Nischa Shah: They’re Lying To You About Buying a House (Transcript)

I was looking at some stats earlier on that said the vast majority of people just have this sort of avoidant relationship with their financial situation, financial literacy, with their bills, with their bank statements. I mean, there’s like long standing jokes from the Internet that people just don’t open their banking apps. They just don’t look at it.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, yeah. There’s even a terminology for this and it’s called the ostrich effect. And it’s a cognitive bias that explains people will avoid looking at negative financial information because of the fear of how it makes them feel.

It’s the same reason why we don’t check our bank account after a night out or we don’t open. There’s a pile of bills on our table and we don’t check them. But it’s that thing, avoiding it, thinking that, oh, it’s just going to disappear if I don’t look at it. It’s that thing that keeps you stuck. It’s that thing that makes you realize, oh, I don’t even know which direction I’m going. It’s disorganized finances.

Step One: Build a Peace of Mind Fund

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if someone’s listening to this right now and they resonate with this idea of this slightly avoidant, they don’t really have a plan. They’re kind of just, they get paid, they answer their bills and then they wait till the next payday. They’re not being intentional with their money. Is there a step one in taking back control?

NISCHA SHAH: The very first thing, number one that I’ll say to do is build a peace of mind fund.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A peace of mind fund.

NISCHA SHAH: This is not about maths. It’s not the mathematically optimal thing to do, but it is the psychological. Because as we’ve discussed, money is as much about emotions as it is about numbers.

So what I’ll say is go through the last 30 days of your bank statements and calculate exactly how much it costs for one month of your living. So mortgage, rent, utilities, bills, minimum debt payments, car payments, whatever that total is, that’s the amount that you want to save up for your peace of mind fund.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay? So I go through my last 30 days of my bills, I find out that it’s cost me, let’s say, $1,000.

NISCHA SHAH: Okay. That’s one month of your core living expenses.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, so I need to save $1,000.

NISCHA SHAH: You don’t need to invest it, you don’t need to save it. You don’t need to. It’s not for a holiday. The reason why you want to save this is because when life does what it does best, which is throw curveballs, you want to make sure that you have it handled.

If a boiler breaks, your car dies on a Monday morning. The last thing you want on top of the stress of dealing with that thing is the financial stress of how you’re going to pay for it. That’s what this thing covers. It tells you I’ve got peace of mind. Whatever life throws at me, I can handle it.

And saving that one month of living costs puts you ahead of 59% of Americans and 30% of people living in the UK. 59% of Americans unfortunately can’t pay for a $1,000 expense and 30% of people in the UK can’t cover one month of their living expenses if something happened.

Step Two: Cut the Financial Bleeding

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is step two in that regard?

NISCHA SHAH: Step two, this is where we do move into the mathematical optimal thing. This is you cut the financial bleeding.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay?

NISCHA SHAH: And what I mean by that is I get so many times people ask me, Nischa, I have 4,000, 5,000 sitting in my bank account, what should I do with it? And my first question back to them is, do you have any high interest rate debt?

Because if you have savings of $2,000 earning 4%, but you also have credit card debt at 20%, you’re leaking money more than you’re making it. It’s like pouring water into a bucket with holes in it and wondering why it’s not going to fill up.

So what you want to do is you want to take all of your debt that you have, rank it from highest to lowest in terms of interest rate, and then everything above 8%, you want to make minimum payments across everything first and everything above 8%, you want to throw your extra savings into the highest interest rate, first to the debt with the highest interest rate, and then move down in that order.

STEVEN BARTLETT: An interest rate, is that paid monthly or yearly?

NISCHA SHAH: It’s paid monthly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Paid monthly. So if I have a thousand pound loan on a credit card and the interest rate is 10%. I’m paying 100 paid monthly.

NISCHA SHAH: Over the year, they’re going to pay 100, but that’s split out into monthly payments, assuming that they’re not drawing down more on that credit card.

The Right Way to Use Credit Cards

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are you against credit cards?

NISCHA SHAH: Credit cards are good if you’re using them the right way, really good if you’re using them in the right way. And that means the points that you’re using, the rewards that you get for it, the bonuses that you get from it, all really helpful only if you’re paying them off in full every single month.

If you’re not using that or if you’re not doing it in that way, which is kind of what they want you to do because they want you to miss these payments because that’s how credit card companies make money, by your missed payments. If you’re not doing that, then the benefits just don’t weigh up. It doesn’t make sense.

Use credit cards, but use it in a way that stacks up in your favor, not in the credit card company’s favor.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s almost paradoxical that you’d use a credit card, but only if you can afford to use a credit card.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, that’s exactly. Yeah, you got to think about it. Can I pay for this thing outright in cash? If I can, then I can ship it on my credit card. And that’s normally if you’re using it to make money, health care, education, but for anything else, unless it’s making you money. Yeah, that’s the way you want to think about it because it does encourage extra spending otherwise.

