The Truth About Money, Debt & Why Financial Advice Is Broken

0:00Sammie Ellard-King:I'm Sammie Ellard-King, I'm a personal finance educator, really helping the average Brit learn the basics of money, all the stuff that we should have been taught in school but we weren't. Because I always thought I'd be the 900 grand person, I always thought I'm going to be a millionaire one day Rodney. What was the moment, the bottom, where you were like, I've got to do something here? I was on a beach in Vietnam, paid for by a credit card. I went away with a friend of mine who's, we call him the chairman, he's like, got his shit together. He turned around to me and he said to me like, when do you want to pass away?

0:29Sammie Ellard-King:and I was like what a strange question it'd be nice to get to 80 so when do you want to retire I was like oh 50 would be nice and then he's like well that's 30 years how much do you want to spend a year and I said I'll just throw a number out there I was like oh 30k and he's like well that's 900 grand do you have that and I was like whoa all right mate and so I came back and I like dived into absolutely everything about money that I could possibly find and luckily that moment happened for me and luckily it happened in my mid-20s and not my late 30s you know because life would be very different for me it also like hit me at that point you know he said one thing that changed my life forever and that that was sammy welcome to the podcast mate thanks for having me thank you for joining us um i want to get straight into it big open question sammy who are you and what problem do you solve uh i have no idea who i am but i will tell you um no so i'm sammy like king i a personal finance educator put out a lot of content on social media um really helping the average brit learn the basics of money all the stuff that we should have been taught in school but we weren't um and the problem we're helping people with is just to kind of get over that hurdle get them into saving get them into investing understanding that these things aren't actually that difficult um it's just how it's been sort of displayed to you and everything is 90 in your my own 10 % theory and the theory is actually quite simple to learn so we try and distill it down for the everyday person and I am not a financial advisor I'm not a suit I'm not a banker I haven't like gone and done a degree in this I've learned everything that I needed to learn myself and I just love this stuff so hopefully that sort of comes across in what we do nice I'm excited to get into it today um why for anyone that's listening if they're not familiar with you why are you the best person to break down some of these theories and pieces of advice because a lot of the people that will teach you as say financial advisors and this is not a slight financial advisors they do a great job um but a lot of them haven't lived it and i've literally made every mistake going so my whole thesis is like don't make the same mistakes that i did and here's the better path and solution and what a lot of people do with personal finance is they follow this kind of like there is a one size fits all and that's just not the case and so you have to cater to someone who values 10 pounds very differently to a thousand pounds they might feel the same about it but they're completely different amounts so if you tell them that there's one size fits all solution for them that's not going to work for the person that's in the lower end of the spectrum and equally the higher end of the spectrum so it's just being able to cater to that and like lead into these things and understanding that everybody's journey is like completely their own and so i always say that like if you line up uh you know if you gave everyone a 40 grand budget let's say we've all got 40 grand and we all earn that right here and then i said all of all of us go away and do a budget every single one is going to be completely different um and i can make that number a billion people and there wouldn't be one the same down to the last pence it just wouldn't happen so it just means one thing that we just all value money differently and we all look at it in different ways and it's just trying to guide people on the right pathway for them and we were talking before about this like whatever i say is what works for me and so it might not work for the next person and being accepting of that especially when it comes to money the conversation can get quite heated online but that's fine you know we're not there to help 100 of people if we can help 10 of people then our goal has been met so that's the way we look at it so let's look a bit at the the education system then right so we've all been to school i think maybe maybe not very often I don't remember ever being taught about personal finance.

4:18I think it's one of those things that's like, put you out to sea, now you're making money, learn about it on the go, which sounds like maybe the path that you've been on. If you could introduce a personal finance course or a bit of teaching curriculum or something, what do you think are the essential components that should definitely be in there?

4:34Sammie Ellard-King:Yeah, so they have changed recently and they are going to be addressing this and putting it into schools. I have my own issues with this. I sat on the Labour committee when they discussed this. I'm not affiliated to Labour. I just went because that was the topic and I'm really passionate about it. And that's what I do. The problem they've got, right, is that if they were to put it into the curriculum, then the teachers themselves haven't been taught themselves. So then they've then got to train the teachers. And then the second issue is like, what are they training those teachers? Because then it's coming from a government-backed thing, which I then have my own personal view.

5:07Sammie Ellard-King:What are you going to teach these kids? like what do you actually want them to know do they really have our best interests at heart we don't know that and so is anything better than nothing yes but then like it's like hundreds of millions of pounds to train these teachers so i'm campaigning at the moment for a digital solution i think it would be much far easier to get the best minds and personal finance together and create like the ultimate online course which gets updated and anyone can access at any point and there's you know 14 to 16 and then there's 16 to 21 here's what you need to know once you leave university here's another like section for you to go through and it would be a lot you know it would cost a few million versus hundreds of millions to then train these teachers and then keep them up today there's lots of charities and organizations doing this thing and like getting into it and it's awesome but they're never going to cover the whole uk um and you know are they covering better place schools what happens to the schools which aren't as higher up on that list and there's all these kind of conversations to be had about it and so yeah i think a digital solution for me is like the the best way of handling this because every kid right now is just glued to a screen that's all they know they're digital natives right and then you put a teacher in front of them which they might not necessarily get on with or like you know let's face it like a lot of our teachers that we were just like yeah whatever and some of them were like they're the best teacher in the world you still could probably say their name now um so like who's teaching it how are they teaching it it's just so many nuances to that and i just find that really like not the best solution we've got like ai coming we've got like literally social media platforms which can which are serving up this type of content to these kids um and so i think that's where we need to address the problem oh god i'm so tired i've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time.

