How much money do you need to retire early?

0:02Lee Boyce: Welcome to This Is Money podcast sponsored by Trading212. Download the Trading212 app today and open a cash isa with promo code TIM to get the 12 month bonus promo rate of 4.61%. Terms apply. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Simon Lambert today is Lee Boyce. And coming up, so you want to retire early, we'll tell you how much you need to have saved in your pension to quit the daily grind at any age. How does your pot stack up? Also state oil prices and food bills soar. Is a fresh cost of living crisis on its way as we head towards winter? Every landlord in England will soon have to join a national register, but will it actually make tenants' lives any better?

0:40Lee Boyce: And has Lee's daughter struck gold with a£10 Disney trading card? Don't forget to stay up to date with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. But first, do you dream of jacking it all in and retiring early? Plenty of us have, and it's the young 'uns apparently that are the most keen. Gen Z, those under 29, are three times more likely to want to retire before the age of 55 than the rest of us, according to research by Skipton Building Society. But are they more likely to be able to do it? How much would you need, And what would it actually take for you to be able to retire at 55, but also 45, 50, 60?

1:27Lee Boyce: Welcome, Simon. Welcome, Lee. Lee, I think for a few of us here, i.e. all of us, the 45 ship has probably sailed. But can we do it a little bit earlier than what is planned? What is the current retirement age? Just remind us because it's changing, isn't it, soon?

1:47Georgie Frost: just to quickly rewind very quickly there uh wanting to retire when you're 29 three times

1:53Lee Boyce: more likely i love that you're already done it's quite depressing isn't it you're done with black

1:59Georgie Frost: you kind of want to retire now i've just had it that's it um done checking out done um okay retirement rules at the moment so you can think about it in two different ways really first part of the puzzle of your retirement is your state pension now that is currently 66 but it's going to be moving up this gradually moving up to 67 between now and 2028 so there are the chances are depending on your age now that age is likely to continue going up if we're being quite frank but that is when you can start getting your state pension and then we've all been pushed um i would say especially under 50s into saving into our private pensions and trying to take control more of our retirement and having more kind of you know kind of investing and making sure that you're on track we have a lot more tools at our disposal I would argue than previous generations in order to do that you can start accessing your private pension from 55 that's rising to 57 from 2028 so for all intents purposes 57 you can take 25 tax-free lump sum from that and then you'll be subject to income tax or anything else that you're withdrawing from your private pension it's also quite early to be tapping into your pension at that age you have to be incredibly careful because you know if you leave that money for another five ten years compounded interest all of that kind of stuff is going to mean you're probably going to have a richer retirement but it's a trade-off a lot of it depends on your health for example what kind of job that you've done you know how much is your body being worn down by the job that you've done all of those kind of factors come into play but that is the current state of play when it comes to retirement

3:40Lee Boyce: I was there tapping my head not just your body Lee your mind your mind think about all those 29 year olds you want to quit now they're what are they going to be like in 20 30 years so tell Tell me about this research then, Simon. What would it actually take? I mean, let's go for the bold one. Like I said, I think the ship has sailed for all of us here. But, you know, let's say you are this slightly disillusioned person in your 20s. What would it take to retire at 45? Is it really doable?

4:08Simon Lambert: I think I'm the only person here over the age of 45, aren't I? Yeah. Well, there you go. So the ship's definitely sailed for me. I mean you two on the other hand you might be hiding something up your sleeve that I don't know about you know six years time or however long it is I could find myself sitting here podcasting by myself you know when Lee's gone off and retired at the age of 45 20 years time when you hit 45 Georgie I could find myself podcasting by myself I wouldn't go that far

4:38Lee Boyce: so I'm 15 15 years time but yeah yeah you could do you could do you got to over egg it haven't

4:43Simon Lambert: you when you're being a gentleman right okay if you are 25 today and you want to retire at 45 and you want to be safe in the knowledge that you won't run out of money until the age of 100 okay so that's basically 55 years of not working more than half your life if you live to 100 and you retire at 45 and by the age of 45 you probably have done 25 years of working maybe okay you would need 1.48 million pounds in pension and isis just quickly the isis is key the isis part is key yeah the isis part is key because what you're doing is you're enabling yourself to take a tax-free income. And to rewind a little bit, when people think about retiring,

5:39Georgie Frost: they think about pensions.

5:41Simon Lambert: When you want to retire early, you need to think beyond pensions, because you can't get your pension until you're 55, and that's rising to the age of 57, and you won't get your state pension until you're 67. So what are you going to live on? ideal thing is to have a pot of money that you could draw on tax-free hence the isa and tax you know has quite a big impact on what you need to to earn and it's you know if you're so minded and you fancy a little bit of fun you can do a back of the envelope calculation sometime i was having a conversation with my friend the other day and i did the same thing and i worked out take your mortgage out of the equation because that's the other big thing mortgage or rent if you take your mortgage out the equation then you work out how much you have to earn before tax to pay the mortgage knock that off your salary then take into account okay if i was living on a lower income and i could get some of that tax free how much less could i live on if you are a higher rate taxpayer and the further up the scale you go, the greater the impact will be.

