Introduction I’ve loved quotes for a long time and have been collecting quotes that have made an impression on me for at least the last 5 years. I agree with Adam Grant when he said of quotes and aphorisms, “they’re memorable and They give meaning and direction. They spur new thoughts or new actions—or remind us to revisit old ones.” The quotes we love and remember are those that we feel speak directly to us, they transcend the individual context in…
Introduction Let me start this post with hopefully the most obvious statement I’ve written to date: nobody’s primary reason for getting married should be because for money, let alone purely for tax benefit reasons. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that in June 2017 I got engaged to the love of my life and we married in Summer 2018. Due to my interest in personal finance I was keen to know if getting married would…
Introduction Some say it’s too boring, others it’s too tedious, and others still that it’s too intimidating but I believe that tracking your spending – all of it – is a fundamentally important thing for everyone to do, regardless of your income or age. The digitisation of money and the growth of e-commerce has made it easier and quicker for us to spend money without fully thinking it through or realising exactly what we’ve spent where, which is why tracking what…
Introduction This won’t be yet another New Year’s Resolution blog post, I’m sure your sick of reading or hearing about them by now. I don’t like making New Year’s Resolutions, primarily because it often feels like people make them purely to break them! Often people know they need to make a change but don’t really want to, therefore proclaim to everyone that it will be their New Year’s Resolution, so that no-one is surprised – and the individual isn’t disappointed – when they give…
Introduction Buying a house is widely viewed in the UK as part of achieving ‘the dream’, along with getting married and having children, another tick in the box to show you’ve made it. Society’s drive to put buying a home on a pedestal will undoubtedly make this a controversial blog, but I feel it’s needed as there are too few voices providing a balanced view. Personally, I am definitely not immune to society’s idealisation of home buying and it’s something…
PLEASE NOTE: If you haven’t read Part 1 of this piece I recommend you start with that, before reading on, you can find it here. Calculating how to reach your Target income Making calculations years into the future is far from easy, for starters we might all be retired in 30 years with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots doing all our work for us. Even without considering massive changes like that, making calculations is harder, a couple of percentage differences in…
Introduction Retirement, it is something which millennials often think is too far away to think or worry about. However, I think about it more than your average millennial because I want to be able to retire early. If you are a millennial in the UK the chances are you won’t be able to receive your national pension until you are at least 70, given most people would have started full time work between the ages of 18 & 22, that…
Introduction As part of my website and through my blogs I try to offer a good sprinkling of personal finance advice, based on solid finance theory and my own experience, focusing on important issues for millennials. Of course, the solid finance theory that I provide doesn’t just come from my own mind, I spend a good amount of time seeking out and refining the advice of others. The aim of this piece is to share the 7 best personal…
Introduction There appears to be more recognition than ever of the difficulties first time buyers – the majority of whom are millennials – are having trying to get onto the property ladder. On first glance the Lifetime ISA (LISA), along with the Help to Buy ISA, is just another tool the UK government is using to add at least a little more balance to the system. But in reality, the LISA is more than that. The LISA is also…
Introduction: This book was gifted to me by a family member around 5 years ago, and although I read it around 3 years ago, I only recently stumbled across my notes. Having this gap between reading the book and reviewing my notes was really interesting, as it provided me with the opportunity to understand what content from the book I’d naturally kept and what I’d forgotten, fortunately more was remembered than I expected! Whilst I am not currently investing in…