Is it time you switched your investment platform?

0:02Georgie Frost: Welcome to This Is Money podcast. I'm Georgie Frost and joining me and Simon Lambert today is Rachel Rickard Straus. And coming up, furious savers are quitting Hargreaves Lansdowne in droves over changes to its fees. So is it worth moving and what should you be looking for in a new investing platform? Also today, nearly one trillion pounds is now tucked away in ices. Most is invested, but are millions of savers missing out by still sticking with cash? Plus, how did one of Britain's gold standard pension schemes descend into chaos, leaving thousands without income and ministers scrambling to offer emergency loans?

0:38Georgie Frost: And we look at the most applied for jobs in Britain and offer some top CVD tips to get ahead of the competition. Don't forget you can stay up to date with all the latest breaking money news. Just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app. But first, the country's largest investing platform is hemorrhaging investors to rivals as a result of a charges revamp. Which is odd because when Hargreaves Lansdowne announced the mishmash of price changes late last month to kick in at the start of March, they were described as providing even more clients with better value for money. Yet while Hargreaves said half its 2 million customers would benefit from lower fees, 20 % will pay more.

1:20Georgie Frost: Rachel Simon, welcome. Rachel, what is going on? Firstly, who are Hargreaves? And then what is going on? And what are these changes?

1:29Rachel Rickard Straus: Hargreaves Lansdowne have historically been the big beasts in the DIY investing space. And they may have been a little bit pricier than the other upstarts. But people got the feeling that they're getting good quality service and a brand that they can trust. And it's when you're putting your life savings into something, you want a brand that you feel is going to be around for a while and one of the best ways of getting that I think emotionally is going for one that has been around for a while already so they've really enjoyed that kind of legacy. They've got to the point I think where there's so much competition that they've had to have a look at their fees and so they're doing that I think they're coming in next month.

2:16Rachel Rickard Straus: They say that the change in fee structure will mean that most people are better off. However, there are some who aren't. And Jeff Prestridge, our editor, money editor at large, wrote something in his column a week ago saying, what do you think of it and how are you affected? He got a very substantial number of readers writing to him saying, that's it, I'm off. So then Jeff phoned around the other investment platforms to find out if that was something that they were seeing as well. So inflows from Hargreaves customers to their platforms. And yes, they all confirmed, well, several of them confirmed that they had seen that.

2:59Rachel Rickard Straus: Interactive Investor, for example, said that it had seen an almost 200 % increase in inward transfers from Hargreaves to Interactive. That sounds like a really big increase. They won't tell us in number terms what that means. So a 200 % increase, you know, in numbers could be, yeah, not very much. But they do say, they said, they wouldn't tell us in numbers, but they said, we're seeing a large influx and significant numbers. So clearly, some people are changing which is i mean that's tough for hargreaves but it's kind of cool because the thing about investment platforms is they tend to be really sticky people do not move around especially with sips with self-invested personal pensions people tend to stay with the same provider because it's a it's not the same as just moving your savings account where you just say well this rates x and this rates y i want y let's go there are lots of different charges involved so it's harder to compare the value that you're getting on your existing platform with alternatives that you could choose instead and it involves buying and selling and it's all just a bit more of a faff so people don't move as often as they do from other types of accounts And I think that that can lend a kind of complacency to some of the platforms not to necessarily offer the best that they could to their customers because they know that they're not going to lose them.

4:36So the fact that there is this kind of shuffling round, I think, is a good sign for the industry.

4:42Rachel Rickard Straus: And it's great to see that investors are shifting their money around and realizing that it might look like it's the right old faff, but actually just get on with it and it's not that big a deal.

4:52Georgie Frost: But if you are, Simon, looking for a new platform, as I was this time last year, what is it that you should be looking out for? Because there are a whole host of fees. It's quite complicated to work out. But also you want good customer service. You want access to whatever you want to invest in on that platform. If you're moving, what should your sort of checklist be?