7:00How have you been doing it? Because I've been cold calling people on my mobile and I reckon I've spoke to one person. No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai. Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call and it calls them and it connects with them over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time? No other better connection, right? Wow, Nooks.ai. just sticking on that then for a second so let's say you were trying to teach someone going into the working world about the financial opportunity and maybe climate as it is we're obviously given these very simple news cut stories of tax the billionaire end of world yeah ai's taking over what is the state of play in the uk economy at the moment

7:49Sammie Ellard-King:in the uk economy uh we're one of the most highest tax nations in the world um it's extremely difficult to one run a business to start a business and maintain that business most of them go under that's some kind of a multitude of of badly run poor ideas but also extremely high tax and difficult to hire people and grow and scale um and small businesses are the backbone of this economy economy and they're not treated as such has been made worse by the current regime and i don't really foresee that getting much better because they don't seem to understand it um and that's a worry for me you know if you look at the cabinet i think this might have changed now but back when they were making these decisions there wasn't one individual in the labor cabinet that had ever run a business before or being a ceo and i just think that's like if you are the health minister you should have basically worked in the nhs for 10 years it's like mandatory but you're then health minister come from you're a politician you're not a health minister but you're allowed to then govern the policies around health exactly the same for like money in the economy so like if you are the chancellor of the exchequer have you worked in like capital markets or the stock you know work for private institutions and banking and all these things they they haven't so i think there's a real disconnect there um but yeah to sort of answer your question i think it's tough here right now i think everybody feels like it is right the cost of living is going through the roof like we're all really struggling to make ends meet and we feel like we're cutting back on the things that we would say valued were and you know we were sold a promise since the sort of late 80s which was like go to university get a good job you know come out of university there's a safe job for you safe as houses here uh get you know safe for that house get on the housing ladder get married have a dog split up get the red sports car you know like that's what was sort of sold to us obviously the latter part not necessarily but like that part was sold to us and i think that's come like in such a disconnect now like both people in a household have to work to be able to afford that house even the rent or even the mortgage whereas you know then you factor in kids into that environment and it almost becomes untenable and a lot of people are finding it extremely difficult so we're trying to help people and a large part of that problem is a lot of people aren't aware of what happens with their money every single month and they sort of live for today and not for tomorrow aspect and that's kind of what's been forced into us because if we're seeing all of this kind of like it go away from us a little bit like we're like well i just bear off just spending that money and enjoying myself today like because i've you know tomorrow's just getting worse well my people spend as quickly as they get it um and we're trying to help sort of change that and pull the power back into people's hands and you know it's one one step at a time so it feels like the the first step before you even educate people when i think about the the kind of the landscape and young people at the moment is is understanding this relationship with money and like there will be people out there that are naturally because of inherited from their parents quite frugal and there'll be some people that are more so like you know what it doesn't matter let's rack up the credit cards I'm sure I'll be a millionaire by the time I'm 40 like I racked up loads of credit card debt in my 20s because I thought I was gonna be a famous pop star paid off now but you know I mean so you have these stories so like when you think about people's relationship with money how does somebody understand what what kind of relationship they do have with money yeah it's a tough one so you learn your money habits by the time you're age seven which is just mental to me um and like the psychology that you then take in it's very influenced by your environment and what you grew up in right but you can obviously then influence that environment like we all see stories of like the kid from a council estate that goes off to you know oxford and does extremely well so there are obviously like anonymities within that but your relationship with money um it largely comes down to like awareness around yourself because i'm like i know that i'm a spender like if you let me loose with a thousand pounds i'll find a way to blow it um so i put things in place which stopped me from doing that and likely it's exactly the inverse opposite if you're like a completely and utterly frugal and you just literally save on everything you turn the lights off every time you leave the room though you probably should do that you get what i'm saying right it's like baked beans for for dinner because i must save everything and i must invest everything there's people that live on that spectrum but they're not enjoying life so what it is is finding the balance so if you're a saver you need to work on being able to like spend things which then provide you value and if you're a complete spender or you need to put blockers in place to stop you spending money so you can keep some more of it so you can set yourself up for future you so it's a constant like i always call it like the scales if you're like completely weighted to one side you need to figure out the other way but if you're right in the middle or then you should be hopefully trying to enjoy yourself with some of your money.

