Halifax to vanish as Lloyds ditches the brand - should we care?

0:02Lee Boyce: Welcome to This Is Money podcast sponsored by Trading 212. Download the Trading 212 app today and open a cash item with promo code TIM to get the 12 month bonus promo rate of 4.63 % terms apply. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Simon Lambert today is Lee Boyce. And coming up, goodbye Halifax. After 173 years, the household name is being scrapped by owner Lloyds. But why would you kill off one of Britain's best known and trusted banking brands? Also stay, Britain suffered the sharpest drop in wealth of any developed nation. What's behind it? And can we arrest the decline? Plus, we share some of the key ways that women can boost their pensions.

0:44Lee Boyce: And men should do some of this stuff too. And how can you make a ton of cash from vintage? Don't forget to upset with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. But first, from branch closures to brand closures, Lloyds Bank has confirmed that it will scrap the Halifax brand after 173 years and all customer accounts will be moved eventually over to Lloyds. Halifax, which started life as a building society back in 1853, was taken over by Lloyds Banking Group in 2009. And there were rumours, weren't there, Lee, that it was on the chopping block earlier this year but we actually got confirmation this week why tell us more give us a potted

1:28Georgie Frost: history if you would have of halifax oh rest in peace halifax howard i know i can't believe it georgie one of the best known banking names on the high street history since 1853 uh just wiped out in a single move and i think their writing has been on the wall for a little while let's put a kind of serious hat on here because lloyds is a bank a bank is there to make profit and if you've got kind of brands that are kind of competing for each other within the same sort of stable you can kind of understand it from a business decision however no you've got to remember there's a lot of Halifaxers out there people that have had maybe their first mortgage first current account and like the brand prefer the brand over Lloyd's and will be quite upset by this move I looked into this a little while back there's 178 locations with the Lloyd's and a Halifax branch in close vicinity so the likelihood is by those branches i would say but the real thing you have to go back i'll go real back potted history but let's go like the more recent history all right so halifax in 1997 it demutulized so it was a building society in an actual fact at one point it was the biggest building size society in the world it went on to the stock market so it stopped being a mutual it stopped being a building society and it went on to the stock market in 1997 came bank instead created seven and a half million new shareholders in the aftermath of that within four years in 2001 it merged with bank of scotland to form halifax bank of scotland hboss and it grew a lot between 2001 and then the financial crisis boom oh destroyed it hit a peak of 11 pound 50 at the share price hboss in february 2007 by the time the lloyd's deal with a rescue deal it was landed with hboss basically because of all of the stuff that had gone in the financial crisis it was had deep exposure to collapse in the uk property market one of the biggest lenders in the country by the time that that lloyd's deal was announced in september 2008 hboss shares had nosedived to below 180p which shows you how fast and how quickly in that financial crisis the brand was struggling so lloyd's was kind of lumbered with it for choice of a better word it was kind of lumbered with the halifax brand and then from from that point onwards basically they've coexisted and have coexisted for quite a long time financial crisis is well in the rear view mirror lots of things have happened since then and lloyd's has seen this as the opportunity to i guess what you would say business beat is streamline the brands if you're a halifax customer current account customer mortgage customer you're just going to become a lloyd's customer now we had a poll on the story about this 10 316 votes at time of looking at this should the halifax brand be kept and 71 of people said yes it's a trusted british banking known 17 say it doesn't matter to me 12 say no rebranding to lloyd's makes sense so you can see that people are kind of upset yeah potentially about the move is it giving you extra anymore thinking of thinking of howard in those early 2000s extra extra that one and actually i look back at that advert uh earlier they were offering four percent on their current account interests at that point that was in 2000 and then we had of course my personal favor which was i said i said pb and all of these things is what people remember how to frats for but if you go let's really go back in time now i'm a big champion and a big believer in building societies because at the heart of a building society is a kind of local banking in which the whole idea of them was people with spare cash could deposit and deposit money and receive interest and then others could borrow funds to buy or build a house and that was basically the whole principle of building societies and actually in the 1890s at the peak there was 3 642 building societies but thanks to all mergers acquisitions demutualizations there's now just 42 building societies left one of which is nationwide which is absolutely huge compared to the other building societies that still exist.

