. But yeah, no, thanks. Thanks for the clarification. You talked then about a couple of years ago and stimulating the economy, COVID and these points. And when we spoke about inflation before, it was very much energy and stuff. How much do you think the quantitative easing contributed towards inflation?

39:18And did you know at the time, look, if we stimulate the economy with furlough and all of this, we're going to get inflation? So quantitative easing is a policy tool to help increase inflationary pressure in the economy. So, it's usually done when the Bank of England thinks that there'll be deflationary pressure, so when prices are going to start falling. So, the first time it was used was just after the financial crisis when it was quite obvious the UK was entering a recession, people were going to spend less, something needed to kind of prop up the economy. And similarly, after the COVID crisis as well, we were under lockdown, all the shops were closed, demand was basically being cut.

39:57and that's when quantitative easing was announced. And so that's kind of the reason you do quantitative easing. And when inflation started to increase, the Bank of England started quantitative titling, which Jack said, which is basically taking money out of the economy and destroying it, which brings inflation down. Yeah, so the deflation point is, I think is quite an interesting one because it's obviously, I think at one point we were forecasting a period of deflation. We now think we might avoid it, but it's often talked about as this really bad thing do economists think deflation is bad especially when we consider that tech is deflationary it removes people from the workforce as we develop more and more tech ai robots and stuff that is deflationary in its very core so are we not heading that way anyway in a sense so deflation is just as bad as inflation right so because it can it means that you would postpone your spending yeah so take for example if you want to buy i don't know like a new pair of trainers if you think that the price is going to fall tomorrow you'll defer that spending to you would just wait and you'll just wait and you'll keep waiting and you'll never spend that money and if everyone does that and that's bad for everyone because the shops aren't getting the business they need um and so you want to avoid deflation now you say technology is deflationary it can be in some sense but again like interest rates will help control inflation make sure it's on target Yeah.

41:22So a counter could be that I'm still going to buy my food shop and the items that I might not buy might be a pair of Ray-Bans and maybe they need to come down in price or like luxury watches and stuff. Does deflationary affect every element of the economy? Would we start to see, you know, consumer essentials, they're essential, right? Yeah. So, I mean, this is where like the complexity of the economy really like kicks in, right? And also why it's important that inflation is like across the board, it's the average across the board rather than. So what we don't want to do is stop a signal of, okay, people don't want to buy as many Ray-Bans.

41:52They want to buy more food shops. The prices should balance out to tell people, produce fewer Ray-Bans, produce more food, basically. So we want those kind of signals. They're called relative prices. We want those. What we don't want is kind of all of the prices coming down on average for any prolonged period of time. And the reason for that is because everything's connected. So the guy producing Ray-Bans is not just a guy producing Ray-Bans. He's a guy going and spending money in the supermarket. So if his Ray-Ban business goes under, he hasn't got money to spend. So he's not going to go spend it in Sainsbury's, which means then Sainsbury's profits are going to come down.

42:32So they're going to be in a worse place. The people working at Sainsbury's won't have as much money because Sainsbury's can't put their wages up. So what are they going to do? Well, they're going to have less money to go spend around the economy. And the whole thing kind of cycles a bit. So you have to kind of think about this thing a bit more in the round. like you know like deflation is bad because it might affect some people but they're then the people that are spending in other bits of the economy and so everything kind of then feeds through the other thing about deflation is um so inflation erodes debt right so say you've got a mortgage and the average cost of everything in the economy is i don't know let's say 10 grand to give a nice round number and you've got a 10 grand mortgage, then you're kind of one for one.

43:18And then all the prices go up and you're now on 20 grand. Well, that mortgage has just gone down by like half the value, right? Whereas deflation does the opposite. It means that like what you're earning and kind of the price things in the economy are falling, but your debt, what you owe is still the same. So it gets more and more expensive to pay your mortgage or your credit card. Or your national debt. Or your national debt if you're a government. Yeah, so it is interesting because I think people like, they just want the prices to come down, but they don't maybe consider it and they hear deflation is bad and then it's like, it's kind of a bitter pill again, isn't it, to swallow?