Step Three: Build Your Emergency Buffer

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so I’m going to pay off my high interest debts first with any spare cash that I have yet. What’s number three?

NISCHA SHAH: Number three is build your emergency buffer. Okay, so this is your core living expenses that we’ve already calculated in step one. And you want to times that by three if you are single, you have predictable income or you want to times it by six if you are head of household, you have a mortgage, you have unpredictable income.

That’s your emergency cushion and it protects you from the bigger life things. It’s the third thing you want to do. It’s protect you if you lose your job, if you have a health scare, if there are dependents that you need to care for. This kind of buys you that time.

But there’s really interesting research from Vanguard that actually showed saving three to six months of your living expenses does more for your emotional well being than earning over 200k.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So just the peace of mind again.

NISCHA SHAH: It’s that breathing room. Yeah. Three to six months of breathing room in your bank account, it just moves the needle. It’s the peace of mind, it’s a security, it’s a stability, one of the core human needs.

And it’s interesting because we’re kind of looking at making more money and earning more and we’re chasing the next number. And actually the thing that’s going to have the biggest impact or move the needle on our financial well being is at this stage having that three to six months of living expenses saved up.

The Stress of Financial Insecurity

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s all relative right at the end of the day. And it’s incredibly stressful. And I’ve been there when you don’t know if you can pay this month’s rent, if you don’t know if you can feed yourself, but also the sort of back of the mind knowledge that if something were to happen, you’d be screwed. It’s an incredibly stressful way to live. And you might not even realize the stress consciously, but you might just feel it. It might just be an angst in your life.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. And this applies at any income level. Even people earning six figures who are living paycheck to paycheck, who don’t have that emergency buffer in place, they have that anxiety. And also that same report showed that having that three to six months with the people that they surveyed, their productivity at work was better just from knowing that they didn’t have that financial stress.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I know millionaires, people that have a lot of money, that are in a similar position in the sense of they are stressed and anxious because their overheads are also in the millions every month and there’s a lot of money coming in, but there’s a lot of money going out. So they’re still sometimes just one or two months away from being at zero. It’s a different type of stress because their sort of subjective experience and lifestyle is better on a day to day. But it’s interesting that it’s really relative to your outgoing.

NISCHA SHAH: Exactly.

Step Four: When to Stop Saving and Start Investing

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the fourth point then? So I’ve got, so far I’ve got have a peace of mind fund which is one month’s expenses. Number two is pay off high interest rate debt. Number three is build an emergency fund which is three times your monthly expenses if you’re single and six times if you’re in a relationship. And there’s people depending on you.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, most people actually stay here. A lot of people just save, save, save, save, save. And I just want to before we move on to step four. I want to say that if you’re saving, you only want to save for one of two things, the emergency fund and the peace of mind fund that we spoke about. And the second thing is for any goals that you have at the next five years, whether that’s a house deposit, car deposit, other than that, you don’t want to be saving that money. The value is going to be eaten away quicker with inflation if you’re just keeping it saved in a bank account. So that’s when you want to move on to step four, and that is investing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so you don’t want to save, you don’t want to over save.

NISCHA SHAH: You don’t want to over save. Know when to stop saving and start investing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when does one start investing and stop saving?

NISCHA SHAH: After they saved a three to six months of the living expenses. That’s the third step. At that point, once they’ve done step one, two, three. This is the point. And the reason why I say this, Steven, is because if you start investing before you’ve got from steps one to three and you don’t have your savings set aside and the market goes down and you have an emergency, you’re going to have to pull that money out at a loss.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

NISCHA SHAH: Or you’re going to have to go into debt. Which is why that was step two. Cut the financial bleeding. So it’s really important to have steps 1, 2, 3, 4 done before you even think about investing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

NISCHA SHAH: Those three to six months, it’s your core living expenses. So it’s forget all your spending on the things that you love or the things that make life good. It’s just lots of things that you need to absolutely survive. Because if you do lose your job, you’re not going to be out partying and spending loads of money. You’re going to think, okay, how do I pay my bills for the next three months? How do I survive for the next month? That’s the thing that’s going to cover that off.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

NISCHA SHAH: Right, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s not like the season ticket at Manchester United or the Louis Vuitton jackets.

NISCHA SHAH: No, no.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s just you’re heating your bills, your food. Survival.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

Why You Can’t Save Your Way to Retirement

STEVEN BARTLETT: So number four is investing.