6:54Simon Lambert: If your additional rate taxpayer is an even greater impact, you can take a surprising amount off your sort of nominal salary and still end up with a reasonable amount of money to live on. So that's why the ISA is important. To go back to what I was saying, so if you are that 25-year-old, how are you going to retire at 45? Because that's what you need to know, isn't it? And what you need to be doing is you need to have£80 ,000 already saved up, and then you need to be saving£900 a month into your ISA and£1 ,208 a month into your pension. If, on the other hand, you went, do you know what, I reckon I could hack it for another five years, and you could retire at 50 instead, then you'd need£60 ,000 in savings.

7:40Simon Lambert: Now, you need to be saving£390 into your ISA and£1 ,042 into your pension. What about the more likely scenario where you are 40 and you're thinking, okay, I fancy being able to retire at 55. Well, in that instance, you would need to have£205 ,000 now across your pension and ISA pot, and you'd need to save£1 ,375 into a pension. Now, we don't be so close to being able to take money out of that pension at that point that you don't need to worry about it. What I would recommend doing is going to thisismoney.co.uk forward slash pensions and then having a look at the figures for yourselves because it's not the greatest podcast to listen to a man reading numbers out of the table.

8:31Simon Lambert: What I take away from this are four, I think, really important things. And this is just a rough list. It's not in order of importance. One, mortgage or rent. If you want to retire early, you need ideally to own your own home mortgage free. If you're still paying a mortgage or you're still paying rent, I just don't see how the numbers add up unless you've got absolute pots of money, at which point you'd probably pay off the mortgage or decide to buy a home outright or something like that. A mortgage or rent, it takes up such a big chunk of your income and is going to continue doing that, particularly if it's rent, that I just don't see how it works.

9:20Simon Lambert: And once you take that out of the equation, as I said a minute ago, it can make a really big difference to what you need in terms of income. Losing growth. This is the big issue. If you retire early and you're no longer saving, particularly into your pension, you're losing out on the growth that you would be getting in that pension. And if you start drawing on that pension, obviously, if you're over the age of 55 now, 57 in the future, then you're starting to draw it down rather than build it up. And for a lot of people, they do need to keep building that pension right up until the point where they're probably at least 60.

9:52Simon Lambert: Still doing some work. This, I think, is the key, actually. If you can still do some work, even if it's bringing in, say, 20 % of what you earn now, then that will make a really big difference to the numbers. And finally, if you've worked for the same employer for some time, or if you worked for an employer a while ago and built up a pension pot there over a period of time, and it's a decent pension pot, do yourself a favor, contact that pension scheme, either your employer now or that old one, and ask them if you have a protected pension age. Because there's lots more people out there who actually have a protected pension age, which means that they can get their pension when they're 55 and they don't have to wait for 57, even after the age changes, than probably realise.

10:43Simon Lambert: And a lot of it depends on when you were a member of that scheme. To give you a personal example, I found out I've got a protected pension age the other day. I didn't think I did, but I did actually phone up my pension scheme and I did ask them. And it turns out I'm still with the same employer, been saving in a long time. It predates a piece of legislation and it means that I don't have to wait till 57 to get that pension. I could get it when I'm 55. Probably not going to take it then. It's nice to know, isn't it?

11:13Lee Boyce: It is indeed. Lee, anything you would add to that? Any top tips to do now if you do want the option of retiring early? It feels like we've got costs coming out of our ears, which we'll get onto in a minute but i just prioritizing i think actually i'm really strange i would say this

11:34Georgie Frost: year has been a massive sea change among my friendship group um most of us are turning 40 this year or turning 40 next year because of the year we were at school um and actually very rarely pensions come up no one's talking about pensions or whatnot but people have been like talking about it a bit more and talking about almost not feeling burnt out or work but feeling like they're about to hit 40 it's big milestone want to do something different with their life can they step out of their kind of job which is you know say earning between 60 and 80k or something like that and actually take it take a kind of lower paying job but a better um to work life balance type scenario um and then talking about how much they've got saved in a pension and all that kind of thing and i think a lot more of that is going on i think it's very hard when you're 40 odd thinking about your retirement age and how it's going to look again i'll go back to that point about health but also i think sometimes you can get really bound out of work and work can get really stressful and it can be really difficult if you're just want to retire or just do something else but you know you can get to that point and then realize that the grass isn't necessarily always green on the other side aka you might take a different role not enjoy it or you might retire maybe you are 50 55 60 retire and actually realize you don't enjoy being retired whatsoever and that does happen quite a lot but look i think you've just got to take control of your pension make sure that you are putting in enough every month which is difficult with mortgage costs and use costs are also going up for a lot of people who are coming off the back of ultra low five-year fixes and facing up to reality of a more of a four to five percent mortgage rate that takes a massive chunk how and hopefully you've made haywire the sun shines and you've been you know kind of boosting your pension and that's kind of what I did I knew that um our mortgage rate wasn't going to be low forever but I made sure that between that five years um I was ramping up what was going into my pension and I'm obviously between that 35 and 40 age category in this uh and I'm well on track for that retire at 55 number which is great to look at if I'm being quite frank that feels quite nice to know that I'm firmly in there uh so you want to make sure that you will play with numbers and that you're doing what you can and you know what's your what's your employer offering you are they um simply matching contributions or are they doubling your contributions what is it that you're getting out of your private pension um and it sometimes it sounds frightfully dull but it could be the most incredibly um important thing that you do just spending a couple of hours every year looking over what your pension is invested in how it's performing how much you're putting into it what that might mean for age 57 for example how much could you have in there for retirement have you paid your national assurance contributions over you know your full working life aka you're going to get a full state pension put that factor that in as well but Simon is right the property aspect is huge and we had another story on the website this week suggesting that around about six million Britons don't know what their retirement is going to look like because they're going to still be paying renting costs and mortgage costs into their retirement.