12:53Sammie Ellard-King:And that's what a lot of financial gurus do. They're like, save and invest. And it's like, yeah, cool, man. But I also want to go out with my mates on Friday night and have a pint. Like, can I do that? A lot of them are like, no. But it's the way that it seems in their content. I'm sure you're not if you sat them down. But that's the way it comes across. And so we need to find balance. And where it's in today's day and age where it's harder, it's like asking yourself the question of like, does this provide me value? Because a lot of what we spend on, if we go into the city, we see 10 ,000 adverts if you use a digital device in one single day.

13:31Sammie Ellard-King:Roughly around 2 ,000 in a rural area, which means they're going to win eventually, right? Marketing's strong. We all do marketing. We all know the drill. Like the more times you show the person that individual, the more likely they are to buy. And so they're going to win eventually. so it's that value piece like is somebody telling me to buy this i.e society or a marketing campaign do i actually want it um and if you do fantastic but largely most of the time it's dopamine it makes you feel good going through the buying process which is really interesting 81 percent of people which impulse spend so they've fed a ad quick on it and instagram gone and bought a thing regret it the next morning and so there was a real trigger there was the dopamine factor of buying it wasn't actually the physical thing which turned up and i've done it i've been you know slave to this i bought some gold nike um air max 97s before and they sat in the box for like a month and i took them back on the last day i looked at them and i was like what the fuck am i doing seriously like i gotta you see me go out and no it's like i'd literally get rinse the moment they're white yeah i've got a full black and white never had no like change my change my game you saw me in my 20s like it'd be very different like i was flashy as hell pop star mentality you're almost exactly the same i started music so i'll get the drill um but that it's like if if i hadn't if i hadn't have like let myself ask myself like do i actually want the thing obviously as i said before you're gonna lose some of the battles as i did with the trainers but um you know if i can win more than i can lose well then i'm taking back some control which is sort of taken away from us there's so much you see on the phone at the moment and it can be overwhelming and people feel like they need to keep up because they see john on social media oh he's just got a new audi 25 plate i should be i should be doing that i should be getting the 26 player when it comes out because i've got a one-up john and like it's a constant status game and a battle with each other and I feel like we're locked into that and social media has amplified that so awareness so going back to your original question is that awareness piece if I can be aware of myself and the way that I am in my relationship with money well then I can better myself when I come out of that environment and make the decisions which are relevant for me in my life as I said because that personal finance is personal aspect of it so it feels like you've been there and done that so like can you paint a picture for just before that penny drop moment where you decided actually I'm gonna make a change I'm gonna start investing I'm gonna start thinking a little bit smarter what what was going on with you Sammy what was your situation yeah it's my Stephen Bartlett cry moment no no so for real like I was uh in that mentality I went to I went to a really good school when I was younger and then I was moved out and put in a different school and I when I was 11 and when that happened to me I had this kind of and this is what I heart back to now and this is like years of like actually reflecting on like what the hell why was I like that um and it was this like drive and need to fit in because I was very different to the kids in the second school um and so that need to fit in stemmed over into when you get loose and the fags and the four for one wkds start dropping you start feeling like you need to be the man showing up and you go to university i did music and we put on nights and played a lot of gigs ourselves so it's like it's kind of you know you felt like that need to be that kind of show it's peacocking right it's what i sort of call it these days and that was me and you know i needed the nicest clothes because i thought everybody would think i was cooler and i needed to be out on a tuesday night because one person said come out and so I got swept up into that and a lot of young people do and it's not to say that like you know don't go out and enjoy yourself don't buy yourself nice things but I was using credit to fund that and so I wasn't earning much I was buying things on credit and thinking later on I'll be a millionaire and I'll pay off exactly the same mentality as you but you know it got worse it just kept getting worse and eventually it just got to the point where about a third of my wages were going on interest payments alone and so i was paid quite well for my age um but as i say like i was having to like pay like seven eight hundred pound in interest alone so i needed to get a grip on that because that was only going to grow with the mentality that i was in um and yeah i mean it's lonely when you're in debt like that because you don't tell anyone like you just sort of keep it to yourself especially blokes as well we do that whole like i'm all right mate like i'm fine um and then eventually i sort of opened up to a friend and it kind of gave me that that permission to sort of be all right about it um and it is kind it comes back to the same point around money now it's like you have to accept who you are because we're all different and i'm just a nutcase spender when it comes to money like that's what i am and so i you know have to start putting things in place and this is not a journey that you go on where you just flick a switch and you become a new man everyone thinks they can like especially with like new year's resolutions they're like tomorrow i'm gonna go to the gym and like i'm gonna do it every day this week and if you put that kind of pressure on yourself you're always gonna tip over so i think it's just being like all right with yourself taking a few steps forward and then you're gonna take a little step back or you're gonna go out on a big night out on a tuesday and wax 200 pound and put some of it on the credit card but as long as you're still like moving forward and it's coming down over time and you're winning um so i think there's that that to it so yeah that was who i was i was like a big sort of peacocker showing off mentality bit of class clown um and you know you have that moment and it happens to some people in their 20s or 30s 40s it's gonna happen to you eventually just realize that what am i doing like what an idiot it like why am i doing this to myself um i wasn't really happy you know i was just sort of like putting myself out there to pretending that i was and so um yeah it changed my life man changed my life for sure what was the moment at the bottom where you were like i've got to do something here i was i was on a beach in vietnam um it sounds bad but i was paid for by a credit card and a payday loan to get there um i went away with a friend of mine who's we call him the chairman he's like uh got his shit together basically he knows his stuff right and uh he's um he we were sitting there pretty drunk 2 a.m and he turned around to me and he said to me like when do you want to pass away and i was like what a strange question um and he's i said oh yeah be nice to get to 80 so when do you want to retire i was like oh 50 would be nice and then he's like well that's 30 years how much do you want to spend a year and i said i'll just throw a number out there i said oh 30k and he's like well that's 900 grand do you have that and i was like whoa all right mate but then it also like hit me at that point because that was my minus 24 000 pound moment and i was like well no like i'm i'm actually and that was when i sort of started to open up and i opened up to him and you know he said one thing that changed my life forever and that that was that moment and i think if i hadn't had that moment that sort of trigger switch because i always thought i'd be the 900 grand person i always thought i'd just have i somehow i'm gonna get there like i i don't know how it's gonna happen but i'm gonna be a millionaire one day rodney um and it just wasn't the case and so like i was proving that with my actions i was going the other way um so i needed to start proving to myself that i could be this person and have a little bit of control um and so i came back and i like dived into absolutely everything about money that i could possibly find and i found my calling a little bit with it because i just really enjoyed it weirdly like um if people will laugh you out the room even five years ago that i would say that i'm doing what i'm doing now honestly they really would so um but you know you never know where life's going to take you and luckily that moment happened for me and luckily it happened in my mid-20s and not my late 30s you know because life would be very different for me um yeah so you've alluded to it a few times of like there's not some fundamental personality change that you've gone through you're like i still recognize that if i had a grand spare i'd spend that grand 100 but you keep kind of alluding to but i put things in place yeah to stop me doing that what are those things that you put in place and maybe more broadly things that people can put in place to make sure they don't make this is my favorite topic so the the the key thing is is taking a breath because of that 10 000 adverts and that impulse spending mentality and that regret factor and dopamine kicker you can put things in place so um the first one is the 24 hour rule so anything that's above 50 pounds which you have been impulsely you know compulsed to buy at that point just wait leave it in the basket number one is 99.99 % of the time you don't want the thing in the morning if you do then fantastic and the second thing is put your email in and your first name because they will send you a discount every time um we know this from running funnels and all these types of things you know if you leave your email in there long enough they're going to send you something they want you you want your custom more than not so not only have got it cheaper two you probably ticked off the fact you don't want to buy it anymore um and that really stops majority of what you can do and the second thing is have a system for your money and this can be set up in literally 10 minutes and you never need to worry about it again it's called a three bank system so um what it is is three different bank accounts with three different providers number one is you get paid into and it's just a standard current account let's call it Halifax for example right now and you get paid into that account and the key is the money drops into that account then you have a second bank and a third bank so the second bank is where all your bills come out of and all your subscriptions and you literally move a set amount of money over every single month and that account draws back down to relatively near zero if you've got variable bills then put a little bit of contingency in there just to make sure you don't go overdrawn or anything like that or some of the bills don't get paid and the third one is your savings account and then you move that money out into your savings account but you do that first before you pay your bills and subscriptions and that's just a called paying yourself first you can also do it where you know you're paying off your debts rather than saving if you if you like and you're in debt and you want to trigger that aspect to it and then what's left in account number one is it it's so simple like okay i've got 600 quid left or i've got 800 quid left okay if I break that down by a week, I could spend£200 a week.

