The Tutor Podcast

Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 451 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine. My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to ave as much fun at work and in life as I do. Although I'm here to share, I'm also here to listen. If you have any ideas that you think might be of interest on the show, or any questions, then get in touch. It's [email protected] or you can find me on X, where I am @TutorPodcast. Maybe you can help me to learn something new, something different, something better maybe, and maybe I can help you and share what you learned. I don't have all the answers and nobody does. Maybe you got a some better answers that would be helpful to myself and to others. Again it's [email protected] or @TutorPodcast on X, formerly known as Twitter. Regular listeners to the show will know that I love to read – every single day I can – about almost everything: finance, politics, business, marketing, the arts, music, science, engineering, biographies, human behaviour…. And much more. Nothing is off-limits and I go where my restless and curious mind thinks is a good idea… consequently there are too many books and too few hours in my day… There are two real problems with this situation: the need to sleep (which I generally consider to be a waste of valuable learning/geeking-out time) and the many books which beckon me from my bookshelves… Now I’ve debunked the “8 hours sleep” dogma on the show before, so I’ll leave that dog unkicked – at least for now, anyway. What I want to share with is my simple solution to managing the book-based shenanigans: my daily stack. I’ll allow myself to read no more than 4 books at a time, split across 4 disciplines or areas of interest. Whatever else is in the long queue of TO READ books – well, that has to wait whilst I grind through the current “live” books in what I call my Daily Stack. My Daily  Stack is just what it sounds like: four current reading books which live on my private study desktop. Every morning – before the world can ask me to do it a favour or demand my attention – I sit down to write my self-programming journal, and then hit The Stack. The journal has been a part of my life for over twelve years – and I’ll dive into it next week, because it has changed my own life for the better and I believe it can help anyone. So that’s next week taken care of! Back to The Stack… The idea behind my Daily Stack is to gradually educate myself – ever such a little – every day, in areas I’m interested in, whatever it happens to be. For example, The Stack currently comprises: Philosophy - The Daily Stoic – Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman – a daily dip into Stoic Philosophy, taking quotes from Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Diogenes Laertius and others, then discussing the quote and the message behind it, one page a day. Nibble a Stoic, baby! Biography - Common Sense Rules – Deborah Meaden, from Dragon’s Den on the telly, giving me the benefit of her entrepreneurial journey and life experience. Business & Finance - No Money Down Property Investing – by my mate Kevin McDonnell – this is on its second go-around, because it’s always worth revisiting a book you found powerful the first time Health and Fitness - Freaky Big Naturally – by Wade McNutt & Matt Gallant – natural bodybuilding and training methods – because I want to stay strong and healthy without any drugs or medicines of any type – not even a paracetamol. That means I have to eat right and train properly, keep my mind on the game and follow the programme I’ve developed to help me.  Why four books? Because if I’m too deep in One Thing I tend to get bored – especially when I receive the same idea from multiple authors. I can also become too focused and narrow. Conversely, if I have ten or so books on the go I’m spread too thin and nothing seems to stick. I’m scattered and my attention is everywhere and nowhere, all at once. But four books seem to be a good number for me – and maybe for you too…  There’s enough to keep me interested, and not so much that I lose focus. I have a pages target to read each day (because I’m a geek who thrives on targets, not because I HAVE TO read so many pages).  – whatever the natural division of the book lends itself to.  The Daily Stoic is one page a day, because that’s the whole point of its 366 pages of Stoic philosophy. The other books are all read in chunks of 10 or so pages per day, or one chapter, one strategy Notations and marginalia are allowed and encouraged in all the books – because the books are tools. (Speaking as an author myself, I can tell you theres’ no joy in seeing one of my books in pristine condition, no: I want to see them dog-eared and tatty from use, pages marked-up and spines broken – any author wants that for their books) As each book in The Stack is completed it is replaced by another: it’s a strict one-in, one-out thing. The old book goes to shelf, the new one joins The Stack. So if I’ve ever been thought of as clever or bright in some way, that’s probably due to the books in my Stack… rather than any objective measure of my mental capacity! And – full disclosure - there is always another book in the loo – or, as I like to call it “The UnIversity of Armitage Shanks”… talk about a seat of learning! So, if you want to keep on growing, learning, expanding and increasing your knowledge and understanding of life, the universe and everything – you don’t need a “brain the size of a planet”, you just need to keep on filling up the leaky bucket of your mind with new and interesting “stuff”.  Start your own stack today, maybe with just one book, or two… then add more over time as you find your level. For me it’s just four books (tiny, pea-sized brain and all that) but a little every day… makes a world of difference over time. This works for me, but how do you manage your reading life? Get in touch and tell me how you do it – where, when, how much, and what are you reading at the moment? We're going to wrap it up there because I’m trying to keep this brief. If you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. Feel free to send any questions or feedback to [email protected]. Leave me a message on X where I am @TutorPodcast, and all being well, I'll see you in the next show. I hope this talk has been useful to you. Till next time, remember that you're always loved and you're never alone. Stay healthy, stay useful. Have a fabulous day.

Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 450 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine. My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to ave as much fun at work and in life as I do. Although I'm here to share, I'm also here to listen. If you have any ideas that you think might be of interest on the show, or any questions, then get in touch. It's [email protected] or you can find me on X, where I am @TutorPodcast. Maybe you can help me to learn something new, something different, something better maybe, and maybe I can help you and share what you learned. I don't have all the answers and nobody does. Maybe you got a some better answers that would be helpful to myself and to others. Again it's [email protected] or @TutorPodcast on X, formerly known as Twitter.  If you're good with all that, well okay, let's crack on with today – And we're following up from last episodes, 447 & 448- when we spoke about the fear of money and some ideas around it and 449 when I ranted about how I object to having what I’ve worked hard for taken away from me by corrupt governments…. Calm, calm…. So today let’s look at something less likely to spike my blood pressure – the old saying that “time is money”. When I first encountered this  Chestnut I think it was in the context of an old Donald Duck cartoon – maybe Scrooge McDuck said it… it sounded like just another greedy person trying to squeeze a worker into moving a little bit faster. Life moved on and puberty hit – then it got messy for a decade or two… Or three. I’d worked for years in everyday jobs – laboratories, sales, restaurants, casinos, then into finance and accounting… and it gradually dawned on me that Time IS Money when you are paid by the hour.  This probably means I was in the slow class, by the way. If you and I exchange our time for money, there is a direct correlation between time worked and money earned – and that is a problem. If we want to be paid more we can only work with two variables: Hours worked Amount received per hour worked As far as hours worked goes there’s a hard ceiling – we need some time for eating, self-care, recreation, learning and relationships… if those things fall by the wayside we’ll get sick and have to ease off our working hours to recover. It’s a balancing act. And – as for the amount we can be paid per hour – that’s not something we can predict. Sure we might set our rate super-high, but that probably isn’t going to appeal to a crowd of eager students or their parents… set our rates too low and we’ll struggle to make ends meet, however long we work. The ideal is to work as much as we want to (this is supposed to be fun, remember) and to be paid as much as our customers are happy to pay us. Regular rate reviews are a good thing to have on your calendar every year – even if you decide not to change anything, you have to think about how you’re doing in order to reach that decision.  The term for this simple exchange of time or other resource for a corresponding value is unleveraged – if you do this, you get that… a fair exchange, I suppose. But what nobody really talks about is Leverage: exchanging time or services for much greater returns than simple parity. You might leverage your time by writing a book, a song, or some other piece of intellectual property which can be created once and sold forever, generate royalties or (as a friend of mine did) sale of the film rights… My favourite example of this is Slades “merry Christmas Everybody” – a perennial fixture on all Christmas radio station playlists, commercials and TV. The writers - Noddy Holder and Jim Lea – earn an estimated 500K to 1 Million pounds each year from that one song alone! THAT is massive leverage! Another example might be to have someone to clean your house. Here’s how it works… Let’s say you earn £40 per hour. Good for you. If you clean your own home and it takes an hour that’s a £40 potential loss of earnings. Now suppose you can pay a cleaner £20 per hour to clean the house whilst you are earning… you are leveraging their time at a lower pay rate to help you make more money in your skilled work. And if your cleaning skills are anything like mine you'll end up with a cleaner house too. Win-win.   My other favourite form of leverage is investing. I like investing in properties which generate cashflow whilst (generally speaking) increasing their value, ultimately – if left long enough – buying themselves for me. If I can do this with other people’s money or creative strategies I can help other people get more leverage for themselves too – and that is pretty cool. The problem most of us hard-working tutor types has is that we are busy turning our time into money. One of my mentors nags me about this constantly – “Neil, you need to spend less time teaching and more time finding deals”. He says I’m working IN the business, when I should be working ON itHis argument is that teaching – especially my pefered one-to-one teaching – is unleveraged and unscaleable. He is correct, of course, but it’s also the most fun thing I get to do. Teaching is more fun than holidays, fancy meals and just about anything – so (in my own twisted little mind) it IS leveraged because I’m not only earning, but I’m saving money that I’d have to spend to buy fun. “I have more fun and make more money having fun” I tell him, but he shakes his head and mutters darkly under his breath… The secong big problem of trading time for money is what happens when you can no longer do the work – whether for health reasons or perhaps the work itself is taking away your will to live? What then? This is where your leveraged assets (IP, Property, products etc) really matter – because they can pay you forever, even if you’re not working with clients anymore…. So, listeners, where are the leverage points in your life and business?  