14:40Georgie Frost: And that's quite a worrying number. And that number has grown. You know, more of us are taking more stretched out mortgages, for example, in order to afford what it is that we want to buy and to make sure we can do it. And all these factors come into play. What this table does in this story, it's a very nifty table, in my opinion. You can have a look on the left hand side at your age. Look at retire 45, 55, 60. Benchmark yourself. See where you are. Are you on track? Are you falling behind? Are you above what is saying in here? And act accordingly.

15:12Lee Boyce: Yeah, I'm just looking at it at the minute here. That's all right. You know, I'm on track. And all I'll say is I'd absolutely nothing sort of 10, 15 years ago. And I'm on track to retire somewhere between 55 and 60. Depends how the next few years go. You know, so you can still do it is all I'll say. But just get cracking on it. Simon?

15:32Simon Lambert: I think a good way to think about this is maybe not the all or nothing thing. And obviously, I talked about if you've got the ability to still do some work. But I think maybe one way to think about this is the idea of potentially taking a bit of a sabbatical and work in your 50s. Maybe after you haven't worked for a while, you might think, I kind of miss it. Maybe if you can't hit that number, or actually, if even if you could hit that number, but you want to protect, you know, continuing to grow your wealth into later life take a year or two three even and then go back to work now the difficulty is are you going to be able to go back to work you're going to find a job and we've had plenty of stories at the moment about people in their 50s struggling to find work you've been made redundant uh and this appears to be something that is impacting uh women in their 50s harder than men in their 50s as well but if you're if you're willing you know at that point to go well do you know what actually i might go back into a less high-powered job i might go back into a job that's lower down the ladder i might go do something completely different we had a great story this week about the the best jobs you can do that don't involve sitting behind a desk all day if maybe if you want to do something like that take your sabbatical um and then maybe as part of your sabbatical do a bit of retraining or get a bit of experience and go back and do something else.

16:51Lee Boyce: I don't know about you, but I'm constantly thinking about what I do when I grow up. At the minute, it's to become a dog trainer, mostly because I've got two dogs and they could do with training. So why not do it yourself? But I'm always thinking about things that I could do. And I remember I read a book, The 100 Year Life, about sort of 10 years ago, and it spoke exactly how you spoke there, Simon, about rather than we have a job or even a career for life, actually, you take sabbaticals through that life. It's different stages and you might do something completely different i'm always thinking like that what would you do lee if you were when you grow up what would be your alternative when i grow up when you grow up and when i do my three months

17:29Georgie Frost: sabbatical uh in the next few years so i'm in you listening i'm gonna write a best-selling novel and uh a film script and a tv sitcom script and there we go the money will start rolling in mate

17:42Lee Boyce: it start rolling why not why not lee or you're going to become a professional trading card person. But we'll get on to that in a minute. Because before we do that, like I said to Lee a little bit earlier, there are a lot of costs going out. And it seems like we're staring down the barrel of even more of these costs going out because oil surged above$107 a barrel, petrol already jumping 5p a litre in a week, energy bills forecast to rise again. And then I'm reading an article on your website, warnings that the weekly food shop could be heading towards 150 quid. Just to put that into context, in 2020, it was£100.

18:21Lee Boyce: That is a lot. So are we heading into a bleak winter cost of living crisis? Simon, oil up above$107 a barrel. What does that even mean to us in our pockets? But where are we going to start feeling that first? And why? I'll tell you what it means for our pockets is I had to fill up the car yesterday.

18:43Simon Lambert: It did a 99 pound you know on your card thing and said you can fill up up to 99 pounds and i couldn't fill

18:52Georgie Frost: the car up with diesel it wasn't on the light right but it was nearly on the light but diesel

18:58Simon Lambert: was so expensive that 99 pound wouldn't fill the tank up wow and it's not like a mega tank it's a

19:05Georgie Frost: big tank but it's not like a mega tank kind of thing so there you go that's what it means in

19:10Simon Lambert: your pocket obviously the knock-on effect of this is that it's not just people like yours truly who had a day off to go surfing and needed to drive back from the wave at bristol yesterday but it's also trucks driving around the things that you buy taking the raw materials for the things that you buy to places and then taking the finished product to other places delivering your food to supermarkets all those other things this that has a real impact you know feeds through into business costs energy prices we are suffering obviously with high gas prices gas prices influence the price of electricity it's still tied to that despite the amount of renewable energy that we produce in this country which is quite a lot we've actually been quite successful at that it's something we should pat ourselves on the back for what we should not pat ourselves on the back for is still paying electricity prices tied to gas.

