Bonus episode: The best from our Series 5 guests (so far) with Philippa Lamb and Lucy Greenwell

The following is a transcript of a bonus podcast episode of The Pension Confident Podcast. Listen to the episode, watch on YouTube or scroll on to read the conversation.

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PHILIPPA: Welcome back. We have something special for you this time, a best bits bonus episode. Now, I love these because I get to look back at everything we’ve covered so far [in] this series. And even though we’re only halfway through the year, we’ve already covered so much: Is it worth getting married? What to do if you’re staring down 50 [years old] with absolutely nothing saved in a pension pot? How to resist lifestyle creep eating up all your pay? And a bunch of other topics all about making the most of your money.

Now, long [time] listeners already know our Series Producer, the super talented Lucy Greenwell. For today’s bonus episode, I’ve winkled her out of the gallery where she usually oversees recordings, and she’s here with me in the studio so we can argue over our favourite picks. Lucy, welcome to this side of the glass.

LUCY: It’s very lovely to be here, Philippa. We argue all the time after every episode. We go through the debrief, and there’s often quite contentious issues in that -

PHILIPPA: that’s true, we do a lot of arguing. But obviously, in the spirit of positivity, now we’ve been working really hard this year, haven’t we?

LUCY: Yeah.

PHILIPPA: We’ve done - it’s more episodes than we’ve ever done before, right?

LUCY: Yes, because we’ve launched, on top of our main monthly episode, we’ve launched two new mini-series. We’ve got Customer Episodes, which is [about] real people with their money stories, and we’ve got our Explainer Episodes where we demystify all that financial jargon.

PHILIPPA: Do you know how many guests we’ve had on this series so far?

LUCY: I do. I’ve counted up -

PHILIPPA: of course you have -

LUCY: all told, we’ve had 33 different voices on Series 5 of the podcast. And I’m the 34th, so that’s a big breadth of expertise and experience.

PHILIPPA: It’s a lot, isn’t it? Now look, the other day Lucy and I were mulling over the best way to choose our best bits, and we had a bit of a brainwave, which was to divide them up into categories.

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Best episode for first-time listeners

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PHILIPPA: And so, the first category we came up with is: best episode for first-time listeners. So, this is like if you wanted to introduce the series to a friend who’d never listened, which would you recommend?

LUCY: So, you and I agreed on this quite quickly. Episode 50 was all about starting that pension pot from nothing, standing start at 50 [years old], and I loved it because it’s so the opposite of, “Oh, we’ve got it all sorted on this podcast, and we all know what we’re talking about”. This is like, you’ve got nothing and you’re 50 [years old], what are you going to do about it? So, it’s just brilliant.

PHILIPPA: It is, you know, seven million people aged over 50 in the UK right now have no private pension savings at all.

LUCY: And you might think, why is it so many? How did that happen? But the episode was full of all the reasons why that happens. [A] massive one is Auto-Enrolment. That didn’t exist until 2012. So if, like me, you were working before that, there was no one to nudge you to get going. I didn’t get going until I was in my early 30s -

PHILIPPA: yeah, people just never talk about pensions before -

LUCY: no one mentioned it to me. I keep telling my Dad, “Why didn’t he make me do it?”. But he’s got no answer. Then there are career breaks, [a] big one as well. Caring responsibilities, huge one. Opting out of your pension when money is tight, and that just adds up.

PHILIPPA: Yeah, we had some really specific numbers on what that opting out can cost you, didn’t we, in that episode - even for a short period.

LUCY: Yeah, let’s hear a bit of that.

SARAH: This is based on a starting salary of £25,000 at 21 [years old]. The average annual salary increases of 2% [each year]. 8% pension contributions when contributing, and 3% annual investment growth [after fees and inflation]. If you have zero periods of opting out of your pension, by the time you’re 68 [years old], your pot size will be £194,185. But if you opted out from age 30 to 33, it’d be £176,740. Which is actually a difference in pot size of £17,445. So those three years make a really big difference there.

LUCY: So that’s over £17,000 difference, and it’s not because you’d have necessarily put £17,000 worth of cash into your pension, it’s the compounding that you’ve lost out.

PHILIPPA: Yeah, that’s the point, isn’t it? Hannah Martin talked about that, didn’t she? About the fact that compounding - we always go on about compounding on the podcast, but it’s so important. Every pound you put in, at whatever age, it still has that chance to grow, right? And it’s so - it’s not all doom and gloom, even if you’re starting late. And I started late, you started late-ish, I started late-ish too.