43:50Like how is the prices of things coming down? I mean, deflation on childcare products and nappies would not be bad for me right now. The amount I'm paying on nappies, I could get some deflation on like just nappies. Yeah, for baby wipes for birthdays. Yeah, honestly. It's like baby wipes. Baby wipes and nappies, please. Once they're out of nappies, I trust you, it just changes. We were going through our bank statements and I've got like a 10 year old and my life is just like spending money on jump heaven and like bouncing trampoline parks and things like this. And in the school, so this is the school holidays now, right?

44:20Yeah. It's a small fortune just to stop them killing themselves and boredom. And you can't work. So you get hit from both sides, don't you? Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks for that. So basically a lot of the questions are from my audience. So I asked them what they wanted to ask and there was a number of questions they got upvoted. One was, do economists think that Brexit was good for the UK economy? We can have fun with that.

44:48So economists have different views. You know, as I said, get two economists in a room, get three opinions. And it's quite difficult to know what the kind of impacts of Brexit are because we're not that far along. And we've had quite a few shocks in the economy. So we had COVID at a very similar time. And so it's difficult to tell kind of what, you know, how Brexit and COVID have kind of affected the economy. And so we'll have to kind of wait for the longer term to really see the impacts coming through. Good answer. So the... Like a true economist. Yeah, yeah. Step over. Sidestep. I mean, if we compare us to the rest of the G7, it seems like we might be lagging slightly, you know, I think we're the only one that hasn't grown over the last few years.

45:34So, I mean, like you say, who knows, but what kind of timelines are we looking at then until we can definitively say, yeah, Brexit was good, Brexit was bad? I mean, like it's tricky to ever think there is a time when we are going to be able to disentangle which bits of Brexit, which bits of COVID, which bits of the war in Ukraine, right? Because all of those things just get mashed together. I think, you know, at the bank, we kind of have these regular forecasts of the economy and for to build those we need to have some kind of sense of what's going on and in that like implicitly under the hood of that is some impact from brexit as part of like a brexit covid ukraine type thing kind of in together so there is definitely an effect but being able to kind of put numbers on it and stuff is yeah that's a pretty even in 10 years time that might be a pretty impossible task i think it's hard because people want to know don't they they want to know like we voted for this thing or we didn't has it been good has it not and it's like well we don't really know and it's you know okay so i think we've focused looking backwards a lot i want to now kind of look forwards because i think economists people say you're often quite pessimistic or it's your job to be because it's but especially you i think your job is to literally go this these are the potential shit storms that could hit us are you optimistic about the uk's like future would you say if you look at like the forecast we put out right and they look at like the next kind of two to three years like in there we've got kind of like this bumpy period of kind of letting this inflation thing kind of work through like there's kind of a downturn in the economy as you kind of try and bring all that back into line but then after that the picture is you know kind of a bit more of a return to what seemingly normality although it's been so long since we've had a period of normality it's hard to know um And then you've got like, you know, over the longer term, like trying to forecast and guess like, you know, 10, 20, 30 years in the future is a bit of a mugs game.

47:31But there's loads of stuff that's potentially kind of really quite exciting there, right? Like adjusting to a new digital world, like the kind of, you know, the potential for kind of reforms in like society as a whole because of all these technological advances, like you mentioned AI earlier and stuff, right? All of those things are quite exciting and could have really big economic consequences. So for me, I mean, maybe it's because I'm an economist and I find that kind of stuff interesting. But those are quite exciting things that could have really important upsides to them. And yeah, so I feel optimistic and positive, even though I'm supposed to be optimistic and cynical.