5:39Georgie Frost: And then actually by the early decades of 1900s, Halifax went from being more of a local society to a more of a national facing brand. And in 1928, it took over a major rival building society, had lots of assets, and it became the biggest building society in the world at that point. And then it was instrumental in the First World War, helping people, funding house building schemes, and also in the Second World War as well. needed to lend money to get houses built and they did and then from the 1980s the kind of the the way it was positioned changed a lot with new legislation that allowed build societies to demutualize and increase their range of services to compete with compete with traditional banks which is what what happened they started offering retail banking stockbroking insurance products and it completely changed the face of the brand and as i say lloyds have made this decision as you say it was kind of rumored earlier in the year so it's not come as a huge surprise the other rumor is that tsb is going to disappear tsb's been around for even longer 216 years uh now owned by santander there's been lots of rumors that santander were going to ditch the tsb brand so we're going to potentially lose 400 years worth of two kind of big financial institutions that have been on the high street that have supported this country through helping lend to build homes to build back you know in times of crisis gone done and I think that's upset quite a lot of people you can have a look on the Halifax website they have a lot of information about what it means if you are a customer things like financial services compensation scheme protection for example what's going to happen to your current account what's going to happen to your credit card what's going to happen to certain products and on the whole it all just mean if you are a Halifax customer you're now going to need to have the Lloyd's banking app and everything's going to be rebadged and repurposed as Lloyd's and Hanifax will be no longer.

7:41Lee Boyce: Yeah quite. Simon was proving there why podcasts are becoming more popular videoed because he was giving a lovely little hand sort of puppet display of you know the rise in the shares as you were speaking and then the fall and then the boom and the fact I think he said he was also a shareholder. But I'll get you to talk about that, Simon. But more generally, with brands coming together, banks becoming huge, I mean, Lee there spoke about nationwide. Is this good for the customer? Is this bad for us?

8:15Simon Lambert: It doesn't really make a huge difference to the customer. Ultimately, you were a Lloyd's Banking Group customer, and you now will be a Lloyds Banking Group customer. It just won't say Halifax at the top of your letters or your internet statement or your digital banking and so on. And in theory, if you are a Halifax customer, Lloyds would argue it's good for you because it's going to save them money, which means that they can give you better deals. They're going to need less money off you for the cost of running your accounts. They've got Halifax Mortgage, Halifax Savings Account, and so on. You know, Lloyds is not really competing with itself genuinely.

8:53Simon Lambert: It might do a little bit of competition with itself, but it's not genuinely competing with itself in the same way that you would compete with someone that's owned by someone else. But I do think, like Lee says, it's a bit of a sad day. It's a name with a lot of history. Maybe we'd prefer it if it re-mutilized. If they don't want the Halifax name anymore, maybe they should say, OK, fine, someone else can have it, you know, re-mutilize it. Obviously, to try and create a building society from scratch would be very, very difficult. But you know that name carries a certain weight and kudos doesn't it you'd definitely be easier to to start yourself your building society from scratch and create a whole new mutual with the name Halifax attached to it than you would if you were going to call it Lambert Building Society so I was I was pointing at myself yes because I was just old enough to get free Halifax shares I had a Halifax savings account.

9:51Simon Lambert: I had the amount of money in it that you needed to qualify, which was£100 or more. And it landed me a windfall of Halifax shares. So I got 200 free shares. I think I got the minimum, which was worth, at the time of the float,£1 ,490, roughly£1 ,500. pounds. I held on to those shares all the way through the boom years, those glory days of the early 2000s when Gordon Brown had abolished boom and bust. The British banking sector was flying, consecutive quarters of growth that just kept racking up and racking up and racking up, basically as people remortgaged their way to spending money. They bought properties, they remortgaged properties they took money out they spent the money on the properties they took some more money out the properties maybe they bought some more properties maybe they moved home it was it was it was boom era you know and a lot of it was driven by the property market in this country there was a certain amount of that growth that was being borrowed from the future and we've been paying the price for that ever since the financial crisis the financial crisis of course something that was, you know, really triggered by dodgy lending in America, but also engineered in London.

11:12Simon Lambert: We must never forget that a lot of the engineering behind it was done in London. Halifax got caught all up in that. And I remember what we used to describe the Halifax and the Lloyds deal at the time as was an arranged marriage. They kept getting grumpy with us when we said Lloyds had taken it over because it was a merger, but it was not a merger of equals. It was a merger of one of the few banks left in the country that was relatively OK, Lloyd's, and one that was a total basket case, Halifax Bank of Scotland. Anyway, so by that point, the shares that I had held all the way up, I had now held all the way down.

11:49Simon Lambert: and then there was the rights issues where investors like me were offered the opportunity to buy some more shares and I looked at those shares in the financial crisis that I was offered 30 something p I think it was I thought well do you know what they can only go up from here 37p I've just looked up an old column here and they did and then they sank again and then they went back up again and then the dividend was reintroduced and then there was the brexit vote and then they went down again and then they went up again the dividend was reintroduced was back and then they went down again got sunk by the covid pandemic and lockdowns and now they are back up again they are above 100p i always said they have to get to 100p there is no way that these bank shares are not worth 100p.

