When you’ve got a small pot of money, it might feel like you can’t make much difference to your finances. But that’s not true! Take Jennie Reed, a pronunciation coach in Scotland, who took the No-Stress Money Plan in 2022.
She learned how investing works and then set about implementing her new knowledge, starting with the pension she had been told was too complicated to understand. She’s added thousands of pounds to it just with some small changes.
Jennie hadn’t been sticking her head in the sand about finances when she became a freelancer (so she was already doing better than I was when I first went freelance!). Thinking it was the responsible thing to do, she’d gone to a financial advisory firm and had them set up a pension for her. But then she got her first statement and saw how much they were charging her each month…
As there’s not a huge amount in my pension, it felt like too much. When I called to question them about how to get rid of this fee, they basically told me that my pension provider’s system was too complicated for me to understand and I was much better off using their services.
Once the course was complete Jennie set to “work”, making small changes with huge impact.
That pension she wouldn’t be able to understand? Moved to a different provider.
She’s saved herself over £20,000 in fees over the next 30 years with just that one change, if she continues making regular payments into it.
That done, she switched savings accounts for a bonus sweetener, and now has different pots for different goals, all of them earning higher interest instead of sitting in the low-interest current account she had before.
Her focus now is on building up tax-free earnings on savings which she’s currently getting a nice 5.6% return on. All of this, she says, means being more financially stable than she ever thought possible as an English language teacher.
The biggest challenge for me was thinking I didn’t have the money to really worry about any of this. But having organised everything and seen what a difference just earning 5% rather than 1% on £1000 can make has been a huge boost and I know I will continue making tweaks as I go along.
It’s interesting that Jennie’s personal challenge here is a mirror version of the wider challenge I have convincing people in ELT that my investing courses will suit them.
People think they don’t have enough money to make it worth doing. But, as Jennie is proof of, you don’t need huge amounts of money to make investing worthwhile because it all adds up. The point is to be better off than you would be otherwise, not to be a millionaire, though all speed to you on that journey because even that isn’t impossible.
If you start early enough or come into money later on AND you already know how investing works, you’ll understand what to do with it! So, if a financial advisor tells you it’s too complicated, you can politely tell them to leave you to it, thank you very much.
If you’d like to have a chat to see if I can help you, book a no obligation call and let’s see if we can improve your financial situation 🙂
Or email or What’sApp me – I usually reply pretty fast.
Lisa Wood
Lisa hovered on my mailing list for months (and her savings for 18 years!) before doing the course. She surprised both of us by how much she got into it!
Clare Hogg
Clare went from having her savings sitting doing nothing and no idea about money to master researcher who now gives ME advice on platforms in Spain.
Genny White
The No-Stress Money Plan inspired Genny to make major career changes after switching path from “no pension, no financial security, no plan” to financially sorted.