5:18Simon Lambert: Well, the first thing I'd do if you're considering opening an investment platform account or moving investment platform or think, hang on a minute, am I paying too much? Is I would go to thisismoney.co.uk forward slash platforms, where you will find our long running guide to the best investment platforms. And we've road tested almost all of these platforms between us. Some of them I've road tested, almost all of them myself. we've also got our best stocks and shares isa guide and our best sips guide written by sam bromley and you need to look at two things you need to look at cost but you also do need to look at the quality of customer service and it's going to be down to you where you fall on that scale and you also might want to include within the customer service thing the element of am i going to get a helping hand do i need my platform to help me now harbury's lansdowne scores very highly on the customer service and giving people a helping hand.

6:19Simon Lambert: It's a business built on those things. It was a business built on those things quite some time ago, though, and things have changed. It's the waitrose of investing, right? That's what it's been dubbed, and it kind of quite likes that. It's taken that on itself a little bit, the kind of waitrose of investing idea. Now, the problem with being the waitrose of investing is if you compare it to the Waitrose of Waitrose. The Waitrose of Waitrose has been losing middle class, fairly affluent customers to Aldi and Lidl because they've decided that the Waitrose of Waitrose has just got too expensive. And they haven't just been switching to Sainsbury's.

7:04Simon Lambert: They haven't just been switching to Tesco. They've actually been going, hey, do you know what? Actually, I quite like Aldi and I quite like Lidl. and it's a dangerous game when you take those affluent middle-class customers and find them sort of getting involved in a bit of oh look how much money i'm saving here and oh look how much money i'm saving there because it's then really difficult to get them back and i think that is what's been going on with hargreaves over the last few years now what's really interesting about these hargreaves changes is that actually the platform has become cheaper for most of its customers, Hargreaves will now be cheaper.

7:40Simon Lambert: So the fee changes are the things you need to watch out for, the way a platform is charged, just to explain. They'll charge you a fee for holding your account. That is usually either a percentage of your investments or it's a flat fee amount, or it can be zero. They will also charge you for buying and selling investments. and there may be different charges for shares and for funds. Traditionally, some platforms that charge percentage-based fees will offer free fund dealing, but they will charge for share dealing. So you could pay a varying amount for that. Or, nowadays, you could pay zero. You see the problem here.

8:22Simon Lambert: The other thing you need to watch out for is any other charges that you might get. And a big one, an increasingly big one, is FX fees. charges for buying and selling foreign shares because there's a lot of investment going into US shares, US investments. Now, those can be a place where platforms claw quite a lot of money back. You're not going to find one that offers zero, but you might find ones that offer quite low prices. Now, Hargreaves has dropped its platform charge from 0.45 % to 0.35%. So cheaper, right this is getting cheaper the percentage amount on your investments but the other thing it had was if you didn't invest investment funds this was charging investment funds it had a cap on the amount that you had invested in shares etfs investment trusts and bonds bearing in mind etfs have become very very popular in recent years um this was 45 pound a year on an isa 200 pound a year on a sip and on a general account a general investment account it was free So if you didn't hold any funds, you didn't pay that percentage charge.

9:29Simon Lambert: Now, they've changed this to£150 a year. So it's got cheaper if you've got a SIP. It's gone up more than threefold if you've got an ISA. And it's gone from zero to£150 if you don't have either of those. You've just got a standard account. Now, the difficulty for Hargreaves Lansdowne over the last few years has been its share-dealing charge. It charged£11.95, and still does until March, for buying and selling shares. That is a very old-fashioned fee. I mean, I started writing about investment platforms, you know, well over 15 years ago. And it was pricey. It was at the pricey end then. Things have dramatically changed.