12:40Simon Lambert: They're currently trading at about 113p. I actually have no idea how much my shareholding is worth now because unfortunately, stupidly, I've never transferred those shares, sold them and bought them back in my ISA. So they're not in my main investment account. They're held through the registrar scheme. I think it's a quinnity. It's another thing to log into. You never look them up. This is a great argument for pulling all your finances together, by the way, is at least if they're in one place, it's just really easy to look at them. Now, realistically, I should probably sell these shares. Am I going to?

13:13Simon Lambert: Who knows? I'll probably hold them all the way back down again. As I said, the last time I wrote about this was on the 16th of September 2021. And I said, like many other British personal investors, I am a Lloyds shareholder. And like many, I've been one for so long that I'm not just getting paid to wait, as the old dividend share stock market adage states, but I've been not paid to wait, paid to wait, and then not paid to wait again. I am now in the fortunate position of being paid to wait again, right? So I've done another cycle now. I looked it up with our inflation calculator, however, and that£1 ,500 worth of shares adjusted for inflation would need to be worth£3 ,800 now just to have kept pace with the cost of living.

14:01Lee Boyce: If only I put that money in the US stock market. Yeah, quite. Hindsight's a beautiful thing. Lee, just the final word to you on this one, because I feel like this is a very you story. And I mean that in the best way, Lee, you strike me as an old fashioned chap. You like the options of cash, of bank branches, of building societies in a time when trust is at a premium, I think, to have a name that is, as your poll I think shows that actually a lot of this might come from emotion you know we do remember Halifax on on the high street we may not remember it during the war but we might have heard the stories that actually I feel like as I say this is a you story Lee well I guess that's that's

14:47Georgie Frost: the thing isn't it it's a it's a known brand it's got connotations with Yorkshire and you know the Halifax area and people might have opened as I said earlier you know their first accounts of halifax so you know get a bit misty-eyed for for a brand the cold kind of calculating kind of robotic side of it is that lloyd's is a bank that is there to make profit that is you know wants to make as much profit as possible and it sees its way of making more profits in future years by scrapping the brand uh halifax and that's the decision that is made if you don't like it if you're a halifax customer and you don't like it and you don't want to move over to lloyd's we are blessed in this country with a number of big banking names big building society names challenger bank names you can move elsewhere um it is upsetting i think it's always upsetting when a big brand of any kind of area whether it's personal finance whether it's a retailer something that we have fond memories of disappears i always think it's a sad day and i wouldn't be surprised to hear more about this in the coming months but georgie i think fundamentally the final word on is it's a business decision and always can do what it wants.

15:57Georgie Frost: I don't think it's a shame that there's not more localised banking decisions made locally rather than centralised decisions. And, you know, a big champion of that, of course, is our Dave Fishwick who set up Bank of Dave in Burnley, you know, local banking decisions for local people. And while it has been survival of the fittest in the building society kind of area, there's still some big ones Coventry, Skipton for example, Leeds they're all sizable for the area and what they pull in and what they do and are successful at doing it but lots of these you know smaller ones have gone have disappeared and it is a bit of a shame it depends where you stand on it you know do you care about your bank and that's that's the thing people often just treat their bank as money gets paid in money gets paid out and as long as you don't do anything to annoy me you stay loyal to that bank and that's kind of the layer of the land i would say at the moment

16:54Lee Boyce: yeah quite quite and as you say it's this demutualization has been happening for ages i was just curious about abbey national because that was my bank and i still look at that fondly you know how many decades later that was the first building society to demutualize in the uk 1989 and then fully taken over of course by santander group 22 years ago and i still i still talk about it. Anyway, let's move on. It is not you. We are actually getting poorer. Britain has seen the sharpest fall in average wealth per adult in the developed world. Between 2020 and 2025, it dropped 23.2%. That's according to Swiss bank EBS's latest global wealth report.

17:37Lee Boyce: Our individual wealth measured by the value of assets like property and stocks and shares fell by around£28 ,500. But the good news is there are more millionaires and billionaires being created in the world, but we'll get to that in a minute, Simon. Let's focus more on the fact that we are getting poorer. Where's this come from? What's this about?

17:58Simon Lambert: Now, many would look at this story and go, huh? OK, so I get it that life seems more expensive and I've got not a cost of living crisis, but a cost of living well crisis going on. But I'm not 23.2 % poorer. My home's value hasn't gone down by that much. My pension has gone up because the stock market's gone up. My investments have gone up because the stock market's gone up. My savings balance has grown a bit. So how can I be nearly a quarter poorer? The answer to this, and the answer to why Britain has performed so badly, is the dreaded inflation. What UBS has done here is it has looked at our wealth and then it has adjusted it for what has happened to the cost of living.

18:50Simon Lambert: And due to the cost of living getting more expensive, related back to what I said at the start of this bit where I was talking, and having got more expensive in this country compared to other countries, we have suffered worse inflation than other countries we have got poorer really we think in nominal terms you know we just think about our number what's our number what's my you know rough net worth kind of thing if i added it all up on the back of an envelope what would it be but we don't factor in inflation going back to actually what we were talking about the other week about um house prices and then not outperforming the stock market and not outperforming inflation, actually.