20:06Simon Lambert: That is a big, big cost that feeds through to everything from heating your home to, again, the cost of running shops, running businesses, producing things in factories and so on. All of it feeds through to basically inflation pressure, cost of living. Are we going to see another cost of living crisis?

20:28Georgie Frost: Well, the Bank of England thinks not.

20:30Simon Lambert: It thinks inflation is going to go up and it's going to peak. It doesn't see the same kind of spike that we had before. But what we are definitely seeing, and we've said this before, is a cost of living well crisis, where there are some people who genuinely are struggling with the cost of living and struggle to get by.

20:46Georgie Frost: But for most of the rest of us, it feels like you're

20:50Simon Lambert: endlessly having to cut back on the fun, nice things in life in order to just meet the essential bills. And I read an interesting column the other day in the Times, and she was talking about the fact that actually wages are rising faster than the cost of living and talking about how the cost of living crisis is a bit of a misnomer. And I do agree with her there. Wages are rising faster than the cost of living. But for a growing number of people, what you have to take into account is that you can't measure those two things directly because they get their pay rise and then they're losing 40 % of it to tax.

21:35Simon Lambert: And due to the fiscal drag that we've seen with more people being dragged into higher rate tax, it used to be they were losing 20 % of it, but now they're losing 40 % of it. So the pay rises need to be that bit bigger to keep up with inflation, plus they're already feeling the pain from before. So whilst I do agree with the sentiment of it, I do think that actually, this is where the fiscal drag thing is really kicking in. I feel like there's such a different picture in different people's lives, that we can't make any

22:04Lee Boyce: kind of proper judgment, you know, cost of living well, cost of living crisis, like you said, some people are absolutely on their knees, and they have been probably say, COVID was, you know, The punches keep on rolling since then and probably before. But then I go and visit my mum in some place in Surrey and cost of living crisis. What cost of living crisis? It's a Tuesday evening and every single restaurant is packed to the gunwales. It's bizarre. But unfortunately, a lot of these things, Lee, energy bills, petrol and food bills, it's not something that we can realistically, if you are really short of money, can cut back on.

22:42Lee Boyce: These are absolutely essentials. how on earth did the weekly food shop get so high well it's true that these are essentials georgia

22:50Georgie Frost: you know filling up the car for a lot of people is an absolute necessity to get to work or to live their daily lives and the cost of fuel is up to a four-year high the filling up is becoming more and more expensive we've got energy prices the the cap is there for october but wholesale gas prices are starting to rear their ugly head again and what's that going to mean for january when the real true cold spell probably hits this country. And that's another worry for people. And then, yeah, the food inflation is absolutely incredible. And I've seen a lot of this over social media. People, you know, that classic, this same shop, you know, a few years ago was X amount and it's now this.

23:30Georgie Frost: You know, what is going on? And actually, if that's you, you're completely correct because the Food and Drink Federation this week said that a£100 food shop six years ago now cost just under 140 pounds um that is due to a big reason for that is the the russia ukraine conflict february 22 that all starts to kick off um and which has helped push up prices but energy and you know the knock-on effect of that has been energy prices and the price to process uh food um and they're saying that they estimate the same supermarket shop will go up another nine quid to£147.50 by July and that food inflation is going to hit 4 % by Christmas.

24:14Georgie Frost: I mean, that is quite alarming. The other piece of the puzzle of this and what manufacturers are warning about is extra red tape and regulation. They're saying that these changes in regulation and taxes are talking an extra two billion in costs for the sector last year. And that's all having a knock-on effect of what we're paying at the supermarket and all sorts of things are going on so for example the super el nino weather phenomenon phenomenon is likely to put pressure on the cost of real staples like rice wheat sugar cocoa coffee it could go on and on and on um and yeah we do have i think we are blessed in this country actually with a full range of supermarkets You've got your kind of lower price, low end, you know, kind of your bargain basement type supermarkets that definitely serve a purpose.

25:04Georgie Frost: Then you've got your kind of mid-level ones that, you know, a lot of us use. And then you kind of have the upper echelons, the kind of more aspirational supermarkets that people go to. And we're fortunate, I think, in this country that we do have that mix of supermarkets that on the whole do do a pretty good job of trying to keep prices as low as possible. because you know quite often there are price wars and things going on yes i can i do moan about them from time to time especially things like loyalty uh stuff all that kind of thing winds me up no end and i do do a big bulk of my weekly food shop uh at a local farm shop now because i just think quality of meat's better at the butchers there for example but that's not uh that's not an answer for lots of people because it's not cheap it's not a cheaper way of feeding us i just find it better quality and it goes further and i think a lot of people are cutting back um what they're spending but i've never been a big fan of cost of living crisis of that term mainly because of what you just said georgie it affects people in different ways and it's just like a one like catch all term that just doesn't work out when you do see restaurants busy you see pubs and busy you go for a family day out and it's not cheap a family day out is not cheap but there's loads of people there there's loads of families there they've paid the entry fee they've paid five quid for an ice cream that's why i've never i've never been a huge fan of it but it is a worry between i would say between now and the end of winter what happens next in terms of bills and how much we're going to be

