Chris’s story

Most people in ELT, like me, took the languages, culture and literature path through life. We probably didn’t come into a great deal of contact with what we might call “money people” until they charged us a load of money to handle things like mortgages, house buying or insurance. Those experiences get backed up by news stories of Wall Street bankers and collapses caused by fraud where the culprits not only walk away but get paid fat bonuses.  

That’s part of how many of us end up like Chris and Fiona, feeling that they should do something with the savings they had accumulated over the years but were earning zero interest.

[The money] was basically our flat improvement fund, holiday fund, rainy day fund, and whatever else fund all rolled into one. It was earning basically zero interest, and we both realized this was no good, but we hadn’t got round to doing anything about this, probably for the same reasons as lots of people – too difficult to understand the options, don’t trust “money people”, no time, we’ll do it tomorrow, etc.  

Chris and Fiona also wanted to reassess some long term investments they had, including a pension they’d started through a former employer but didn’t fully understand. This sort of stuff has become my personal obsession so I was very happy to help.

I’m hugely impressed by anyone that already had some sort of pension before they found my course because I had done nothing about any of this stuff until 2021 myself.

But, half the time, when we don’t know what we are opening, we can end up losing out a lot on fees or by being invested in things that aren’t really right for us. Once people have done the No-Stress Money Plan, they can see relatively clearly how much they’re paying, how much they could be saving if they make some changes, and what it all means. 

And then, like Chris, they go on to make those changes and start earning money from their money.

The chunk of money we had sitting in a bank, doing nothing, is now nicely organised into different pots (emergency fund, flat fund, holiday fund etc), and each one is earning interest! The course taught me about the importance of having defined “pots” for different things, and also about the different ways to make your money work while it’s sitting there. This makes it much easier to put a little aside each month, as we know where it’s going and what for, which somehow makes a big psychological difference too, as it’s not all getting lumped into a random black hole. 

For a lot of people, like Chris and Fiona, learning about the different options for where to put money, depending on how quickly you want access to it, meant also learning that it’s not all about investing large lump sums. Because investing works on small, regular amounts too, you don’t have to be rich or have savings to start. Most of the changes they’ve made have been about what they do with their income going forward.

Chris is another one of those people who really got into the course, passing his knowledge on to Fiona who also now understands what their money is doing. So from distrusting “money people” to being able to say things like this:

The course equipped me with a much better understanding of how things like compound interest, fee structures, and how different types of funds are managed can affect your longer term investments. This helped us to have a much better-informed discussion with the people responsible for our own workplace pension, and we’re now working on reorganising that. 

One of the things that never stops amazing me is how comfortable people become with their new language of personal finance.

But it doesn’t change them.

You don’t become a murkier person, you just learn how to see through the murk. And you’ll be able to spot dodgy “money people” a mile off which can only help when it comes to retirement planning time. 

If you’re naturally suspicious of “money people” and the shady world of financial investments, or if you simply feel it’s too big and confusing (and scary) to think about, that’s precisely why you should do Nicola’s course. She’s great at demystifying all that stuff, and will get you thinking about how you can make your money work better for you, whether that’s in the shorter or longer term. There are a lot of people (like fund managers) who have a vested interest in making all of this seem more complicated than it has to be, and with Nicola’s help, it’s possible to do a lot of stuff for ourselves, saving and earning money along the way.