19:31Simon Lambert: Because we look at houses and we just go, well, houses are expensive, right? So house prices must be going up because houses are really expensive. But what we don't factor in is what's happened to inflation over that same period of time. So, and actually, in reality, weirdly, houses have got slightly cheaper because wages have gone up faster than house prices. It doesn't feel like it because they started at such a high level. But yeah, that's why we're getting poorer.

19:54Lee Boyce: Lovely. Good. How do we compare? Like who else is doing well? Who's doing badly apart from us?

20:00Simon Lambert: Basically, South Korea. Since 2020, South Korea's real average wealth per adult has ballooned by more than 55%. Right. South Korea's stock market is up a lot in recent times. It's being driven by the AI trade. There's some companies there that are very, very related to it. South Korea's stock market is up a lot. So basically any, you know, South Koreans invest in the stock market, you know, their pensions invest in the stock market and so on. weirdly russia and croatia saw average wealth levels rise sharply since 2020 37 and 29 respectively i'm not entirely sure of the full effect behind russia and what's going on there so i'm not going to describe it i imagine that may have something to do with the period of time we're looking at and the cost of living there but i would need to do some proper digging norway yeah not to georgie real average wealth per adult increased by 27 % between 2020 and 2025.

21:00Simon Lambert: Singapore also fared well. Nine nations, including the UAE, Taiwan and Turkey. I don't know whether UAE would still be up there, actually. And Japan saw the biggest amongst G7 economies with a 55 % spike. Again, Japanese stock market has been doing very well. But in 15 cases, average wealth per adult dropped, sometimes moderately, such as in Brazil, which went down 3%, or in France, which was down 4.5%. but it was more severe in Britain. Obviously, as we talked about, the Netherlands down by 14.4%. And Mexico was the only country to see wealth fall by more than Britain, although only on the mean average measure and not the median.

21:40Simon Lambert: So Mexico down nearly 30%. Now, does this bode well? But Sunday night is the only thing on my mind. The only thing on my mind is like, does this give us an advantage? I mean

21:54Lee Boyce: We're both thinking the same thing Exactly

21:57Simon Lambert: I mean the hilarity of all this Georgie you're missing out on this because you're in Canada

22:02Lee Boyce: I know which means I actually get to watch it at a respectable time

22:05Simon Lambert: You're missing out on the joy of the debate around do you go to bed and then get up and then watch it and then go back to bed do you just stay up do you just go to bed and not watch it if you stay up and watch it will you make England lose there's so many factors at play here

22:22Lee Boyce: Yes, on at eight o 'clock here.

22:23Georgie Frost: I love the thought of like a couple of English geezers on the back streets of the Azteca in the high altitude talking about this UBS report with a couple of local Mexicans.

22:33Lee Boyce: Yeah, that's the real battle, isn't it?

22:36Simon Lambert: We're not getting as poor as you. But we are getting poorer than Brazil, Germany, USA, Greece, Switzerland, Israel, France, Turkey, Hong Kong, Poland, South Africa, Australia, Ireland, Singapore, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Saudi Arabia, China, Qatar, Taiwan, Russia, South Korea, India, Cyprus, UAE and Japan. Yeah, but you know what, Simon?

22:57Lee Boyce: There's at least most of those countries that haven't made it through to the next round of the World Cup. So, do you know what? Who's poorer in my eyes, eh? Lee, the reason I ask that, is there any similarities between the bottom countries? And Simon laid out last week beautifully that when he takes over eventually, he will obviously run for leadership at some stage. there will be an opening, no doubt, coming down the line. But can we do anything to arrest this sort of decline?

23:26Georgie Frost: It's all linked to inflation, George, isn't it? It's all about taming inflation. And actually, Paul Donovan, who's the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth, said that a lot of it is due to the peculiarities of our energy pricing structure. What that means is that basically the price cap and how energy is priced in this country and the spikes that we've experienced over a couple of different periods have really hit us in the pocket in the way that they've measured this. And as Simon said, right, at the start of this, right, I think that it is a cost of living crisis, but it's a cost of living well crisis, and people potentially, you know, are cutting back here and there on kind of discretionary spend.

24:07Georgie Frost: And then you go and start thinking about property prices and what's been happening in property market uh over the last five years as well i mean property is kind of especially the last 18 months or so it's kind of been a bit in the doldrums in terms of of growth in property and i think the other interesting thing actually georgie and you mentioned it is about the number of millionaires and i was i was taking a back a little bit in this ubs because it said that 2 680 people per day are becoming new millionaires globally uh it estimates the number of millionaires have increased by 1.5 percent in 2025 highest growth rates in millionaires found in eastern europe led by lithuania with an eight percent increase followed by turkey latvia and hungary or with a growth rate above five percent in the us more than 440 000 new millionaires this is based on the dollar by the way 440 000 new millionaires were created in 2025 and around about 40 of the world's millionaires live in the US, which I thought was interesting.