24:26Sammie Ellard-King:If I rinse£300 this week, well, I've got£100 less next week. And it's just so much easier that way rather than this like money comes into one account, then the bill comes out on the 18th and you're like, get 75 quid just come out of the account. Like we haven't got any money. And it happens to so many people and I see it all the time. And so just putting this in place works if you're in debt, it works if you've got multi-millions of pounds and net worth and everybody in between and so it can be really powerful just 24 hour or three bank system will probably solve like 90 of your problems um and yeah yeah those are my two biggest things that's really good so there there are maybe we can i don't know how much you want to there's a camera you can point down and call people out later if you want but there is so much financial advice out there and i always think about this big white table is like let's dump it all out there i think you've got stocks and bonds you've got like um pensions you've got cryptocurrency you've got trading you've got gold you've got silver um somebody came up on an instagram ad the other day so for a pound course i could learn how to flip houses and make a hundred thousand pounds within a year what is true and what is marketing clickbait oh good question man so for the vast majority of people like it's largely clickbait the reason factor in is that when it comes to let's just take investing there's different pathways you can take there's the set it up in five minutes direct debit into a simple like index fund which is essentially just like a basket of stocks um people like to complicate that it's literally what it is it's like the top companies in the world from a particular region or even globally sit you have to worry about it you're like basically buying the best businesses you can set up in five minutes and go about your merry way and direct a bit into it each month and just crack on and really interestingly that outperforms 91 percent of professional investors people with billion pound budgets and analysts of hundreds of hundreds of people all of the computer power you could possibly imagine and they still can't beat that so really like the most boring simple approach generally is the best approach or there's like the time factor in i'm going to trade this coin this cryptocurrency this commodity there's forex there's avenues and avenues and you can trade by the literal like second right up to the you know months or even years in some cases so it's how much time do you want to be putting into this um knowing the odds when you become a trader they say around one percent of people should probably trade because they have the ability to do it and it's like learning a degree it's extremely extremely difficult i don't do that um because i'd be mental i'd be there all day long like trying to learn it it's literally takes people years and years and years and a lot of mistakes to get to the point where they're even able to break even um or extreme talent right so there's like the variables there um and when it comes to property they said put a pound in and do it with no money and all of these things the fact is a lot of people don't factor in time to that flipping a house doing it up there's levels of risk just like there is with even index funds when it comes to investing so how much time are you willing to put into it how much risk are you willing to take because all of the avenues which you just mentioned can make money it's just one is timing two is knowledge and three is like how much risk you are taking and so often a good approach is like ask yourself what you're wanting to get out of it and if it's property and you're just absolutely obsessive property and that's what you want to do then great like it's a great investment vehicle if you learn how to do it and understand the risks that are attached to it but if you just want to like invest a bit of your money here and there so you have something for when you retire your time is better spent getting better at your job and putting more into that because you can just move the wheel as we discussed like almost exactly the same as someone who's like trying to learn trading and putting all this time and effort and like a lot of people invest because they make dave down the pubs told them some new biotech company is going to cure cancer and guess what happens that doesn't happen and they lose money because they mate dave isn't a biotech knowledge he has none he's a wanker he's a wanker he's two pints a guinness deep like he's not it's not like happening for him he's learning off some blog article that he's sort of found online right so who are you taking advice from what do you actually want to get out from it because all of it can be the right vehicle for you just where you need to go in life and you know how much effort you want to put into it a bloke stopped me in the street the other day and screamed where.