48:11I'm always optimistic. Otherwise, why are you getting out of bed? As a long-term investor, I have to be optimistic. Otherwise, what's the point? like just blow my money now. So one - You mentioned digital. Yeah. While you're talking about digital, what do you think about crypto? We hear a lot about CBDC, central bank, digital currency, like a digital pound. I work in crypto, half my net worth is in crypto. Give me a good answer, please. Give me a good answer. But yeah, what do you think about crypto going forward? Have you got any Bitcoin without gold? No, no. We're strictly golden. We're just gold.

48:46We're just gold. We're just gold. But we, I mean, on that like the gold is not ours right so of the 400 000 bars of gold in the bank only two of them belong to the bank of england and they're both in the museum so we sold off a lot of gold like a few years ago right so the government has like a lot more gold in there but they sold off loads so they there was a fair sell back in like the the 2000s but like specifically for the bank of england we're basically just looking after it for our rich friends or like you know governments of other have two and they're both in the museum so you can go in and lift them up and play around with them or whatever so crypto yeah this was one of the most asked questions yeah literally it was one of the most uplights everyone was saying what do they think about crypto we don't give investment advice i guess there's a difference between like crypto assets and central bank digital currencies, right?

49:44So, crypto assets are assets like anything else you can invest in, like shares or kind of bonds that you might buy, which go up and down in price depending on kind of demand or supply of them. And they can be quite volatile, I'm sure. Oh, very volatile. You know, price crashes or price increases all the time. Central bank digital currency is a bit different. They're a bit like having an account with the Bank of England, where you can deposit at your money at the Bank of England and take it out a bit like you would with a retail bank, but without kind of that intermediation there. So at the moment, kind of with your retail bank is backed by the Bank of England.

50:22So if anything goes wrong with them, the Bank of England will make sure that you get your money. But here you cut out that kind of bank and you do all your banking with the Bank of England. Would we get the favorable rate that banks get that are creaming at the minute? Because I mean, you see like Barclays have probably got, every time the interest rates go up they're making an extra fair few hundred million aren't they on there the money that they help they hold with the bank of england essentially would would direct consumers get that similar rates with a i mean so this is one of the really interesting design questions so we have like a consultation paper at the moment asking people to kind of give their views and talking to people in the industry and stuff but the question about whether we would pay interest and if we would pay interest like what rate of interest we would pay is is kind of still an open and live question and people in different parts of the world are kind of coming out with different answers, but it's entirely possible.

51:13So I think like the kind of the default model we would have is more like a digital bank note. So it's more like, you know, you don't get interest on your five pound note. Um, and it would be more kind of that model, but what you're getting in return is kind of something that's completely safe and, um, kind of you're able to use it across a wide range of things and it's got our guarantee on it and stuff, but there's nothing technologically to stop us having one where you paid interest, just like you would get with Barclays or something. and yeah like I say that that's kind of an open question that we're kind of investigating and we're asking for people's views on as well yeah because I think you know people feel that the rates don't trickle down on the saving side they just they just get applied on the borrowing side quite quickly don't they and you know you see it with banks paying one percent when they're probably getting four percent from from yourselves or whatever so coming back to the growth point before we spoke about optimism in the future but demographic trends are that we're having less kids in the UK, how does that fit into growth with us having less children?

52:11And then how do systems that rely on growth, such as pensions, are affected by that slowing growth rate? So, you know, the population is aging. So, there's a large proportion who are older, which means there are fewer people in the labour force. So, people that will work in the future compared to those that, you know, are working. And you need labour, essentially, is one of the the key ingredients for economic growth. And so, as that labor force kind of gets smaller, it can be a bit more difficult for the economy to grow. But one thing which you should take into account is technology, which means that you might need fewer workers.

52:47Replaces the labor force. Sorry, it replaces the labor force. It might even make it a bit more productive. So, it's quite difficult to tell kind of which way things can go. And obviously, even if you've got an aging population here in the UK, things like migration help because you You can get younger workers who might move here and contribute to the labor force in that way. So you see this trend happening, but you do think it's not going to be. Because it does seem that within the Western world, the growth hasn't been abundant in certain areas, especially in the UK. And it's like, we're reliant on growth to get us out of issues.