25:11Georgie Frost: In Britain, the number of millionaires worked by 1.8%, growing by about 43 ,000 people. And there's 172 ,000 adults in Britain that fall in the 5 to 10 million pound wealth bracket. And UBS actually said, not a single nation in our sample of 56 markets has ended the year 2025, but fewer millionaires than it had at the beginning. and then it breaks it down into billionaires there was 3 ,402 billionaires globally there was an increase of 383 jump on 13 percent a thousand of these billionaires over a thousand of these billionaires are in the u.s 562 in china and 211 are in india and then we've got germany and russia closely behind that ubs said 19 billionaires had assets of more than 100 billion dollars 15 of those 19 are based in the US and on average billionaires wealth rose by close to 25 % in 2025 I think that all those things are quite interesting you know when you look at a snapshot of what's happening you could say the very richest are getting richer on that note there's a headline

26:21Simon Lambert: here Los Angeles Times SpaceX IPO sparks race for luxury housing in Southern California so off the back of the SpaceX IPO the Southern Californian luxury housing market is booming because there are lots of people who were early employees of SpaceX or they might have been lucky enough to somehow manage to be early private investors who are now worth a load of money off the back of the float and you're going to see a similar thing happen if OpenAI floats if Anthropic floats and so on and so on there is this kind of this effect that there's not that many of these people But, you know, it's a few hundred each time, at least.

26:59Lee Boyce: Well, that's good. You know, we may be getting poorer, but, you know, let's celebrate those people in Silicon Valley who are, you know, really smashing it. Lee also pumping his fists there. We are so pleased. Anyway, as we know, as we know, because we discussed it many times on the pod before, I tick mostly every box for those screwed in retirement. Female, 40-ish, self-employed, middle earner. Let's take my double X chromosomes alone. And government figures show there is a 48 % gap between the amount of money built up by men and women coming up to retirement. But, but the good news is there are vital ways that women can increase their chances of a decent retirement.

27:42Lee Boyce: And menfolk listeners don't turn off because, well, a lot of these can apply to you as well. So, Lee, I would like to point out I'm not totally screwed because the good thing is a good few years ago, I decided to become a personal finance journalist. And as I've said in the past, it was probably the best financial decision I've ever made to leave sports journalism where I was rubbish with money to become a personal finance journalist where I get to speak to experts like you and at least give myself a go at being better with money. So as much as I do tick every box there for the profile, don't worry, dear listener and Lee and Simon, I feel like I'm on the way.

28:22Lee Boyce: I'm on the way to a fairly decent retirement. But why are Lee generally women so behind?

28:30Georgie Frost: Well, let's look at the figures in this first, right? So government says that there's a 48 % gap between the amount of money built up by men and women coming to retirement. most recent data that's 2022 women aged 55 to 59 generally built up a private pension fund of about 81 000 against 156 000 pounds for men and new research from aj bell shows 36 percent of men contribute between six percent to 11 percent of their monthly pay to workplace pension each month compared to 29 percent of women so there's a gap there too and it also that data also suggests that women were more likely than men to contribute just three to five percent of their monthly salary which is probably not enough for a comfortable retirement all of these things add up over time and get separate figures from now pensions show women have a hundred around 105 000 pounds of pension savings when they retire compared to 232 000 pounds for men so that sets the scene that shows you that there is a gap that exists between men and women when it comes to pensions one of the The most obvious reasons for that is taking time out of work looking after children and also caring for elderly relatives.

29:39Georgie Frost: Women, unfortunately, in a position where quite often they are the ones that bear the brunt of that kind of care. I'm not saying that's always the case, but it still is quite often largely the case. So what can you do to make sure that you don't fall behind and at least try all you can to fill those gaps or make sure that you're going to have a big enough pot when it comes to retirement? And this is quite heavily skewed towards women, but also some of this will apply to men as well. Because as I say, not every family is the same. Not all care needs, not all the way families are structured are the same.