26:40Lee Boyce: paying for all of those essentials so i mean um put this all in the pot shake it all about

26:45Simon Lambert: what does this do to borrowing costs what does this do to interest rates what does this do to push them up. I mean, we've seen mortgage rates rise this week off the back of higher government bond yields largely, but the expectation that interest rates are going to have to rise. There is an expectation that the Bank of England will raise interest rates before the end of the year. There's been a greater expectation that the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates in the US due to the US economy running hot and the impacts of the Iran war, etc. on inflation. whether that happens we shall see the bank of england has said sort of effectively some of its job is being done for it it doesn't necessarily need to raise rates andrew bailey dispelled brilliantly this week the myth that they have a secret plan as well he said we don't have a secret plan that that's not true but it remains to be seen but if you go back a year or to the start of this year the expectation was that interest rates were going to come down and as lee mentioned earlier there are people coming off five-year fixes at the moment that were very very low i know someone coming off what a 0.99 percent one at the end of the year and and the impact of that is substantial and and has continued to be feeding through so what what the bank of england won't be relying on is the data provided by the least scientific poll created in some time by me in our story about the cost of weekly shop this week in which I asked how much do you spend on grocery shopping each week I did not specify the size of the household however I thought about that as I was writing the poll and then I thought you know what it's going to be so complicated if I do that There's going to be so many variables.

28:36Simon Lambert: I'm just going to stick it down as a really simple thing. This is a poll of equality that even reform would not pay for it. Anyway, do you want to know the results?

28:44Lee Boyce: Absolutely right.

28:45Simon Lambert: Well, the results are really interesting. Yeah, of course. 1 ,581 votes and the categories were less than£75, 75 to 100, 100 to 125, 125 to 150, more than 150. And I think the results illustrate the points that you made and Lee made is that, you know, it's not all one homogenous bunch. It is really spread around because basically it was pretty much a fifth for each answer. 17 % said less than£75. 22 % said 75 to 100. 20 % said 100 to 125. 22 % said 125 to 150. 19 % said more than 150. So even allowing for the fact that people answering that are going to have different sized households, it is quite interesting how there's a real broad spread there across the cost of the weekly grocery shop.

29:41Simon Lambert: I guess the thing is, is if you are, you know, thinking, right, I need to cut back on this, which I mean, my family isn't the worst offender, but potentially does largely due to yours truly's habit of going to the shop on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday and blowing the weekly food budget with nice things to eat for dinner that evening. Maybe if you can knock yourself down a category, you'll feel that a little bit richer.

30:06Lee Boyce: Yeah, absolutely right. I'm just trying to in my head think about how you could make that slightly more scientific. I wonder if you could have done it sort of per person in the household. But then like Lee's got little people. So, you know, that doesn't really work out.

30:19Simon Lambert: You're basically asking people to do maths there as well.

30:22Georgie Frost: I was going to say, I've got little people that basically diet consists of pasta, pasta sauce and bananas. Like, you know, from a day to day base. They're cheap, Georgie. They're cheap to run and maintain kids. They're pretty basic. And actually, one thing I was going to add to this that you can't factor in is the shrinkflation kind of effect as well, right? Because this week, Mr. Lambert treated The Office to a pack of M &S Dark Chocolate Digestive Biscuits. And I took one out of the packet and they have changed the size of the digestive. They are paper thin. And then I looked at the gram on the packet of biscuits, 300 grams.

31:01Georgie Frost: I could have sworn over 400 grams at the start of the year. that kind of thing is going on a lot of that's a lot that is a lot so that kind of thing creeps in as well because naturally you didn't have to buy more of the product to make up for what you're missing so that kind of so hard to factor in as well my answer to this when he pointed out

31:21Simon Lambert: how thin the biscuit was was well the chocolate's the best bit but that leads me to that it's not

31:27Lee Boyce: just shrinkflation i can never remember what the name of it is what's the one where they skimpflation is that yeah skimpflation I did remember where they skimp on the quality of the

31:37Simon Lambert: product yeah and we had greedflation where big brand companies were pushing up prices by more than they needed to taking advantage of inflation it's all hitting us in our pockets or in our

31:48Lee Boyce: stomachs either way right moving on from this one because landlords in England will soon have to sign up to a new national register from this December so the government says it'll help renters know who they're dealing with and councils crack down on rogue landlords but landlords say the database which is part of the new renters rights act risks duplicating existing schemes and just simply adding more cost and bureaucracy so who is right on this one firstly what exactly lee is changing