10:10Simon Lambert: As I explained, you can now buy and sell shares for free. And that means that Hargreaves is increasingly looking like an outlier. The difficulty is, is if you drill into Hargreaves results, what you will discover is that Hargreaves makes a lot of money out of people paying£11.95 every time they want to buy and sell shares. So it's like what do you do about the golden goose? How do you deal with this problem? Now they've chopped that fee all the way down to£6.95 but you will notice that£6.95 is still£6.95 more than zero for example which is what some other platforms for example trading two on two offer and what's really interesting as i said is they've also introduced a fund dealing charge which is one pound 95 per time and that was previously free so that's gone up but is that they've cut prices for most people but what they appear to have done is flagged more widely that even though they've cut their prices it's still quite expensive compared to everyone else and i had lunch with the boss of uh ig last week a guy called Michael Healy.

11:16Simon Lambert: And he was telling me that they've had a massive influx of customers. He said, I've never seen it where a competitor has put their prices down and we've got a load of customers. As Rachel said, Interactive Investor have told us they've had an influx of customers as well. AJ Bell have told us they've had an influx of customers. Trading 212, who we know well as well, that the bosses there have been telling us for some time that they are getting Hargreaves' customers in the door. It's not just new investors or younger investors, which is how Trading 212 grew so big in the first place. They're now getting established investors coming in.

11:52Simon Lambert: I know the guy of an investment platform called Prosper. Now, Prosper is a really cheap way to invest because basically it has no account fees. It has no dealing fees. And on some passive funds, it will even refund the fund fees. So you could, in theory, invest absolutely for free. And that's what Hargreaves is up against is, yes, it's brought its pricing down. But it's going up against people who are offering, you know, really, really, really cheap pricing.

12:21Georgie Frost: Rachel, how worried should Hargreaves Lansdowne be? And in turn, how worried should customers be, even customers that perhaps might be better off, thinking everybody's leaving? It's like sinking ship. Or is it are we just getting a bit overexcited about it? I think that the losses that they're seeing are around the margins.

12:40Rachel Rickard Straus: I don't think it's like an exodus that will totally transform the business model. I think it will make Hargreaves, but the whole industry, sit up a little and notice that people will vote with their feet. And that can only be good for customers. I do feel for beginner investors, though, in particular. You know, when we're talking about, well, the best deal for you depends on whether you would spend a lot of money with share dealing or if you want to buy ETFs. And all of these models work very specifically for different types of investors. And if you're an established one, then you could probably answer those questions.

13:24Rachel Rickard Straus: If you're a beginner, my fear is that you might be put off at the word go because you don't know how to answer those questions. so to that I'd say do it imperfectly pick one they're all okay none are going to thoroughly mug you and most of them are going to be better than the outcomes will be better than if you just put your money into a savings account and what this Hargreaves story shows is that it's not that big a deal to switch so start you know go to this money.co.uk slash platforms pick the one that looks like it's likely to be the best. But don't wait for certainty that you've absolutely found the right one.

14:09Rachel Rickard Straus: Just do it. Pick one. If it turns out that the fees don't work with your style of investing, then switch. But just do it and see what happens.

14:26Georgie Frost: Good tips there. Simon, just one issue about if you are going to move. A lot of people will obviously be investing in ISAs. the idea is obviously you don't take the money out you let the platforms move it for you so you