53:23Grow GDP and things, we hear this. But with a shrinking population, it's like, how will that happen? Yeah, I guess one of the important things that's kind of really like coming in more into economic thought, I guess maybe two important things. One is like people are actually kind of understanding a bit more broadly the importance of like it's not GDP, it's not the amount in economy, it's the amount per person. It's kind of per capita thing, right? So RuPaul's right, even on a per capita basis, if you've got more people that are not working and fewer people that are, that can create problems. But in general, like you said, if your population is shrinking, then you can still have people's standards of living that are per capita GDP going up as long as growth is, the economy isn't shrinking quicker than the number of people.

54:12So that's one thing. The other thing is there's this acceptance among economists, and it's been growing for decades right it's not new but it's really kind of capturing people's imagination now about um different ways of measuring the economy so we don't just economists don't just talk about gdp they talk about well-being indices or they talk about um like the kind of circular economy type thing and like you know all these different measures of um yeah yeah all those kind of things right and so they're feeding into the conversation a bit more now yeah i think like Ultimately, we all just want to be happy, right?

54:49So if that's, I would take being poor if I was happier. Yeah. So you were speaking before about basic economic lessons. You said, you know, it's this understanding of how much you can buy with your money, etc. Are there any other things that you think listeners should know that don't know anything about economics that could maybe get them started? Any basic rules or? I guess that. Basic. Oh, about economics. Yeah, just about what you say. To help them understand your world and the decisions that you make, like any rules of thumb. I remember Setibus Paribus from my economics. It's like, if everything stays the same, then this might happen.

55:26And that just seems silly to me because we live in a world of chaos. And the fact that you have to learn it in Latin as well, is absolutely ridiculous. Not only do you learn in economics, you happen to learn a dead language as well. So yeah, we took out all the Latin from the book. Mainly, yeah. I mean, I think for me, like the thing that always kind of seems to get leveled at economists is that like we have this like hard-nosed kind of view of of things like people are out to just make it you know their own self-interest they're there to kind of make as much money and the thing i always try and like kind of get my friends to kind of get their heads around is there's nothing inherent in that kind of model of economics that means it's all about the money the concept we have at the heart of it all and we talk about in the book a bit is utility so it's this idea of like the benefit you get and And that can be money and money sometimes a good way of kind of proxying that and capturing that.

56:15But it could be quality of life or the sense of well-being you get from helping out in your local community or something. There might not be any money made there, but that might give you utility. And so like this kind of model of, right, you've got to be completely rational and try and make as much money as you can. And that turns people against each other. That doesn't have to be a part of the model. like the model can be what we kind of as humans kind of make it and therefore you know this concept of utility is a really important one to get your head around is it money or do you value other things do you value your time and your quality of life and your friendships and your community and all of those kind of things that can all sit within this economic model so you don't have to throw the model out just because you think yeah in the book you talk about someone taking a pay cut and how that from a pure economics perspective that might not make sense like financially, but actually from a utility perspective, they might have a short commute.

57:10They might enjoy the job more and the work more. So would you say that over time, your job is to find what the important measures are then in that sense? Like you talked about happiness before and these kinds of things. Are you seeing, joining on that, are you seeing a lot from people working at home? Does that make, is that making a difference as well in the economy? Because I work from home and I find my life a lot happier not having to go to Liverpool Street on the tube every day. I would take a pickup to work from home. I'm not going back to full time in the office ever again. Yeah. And there's loads of people making that same decision, right?

57:42And there's some really interesting, Stanford University has got some really interesting studies on this where they're basically trying to find out how much of a pay cut people would be willing to take. But it just goes to show that people aren't there weighing up just the money. They're doing quality of life. Quality of life is massive. And you should remember that economic growth isn't really about how much money an economy has. It's really about the quality of life. and one way economists measure it because it's just quite an easy way is GDP per capita which is how much you know each person essentially should get from an economy but really it's all about the quality of life.