I’m curious, because maybe I’m missing something here… so help me out. And when you do, I’ll be leveraging your brainpower… it’s euphemistically called crowdsourcing – and it’s how YouTube, TikTok, Air BnB and Uber operate: youtube and TikTok make no content, Air BnB operates no hotels, and Uber owns no taxis… they are platforms which leverage everyone else’s time and assets. It’s not an hours-per-pound deal: it is highly assymetrical – highly leveraged. Transitioning from time for money to money for not much of anything can be part of your business and life plans… When do you want to start? And remember that time is money, ok? We're going to wrap it up there because I’m trying to keep this brief. If you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. Feel free to send any questions or feedback to [email protected]. Leave me a message on X where I am @TutorPodcast, and all being well, I'll see you in the next show. I hope this talk has been useful to you. Till next time, remember that you're always loved and you're never alone. Stay healthy, stay useful. Have a fabulous day.

Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 449 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine. My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to ave as much fun at work and in life as I do. Although I'm here to share, I'm also here to listen. If you have any ideas that you think might be of interest on the show, or any questions, then get in touch. It's [email protected] or you can find me on X, where I am @TutorPodcast. Maybe you can help me to learn something new, something different, something better maybe, and maybe I can help you and share what you learned. I don't have all the answers and nobody does. Maybe you got a some better answers that would be helpful to myself and to others. Again it's [email protected] or @TutorPodcast on X, formerly known as Twitter.  If you're good with all that, well okay, let's crack on with today – And we're following up from last episodes, 447 & 448- when we spoke about the fear of money and some ideas around it. In episode 447 I promised to go through some fundamental ideas about money which have been helpful to me over the years. So today we’re going to look at one of the biggest evils ever to befall a people or nation: taxation. Upfront, I’ll confess to having a position on taxation – it’s very simple: taxation is theft. Governments have given themselves the ability (it is not a Right, it’s a power they gave themselves) to decide how much of oyur money, my money - everybody’s money – they are going to extract at gunpoint from us.  Gunpoint? Yes, because if we don’t give them their self-appointed slice of Our cake, they will take us to court, impose fines on us, seize our assets or put us in prison. Should we resist, then the penalties escalate still more… at the end of the road of resistance there is armed resistance to being arrested… and the police are the ones with the guns, It is a deeply offensive system to anyone who is prepared to do something for themselves, work hard and long in pursuit of their goals, only to have corrupt governments steal a huge part of what has been earned, Whatever you do in the UK or any other developed nation, tax is likely to be your biggest expense. More of your money goes to government in the vast array of taxes foisted upon us than almost anything else you could think of. You are first directly taxed when you earn: income tax and National Insurance.  Income tax is a fairly recent invention, before which, there was no need to steal from the people of the land. Governments balanced the books the best they could – borrowing from private individuals and banks like a real person had to… they didn’t appoint themselves powers to steal from the common man to clean up their mess. Like so many other vile impositions, this was introduced as a TEMPORARY MEASURE… in 1799, then withdrawn – only to be reimposed and withdrawn again, before becoming a permanent blight on the people in 1842 because - once a government figures out how to fleece the population and get free money to buy votes with… well, they ain’t rolling that back any time soon. At least Income Tax calls itself what it is – but what about the euphemistically-named National Insurance? Well, it’s another tax – whatever you’re told it is called. So you’re robbed twice before you ever see a penny of what you’ve earned. It is criminal. The slime of government don’t wait outside the staff entrance to rob you – no: they make your employer collect the taxes for them. This imposes costs on the employer, who has no choice but bear it – suppressing wages and reducing the profitability of the business. The business not only has to pay to administer the tax on YOU, but is also taxed for employing you: employers’ NI. No wonder employers resist hiring… It makes my blood boil… unaccountable idiots in Westminster presuming to preside over everyone else in the country, paying themselves and