The Meaningful Money Personal Finance Podcast

It’s time for another return guest, and this week it’s the turn of my friend Damien Fahy from MoneyToTheMasses.com. He’s set up something which I think is going to really help a lot of people, and it’s called The 80:20 Investor. Stay tuned to find out more…   Don’t forget that MeaningfulUniversity is now open for enrolment. There is just one course on there at the moment; Learn How To Budget. More courses will follow, but LHTB will give you everything you need to KNOW and everything you need to DO to set and stick to a monthly budget. Check it out at meaningfuluniversity.com.

This week we’re going to be talking about putting your finances on auto-pilot.  We all procrastinate on important decisions, and when those decisions have to be made regularly, such as how much to put aside each month for our future, they end up getting left altogether. The answer is to automate as much as possible to remove that decision making.   Don’t forget that MeaningfulUniversity is now open for enrolment. There is just one course on there at the moment; Learn How To Budget. More courses will follow, but LHTB will give you everything you need to KNOW and everything you need to DO to set and stick to a monthly budget. Check it out at meaningfuluniversity.com.

Continuing our investment masterclass, this week we’re talking about understanding costs. Every pound spent in costs as you go along your investing journey, is a pound which isn’t compounding for your benefit. So we need to know what costs you’re likely to incur, and then what you can do to keep them to a minimum. Stay tuned…

We’re continuing our Investment mMasterclass today, having taken a bit of a break for the past six weeks or so. Although, you could argue that my interview with Greg Davies of Barclay about behavioural finance was timely. Today we’re going to talk about setting targets, and perhaps more importantly, to achieve them. Stay tuned…

Here we are at session number 110 , and we’re going to be talking to a US financial planner called Carl Richards about his new book, The One-Page Financial Plan. You know I’m always banging on about planning here on the podcast, and Carl’s book distills the idea of financial planning down to the basics. Carl has a knack of explaining financial planning and particularly behavioural finance concepts in an easy-to-understand way through a series of sketches that he draws. These sketches are peppered throughout the book and also on his website, behaviorgap.com. Stay tuned for my chat with Carl…

Here we are at session number 109 , and this week we’re continuing my chat, begun last time, with Greg Davies, Head of Behavioural Quant Finance at Barclays. We’re talking about why investors are often their own worst enemies - it’s a fascinating topic with practical lessons we can all learn, so stay tuned for the conclusion of my chat with Greg in just a sec… MeaningfulUniversity is finally ready to go live on 15th May. The first course there will be Learn How To Budget. A few of you registered on the site after my chat a couple of weeks ago with Martin O, which was meant to coincide with the launch of MU, but in the end I just couldn’t get things done for the 1st May as I hoped. As usual, I bit off a little more than I could chew! I am pleased with how the site has turned out however, so if you want to learn the best practice for setting and sticking to a monthly budget, then head on over to MeaningfulUniversity.com and put in your email address and I’ll keep you posted.

This week, we’re revisiting the very important subject of budgeting. This is inspired by a wonderful email received this week from a listener called Martin in Pontefract in the UK. I was just going to read the email out, but I decided instead to ask Martin onto the show and he agreed! We’ll hear from him in just a second…  

We continue our investment masterclass and this week we’ll be looking at risk and return. We covered this last way back in session 16 but I think it needs to be revisited in the particular context of risk when investing. So stay tuned, because your investing education continues shortly…   Introduction Risk is an unavoidable part of investing. The two go together like, well, two things which are meant to go together. Like Andy Murray and Kim Sears, perhaps. It isn’t a very pleasant word though, RISK. It’s a horrible four letter word that most people would like to avoid if at all possible, but it isn’t possible, so you might as well learn to work with it. And that’s the point. Risk is something to be harnessed. It is to be understood and then set free to do its thing, and in doing so your returns should be more predictable and rewarding. With risk comes reward, as sure as night follows day, if you get it right.

Here we are at session number 105 , and we’re going to be talking about investing. Last year’s listener survey revealed that building an investment portfolio was the single biggest issue that respondents struggled with. Well, fear not! I am here to help with an investing masterclass! Over the next three or four weeks I’m going to be covering the art, nay, science of investing in enough detail that you should be able to build your own portfolio by the end of it. Or at least, you will know whether or not you want to embark on doing so or leave it to the professionals instead…

This week we’re going to be talking about how pensions really work. I occurred to me while looking back over the first 100 sessions of this show that while I have covered off pensions before, I have not dealt with how the money gets in and out of a pension, and how it behaves while it is in there. So stay tuned for some hardcore pensions info which hopefully won’t make you snooze because I’m joined this week by my best mate in the world…