LUCY: Yes.

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Most surprising number

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PHILIPPA: Now, this obviously is a financial podcast, which means there are always going to be statistics. Every series, there’s one I think -

LUCY: yes -

PHILIPPA: at least one, but maybe a big one that just stops the conversation dead. I’m going to say for me, it was Episode 46, which was redundancy. Because when our guest, Eleanor Mills, talked about her own experience of being made redundant after 23 years at the Sunday Times, and just how devastating that was for her; 10,000 people wrote back to her to say they felt exactly the same.

LUCY: Yeah, it was really, really shocking, that moment. And one of those moments where all of us in the gallery just fall quiet as well. Just, she described it so beautifully. We’ll hear a bit in a second.

But the point is, about redundancy, is that everyone, almost everyone at some point, is either going to face it themselves or they know someone who is, or they’re worried about it given what’s happening in the job market. It’s timely. We recorded that episode in January of this year and that conversation about job security has just got ever noisier since then.

PHILIPPA: That’s the thing, it’s so common, it can happen more than once, and the sad thing is there’s still so much stigma around it even now, even though it’s a really common thing, people don’t talk about it.

LUCY: Yeah, it’s true. Let’s hear a bit of Eleanor Mills telling her story.

ELEANOR: It was horrible. It was really, really grim. I’d been at my old newspaper for 23 years. I was the Editorial Director, I was the Editor of the Sunday Times magazine. I got a call asking me to go up and see the new Editor. I went up with all my stuff for the six months, all my jolly things.

PHILIPPA: The things you were going to be talking about.

ELEANOR: I just interviewed Sheryl Sandberg. It was all good, world exclusive. [I] walked in, the tissues were on the table, the Head of [Human Resources] (HR) was there with the new boss, and I was out.

PHILIPPA: Wow.

ELEANOR: It was a truly horrible, surreal moment. A bit like being in a car crash. When you get that real dissociation. I was sitting in that office and watching the tugboats chug up the Thames and the seagulls flying around the Southwark Cathedral. Just knowing in that moment that my life was never going to be the same again. It’d been my life from when I was 21 to when I was 50 [years old], and I suddenly realised that I was going to have to start again.

LUCY: The way she described seeing the tugboats and the seagulls, that clearly, she went into complete shock at that moment, and those images are just frozen and kind of replayed -

PHILIPPA: just burned into her brain, aren’t they? -

LUCY: so horrendous. And we actually, on that episode, we had Jimmy McLoughlin OBE. He was with us, and he was once a Number 10 Advisor -

PHILIPPA: oh yeah -

LUCY: to Theresa May and Boris Johnson, wasn’t it? And he described redundancy of a different sort when there’s a change of government. So, as we all watch on the TV, the new PM walking into that black door with Number 10 on it, in Downing Street, all the advisors literally at the same moment are just filing out of the back door unseen. It’s the end of it. So, it’s pretty topical given what we’ve seen in recent weeks.

PHILIPPA: I was just thinking that. I remember him saying about that, and then now here it is playing out in real time now that we’ve got a change of Prime Minister. And of course, everyone always says, you go and see a career coach if you’ve been made redundant, but it all costs money, doesn’t it? And Jimmy, I remember he had this great tip about how to get some fresh career ideas for free.

LUCY: He did. He said, “Use AI”. So just go on, tell it everything about yourself. I was talking to a friend about this yesterday. She said she’d just uploaded her CV onto AI and just gone through the motions of pressing it for suggestions about what company she could approach for freelance work. And so, you ask it to act as a career coach, you ask it a few questions about yourself, and he said it’s a really good way. I haven’t tried it yet, but working out what you’re actually good at, your skills. And it’s quite hard to do that on yourself without a bit of external help. So, it’s a free tool worth a go.

PHILIPPA: Yeah, do you know, I’m tempted. I think it’s a really interesting idea because even if you ask friends or family, I mean, there’s only so much stuff they’re going to say to you -

LUCY: yeah -

PHILIPPA: and AI is completely objective about you. It doesn’t care. So, you know, sounds good.

LUCY: Yeah.

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Funniest episode

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PHILIPPA: Now look, we’re a serious money podcast, obviously. But we do laugh a lot in the studio. We do have some very funny guests. I’ve got a standout favourite in the series so far. Do you want to guess who it is?