30:23Georgie Frost: so anyway number one is to claim child benefit right so to get the new full state pension you usually need at least 35 qualifying national insurance years on your record but until a child is 12 if you get child benefit you should receive free ni credits towards your state pension so while working is one way to get national insurance years claiming child benefit if you have children is another but you've got to make sure you register for this and many women don't due to the removal or a child benefit where a partner is a higher earner so you've got to make sure that you go and do this even if it doesn't feel like it applies to you in order to make sure that you don't end up with a sizable gap and therefore don't get full state pension when the time comes number two if you are a low income you can still be auto enrolled so anyone earning less than 10 000 pounds a year with any one employer will not be automatically enrolled and also enrollment has been a huge has made huge steps into the way in which we save into pensions in this country and it has made us probably pay more and pay more attention to our pension but it hits people on lower pay and those working a low number of hours again quite often that is heavily skewed towards women who might be working around child care when your child might be at school and you're doing sort of hours that are kind of fewer than a than a full-time job um you say you might be part-time but if you are on that low wage and you want to join a workplace pension you shouldn't be despondent and those that earn between six thousand two hundred forty pounds and ten thousand pounds one employer have the right to opt in and be treated like other members of the scheme so when you're paying your contributions too and so you should go and have a look the big issue with that though is that if you are earning that amount having any kind of money hoovered out of your monthly paycheck is probably going to be quite noticeable and it depends if you need every single penny and that's why it makes it a little bit trickier.

32:20Georgie Frost: Get pension contributions matched, I mean that's a given really. You want to find out what your employer is doing, is it matching what you're putting in, is it doubling what you're putting in, all of those kind of things. You want to go and check that out. Euthanize universal credit, so claiming benefits like universal credit counts towards the years needed to be able to claim state pension. I'm not sure everyone knows that. But again, you should go and find that out and see if that is going towards your qualifying years. Don't stop contributions during maternity leave. Again, this is a tricky one.

32:54Georgie Frost: I think this is a tricky one for people to kind of get their heads around. Typically, women take a year off out of work. I mean, I say off, but you know, looking after a small human for the first year of his life is an incredibly arduous and difficult thing for parents and especially mum your pension contributions while you're on maternity leave are probably going to be at the very very very very very bottom of your do i care list um when you are in those real throes of early child child life but it's well worth finding out how it works with statutory rules and what your pension's going to look like after a year of not contributing potentially can leave a bit of a hole you're going to miss out on all of those years of compounding interest for example so well we're fine now number six plan pensions as a duo i think a lot of us are guilty of this we just don't talk to each other properly about money.

33:56Georgie Frost: We don't have a proper plan together, especially about pensions. I think household bills may be more so, but I think as a married couple or just a cohabiting couple, you might just not talk about pensions. And, you know, do you know how much money your partner has in a pension? The answer is probably not because you don't really talk about it. But it is quite vital because you should see your retirement as a duo rather than just as a kind of solo act um so while you might be sitting pretty nicely into a pension and things are building up and going well your partner might not be you know so fortunate so it's well worth having that conversation you can add one-off sums to your pension this is number number seven so aj bell findings suggest men are more likely to use a one-off payment like a bonus to boost their pension pot this is because men often have larger average incomes meaning they have that freedom to cover one-off cost via salary if you get a thousand pound bonus from work you write it to a pension the government

34:57Lee Boyce: adds 250 pound tax relief to that but again the temptation is with a bonus you see it is that

35:02Georgie Frost: kind of extra money that potentially goes on a holiday potentially goes on a new car potentially goes on some treats for yourself for your family and you might not necessarily think pension and And the last one is pretty obvious, but increase your pension contributions. If you can just make those tiny little tweaks, as we always say on this show, go and have a play around with your calculators that your pension provider probably has. 1%, for example, could be huge. Analysis by PensionBee this year showed that for someone earning£25 ,000 a year, a 1 % contribution increase would mean an extra£21 per month to going into a pension.

35:41Georgie Frost: it's not a huge amount of money going in but the compounding effect over years will make it worth it while in 20 10 20 30 years and so all these things they seem fairly obvious and fairly like reminder heavy but it's incredible how often things like this do just slip down lists you end up feeling like you're in a bit of a hole oh wish i thought about that 10 years ago 15 years ago i I wish I paid it more attention. I wish I cared a little bit more. I wish I did ensure that I signed up for claiming child benefit. I wish I did know that about being able to be auto enrolled on a part-time role. All of those kinds of things that you just might not necessarily think about is well worth going investigating and making sure that you're going to have the most comfortable retirement as possible.

36:32Lee Boyce: Absolutely right Lee. These reminders are absolutely vital and if it doesn't affect you listening it probably affects someone that you know. So spread the word. Simon your views?

36:41Simon Lambert: I think as Lee said it's really important to think about this as a as a duo as a couple and if one of you is not going to be working because you're looking after children or one of you is not going to be working for any other reason or one of you is a lower earner then you need to think how are you going to balance this out. I also think you know as you talked about at the start of this if you're self-employed this is something that you particularly have to think about and so if you're a couple where one person is self-employed you need to think about it as a couple and if you're an individual and you're just self-employed then unfortunately it's it's all on you but it is really important to engage with these things and to just some of these little things can make a very big difference particularly things like this child benefit you know scenario which is an unholy mess but you know it is that kind of start early start small keep going and it makes a really big difference absolutely right simon simon do you

37:33Lee Boyce: I've realised that we've gone months now, maybe weeks. Time goes sort of weirdly for me at the moment. But we haven't had an update on how your trading slash investing£500 went or is going. Is it over the path to, was it£10 ,000 and you were up against a monkey? The reason I mention that is because we're going to talk about Vinted in a sec. But before we talk about Vinted, how did you get on?