14:40Simon Lambert: don't lose the benefits right absolutely 100 you need to make sure that you do that if you move investment platform you need to go through their transfer process because you don't want to be taking the money out and then putting it back in yourself you don't want to accidentally remove all the money from your isa and then use up your isa allowance paying it back in you can't take all the money out of your SIP and if you do take all the money out of your SIP before you're at the age of 55 you'll be in trouble and if you're over the age of 55 you'll get hit with a massive tax bill and then obviously you have a pension allowance and even with a standard account you should use the transfer system to do it and the other reason why you should do that is because quite a lot of investment platforms will pay you to transfer to them they'll give you nice chunky cash back amounts so have a look at that as I said go to our platforms guide this is money.co.uk forward slash platforms that looks at all the investment platforms it's also got links to our look at the best stocks and shares isis it's got links to our look at the best sips and if you're the person that the people that rachel was talking about who were like what on earth are they rabbiting on about here well done for getting this far because we were talking a lot about it but you'll also find a link in there to the best investing platforms for beginners where sam bromley has been through those and that those are the ones that will really help you out the thing i would say in defense of Hargreaves Lansdowne is their customer service is genuinely really good you pick up the phone you call them and you get somebody at the other end of the phone who knows what they are talking about and I've had to do that I've got Hargreaves account don't have most of my investments in it but I do have a Hargreaves account and my mum has one as well for her SIP and I've had to contact them a number of times online and over the phone about stuff that's quite complicated and it's someone there at the other end who knows what they're talking about.

16:26Simon Lambert: The same I've found is true of Interactive Investor, where I've had to do the same thing. Can't vouch for lots of other ones, but that is where some of the established platforms will come through. And secondly, remember that you are protected by the FSCS up to£85 ,000 in an investment account. And that's if basically they don't do what they're meant to do. You're not protected if the value of your investments goes down, but that's if they don't do what they're meant to do. So if you have an FCA regulated investment platform, your money's safe in there, up to£85 ,000, obviously not everybody's going to have under that amount in there.

17:01Simon Lambert: Once you've been building up a SIP over a long period of time or an ISA over a long period of time, you might have more. So you need to make a decision yourself on whether you split that up or not.

17:11Georgie Frost: Thank you very much, Simon. Right, we're going to stick with ISIS because savers and investors officially hold close to 900 billion in their ISIS. That's according to the latest HMRC data. But that data is from 2023. So in all likelihood, that figure has well surpassed the one trillion mark already. While most of that money is invested, over 100 billion is held in cash. So, Rachel, are we saving wisely and tax efficiently or are millions missing out? Firstly, the stats. What's going on?

17:44Rachel Rickard Straus: Gosh, it's a lot of money, isn't it? It makes me nervous. A trillion earning tax-free returns sounds very delicious to a Chancellor. I know that ISIS are very beloved of savers and meddling with them never does Chancellors many favours with voters. but we've seen that this Chancellor is not adverse to doing it and you can easily argue that yes we are holding too much in cash for our own good and we're seeing that change coming in next year with the cut to the cash ISA allowance from you can use your full allowance at the moment of 20 grand to put into cash that will drop from 12 grand if you're under 65 It's not something that the Chancellor is completely averse to doing.

18:38Rachel Rickard Straus: And when you have people who have ISA balances, and we're seeing increasing numbers of them, of over a million quid, you think what return that's giving you. Even if it's just 4%, what's that? That's 40 grand tax-free income. you could very easily argue is not what ISAs were initially set out for. They were set out, you could argue, to encourage people to save for a rainy day. I mean, it would really have to rain hard for you to need a spare million in your back pocket, tax-free, to think that the taxman can't touch that at all. so I don't know what this means longer term as these balances inevitably increase further and further especially if we have the types of years that we've had in the last couple of years where you could it's not hard at all for you to have earned double digit returns some people easily will have made 20 percent for the last two years running if you already have a high balance can you imagine what that is on top of that and then they just continue to grow let's see should there recap?

19:53Rachel Rickard Straus: Well, I mean, it's a good question. It's moving the goalposts. That would be undermining the kind of long term investment and saving visions that we're encouraged to have. But to get from 1 million to 2 million is not half the leap of getting from zero to one. so we'll end up quite soon having people with two million tax-free in ISIS. At some point that might start to look controversial.

20:35Simon Lambert: Simon? Well if you bring in a cap you might want to start trying to increase it with inflation or maybe asset prices. I mean that's the problem with these caps isn't it? They shouldn't be a cap because then once you bring in a cap governments start tinkering with it. Look at the disaster that was the pension lifetime allowance introduced by Gordon Brown as a Labour prime minister at one and a half million. When that actually did go up, the Blair-Brown government respected the fact that you need to move these things up to reflect inflation, asset prices and everything. And then the Tories hacked it all the way back to a million.