29:34And I thought he was trying to get to the nearest dry cleaners, but he wasn't. Do you know what he was saying? He was saying where. Do you get your hair cut? No, he wasn't. Because you'd sue them. Thank you. Where do you get your data when cold calling? Oh, and what did you tell them? Well, I told them I know a little place where it's 98 % accurate. You didn't know how to spell it, did you? I didn't know how to spell it. It was Prospio. Prospio, that's P-R-O-S-P-E-O. Oh, dot IO. dot io dot io if you are looking to get stronger contact data for finding your dream clients that's prospio dot io so I want to get your opinion on this because I've seen so many podcasts about it and I actually can't make up my mind it but if we go down the path of buying a house okay so the dream was like you said the 80s like work really hard buy a house so we've been running a business for many years I've got to a position where I finally bought a house, got a lovely kitchen.

30:33Hasn't it got a lovely kitchen? Thank you, Zach. And I got my, I've been in there two years now and I got my mortgage statement through and I won't say how much the house is worth, but it's a big time. It was in a nice house. Big time. Multimills? It's in Manchester. Yeah, Multimills. But basically for every three pounds, one pound goes off the house and two pound goes off the interest. I said that to Zach and Zach said, well, at least you can smoke inside. I said, but I don't smoke. So I don't really get it. So I've now got this house. That sounds very similar to the interest on your credit card.

31:10But I've got this house, which is great. But I'm paying off like, it can take 35 years and I'll pay off millions of pounds to get there.

31:19Sammie Ellard-King:Should I have just kept renting? Let me ask you a question. Please. So when you purchase that house, if somebody asked you how much did you get that house for, what do you say? The amount. Yeah, the amount I bought it for. Yeah. You don't say the amount plus the amount I'm actually going to pay for it. Because no one does that. So they all assume that it costs X, Y, and Z, but they don't run the numbers. And the crazy thing about buying a house is that you've got probably double the amount in interest in most cases. So give or take leeway here or there of a couple of basis points, right? And then you've got maintenance.

31:53Sammie Ellard-King:You've got the fact that you need to buy all the furniture. you've got the fact that probably your other half in 10 years is going to go i'm really tired of this kitchen 10 years i had that in three weeks and it was a lovely kitchen i was being i was being nice like we just moved house right we walked in and my other half just went like i don't like any of this i'm like okay so we're paying the whole house uh okay cool and so we have right and you know that's costs money like that's money that's gone into the house but if someone said to you how much you buy the house you go x y and z so you don't add all of these things into the play you don't look at it over a 35 year period and yes people will be like but what about the increase of the house summit like yes it increases in value if you buy in a good area if the housing market continues to perform at its current levels which is not guaranteed and so people you're buying your house is not an investment it never has been it's just a store of value essentially when you work it Now, you can make money in some instances, but especially if you build the extension, flip it, sell it, do all those values.