38:01Simon Lambert: Right, so the race to£10 ,000 is still going.

38:05Lee Boyce: Okay.

38:05Simon Lambert: We are trying to race our way towards£10 ,000. We are racing our way towards£10 ,000 quite slowly, if I'm going to be entirely honest. Okay.

38:12Lee Boyce: How long has it been going on for?

38:14Simon Lambert: Yes, exactly. So I am currently up. Okay, I was down, but I am now currently up£1.31.

38:23Lee Boyce: Wow.

38:25Simon Lambert: Hmm. Yeah. Okay. Just go to the show, quite difficult to trade your way to£10 ,000 on the stock market. I've been buying in and out of stuff. I've been trying to jump on things that will go up. It's time consuming is the problem, even if you're allowed to do it during work time, which I am due to this. And some stuff goes up, some stuff goes down. So currently, I'm doing this on Trading 212 app, podcast sponsor, obviously. The reason why I'm doing it on Trading 212 app, no fees, no account charges, no share dealing fees. so I can buy and sell as I like without being hit by fees. And if you're trying to race your way to£10 ,000, that matters.

39:02Simon Lambert: If you're just investing, that matters. And if you're desperately trying to keep your head above water and you are currently gloating over a£1.31 profit, it really matters. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So out of the current investments in the Aberdeen Group, the fund manager, asset manager, that is up 32.73%. So I've got£132.07p holding in Aberdeen Group. Who'd have thought it? Aberdeen. I mean, they've had some really tough times recently. But that's been a good investment. The S &P 500 Vanguard tracker up 13.97%. That is on£113.97. Capricorn Energy, North Sea oil company, been up and down. Obviously, I invested in this off the back of the Iran war.

39:51Simon Lambert: That's up 12.98%. so that's on 112 pound 42 legal in general subjects of takeover talk actually that's why i bought this one that's up 10.9 so i've got the grand total of 99 pound 31 in there i didn't obviously by the point i got to lng i didn't have 100 pounds to spread across five shares anymore because some of the ones i bought really went down and then the duffer of the current portfolio philtronic small uk company uh specializes in kind of stuff for satellites and things should be doing really well off the back of the spacex boom has done very well off some deals with spacex in the past has some results out i thought the results looked good and i thought by philtronic those shares are going up uh currently down 38.13 on when i bought them yeah it turns out the results weren't as good as I thought.

40:43Simon Lambert: Worth a grand total of£42.7. Oh, for heaven's sake, in the time I've been talking to you, I've lost a pound.

40:51Lee Boyce: It's now only worth£500.3.

40:53Simon Lambert: I'm 3p up. Oh, Simon, bless your cotton socks. Oh, hang on a minute. I'm up 41p now.

41:00Lee Boyce: And this is why we don't look at our portfolios all the time. Yeah, okay, so 41p after genuinely, is it about three months?

41:08Simon Lambert: Yeah, a couple of months, yeah. Two months. Now, if I was buying and selling secondhand clothes on Vinted, on the other hand, and I was really good at it, I would be like Jeff Walton and I would be up£437.50.

41:21Lee Boyce: £400, eh, Lee? Well, this leads us on nicely. You've got an article on your website, but you are holding up the World Soccer Magazine, which I don't know has anything to do with Vinted. but maybe you can sell worlds. Yes, apparently it does. We'll get into that in a minute. But apparently there's lots of money to be made from our unwanted clothes in the back of our wardrobes. That's according to a woman that you spoke to who claims to make£12 ,000 a month selling high street clothes on Vinted. I am assuming all the clothes and accessories were not her own because that would be an enormous amount of unwanted clothes in one's wardrobe.

42:01Lee Boyce: She shared her insider tricks. I'm quite intrigued by this, Lee, because I have tried to sell clothes on Vinted. And yes, I made about£100, but the price of the clothes should have probably got me way more than that. But I just didn't I didn't care because I didn't want the clothes. So it didn't really matter massively to me.

42:20Georgie Frost: But just firstly, have you made any money from Vinted, Lee?

42:24Lee Boyce: Never go broke, by the way. Available in all good book shops, I think. Lee's book there. I just wanted to point out a little plug. Lee, carry on.