21:08Simon Lambert: And then it started causing massive problems. Rachel Reeves has already cut back on the cash ISA and she's saying that she wants people to invest. The worst thing you could do if you want people to invest is start tinkering with the investment ISA as well. I can definitely see why there would be certain people eyeing it up, though, and eyeing up all that money that all those rich people have and how it's completely unfair that they've built up those pots and that they should be paying more tax. The thing is, though, also what you should do is you should overhaul the entire investment and savings tax system if you do that, because the reason why it's got more important to put money into an ISA in recent years is because of the massive raid on investors and savers.

21:48Simon Lambert: So bear in mind that, you know, until a couple of years ago, you could make£12 ,300 a year capital gains tax free. Now you can only make£3 ,000. And that's thanks to Jeremy Hunt, who last time I checked was a Conservative, not a Labour member of Parliament. And then Labour hiked the capital gains tax rates on people. The personal savings allowance is£1 ,000, but only if you're a basic rate taxpayer. It's£500 if you're not and you're a higher rate taxpayer. Tax thresholds have been frozen for ages. Loads more people have been pulled into high rate tax. So loads of people are only getting a£500 allowance and lots more people are getting zero because they're additional rate taxpayers.

22:27Simon Lambert: The additional rate band used to be£150 ,000. It's now£125 ,000 because someone cut it. And those allowances haven't gone up at all with inflation. So, you know, yeah, maybe you could bring in some kind of cap or target those people right at the top end of ISIS. But if you do that, you have to play fair everywhere else. And can I see a government doing that? Not really.

22:50Georgie Frost: No, quite. All right, let's move on. Capita bosses are under fire once again after one of Britain's gold standard pension schemes descended into chaos. Tens of thousands of civil servants are caught in a 120 ,000 case backlog, with some retirees left without income for months, forcing the government to offer emergency loans. The outsourcing giant says it inherited the problem. MPs say warnings were ignored. So, who's to blame? What went wrong? What is this about? Who are Capita?

23:28Rachel Rickard Straus: So if ever there were somewhere that you would think might be protected from chaos, it would be a pension scheme for the civil service. I mean, surely they would know how to run things in a very boring tickety-boo but smooth way. This is not the case. So this is a story that's being covered absolutely brilliantly by Tanya Jeffries, our pension and investment editor, who's been speaking to countless readers who are members of the civil service pension scheme or are family members of people who are, who can't get access to their own money. And they haven't been able to for weeks or months. And we've got one reader who our consumer champion, Sally, I've asked Sally in Money Mail spoken to, who hasn't managed to get hold of pension that they're owed for three years.

24:29Rachel Rickard Straus: so how this has come about there's a lot of kind of blaming going around so it's hard to precisely unpick what's going on but Capita has taken over the scheme and they argue that they took it over from incumbents who left them with a huge backlog of cases and unanswered emails that they're now just trying to unpick. But it means that the whole system is jammed. We've got readers who have been trying to get through on the phone. They're on hold for two hours, and then the line gets cut off. And emails are just not answered. There's a backlog that hasn't even been touched. and even people in quite dire situations are not having their problems solved and Capita argues that they're doing their best, that they're clearing the backlog and especially in cases of bereavement they've got better but they acknowledge that there are serious problems and they're apologising for it.

