Clare’s story

As a freelance editor and translator, and full-time mum, Clare was limited by time and money and hesitated about enrolling on the No-Stress Money Plan. But, in the back of her mind was the nagging feeling that her savings that had been sitting in the bank doing nothing for years should be invested somehow. And, like many of us in ELT, she was worried about retirement and her lack of decent pension from the Spanish system.

But, even though Clare had always been open to the idea of investing, she’d never found the time to research it and didn’t understand what she did manage to read. I can tell you that Clare is a very detail-oriented person; even before the course began, she had a lot of questions and found the most cost-effective way to structure the payment. But, even though research is actually one of her biggest skills, she was overwhelmed by the swamp of information there is out there about investing. 

“Without the course,” Clare says now,  “I would probably never have got started or, if I had, I would definitely never have managed to put in place a principled investment strategy.”

She just needed someone to fill the knowledge gaps and give her some direction. 

And that’s where the No-Stress Money Plan came in. 

She’d been worried that she wouldn’t have time to get it done but she did because the workload is only 1.5-2 hours a week.

And, by the end, Clare was saying,  “I feel like I have a solid overview of the main options open to me and I can read/listen to financial information and actually understand most of it!!”

What Clare has achieved since the course finished

By March 2024 Clare was confidently announcing that she’d achieved her main goal of getting all her savings into investments. something she says she never would have dreamed she could do.

Not only that she had:

• moved her son’s savings to the higher earning potential of an investing account, which is likely to add between 5000–9000€ more to his account by the time he’s 18 compared with what it was doing before. 
• moved her pension to something with lower fees, saving her about 4-5k over the next 20 years. 
• cancel her mortgage-linked home and life insurance policies and switch to a different provider that would work out cheaper, saving approximately 3100€ by the time the mortgage ends.

Lots of my alumni have found that taking control of their finances has bigger implications than “just” setting up investments and earning more money. Through all Clare’s financial wins and changes, this last mortgage-related one had an even bigger win attached.

My main victory was a psychological one over the bank by being empowered/confident enough to research and calculate that I COULD ACTUALLY BREAK FREE knowing that I wouldn’t lose out financially, even though the bank always tried to make you think you will!!!!

Since then, she’s carried on researching investing platforms in Spain and that’s how she came to be giving me advice. 

I was wondering if a particular platform in Spain would allow me to choose funds within a children’s account but I couldn’t tell based on the information available on their website. In true “the student becomes the teacher style” Clare recorded me a video walking me through how it worked within her son’s account. With the information I needed, I went ahead and opened the account. (Transferring my own account over to this cheaper platform will add at least 5000€ to my personal investments over the next 20 years.) 

I can’t think of a better example of the power that knowledge about investing brings and I couldn’t be prouder of how far Clare’s come.

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