32:59Sammie Ellard-King:Yes, those use cases exist. But for a large amount of people, they end up either breaking even over a long period of time because the amount they spent on it, or they make a touch more money. now really interestingly if you manage to keep your rent low but you invested that same amount of money historically there's not a guarantee again of like future performance on investments because it's impossible to say what's going to happen tomorrow right like last year is very different to this year we all know that right um but historically investing has massively outperformed owning your own home and using it as an investment vehicle now there are other avenues with that buying in a you know a low cost area renting that place out doing the work on it increasing the value extracting that value and growing a property portfolio there are those aspects to it but there is no wrong or right answer when it comes to renting or buying because both have their own aspect of risk associated to it you've got opportunity cost but the fact that you're buying that house it provides you security on the other spectrum in some factors and then renting it's like your landlord could put the rent up your investments could go down and but if you look at the numbers over the years it's it's night and day versus in renting and investing in most cases in the average cases and renting and investing beats buying but then you do have the asset at the end so that's something you have to factor in so there's no right answer and so I own my own home just for context i don't rent and invest i don't do that i i want the store of value in my own house and i will actively try and overpay my mortgage there's some fantastic apps out there that help you overpay your mortgage by the way when you're shopping there's things like sprive um which is amazing um and then you know you've got um you've got your money going into that and you've got your money going a little bit into investments as well so you can do both um it's it's just it's not there's no wrong or right answer people just have to know their numbers because as i'm saying before like buying the house it doesn't doesn't always add up when you look at it and we've done videos about this and people still even with the numbers like literally in front of them a multitude of different examples i'll be like but buying beats investing because you're paying somebody else's mortgage i'm like you just didn't listen you just didn't miss a bit yeah yeah because it's not it's not like it's not me trying to say that either is right or wrong or like you should and we're obsessed with property in the UK we're obsessed with it and I just think people need to to know both spectrums before they open that decision to themselves that some people prefer it and they want that home and I get that because when we want to knock down walls and do it the kitchen you can't do that in a rental and your landlord could put the rent out by 500 quid there's not really much you can do about that um but you know it's it's a game yeah it's a game you're way up either side you touched on apps then yeah there's a lot of good tools out there maybe some some bad tools but from your standpoint what are the ones you'd recommend and for what purposes come on gains see how i did it yeah you did it i appreciate it i appreciate it no look um we're building something but i'll touch on ones that exist now because we we've got our waitlist open but if everybody wants anybody wants to join it um when's this coming out guys you know a few weeks yeah there's a bit of a backlog but we can we can work it out we might be live in the front of that waiting list look gainsapp.com go there if we're live download it if not join the waitlist you get something for joining um that's easier yeah yeah sweet um but look the apps that exist out there as i said before like automating as much as you possibly can with this i'm obsessed with monzo um because they have something called pots so um pots is just class right because you can split them up so i name mine christmas i've got the fu fund in there fu money super important that personal something goes wrong i've got a bit of cash knocked aside holidays all of those and all of my pots are in interest and let's say i just pop 200 pound in my monzo account it knows that it's taking 40 quid in that one 30 quid in that one 20 quid in that one and all those pots are in interest so it's such a nice way of like covering what the costs happen every single year because like christmas is happening whether you like it or not your mum's 47th birthday or 67th birthday is happening whether you like it or not um and what we do usually as humans is that we let them those come that's why we all feel it in january right but what if you made a plan for christmas the next year you're not like going oh my god how are we gonna pay for this or better get out the credit um and you're back round you go again right so just popping a small percentage of your money away for the yearly costs happening all the time into things like monzo pots's class I love Monzo when you can and you can use credit cards responsibly like they're an amazing tool to get free travel and stuff so I build up points that we paid for Australia my mum's out there now and two sisters live out there so we went out there and literally paid for our flights with points a couple hundred quid I think we paid in cash these are two grand flights I'm not flying business class yeah unfortunately but um it's expensive right isn't so and that was paid through credit card spending so if you're bad with credit cards a good way of doing it is um putting like one subscription on a credit card and actually like cutting it up because you've like already put it on it and then you just direct debit that out of that second bank account that we spoke about earlier so you're still getting the points and then using the credit which improves your credit score but you're not you don't have the card on your apple pay or in your pocket for you to like whack on it so you can still like do that and then as you get better over time you can put two subscriptions three subscriptions and then slowly build it up like now i'm like 90 percent of my spending goes on my credit card and because i just want to build the points so i know the value of it and i just make sure that i'm not like rinsing it um so that's a like amazing way there's some fantastic cards out there you know amex is good chase all of these things just check them out there's different rewards for different ones some give you cash back some give you points i prefer the points you're using for travel and then we're building gains as well which is basically the problem that exists right now is that how actually i'm really interested now how many banks do you have it's plum count yeah yeah uh two two interesting yourself three three plum and then abby national you know there something there something there and uh halifax and i've got an american express i've got an american express there you go okay so yeah it does yeah three then and we've got two or three in the business and we're in the business we've got quite a lot of bankers sorry we got a few though you just you were just quite quick to answer you didn't think the answer through i'm terrible at this