25:35Rachel Rickard Straus: In the meantime it's got so bad that some people who have been affected are being given loans because they can't pay their rent and they can't pay their bills understandably because they were relying on a civil service pension that they're not that they're not being given but what is so extraordinary is often with these sorts of situations we can get involved readers come to us and with the very worst cases we might put them to the company involved we might go to the press office and say look this is really difficult this person is in a very difficult situation can you please help them out and they do it things are so bad even we are finding it hard to get through tanya has just got a success on an awful situation it's someone who they want to retire with their partner to spain to get a visa the spanish government requires them to show their income they can't show their income because they can't get it from that they're an ex-civil servant and they can't get it so their plans are in the balance and I think she's just had a success there in getting a result from Capita but a lot of them we're just we're putting it forward to them and they apologise and they were hauled in front of MPs this week and Tanya went along to that as well and plenty of remorse and plenty of explanations about all the things that happened that they couldn't have helped, they claim.

27:08Georgie Frost: Simon, this is not the first time that Capita have come under the spotlight, not for positive reasons. But I think people might be a bit, one surprise, they only came in December. So you would expect the fact that, you know, surely this had been sometime in the making. Otherwise, that's a real bulls up in a very short amount of time. But also, how does the outsourcing thing of pensions work?

27:31Simon Lambert: Look, the problem is, is that a lot of stuff nowadays is done on the basis of outsourcing it to large outsourcing companies. Some of these companies are huge and do a huge amount of different things. And that means that they repeatedly manage to get caught up in messes because there are lots of messes out there. And there's only a relatively small number of these companies. I am of the opinion, and this is a difficult one to unpick, right? Because arguably, if you've got a company that's got a specialism in doing something and you've got something that can just be outsourced to them and they can do it cheaper, then do that because it will save you some money and you can use the money that you need in public services elsewhere.

28:15Simon Lambert: I do look at the scenario that we have been in in this country for the last 20 odd years and ask myself the question of whether outsourcing stuff to massive companies is actually working. in this instance doesn't appear to be capita's fault but you ask how did it get so bad in the first place why was this not sorted out before but there are lots of other problems where capita have been to blame there is lots of other problems where other big outsources have been to blame the sercos of this world and so on and i one of the things i look at particularly not necessarily on something like this where it is a genuinely like a national thing but i look at things locally and I look at the amount of utility work, construction work, building work, outsourcing of services to companies that goes on from, you know, in local areas, from local government, whether that's at a county level or a district level.

29:12Simon Lambert: and I think would it not be better if they used a larger number of smaller firms that had some form of local basis because if you are a business that has been built up in that city or that town you've got a certain reputation to protect in that city or that town and this is particularly true of building house building for example when you had local builders that tended to be in a certain area and they tended to be the ones that built more of the homes in that area it was in their best interest to build those homes properly if they were building a hospital if they were building a school all these other things if they were fixing the roads it was in their best interest to do these things properly once you went to large multinational national companies did they really care what happens in that town do they really care you know whether those houses are any good do they really care whether they filled in the potholes properly do they really care whether that school needs some repairs in 10 years time or have they just moved on and i think that we've lost something along the way um i don't know whether it's directly relatable to this issue at hand right now but i kind of suspect that if you had maybe some smaller companies that it mattered to more involved in this perhaps maybe these things wouldn't go wrong so often finally

30:34Georgie Frost: what are the most applied for jobs in Britain and how can you polish up your CV so you get them or at least stand out from the crowd and have a decent chance of getting them Simon well the most

30:48Simon Lambert: applied for job in Britain which when you look at it you think that might not necessarily be the job that you should go for if everybody else is applying for them just to be clear these aren't the most in demand from employers or recruiters. These are the most applied for, according to a jobs board CV library, is software engineer. Software engineer roles are leading the popularity pack with the average advertised salaries coming in above the£61 ,000 mark. So good salary, but they are the most applied for jobs. And then below that you have receptionists. I thought there was a skill shortage in tech and that sort of thing.

31:28Georgie Frost: That surprises me.