LUCY: I know who it is because we’ve talked about him. Bobby Seagull -

PHILIPPA: yes -

LUCY: Episode 47, on the ‘Singles Tax’, the financial penalty for single people.

PHILIPPA: The spreadsheet. He has a spreadsheet.

LUCY: Yeah, so Bobby, for anyone who doesn’t know him, he’s a Mathematician, he writes for the [Financial Times] (FT), and quite surprisingly he appeared on a Netflix show called Indian Matchmaking, also been on University Challenge. So, he’s a sort of star in his own right. And he was single, sort of. And Philippa, you asked him about the cost of dating -

PHILIPPA: I did -

LUCY: and he just revealed, just casually dropped it into conversation, that he has kept a spreadsheet of every first date he’s ever been on.

PHILIPPA: And that’s 158 first dates.

LUCY: That’s not a small number. And he’s got a graph, so the average spend per date tracked over time. Let’s hear a bit of that.

BOBBY: Being the mathematical nerd I am, I have - for my own eyes only - I have a spreadsheet of all my first dates.

EMMA: No!

BOBBY: Yes. And after like 10 first dates, I’m like, “I’m a Mathematician, there’s great data here”. I know it’s not very sexy.

PHILIPPA: Are you ranking these women?

BOBBY: Well, if you’ve got data there, you can choose to rank them if you want. It sounds like a lot, but over 14 years, 158 first dates.

VALENTINA: Did you pay for all of them?

BOBBY: So, pretty much 99% of first dates. One pro tip is that a lot of London museums have London Lates, so National Gallery, Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and they’re free to enter and you can buy drinks, but that’s a cheap, great date.

PHILIPPA: That’s an excellent idea.

BOBBY: It’s my number one choice [out] of my 158. A lot of them, a sizable minority of them, would’ve had that.

LUCY: It was eye-opening though to hear how much our world is financially geared for couples. So, couples pay less per head than singles for pretty much everything: streaming services, rent, holidays. This cumulative cost of living alone, it’s really unfair.

PHILIPPA: I know, I remember that conversation really well, and it’s so unfair, isn’t it? Because single people are this growing army. I remember Bobby saying there’s 8.4 million single-person households in the UK, all ages obviously. And all those companies offering products and services, I’m kind of thinking they should think harder about that.

LUCY: I totally agree.

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Best money tip

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LUCY: Right, next award: best money tip.

PHILIPPA: Yeah, you know, I always love this part. This is the episode where people get into the really practical detail, the things you could actually go do right now, today. Did anything from this series land as a proper, you know, “Right, I’m gonna do that” moment for you?

LUCY: Well, almost every episode has a bit of a “Right, I’m gonna do that” -

PHILIPPA: that’s true -

LUCY: for me, but this one that I’ve chosen comes from our recent lifestyle creep episode, [Episode 51]. So, lifestyle creep [is] that silent consumer of all of our pay rises, where the more you earn, the more you spend. Your spending rises just to match that income, leaving you absolutely no better off. You never feel any richer.

PHILIPPA: Yeah, I think we all know how that is, that phenomenon as you earn more, you go for more expensive stuff, don’t you? Because you can, better restaurants, better cars, better holidays, better clothes. But you get used to it.

LUCY: Yes.

PHILIPPA: Really fast.

LUCY: Yes.

PHILIPPA: So, it all feels like it was before, even though you’re earning more.

LUCY: Yeah, it doesn’t make you feel any better off. So, there’s a reformed lifestyle creeper came on the show, financial expert Clare Seal, and she had this really good tip - which is simple, but just strangely effective sounding.

CLARE: If you can make it really tangible, so doing direct swaps. And so, this is how I incrementally started paying more into my pension. I literally took the thing and cancelled the thing and immediately set up the Direct Debit straight into my pension. So, a direct swap of -

PHILIPPA: interesting -

CLARE: this thing that I’m not getting value out of versus this thing that I’m gonna get so much value out of. As you walk past the coffee shop, pop the £4.50 straight into your savings or your investments or your pensions. Honestly.

PHILIPPA: She’s so right about that -

LUCY: I know -

PHILIPPA: and it’s so simple -

LUCY: I know -

PHILIPPA: but such a good thing to do. I’ve got a surprising one too. It’s a bit niche - LUCY: yeah -

PHILIPPA: but it’s from Episode 49 -

LUCY: oh yeah, what was that?