their cronies/special interest groups with your and my money. AND it only begins with your paycheck – because if you do pretty much anything in Britatin, you’re being taxed on it. Taxed over and over again. You and I are merely cows to be milked in the great tax-farm that is the system we were raised under So let’s look at the next set of taxes you’ll be forced to pay: Consumption Taxes Every time you spend your remaining take-home pay, you face indirect taxation: here’s a quick list and a breakdown: Value Added Tax (VAT): The standard rate is 20% on most goods and services. Here’s how the government steals a chunk of any uplift in value a business makes: a tax on profit before the business is taxed agin on its profits (corporation tax) Over a lifetime, a significant portion of your disposable income goes toward VAT on electronics, cars, household items, and standard services. Duties and Levies: Depending on your lifestyle, you pay heavy specialized taxes built into the price of specific items, such as  Fuel Duty (petrol/diesel) another weasel word, duty: it’s a tax! Vehicle Road Tax Alcohol & Tobacco Duties – that weasel word again: it’s a tax! Insurance Premium Tax. And if you start to do OK for yourself in any way, the taxman will be there to rob you a bit more with Wealth and Property Taxes As you move through milestones like buying a home or building basic savings, you trigger transactional or localized wealth taxes: Council Tax: A recurring annual tax paid to your local authority based on the property value band you live in. “ah, but that’s a local tax – nothing to do with us” say the Westminster robdogs… what a con: it’s smoke and mirrors, because Westminster gave councils the right to raise this tax: therefore, it’s on Westminster Stamp Duty Land Tax (SDLT): Paid when purchasing a home or land in the UK over a certain threshold. Want to buy a home? Hand over your money… If you want to buy a second property to rent out and help your retirement, good luck - the taxman will steal 5% EXTRA from you… Capital Gains Tax (CGT): If you happen to own and then sell non-exempt assets (like a second home or shares held outside of an ISA) that have grown in value, you face a tax on the profit. But here’s the thing: assets – real assets – rise in value over time, because the system engineers inflation into existence… so more tax is generated. There are taxes on gifts, too…  Whatever you want to do with your money, the political parasites will want a piece of the action. But it gets worse: even more cynical is the way tax-free thresholds don’t rise with inflation, so more and more transactions become taxable. This is called bracket creep, or fiscal drag: more euphemisms and weasel-words…. SO let’s say you’ve had a good life: worked hard, built something, made something happen for yourself and your family…. I have some bad news for you: this is where HMRC really do you over with End-of-Life Taxes Inheritance Tax (IHT): a totting-up tax when you pop off your perch. Vile, vile, vile. Any wealth you have accumulated beyond an imposed threshold at the time of death is taxed at 40%. FORTY percent!!! You can almost hear them say “Well done you - You’ve spent your whole life paying in to a rigged game and managed to hold on to something… well done you – now we’re going to take nearly half of that away, just because we can. Tough shit” My point is that if you don’t take every step you can to limit your exposure to tax, your chances of ever making – much less holding on to – money is pretty slim. You MUST order your affairs in such a way as to minimise the amount of tax payable: that is what the law says is your right. You’re not dodging tax, you’re learning how the rules work and structuring your affairs so that you can prevent yourself being robbed. Evading tax is a criminal offence (the threat of fines and prison I mentioned at the start), but tax planning and minimisation is completely legitimate. If you’re not looking at this, you’re a moron. This is why being in business and investing aggressively is the best way to build wealth. On an average wage you can’t do it because you’re fleeced at every step. The average person in the UK is robbed of around 40% of everything they earn: direct taxes income tax and NI, then consumption tax VAT, excise duty/tax… the list goes on, capital gains tax, and then finally inheritance tax. Ever get the feeling that the game is rigged against you? That’s because it is. Ignorance is no defence: but understanding the game and its rules is. Learn the rules to play the game better is common sense… Ever wonder why you aren’t taught money at school? Now you know why: if you understand money you will be harder for Hmrc to rob. The ugly truth is this: all the government wants from you is to pay up every week or month and then die, obediently submitting to being milked at every step. Get educated about tax – get educated about money – and keep more of what you make.  We're going to wrap it up there because I’m trying to keep this brief. If you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. Feel free to send any questions or feedback to [email protected]. Leave me a message on X where I am @TutorPodcast, and all being well, I'll see you in the next show. I hope this talk has been useful to you. Till next time, remember that you're always loved and you're never alone. Stay healthy, stay useful. Have a fabulous day.

Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 448 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine. My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to ave as much fun at work and in life as I do. I don't have all the answers and nobody does. Maybe you got a some better answers that would be helpful to myself and to others. Again it's [email protected] or @TutorPodcast on X, formerly known as Twitter.  If you're good with all that, well okay, let's crack on with today – And we're following up from last episode, 447 - when we spoke about the fear of money and some ideas around it. In episode 447 I promised to go through some fundamental ideas about money which have been helpful to me over the years. So Let's have a look at one of the fundamental ideas in business and personal finance that people are terrified of: credit. Many of us, myself included, grew up in environments and families and social groups where credit was seen as a bad thing, where you were encouraged never to be a borrower. If that sounds familiar to you, you're not alone. Not taking on a bunch of expensive debt is often a good thing but sometimes it can be a missed opportunity. Fundamentally we all need to understand the difference between good debt and bad debt because they are very different animals. Let's take a look at bad debt first because that's the one that we were really being warned against I think. Bad debt is the loan or advance of cash that you take in order to buy something that has no greater return than the value of the debt you took out. This might be something as daft as borrowing a ton of money to go on a holiday, or for designer clothing, or an expensive car, because you think it gives you some kind of social status. The problem is that the initial cost of the item is just the beginning. When we buy things on long credit we have to pay additional charges to the person or organisation that loaned us the money.  That's pretty bad in itself, come on, but a lot of times we'll buy items which depreciate in value. At the same time we're paying extra just to own that depreciating asset. Just suppose you go and spend a couple of thousand pounds on a bunch of new clothes for yourself. Maybe they've got the right labels on and are all the rage. By the way, the instant you put them in the bag and take them out of the shop, they're worth very little because they're now secondhand. The same thing applies if you buy a new car. The instant you put the key in and drive it off the forecourt, the value of that vehicle falls significantly. You will feel good for the first week or two whilst you have a brand-new car but that brand-new car is now only worth a percentage of the sticker price on the forecourt. If you bought at that sticker price on credit, the amount you owe for that now-depreciated vehicle is much higher than the sticker price.  Congratulations. In the time it took you to put the key into the car and drive it off the forecourt, you may have lost as much as 20% of the sticker price! Certain electric vehicles seem to be particularly prone to even higher rates of depreciation – there are some horror stories out there - but the average annual rate of depreciation for a typical electric car runs at about 20%, which is a few percent higher than that for an internal combustion engine vehicle. Do you opt for an electric, petrol, or diesel car? The new car carries a premium cost and if you're buying it on credit, that premium cost is even greater than the burden of depreciation, Because you're going to be paying it off for the next few years, And the cost of that time is paid for in money. The same story applies if you're using your credit cards or a personal loan to buy Depreciating or wasting assets. If you must buy such things and you can do it legitimately, buy it through the business. For me an example of a wasting asset is a guitar, but that's a tool for the teaching business, isn't it? To put it in a nutshell, bad debt is debt that costs you more than the value of the thing the debt is paying for. That's the dark side of debt. We'd better have a look at the bright side now. This is the concept of good debt, which I needed to have explained to me a long time ago by my then boss, Mark, who is an absolute business genius. Good debt is money that costs less to borrow than the value of something it buys. Simple but I never really thought of it that way. I was still saddled with the idea that all debt was bad and I should avoid it at all costs. Let's say that you have a fantastic opportunity to acquire business premises for what you do. The impact on the business is all positive. You can teach more in that environment because it's not working out of home. When you're not working in there you can rent the room by the hour to other teachers and tutors. The problem is you don't have the money to acquire those premises so you will have to borrow the money. Borrowing the money for those premises can be very good, because if the premises generate more money than the cost of taking out the loan, you’re quids-in. By taking out the loan you acquire an asset which pays for itself and gives you a profit on top. This is a good example of how good credit works. In my property businesses: I use borrowed money where I can to fund deposits, then I leverage that borrowed money again using mortgages For the balance of the purchase cost.  