31:29Simon Lambert: Well, there is a skill shortage in tech. And actually, software engineers are a job that's in demand, especially software engineers that can do anything to do with AI. But there's also quite a lot of people going after those jobs. I mean, you've got to remember that we have got a whole generation of people working now and job seekers for whom the idea of going and becoming a software engineer was just a completely normal thing. and you know not i'm not saying that the older generation of software engineers are weird right just to be clear but it was a less common thing to go right i'm going to go do that whereas you've got a generation now in their 20s and 30s for whom when they left school or university going and being a software engineer was a completely logical career choice because they were like well what's growing really fast the internet what does it mean people to do the engineering you know uh administration receptionist uh delivery driver customer service advisor marketing executive production operative cleaner housing officer i find it strange there's so many people applying for jobs as housing officer graphic designer and recruitment consultant that's your top 10 most applied for jobs not most in demand jobs just to be clear most applied for all right so

32:43Georgie Frost: So you do want to apply for that, Rachel. You've got your CV at the ready, but it needs a little bit of work. How can you brush up your CV so you stand out from the crowd?

32:55Rachel Rickard Straus: We've been given a bunch of tips from Total Jobs, who should know what they're talking about. And they say, number one, to be succinct, which I can really empathise with, no more than two pages of A4. and if you've done loads of awesome things I can see how that would be hard to to trim it back and think oh shouldn't I mention this shouldn't I mention that but honestly if if we do have the level of job applications that that this story and others suggest recruiters don't have very long to look at CVs so say it briefly and tailor do you know I do I've got a bit at the top I don't

33:37Georgie Frost: know if this is a good thing and I've not used my CV in a while so I can't say whether this actually works but right at the top i've just got like bullet points of like really key things you know well that might be a way to do it point three is an eye-catching cv personal statement

33:53Rachel Rickard Straus: um well there you go so yeah picking out the most important or the key information that sounds

34:00Georgie Frost: does a photo work or does it work against you or does it depend what industry you're in i hear such different things it's a really good question i've no idea if it's not mentioned in the top tips

34:13Simon Lambert: and it's probably not a good tip to have so i i right okay i would say first tip and the second tip are in the wrong place i think you need to tailor your cv to the job that you're applying for um as someone who's had many cvs over the years you wouldn't believe the amount of people who don't bother to send you a covering letter or actually tailor the cv to the job they're applying for give any indication why they want that job it's three paragraphs on why you want the job that'll do you don't need to do any more i mean ideally if you can do some more evidencing and stuff like that that's great but do indicate that this isn't just some kind of auto apply thing and that as more jobs have gone on linkedin um has become a real thing of basically you just get a stream of stuff and you're just like i think this person's just hit a button and it's just gone ping ping ping ping ping and then i'd be wary of putting anything on there that would mean that anyone could um discriminate against you in any way right and i don't mean necessarily discrimination as in you know the illegal discrimination stuff obviously that you know you don't do that but that's illegal so people can't do that but i would be wary about the photograph thing you just never know whether somebody's just going to look at a photograph and go i don't i don't like to look at that person so yeah if you don't put a photo on they can't do that it's like should you put your age on there a lot of people leave their age off cvs now now obviously age discrimination is illegal but people will still look at it and they might make a judgment on it so you could put it on there but maybe just leave it off because there is a chance that someone might go hmm yeah too old

35:47Georgie Frost: too young too whatever so just leave it off you look like my ex yeah could be anything i mean it's interesting what else what are the points there um Rachel well the other thing it's not on it but

35:59Rachel Rickard Straus: what I would say I'm gonna have to put on point 11 people increasingly using AI oh yes like chat GPT and stuff yeah which can be really helpful I still think you can tell but I don't know if that's my biases there but if you do use it don't let it run the show make sure that you have your personality and you are picking out the things that you think are most important and you're really tailoring to the specific job that you're applying to rather than using AI as a shortcut to make your life easier in the short term and perhaps not yielding the best outcomes in the long term.