uh the um the average person has 3.2 so like to know what's going on in all of them you've got to log in look at the statements maybe even like print that statement out like understand it it's a nightmare right um and you might spend with a joint account you might not with your other half you might have your personal ones and your personal card and joint cards and it all just gets a little bit messy um there's nothing really that exists where you can pull out all of that environment into to one space um and see exactly what's happening across all your bank accounts be able to separate your joint and your personal finances with your own budgets um and then we've built ai financial coaching which will analyze your spending and then find ways to save money so um if you shop in tesco it's going to know that about you and it's going to feed you the discount codes for for tesco next time you go in there you can buy what's called an instant gift card and you get say four to six percent off your tesco shop every time you do that and you can build that balance up and then withdraw that money or not or move it into savings accounts um so what we're building is basically the way of like you can walk down the street and you can say to the app hey how much have i spent on takeaways and it's going to go you know you spent 49 pound 50 last week you could tell it to roast you and it might call you a fat fucker after um it's not necessarily like gonna say that but the the the idea is that basically you can the questions that you would like to ask around your money that you usually just bury your head in the sand because it's long to go on like four apps you can just ask it and it's going to give you the picture across the mall and it's going to find you uh cool ways to save so that's that's gains app and what we're building at the moment and so really the flip is like if your food shop's gone up by four percent but we can give you four percent back on your shopping when your food shop hasn't gone up in price and so everybody's worrying about the cost of living and we can essentially beat the cost of living by putting that money back in people's pockets and that's really where the app sort of come from i'm not just saying this i was literally looking for something like this on the weekend i just moved house in the last few months and i was like i need to get my head around what's happening with all the different money moving it out i was like there must be an app that connects it all up and i can just understand it all in one place but there isn't it's quite weird there's stuff that tracks like oh you've got an extra tennery let's trick that into but there's nothing that would give you the overview of like iceberg ahead like plan ahead for this so yeah yeah um and seeing your spending as well is like mental so like a lot of us what we don't do is we don't it's really interesting yeah uh have you come across damien talks money before yeah brilliant personal finance youtuber recommending him to everyone uh good friend of mine lovely chap but he did a video yesterday it's really interesting like he was like oh yeah you would think that i'm like the picture of like personal finance god and investing all my money and saving it here and there and then i printed out my bank statements and i've realized i've into greg's 45 times in three months so it's like you don't know like your bank state where you've actually spent money is is the real you even though you're telling yourself it's coming completely different because you do that thing where you're in the morning you just sort of you know i'm going into this shop and i'm going to spend my money and that didn't happen in your head you're like yeah you know i haven't spent any money in that place and then you look at it you're like yes so um but the app doesn't judge you and that's what's really key a lot of the apps out there that exist they've got these like big like red things they're like you know you have done bad in this area like what are you doing and then our app will just be like yeah mate you might have like kind of overspent a touch there but you have some space here um or would you like us to figure out a way of like making these things cheaper for you yes cool well then like here's ways and it's totally personalized to you so like your experience with some of the apps out there is like here is basically a spreadsheet on a mobile phone with some fancy like colors and making it look nice it doesn't like personalize it to your own individual like circumstances and so if you're super into your fitness and i'm not and i'm obsessed with you know mountain biking or whatever it's going to understand that about you and not judge you if you're like putting 100 quid extra into fitness or mountain biking or food or whatever is important to you so it learns that about you over time you get smarter nice i'm sold i'm in sweet yeah it's free as well guys as well so um like we make money because we partner with the retailers um and that's the way we make money so we can give you that service for free and obviously there is a premium element to it but it's essentially allowing you to just connect more banks than one um we actually allow two on the free plan and then any more will give you access to a few wider and a few smarter more in-depth tools if you're a like geeky budgeter and stuff like that so for 90 % of people it's completely free nice so I'd imagine if someone's listening to this now they're probably in a similar spot trying to get their head around finance yeah and maybe in doing that they're also thinking about potential risks and opportunities that are coming and it feels like AI is probably one that we wish we could see around the corner on i knew you'd ask this what are your views on ai how how are you thinking about it it's really interesting so uh on the way up here i had a two-hour drive i spent an hour and a half with chris and my team and talking about like how we're i've quite i basically i've been down a rabbit hole for the past like three weeks i've done multiple four-hour podcasts of all the geekiest nerds and ai going from elon to claude ceo and sam altman all these people right and what i've come to to sort of realize is that the world is going to look fundamentally different no matter what we might let ourselves think like in the next five years it's going to be completely different and so i'm struggling at the moment i'm not 100 sold on this but i'm struggling to see how if you're in your 30s or 40s that a pension makes any sense um and that's quite a big statement but the reason for that is that that money is right now and that may change if everything starts to go nuts but that right now that money's locked up until you're 57 um it's 55 right now it's rising to 57 in 2028 but if it goes if it's locked up and i need it because the world's gone nuts but that that worries me a touch and so people are you know chris chris and my team is like well what do you tell people to do well the fact is the socks and shares is flexible you can take your money out tomorrow um so if you start seeing things go tits up and you want to try and grab your money out of your investments and pull it out you can so it's way more flexible it's less tax efficient than a pension yeah but it's not it's not locked up um so i'm