42:31Georgie Frost: I was going to say, actually, the lady in this story is in the race. She is the reseller in the race. But she started the race, to be fair, with a different sort of shop name and stuff. So she went from scratch to show that, because otherwise, if she did it with just how she was doing it, she would have won it within like two weeks. but she essentially set up her own like individual thing for this to start it from scratch to show that you can build up profits from scratch rather than just doing it and piggybacking off of the account that she's doing it from um i don't use vinted but i have got back into ebay and the reason why i'm holding up this copy of world soccer magazine world cup 2026 which has got a lovely wall chart in it it's all sealed up is that this is a genuine 10 bagger now what i mean by that is i went out uh and i realized how difficult it was to buy this magazine i couldn't find it anywhere in london i was just resigned to not getting it i just wanted a copy of it it's got analysis of every single player that's at the world cup every single nation and i just want to sit down flick through it and it's you know we're in watching games look at the profiles and all that kind of thing a couple of weekends ago in the most obscure news agent uh in my little local town in essex i saw a copy of it i couldn't believe it so i went and bought it five pound fifty five pound fifty well spent um and i didn't i did notice that there were kind of about five or six more copies of it laying underneath buried uh under some things anyway i went off and i thought i wonder how much they're selling for an ebay and if people were actually buying them well blowing me down I was seeing sold prices on eBay of 40, 50, 60 quid for a£5 magazine.

44:15Georgie Frost: So I raced up there the next morning. I'm really sorry, listeners, if you think this is, you know, really horrible of me. But I'm sorry, but sometimes you just got to go out and make some money. So I raced down with my daughter in the buggy down to the news agent. They were all still there. I picked up another five copies for a total sum of whatever it was,£5.50 times five. I gave one copy to my nephew because I thought, nah, it'd be nice for him to have a look. And I've got two left. I've sold two on eBay. And I've made a total of£90 profit on those two magazines. Just selling them on eBay. Sticking them in an envelope.

44:54Georgie Frost: Bidding more. Getting off. Done. Got two more to go. Might hold one for roundabout the World Cup final time. But it was just so hard to buy the magazine. I just saw an opportunity just to make some extra cash. and sorry but if i didn't do it someone else was going to do it so there we go that's why i was holding up a copy of the magazine so anyway i think the vintage have come along they've stolen a lot of ebay's thunder i think a lot of people use vintage now versus ebay ebay was always the kind of place to go and this lady jess has given all of her top tips here so first thing is photos are everything you've got to make sure that you are using the right lighting you've got to make sure that the pictures are really good they show any blemishes they show off the item in the best light and then you know hopefully you'll get more eyes on it we're in a world now where visuals really do matter use trendy keywords so what you need to do is make sure that you have all of the information in the listing in the title because people do really hyper search things they really get down in the weeds of looking for something specific in terms of clothes always give the correct measurements there's nothing worse if someone buys something and then try to return it because the measurements were incorrect or the sizing was wrong.

46:02Georgie Frost: The research items you sell, I do this all the time. That's why I did that with that World Cup soccer magazine. I went and had a look to see if it was actually any interest in it and look at sold prices. Don't look at listing prices because listing prices can be anything. Sold prices are going to be better. She says here, price higher than you expect. I kind of understand that, especially on Vinted, because a lot of people you see on social media, they get lowballed and people do really come in with some really gnarly offers and it's because i think a lot of people think that otherwise you were just going to take it to a charity shop or one of those clothing bins bundle clothes together so she's saying here that you know you could basically get a few items put them all together offer it with a you know a certain percentage off the list price you know items that might match together an outfit that kind of thing you know people can get visual with it and then boom you're done and then she says find your own speciality which is actually something i go into quite a lot in never go break it's about finding your niche right it's making sure that if you are left with something um you're happy to be left with it because it's something you like and it also it's about becoming really knowledgeable about what you're selling so for example for her she specializes in y2k jeans 30 skirts jean shorts ladies high street fashion items especially brands are m &s and monsoon and a few men's hoodie brands so she's you become a kind of real expert a go-to your expert on those items if you see them out in the wild or you see somewhere to go pick them up boom done you've got it you know how much it's going to sold for and you know there's going to

47:31Lee Boyce: be a willing audience to pay for it yep fabulous thank you very much lee simon your start of the

47:36Simon Lambert: week 130 pounds apparently that is what those 200 halifax shares that i was given in 1997 are now worth having held on to them i also got a bit of a payout in a special capital restructuring dividend which means I've had a total return of£248 on top of that. I don't know whether this answer is accurate because I looked it up on the internet, but I will find out if the answer is accurate and we will do and ask an expert question on it.

48:05Lee Boyce: Lovely. Thank you very much, Simon. Thank you very much, Lee, and thank you for listening. You can keep up to date with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. And if you have any comments or questions with the team or anything you'd like them to look into, Simon?

48:18Simon Lambert: email us at podcast at this is money.co.uk ask us your questions tell us what you think all right

48:23Lee Boyce: then and if you like our podcast why not rate us wherever you found us helps other people find us