32:17Georgie Frost: when why who what where when uh so this is a new mandatory database landlords need to be signed up to it as part of the renters right act uh that came in in may that we talked about quite a lot the national database starts from december and the aim is to give councils rent as a single source of information about who owns and manages each property of course the rental industry does have the occasional bad egg in terms of landlords on the flip side of that you can also get nightmare tenants and just to give you a little insider information on this story georgie we actually had written about this before but there was just this update basically like a nudge i would say from the housing minister who said the rollout of a national landlord registration service is an important first step toward establishing our new innovative database of private rented sector properties which will empower tenants support responsible landlords and help counsel councils enforce our transformative renters rights act now the reason i was going to say the insider information on this it was should we write this story or not is it interesting enough or not and i think i said let's definitely do it because i think there's a lot of landlords that are going to be upset by this that might not have quite realized or cottoned on how quickly this is coming in and this story now has 400 comments on it three quarters of the comments are quite angry landlord saying that there should be a tenants database as well to highlight nightmare talents and then it's all got a little bit nasty landlords are getting kind of shunted left right and center as these big bad figures when it's not always you know very rarely the case you know they serve a purpose and people need homes to rent and that's the thing so i understand the logic of it though because there are the occasional bad eggs that you want to root out.

33:59Georgie Frost: But it's one of those kind of big brother-esque type scenarios in which people are upset that they have to be on this database and their credentials kind of hoard over.

34:11Lee Boyce: Well, Lee, is it sort of like a trust pilot kind of thing? I mean, can you rate your landlord? Or have I just taken this a whole other step further? I mean, it could be, but just names and details.

34:22Georgie Frost: I don't think it's quite that. And I think it's like, you know, if there's, or flag, if there's been an issue in the past, you know, something that's potentially gone wrong with the let or one of the properties that the landlord has had. But I think this is a real can of worms. And I think that it's one of those things where it's, you might be a tenant and you have a landlord and there's something goes wrong with the boiler. Now you have different types of landlords. You'll have a landlord that's completely sympathetic, which I would say is a large chunk of the landlords that will go and get that issue fixed as if it was their own home.

34:56Georgie Frost: They understand that you need hot water, that you need heating and they try and get it fixed as quickly as possible. Then you get the occasional bad egg of a landlord that will kick in the can down the road. And before you know it, you've gone a couple of weeks without a working boiler. And that is very much, I would say, the exception rather than the norm. And what this does is it makes all of the really good, legitimate landlords feel kind of victimized and being clubbed in with the occasional bad egg that's not getting things sorted. And the idea is for tenants to be able to make a kind of informed decision whether the property that they're going to let out is run and has a landlord that is a good landlord.

35:35Georgie Frost: As I say, I understand the logic, but I can also understand if I was a landlord, why I'd be a little bit upset by this.

35:42Lee Boyce: I'm a landlord, an accidental landlady, lord, whatever. I don't mind it, but I'm definitely down on the money. Like it doesn't even cover the mortgage, but it's because I have to move somewhere else that I rent out the house on a view that I might return there eventually. Now, one, I assume the property name and area is going to be on this register, which is a bit of concern if landlords do want to return to their home. But I have no problem with a register per se, you know that you are providing a vitally important very personal service you know it's not like another industry this is someone's home they live in so i don't really have an issue per se with having a register of people what i do i do think is most of us thankfully will not come into contact with the really rogue landlords most of us i would suggest because there are some really you know underground kind of bad landlords this is going to do nothing nothing to sort that out is my view.

36:37Lee Boyce: Simon? I just think this is, it's well-meaning, but I just feel this is more

36:43Simon Lambert: pointless red tape. If you let out a property with your tenants, there will be a tenancy agreement. Now, what will happen is one of two things. Most people will use a letting agent and it's the letting agent's responsibility to look after things. And it will be made clear when you sign up to that property or should be made clear whether that letting agent is just responsible for letting the property and then the management will pass over to the landlord or whether that letting agent will rent the property and then also look after the management of it at which point your letting agent is the point of contact and they'll sort things out and they've got all that information there or you have let it directly from the landlord and if the landlord has directly let it to you then your contract will be with the landlord you know the landlord is managing it I don't really see what this is solving because still, if you have a problem, it's them that you need to go to.

37:39Simon Lambert: There is this thing of making sure properties are up to a decent standard and everything like that. But you don't need to do this whole like national register of anything to do that. That's just part of the like, is it OK to be rented? And the reason why I was shaking my head is because I kind of think it's easy to dismiss a bit of this in being harmful to tenants idea. as just landlords and the lettings industry grumbling and moaning. But it is happening. And there is a big issue, not just of affordability of houses to buy, but houses to rent and flats to rent, obviously, as well. And we are seeing an impact there.

38:17Simon Lambert: The government keeps being warned about this, but doesn't really appear to be paying any attention to the people who were actually involved at the coalface. Then it's just dismissing them as, you know, wicked people renting homes. I think is the general vibe. First time buyers good, landlords and letting agents bad. Vibes based policy, basically. But I was shaking my head because a friend of mine also, like you, has become an accidental landlord. He owns a flat in Hackney. He is letting it out whilst he lives with his girlfriend somewhere else in London in a flat that they also let because it didn't work to sell it.

38:55Simon Lambert: They couldn't buy, but they wanted to live together. So that's what they've done.