steering a little bit i'm playing around with this a little touch right now and where do i think the what people should do and i i can't give a solid answer but i know it's not we can't think in 10 years like we used to in 2000s and even in the 90s we can't think in in that realm because it's going to be quick and it's going to be violent so i'm planning in like two three year increments now rather than thinking 20 30 years out for my future because i just don't think that that's kind of an acceptable thing to sort of teach people and granted that's exactly what we have been doing until literally this conversation today um with chris and my team so you this is hot off the press but i just think it's going to be quick and i think we have to be prepared i think we have to have a little bit of cash aside um that's liquid you know things that have value you know people may argue on the gold aspect people might argue on the bitcoin aspects and I don't give an answer on that like I don't think there's a right answer to this I just think it you know think about it and learn about it because we were talking about this earlier as well like learn about this stuff because it's gonna happen and it's gonna happen fast and so you know I am a little bit worried about like longer term but and so I think people should sort in their time horizon when they're thinking about making decisions I don't think people should take on big big debt and big projects like over the next if you you know if you're getting in there now then fine but you know certainly in the next couple of years it should be a bit careful about you know what sort of pressure you're going to put yourself under financially and what you owe people um because yeah if half they're predicting half the jobs 50 percent of white collar work like gone in the next 18 months which is quite scary that's like billions of people um so if that happens like where where are you know it's this isn't the industrial revolution this isn't the internet where people could just reshift this is like total eradication of that work um and so if that happens we just got to be a bit more careful around that and i know it's sort of doomsday properties prophecy stuff and no one likes hearing that but i just think we just got to be really careful over the next 24 months about what we take on and where we put our money our books are now open if you are sat there wondering where your next sale is going to come from wondering why your pipeline isn't full of meetings with qualified decision makers look no further because the we have a meeting team has got you covered just go to www.wehaveameeting.com speaking of books if you are looking to get better at sales communication and making more money our book sales is therapy is available on amazon now i've listened to so many podcasts where people are saying don't have children for the next five years and i think we're we're six kids deep between us fair play we're fucked the so you you've kind of alluded to it there sammy so you said like have a little bit of money set aside because we we do have this future looming where we actually don't know and then you you mentioned earlier fu money which i believe sends for to the camera fuck you money i think that's right um how much or or you said like have something so like got something of value gold blah blah blah like what in your opinion how much should people be having set aside and and how long should they be prepared for yeah so my initial thing is like that security element um that emergency fund is the most important part of personal finance everybody it is so boring people hate talking about it but honestly everyone that i've ever spoken to that has gone and done it feels like complete relief and right now it's because they can bat off pretty much anything that happens to them someone drives into your car you and drives off you can pay for it um you know your roof case and you can pay for it your boss calls you an asshole in front of everyone and you think i'm done well i can leave and that toxic boss is no more i can bat off anything for three months now three to six months of living expenses and that isn't um that isn't like what you get paid people confuse that some people like building to that and i get that that's fine but for me it's like if i stopped uber eats and getting expensive x y and z's or these types of things what could i really live off so all my bills are paid off and my family's covered and your kids can eat and all those types of things what's that number and then times that by three and work to that first um that's the first bit to get to just get that stashed away in an easy access high interest saving account which you can you know go and get tomorrow if you need it um that's like the number one thing i think people should do with personal finance in any way for shape or form is just get that emergency fund together um and then yeah like you might different finance people will argue against this but I'm you know I have a little bit of bitcoin I have a little bit of physical gold I'm not a millionaire you know a couple of hundred quid here and there is it's a start right and to start with what you can and again it's there's no right or wrong answer to like how much should be in certain aspects into you you just got to be comfortable with your decisions but you know if you're only saving and you're not investing or you're only buying gold or only buying bitcoin well then you're very reliant on that one individual thing so putting fingers in pies is a good place to go sort of diversification essentially sammy i've absolutely loved this conversation it's given me so much food for thought and like i i'm feeling like i don't need a new year to start getting better with money so thank you you've inspired me we always ask one last question for the audience if someone's listened to the full conversation what's one question you'd like to leave them with question for them yeah

53:23Sammie Ellard-King:yeah I think ask yourself like the last thing you bought whether or not it really like it really lit you up and just like unpack that feeling inside yourself just ask yourself that question and it you know it can be as simple as like i spent a four pound on a coffee when i had a coffee machine at home but if that coffee lit you up and that was your best moment of your day well then great but if not unpack why and if it did unpack why too and then the next time you do that ask yourself the same question keep asking yourself that question every time you buy it just take a little moment and be in control and it really helps great question um thank you so much for joining us if people want to find you follow you get gained how do they go about that yeah gainsapp.com um definitely come check us out there um we also have uh up the gains money which is our social media channels where we do sort of break down personal finance stuff much less boring than me on a long form podcast we put bangers on the back hip-hop tunes and 70s funk classics and stuff so we have a lot of fun there but um also on up the gains.co.uk we have about 300 free guides so pretty much if you think about anything with money we've probably covered it in some form and if not tell us and we'll write it so yeah appreciate it amazing thank you so much sammy thanks man