If I am creative enough. I  can acquire properties with little or none of my own money. Provided the rental property produces more revenue than I need to service those debt obligations I'm making money out of thin air. These days I'm not afraid of using credit - Provided it is good credit and not the bad kind. It's very, very important to understand the difference between those two things. One will make you wealthy. One will eat you alive. Here's a quick tip about credit in general. It is called the Rule of 72 and it's a quick and dirty way of calculating how fast your money will double or halve in value (depending on whether you're making money by or paying interest to a lender). All you have to do is divide the number 72 by whatever interest rate you're earning or paying. This will give you a good approximation of the number of years it will take to either double your investment principal or halve the value of a depreciating asset. Let’s say you have an investment which returns 5% per year. Divide 72 by 5 and you come out with a number just over 14. That means it will take just over 14 years to double your initial investment. If you could make it 7%, it’ll take around 10 years to double your initial investment, and so on. Likewise, if that new car depreciates at 20% per year it will be worthless in around three and a half years – at least on paper. In practice there is always a floor: the scrap value of the metal itself. That’s the big difference between good and bad credit. The financial difference is more profound, because it is a spread: the difference between the value of an appreciating asset (say, a property) which makes you money and a depreciating asset (say, a car). The good credit funded positive asset might make you 10K per year, the depreciating car, watch, iPhone or gadget might be costing you thousands of pounds per year as its value falls – lets say the car depreciates 1oK this year. The 10K positive and the 10K negative are a combined spread of 20K: both outcomes are built on credit: which one would you like?  We're going to wrap it up there because I've got things to do, people to see, and I know you do too. So I'm always trying to keep this brief. If you enjoyed the show, please like or subscribe. Feel free to send any questions or feedback to [email protected]. Leave me a message on X where I am @TutorPodcast, and all being well, I'll see you in the next show. I hope this has been useful to you. Till next time, stay healthy, stay useful. Remember that you're always loved and you're never alone. Have a fabulous day.

Hi, it's Neil Cowmeadow here with episode 447 of the Tutor Podcast, the Monday morning shot of over-caffeinated uncommon sense for anyone who wants to start, grow, and love their own tutoring and coaching business the same way as mine. My aim is to bring you the ideas that have helped me in my business journey and life, as a teacher, property investor, mentor, and parent (even in a no-nonsense no-BS kind of way), in the hope that it helps you to ave as much fun at work and in life as I do. Although I'm here to share, I'm also here to listen. If you have any ideas that you think might be of interest on the show, or any questions, then get in touch. It's [email protected] or you can find me on X, where I am @TutorPodcast. Maybe you can help me to learn something new, something different, something better maybe, and maybe I can help you and share what you learned. If you're good with all that, well okay, let's crack on with today – and we need to talk about money: Talk about the fear of money. This is based on a conversation I had with one of the listeners. He is an extremely smart wonderful person but he's afraid of money. So my excellent friend and all my excellent friends who listen in, this one's for you. I did a little bit of grubbing around to try to investigate fear of money and it turns out there are three principal ones:  Chrometaphobia, which is an extreme fear of spending money. This makes misers out of successful people. If you fear to spend money and use money as a tool, the tool controls you. Peniaphobia, which is a persistent irrational fear of poverty. A long time ago this would have been a completely rational fear since there was no safety net of state benefits for anyone. A hundred or so years ago, back in the day, society and your community would probably look after you so you didn't die of malnutrition or exposure. These days you have to work quite hard to be in absolute abject poverty. Plutophobia, which is an intense fear of wealth or success. This is possibly the most bizarre of these fears. If you have plutophobia, the intense fear of wealth or success, ask yourself: How is that ever going to help you to do well in life? You would have to be mental to believe that, wouldn't you? Who knew?  