36:38Georgie Frost: Some good tips there, good tips from your article but good tips from you two as well because let's be honest you have probably had more people interviewed or more CVs that you've looked at yes for one specific area journalism and that might be Rachel why you're probably a bit pickier about the AI because you can probably tell because it's your job you're a wordsmith but other people may not be able to tell but but one more related story to this because we've obviously been talking a lot about student loans of late um so you have on your website Britain's best apprenticeships revealed which was interesting I had a conversation with my nephew the other day who is 13 and they said well you're going to go to university said i'm not auntie georgie i'm going to do apprenticeship so this one is for you matthew top choices for high paying careers with no degree needed and how to apply because he also told me he wants to be rich so there you go

37:31Rachel Rickard Straus: matthew good shout you can have your cake and eat it lots of people want the cake that's the problem and increasingly so because graduate jobs are so in demand all jobs at entry level are in in such demand there's a real dearth of them so these apprenticeships especially the top ones are highly competitive but for example management consultancies banks all a lot of them offer really good apprenticeships that either you can go straight in and learn on the job or they pay for your degree alongside work. I was speaking to a colleague, his son is earning 40 something grand a year, and he's doing a degree that he's not paying for.

38:20Rachel Rickard Straus: What a dream! In a time when we're writing about the weight that student loans have on graduates, I think that increasingly that looks very appealing.

38:32Georgie Frost: Doesn't it just? The worry there, and eventually these apprenticeship schemes that pay you that sort of money and you do have university alongside it will go to those people who sort of have the money. I don't know, I worry. But anyway, Simon?

38:46Simon Lambert: Well, a lot of these companies will try to target people from different backgrounds as well. You do need to bear that in mind. You know, they will have objectives that they're not just taking posh kids from private school, you know, and the highest educated. They will look for other things. But it is notoriously competitive to get these things and as we talked about on the podcast last week and as rachel just mentioned like the increasing burden of student debt means this kind of stuff is getting even more competitive especially ones where they'll pay for your degree but it is worth looking into i think also if you can't get into one and you are really interested in this don't just give up okay so maybe you leave school you don't get onto one of these you're like OK, but if it's really something you want to do, go do something else.

39:36Simon Lambert: Go get some work, you know, life experience. You know, go do something that proves that you've got the get up and go. That means a company, when they're looking at these schemes, is going to look at you and go, OK, well, this person isn't actually a school leaver and doesn't fit into this box. But, wow, look at that stuff that they've done. They've gone off. They've actually started earning their own living. They've done this. They've got involved in this. They've gone a step above. And if you can make yourself stand out in that way, then you can find a way to get some of these things. And also, don't only look at these big schemes run by these big companies.

40:12Simon Lambert: Smaller companies will do this as well. You know, not even, you know, stock market listed companies or what we think of as big companies. But like, you know, relatively small companies might have some places where they'll pay for someone to go through university if they commit to working for them for a certain amount of time. So look into that as well. yeah some good tips he's not at private school so it's fine uh finally simon's start of the week 1.5 million euros that is what you could buy a spanish home with its own mountain and 690 acres for wow where's that obviously in spain it's a column era spain six bedroom house 1.5 million euros that's about 1.3 million pounds 690 acre site it's got wild boar rabbits partridges iberian ibex the main house was built only 12 years ago um and it's designed in the style of a rural hunting lodge and yeah as i said it comes with its own mountain not unfortunately for me the kind of mountain that you could go snowboarding on yeah but i could probably live with that if i had that much space um so yeah not really a stat of the week more a price of the week but there you

41:29Georgie Frost: go yeah i still like it it's near granada i see here okay lovely uh don't have a spare 1.5 million euros uh thank you very much simon thank you very much rachel 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 for the team or anything you'd like them to look into simon you can email

41:51Simon Lambert: us podcast at thisismoney.co.uk or come to thisismoney.co.uk forward slash podcast to find all podcasts past and join in the debate and read comments marvellous and if you like our podcast why not rate us wherever you found us helps other people find us too