38:58Georgie Frost: He's not making any money on this. Similar scenario. He's losing money.

39:02Simon Lambert: It would be cheaper for him if he was still living in his own flat. But the tenancy agreement is up and the tenants are moving out because they're buying somewhere. And he said to them, well, you can stay until you're ready to move to wherever you're buying. Like, you don't need to leave on a certain date. I'm happy. You just tell me when you're completing. That's fine. I said, what are you going to do? Are you going to let it out again? He said, well, well, I've thought about it, but to be honest, I've got to apply for a license from Hackney Council to let the property from now on. And it's going to cost me a grand.

39:36Simon Lambert: And now I look this up and it's not totally true. It's actually going to cost him£925. So he's exaggerated slightly. But he's like, I just can't be bothered. Now, obviously, if you spread that out over a year or whatever, then the cost comes down and everything. But it's just an extra cost on top. He's just like, I just can't, I can't be dealing with it. I'm not paying them a grand for a license to rent my flat out. And he's a good landlord. No, he's looking after the tenants who've lived there. And he's like, it's just, so anyway, he's trying to sell it, which, you know, okay, that maybe puts the flat into the hands of a first time buyer or whatever.

40:14Simon Lambert: And maybe we're continuing down that route where we have decided landlords and letting bad buying good. but there's lots of people in the property industry saying we've swung that pendulum too far and it's now harming people at the other end who let's face it can't raise the deposit to buy the property because they're paying so much money in rent due to the depletion of rental properties I do think it might be worth just maybe listening a little bit to the people actually involved in letting out houses I think we've got to that point yeah and I agree with you about the vibe

40:50Lee Boyce: space thing and I will say this and I will continue to say this even if I become a homeowner and never

40:56Simon Lambert: rent again unlikely because I just do rent all the time I like renting I'm really grateful to the

41:04Lee Boyce: phenomenon some I've had some I've had some pretty crappy landlords thankfully no one terribly terribly bad but I'm I'm so grateful for the opportunity I had to to rent around the country and live in places that I probably wouldn't be able to afford. You know, I can leave quickly, bad boyfriends, all that sort of thing. I could go on. But yes, so I'm grateful for renting, and I wish we'd treat it a little bit better. But anyway, on to something a little bit cheerier, Lee. I've been accidentally swept up in trading card mania, says Lee Boyce. do we now own a piece of card worth£2 ,500? Now, I read this article as I was reading a book which was talking about rookie baseball cards.

41:52Lee Boyce: So I was sort of in the trading card mindset of investing. But this is a lovely little story with your daughter. Tell us more, Lee.

42:03Georgie Frost: Oh, Georgie, this is, yeah, I'm just going to tell you the story. I'll try and keep it as concise as possible. I should point out here as well that my seven-year-old daughter Brooke and I occasionally buy some trading cards. Very occasionally, usually like football cards. She's quite into football, quite often taking some matches. So she's naturally just quite interested. And my nephew, who's 10, is banging into Pokemon and football cards and things. So she wants that kind of connection with him. So that's why she kind of likes doing it. Anyway, we were on holiday in London. We had a few nights in London.