I didn't even know there was such a thing as a fear of money but I've met lots of people who have peculiar relationships with money: from the tightwad who never wants to put his hand in his pocket to the guy who seems to make his money disappear as soon as it lands in his bank account, and all points in between. From people who save incredibly hard and spend nothing to people who spend everything and save nothing - We all know people like this, don't we? How you got the fear is something you can't really go back and do anything about. The chances are it will have come from parents, teachers, peers, or some experience along the way that fundamentally shifted your relationship with money. What I'm more interested in is developing a healthy and positive relationship with money, finance, and making things work better for yourself. First of all I think it's vitally important to understand that money is really just the counters in a game called life. It's completely made up. Money is a fiction that makes society run more smoothly than if we all had to carry around a pig under our arms to barter with. I think we all need to get over the idea that there's some inherent value in a particular piece of paper or plastic and that the numbers on the screen of your bank app mean absolutely jack shit. That's why banks can create money out of thin air on a bank screen and lend it to you, thus exerting vast amounts of power over you and your behavior whilst extracting additional value (interest on the loan) from you on something that they conjured out of thin air. That is fucking magic. I'm not here to tell you if that's right or wrong. What I am here to tell you to do is acknowledge the fact that it's just a game and you're playing the game. Stepping back from understanding the rules of the game will not make you a better player. It will make you a bigger loser. It's vitally important, and this is my big point for today, to realize that money isn't good and it isn't bad. It is, at its heart, completely neutral. What makes it good or bad is how you or I choose to use it. Like any tool, a knife can be used to kill or to perform life-saving surgery, to murder or to prepare dinner for your loved ones. The knife itself is morally neutral and so is money. I love the idea that money is an amplifier. It will allow you to do more of what you already do. If you're a charitable giver you'll probably give more if you have more money. If you're a dick you'll probably do bigger-scale dick things if you have more money to finance your dickery. This is the reason so many people who win lotteries or, back in the day, the football pools, would often go broke very quickly.  Money doesn't do anything other than reveal who you really are.  Speaking very personally I've been able to do a lot more good as I've done more in business and property. I've been able to help more people because I've had more money to do it with - Just like owning better tools and more tools has allowed me to do more interesting jobs. The money is just a store of value that can be deployed, or spent, or invested as you please. It is convenient and reduces friction in society, that's its job and it's very good at it. What money isn't is the end point. If money is the end point of everything you do, you have a serious problem. There is always more money. You can't have it all so you'll always be chasing something that cannot possibly be achieved. Frankly if you were to acquire all the money in Britain, for example, you'd find that the government would simply print a whole lot more. That new print of money would cause the buying power of the money you already had to fall in value. This is inflation and it's built into the system. In a real money system there would be no inflation and the currency would be stable. However governments successively have inflation targets, which function just like another stealth tax on your overtaxed earnings. So - If you're afraid of spending your cash or investing your cash - just remember that you should be more afraid of leaving it in the bank earning very low returns (because its buying power is being systematically eroded by inflation, completely by design). And as far as your phobias go, start exposing yourself to the things you're afraid of. Initially this will be uncomfortable but that discomfort will diminish over time given exposure. Growing up in my family, we didn't really talk about money, so My brothers and I left school and went into the world of work with very little understanding of money. Pretty much no idea of saving, and it took years and years to get past that and to think in terms of saving, investment, then later into business and entrepreneurship. I've always tried to teach Alex, my son, how money works and he's starting to get it.  Money is not difficult but the rules are hidden in order to keep you poor and compliant. What I want you to think about today is breaking away from your servitude to money and the slavery of debt and taking control of your money so it works for you instead of for the banks and the government.  This is your wake-up call. The future starts now and it's looking bright.