PHILIPPA: Well, that was about whether having a Buy-to-Let property, if you’re fortunate enough to have one, is it worth keeping it anymore? And it was Anna Pearce. She was a Buy-to-Let Landlord. She was a Content Creator as well. ‘Property Empress’ is her handle -

LUCY: yeah -

PHILIPPA: and Michael Annis, he was a Mortgage Advisor, and it was - it was - this doesn’t sound great, but stay with it, because it’s really interesting. It was about conveyancing.

PHILIPPA: Can you do your own conveyancing? Is it a bad idea? It’s a bad, bad idea -

ANNA: you know -

PHILIPPA: you should see your face!

ANNA: I actually looked into this not too long ago. You can technically.

PHILIPPA: You can?

ANNA: Highly wouldn’t recommend it.

MICHAEL: I think if a client said that, I’d start crying.

PHILIPPA: The general suggestion here is that -

MICHAEL: unless you’re a conveyancer yourself -

ANNA: a tip I’d also say is look [into] finding a solicitor in the North, because they’re cheaper.

LUCY: There we go. She says you don’t have to be local, shop around, shop nationally to find a better price for a conveyancer. And she’s talking about Buy-to-Lets there, but obviously that applies to any property you buy, your main home included.

PHILIPPA: Yeah, and it’s the great thing, isn’t it? We’re still kind of hung up on pre-digital days, aren’t we? That you need to go to some solicitor who’s around the corner -

LUCY: high street -

PHILIPPA: you really don’t.

LUCY: No, you don’t.

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Most shocking moment

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PHILIPPA: OK, time for our last category: the most shocking moment. What was the one thing a guest said that genuinely stopped you in your tracks, behind the glass there in the gallery?

LUCY: There were a few things I was toying with here. But the thing in the end that we all thought was, “We just haven’t considered it.” Episode 48, ‘The Great Wealth Transfer’, which by the way, if you haven’t heard it, please do - it’s packed with really fascinating information.

PHILIPPA: It really was. 

LUCY: It was. We had this solicitor called Annaliese Barber. She’s a specialist in wills and estates, and she told us about the Inheritance Tax threshold. Sounds boring, [it] really isn’t.

PHILIPPA: So, this was about the fact that it’s been frozen for so long.

LUCY: Yeah, so long. Let’s hear that clip. We’ve clipped it up for you.

ANNALIESE: It’s been frozen since the 2009/10 tax year at £325,000, and it’ll stay at that level until 2030/31. So it’s like 22 years, which -

PHILIPPA: 22 years with all the inflation that we’ll see in 22 years.

ANNALIESE: Mm-hmm.

PHILIPPA: That’s amazing, isn’t it? Something that’s so far, far more people are going to be caught by -

ANNALIESE: oh, absolutely -

PHILIPPA: Inheritance Tax than they ever used to be -

ANNALIESE: yes.

PHILIPPA: What should the number be?

ANNALIESE: So it should be more like £535,000 [if adjusted for inflation], which is a huge difference.

PHILIPPA: It is, isn’t it? Because if we’re saying that the average house price is under £300,000, then that gives you quite a lot of wriggle room with your estate, doesn’t it, for other investments and savings and belongings and all the rest of it to be part of your estate before you’d have to pay any Inheritance Tax.

ANNALIESE: And I think it’s something that sneaks up on people as well. They don’t appreciate how much their property’s worth.

PHILIPPA: Startling, huh?

LUCY: Yeah, shocking. Really shocking.

PHILIPPA: That’s a wrap on our favourite bit so far. Lucy, thank you as always for coming out of the gallery.

LUCY: Such a pleasure. I’m going to creep back to the gallery where I belong.

PHILIPPA: If you’ve missed any of the episodes that we’ve talked about today. They’re all there for you wherever you get your podcasts. We’re on YouTube and in the PensionBee app too.

Now, in September, we’ll be back with an episode on ‘What’s missing from your investments?’. You don’t want to miss it. And if you’re enjoying the show, please do subscribe, leave us a review. It genuinely helps us find more people like you.

Just a reminder, anything discussed on the podcast shouldn’t be regarded as financial advice or, of course, as legal advice. And when investing, your capital is at risk. Thanks for joining us, and we’ll see you next time.

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Risk warning

As always with investments, your capital is at risk. The value of your investment can go down as well as up, and you may get back less than you invest. This information should not be regarded as financial advice.