58:16Yeah because when I was when I was working my full-time job for an accountancy firm and had my YouTube channel I had two incomes coming in I was earning more money than I ever have but I was completely miserable so I quit my full-time job to focus on YouTube just to improve quality of life and essentially halved my income at that point but like you say it's the end result, it's happiness, isn't it? I think sometimes we have to kind of remind ourselves that day. Well, having said that, are you guys good with money? Are you good with investments and generally budgeting and money? I think my bank account will probably speak for itself.

58:51I'm not really sure. Like, you know, I think the good thing about being an economist is that you really understand what things like, you know, the interest rate decision really impacts yourself self and your kind of personal incomings and outgoings um which is really useful so i know for example when the interest rate goes up what it means for my loans and then i can think about that in terms of how much i get in my salary um and it's useful kind to make sure that you know everyone else knows what that means for them as well go on then what would you say like just so like someone listening going if an interest rate rise goes up if interest rates go up now what does that mean for people so it depends if you're a borrower or saver so if you've got you know a mortgage or a student loan, for example, it means that you'll have to pay more out of your salary if it's not going up at the same rate towards it.

59:40But if you're a saver, it means that actually you're going to get more return on your savings, which actually means you have more money to spend. So it really depends. And a lot of people are both right. You borrow and you save money. And so it kind of depends on the balance of the two. Yeah. And then investors, it's like, they say interest rates are like gravity on asset prices or is is what warren buffett said i think so you can be an investor and add that to the mix and there's a whole load of confusion then isn't there can you guys invest so it depends in what um what the bank of england uh so if you work at bank of england you're not allowed to invest in any kind of banks or insurance companies that we see fights which is actually quite a lot of well i think most of them in the so financial institutions essentially yeah and most of them would need to be here because of the way the uk is regulated right they'd have uk entities yeah so you know the uk has a large financial center and so a lot of financial companies are headquartered here or have some sort of presence in london especially yeah so economists understand incentives right and and it's a really bad incentive if you're able to invest in stuff that then you also have like a say in trying to control So to take that conflict completely off the table, bank staff are kind of, you're not allowed to invest for like speculative reasons.

1:00:58We can't do crypto. We can't do kind of things that we're regulating, all those kinds of things. And it just keeps it kind of clean and clean, right? Is, you know, you take that off the table. And would you say you're good with money? I want your opinion on that as well. I mean, I'm pretty good at spending it. Yeah.

1:01:17I've got three kids. So actually I don't spend my own money. They will spend it for me. Yeah, fair enough. But yeah, I mean, I get by, right? It's one of the benefits. Like you look at studies about if you've got basic economic or financial literacy and you end up, you know, doing better with money over the course of your life. Living longer, you say, in your book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, and it's all associated from the fact that, you know, over the course of your life, you're able to kind of navigate more. You end up financially better off. So you're healthier as a result, better healthcare, better food.

1:01:46Yeah, you spend less time worried about it. It's tied into like mental health and wellbeing because you spend less time stressing about money. And you know, stressing about money can be a really big hit to your health, right? They say it's like smoking. Like if you're chronically unhappy or stressed that can take as much off your time as being an active smoker. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So everyone should read your book and listen to the podcast and then you'll live longer and be more wealthy. Yeah, do the podcast first and then come get me. There you go.

1:02:18When we recorded this episode, the Bank of England base rate was 4.25%. It's now 4.5%, impacting mortgage holders and house hunters alike. So next week, we're debating when you should buy and when you should rent. If you want a bullet point summary of the episode, then subscribe to our newsletter in the description. But if you're new to the podcast, you need to listen to our first episode, which is all about your relationship with money. That's exactly where you should start. I'm Damien Jordan, and I'm the host of this podcast with my great mate, Tamena Keroulet. The episode was recorded by Jack Hobbs.

1:02:49Video editing is done by Johnny Hunter, with music by Felix Taylor. Our producer is Ruth Edwards, and it's all brought together by Will Stollerman.