42:33Georgie Frost: And I'd been to the Topps Fanatic store, which is in Regent Street, a few times before with friends. and stuff now for those that don't know tops is a massive trading card name it was taken over a few years ago by fanatics which is a big us sports platform and they've really ramped up what they're doing so this shop is very professional it has it's like a museum in there actually there's lots of really expensive cars but there's also a lot of sports memorabilia there's lots of formula one stuff in there which is actually for sale there was an f1 used helmet from the last season that was in there for like 45 grand and there's a lot of stuff in there anyway i didn't have 45 grand to give uh to brooke i said to brooke here's 10 pounds you could buy whatever pack of trading cards you would like from the shop or packs of trading cards so we went to the till she looked behind the till and her eyes were drawn on a pack of disney neon cards now tops has the license for disney and these are kind of relatively new set there's 200 characters i've since found out and essentially you try and collect all the characters like you did back in the day if you're a millennial like me with merlin premier league stickers that used to cost about 25p for six or however much it was these pack of cards five cards were 10 pounds on the nose which incredibly spicy for a pack of trading cards but that's what you wanted that's what you get now inside this shot and there's lots of tables around so you can open them and also there's quite a lot of like selfie kind of stuff in there as well so lots of people going in there to buy expensive boxes of cards expensive packs they film themselves for social media showing what they've got and they're looking to hit gold well brook only went and hit some gold off of one packet of cards so we're opening this pack of cards i'm not really paying a huge amount of attention and then i see in the corner of one of the cards in gold embossment there is one of one so the number one slash one now i have a bit of knowledge about trading cards just because i find it quite a fascinating area and to go back to your baseball card um chat there georgie um there's the uh shark tank star kevin o 'leary which shark tank is the u.s version of dragon's den and he has an investment collective called secure collectibles when they're basically snapping up very rare cards for a lot of money so it was a baseball card that went earlier in the summer that sold for 11 million dollars um it was an autograph card and that was pulled from a hobby box in florida so somebody's actually basically become a millionaire from something that they've opened and and he's bought that and put it as part of their collection so you know he's tuned he's treating it like an asset class it's comparable to fine art gold or you know bitcoin coin you know it's just another asset class that people are getting involved in and i thought that the boom had come a few years ago but it's continuing to boom um and people are interested in it now back to the story she's pulled the card out it's shiny it's looking good it's green and gold it's all glittery it's great so i called over a member of staff and i just said it's i'm not going mad here like this is quite a good card isn't it and he looked at it he looked at me and he said you've got that card from that pack and said yes he raced he raced off he came back he carefully put this card into a plastic sleeve for me so a protective sleeve um and then he and then he said congratulations that's worth a small fortune it was like the odds of pulling that card from that pack are absolutely minuscule um and i got completely swept up georgie you know my money editor went well how much is it worth and he's like can't tell you there's only this card in the world it only exists you have the only one that's what the one of one obviously stands for the card is number 63 it's flash from uh the film zootopia now flash is a very popular meme i've since found out that he's a sort of very slow sloth uh so he's a sloth character and he gets shared around a lot so he's a relatively fringe character but he's quite a popular character now the guy said to me you can go and queue up at the grading service and they might give you a there on price now what you can do with cars is you can go and get them graded it costs quite a lot of money to get a card graded uh it's usually if you're looking to boost the value of a card from a few hundred pounds to a couple of grand it's a very expensive service to use i was told not to grade this card because it's a one-of-one there's nothing you need to compare its um kind of condition to so i'm at the counter guys looking at it told him the story again he was like you really pulled this card from this and i said yes uh and he said i would value it between one and a half and two and a half thousand pounds because um disney is just absolutely surging at the moment there's lots of people who love collecting disney cards um and that's what i would be aiming for he called over another member of staff who like uh disney cards and he essentially offered me a thousand pounds for it which at that point i took a massive pause and i realized how swept up i'd been in it that i hadn't even really sort of it was it's brooke's card what am i doing what am i trying to get rid of my seven-year-old daughter's card and she looked at me really sort of like i don't know like doughy eyed and she said daddy i don't want to sell it i don't want to i love this i want to take this off home um and then i realized that i'd been quite a bad parent and the guy behind the tool sort of overheard this and said you know definitely hold on to it it will probably grow in value so it's come home back to essex with us from london it's under lock and key yeah mainly because i'm nervous about my two-year-old who will find trading cards knocking around the house from time to time and just bend them all up and go mad with them so it's all locked up and currently no plans to sell but a lovely little story and from time to time we have pulled that card out of the cabinet in which it lives and had a little smile and a little giggle about the story and i've told quite a few people about it and people just have been really interested and found it really fascinating but that's my trading card story georgie i was thinking maybe she's

48:49Lee Boyce: luckier with money than you are so quickly stuff her premium bonds with probably the money in your

48:56Georgie Frost: i i put that on twitter actually so i i shared sorry x i shared it on x the story and uh one of uh one of um the fire people who we spoke to quite a lot at the on the website he sort of said a great story and i messaged back and said is it ethical if i sell the card behind her back and put it in her stocks and shares isa uh and which he was like do not do that that is cruel like imagine having this really cool card and then you're putting it into a stock she shares isa that she's got absolutely no idea about and won't thank you for whatsoever and you know in a couple of years time she'll go to where's that sloth card and yeah to say oh but it is tempting to sell and my wife was like just sell it immediately just sell it it's going to get ruined it's going

49:41Lee Boyce: to get lost it's going to happen to it right simon you start the week please 330 million pounds

49:48Simon Lambert: that is what chris rockos the hedge fund tycoon who is leaving the country uh to move to greece switching his residences to greece and opening an office in athens it was reported this week that was how much tax he paid last year he was the uk's third biggest taxpayer according to the sunday times tax list uh and that doesn't isn't just income taxes obviously very rich people earn money in lots of different ways. This list takes into account corporation tax, you know, relative to someone's stake in the business, income tax, tax on dividends, tax on capital gains, etc. But it also includes the nugget that apparently last year he paid himself 476.8 million to fund the rebuild of his Wiltshire estate.

50:37Simon Lambert: But to put that in context, the amount of tax that we're potentially missing out on, and we won't, my point with saying it's all these different taxes, we're probably not going to lose that much all of that money right because it you know there's the corporation taxes everything else involved in there but this is a concern and again something we should probably be worried about um is that it is the equivalent of so it's the equivalent of the salary of 10 ,000 newly qualified nurses or 44 ,522 times the amount of tax that someone on the median salary pays each year.

51:17Lee Boyce: Thank you very much, Simon. Thank you very much, Lee. That's it. You can keep up to date with all the latest Spoken Money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. And if you have any comments or questions, team, anything you'd like to look into, Simon?

51:26Simon Lambert: Email us at podcast at thisismoney.co.uk. Send us your questions, send us your thoughts, and also come to thisismoney.co.uk forward slash podcast to join in the debate and read the comments.

51:38Lee Boyce: And if you like our podcast, why not rate us wherever you found us? It helps other people find us too.