NISCHA SHAH: Number four is investing. For a while. We’ve heard of the phrase save for retirement.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

NISCHA SHAH: Saving for retirement. You cannot save your way to retirement. Well, the way cost of living is going to, with the way inflation is going with the price retirement is going to cost. By the time you get there, saving is just not enough. You have to be investing your money. And there are two main ways that you can invest. But before I even say that, most people know that they should be investing but they don’t do it. They say, I’ll do it tomorrow or next week or next year or when I’m rich. And then by the time they do start, they missed out on the most powerful lever that they had going for them, which is time. That is one of the most important things when it comes to investing because of the way when you start investing with small recurring amounts, it just compounds over time. So early. Often when it comes to investing, there’s two avenues to invest through. The first is through your employer sponsored retirement account and the second is through your own individual tax advantaged account.

Two Ways to Invest: Employer-Sponsored Plans

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are those two things?

NISCHA SHAH: The first is done through your employer. So what they do is they invest on behalf of you. In the UK, you’re automatically enrolled into it. In the US, you’ll have to check with your HR and get yourself enrolled into it. And what this does is your company before it pays you or puts money into your bank account, it takes a small percentage, you could decide how much and it puts it towards investments for you on behalf of you pre tax. So you’re not paying tax on that amount, you’re putting into an investment account and then that money is compounding for you pre tax.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do all employers do this?

NISCHA SHAH: Most employers do it, not all employers do it. And some employers have a match, which means if you put some money in, they will also match that amount that you’re putting in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how do I know if my employer does this?

NISCHA SHAH: Check with your HR.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is there a cap?

NISCHA SHAH: There is a cap to how much they will match. So say if they match up to 3%, then you want to put in the 3%, but then you could keep going. But at this stage you don’t even need to go over the match at this point of the steps. You just want to put in enough to meet that match because you’re getting the tax benefit and then you’re also getting free money from your sponsored plan on top of that. You don’t leave that on the table.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when can I pull that money out?

NISCHA SHAH: When you retire at retirement. So this is for your retirement. You’re looking after your future self. It’s today’s you planting seeds for future you. That’s what this is about.

The Trade-offs Between Living Now vs. Investing for Later

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about people that say, listen, retirement’s a long way away. Yeah, you know, I’m going to be what, 65 75. It’s just a long way away. I want to live a good, I want to live it up now. Sure. I don’t want to be putting money in a box I can’t open for 50 years.

NISCHA SHAH: And you want to spend the money now to live a good life? Yeah, I. The most important thing when it comes to money is understanding what you want and then making sure your money backs those decisions. And I say this because when I was in the graduate scheme there were two very different people who worked in my team. And the first person who sat opposite me on the bank of seats in front of me, he used to come in in his Ferrari and he, on Monday morning when we’re talking about what we did over our weekend, what we did on the weekend, he would talk about the Michelin star restaurants, he tried, the last minute trip to Italy and his computer screen was the next car that he wanted to. And on my left was Phil, who later became my mentor. And he came in with his packed lunch. He wore the same shirt tie combo that I could probably remember and sketch it from memory. And he had his holidays, he had his vacations but he was a lot more selective about them.

And I didn’t see it at the time, but now it’s so clear to me that they were chasing very different things. The person opposite me, he was chasing this good life, the stories, the status, the memories. And that was important to him and he went for it. But Phil and I visited him just before I came to LA. Him, his wife, his two kids, dogs in their countryside home. And he was enjoying the retired life, he was loving life, he bought what he wanted, which was early retirement. Freedom, time, choice. Neither path is wrong, but both paths, both people required taking a series of trade offs, both had to make some sacrifices. And I think that’s the thing that people miss sometimes. It’s so easy to say yes to the thing right in front of you because the benefit is there, the benefit is immediate. You don’t realize what you’re going to miss out on later on in life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So the guy that was sat opposite you with the Ferrari, what was the trade offs he was making?

NISCHA SHAH: He was probably going to be end up working for the until he had retirement money to spend. He was going to spend his life at banking, but he was going to live it big. But he wouldn’t have the freedom, the choice, the time because his spending and his income matched each other. And so what I wanted to say is for anyone saying, oh, I just want to live it big, I want to enjoy the money. Find out what is the thing that’s most important to you and make sure you, your money choices stack that decision. Because the wrong choice isn’t choosing the wrong path. It’s just not knowing that you even had a choice in this whole thing.

The Psychology Behind Financial Choices

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think the guy that sat opposite you with the Ferrari was in any way insecure? Was there an element of seeking validation?

NISCHA SHAH: There might have been, yeah, there might have been. That’s, that might have been what made him happy. But I think it’s also not having the self awareness to. If that made him happy, then by all means, but if it didn’t make him happy, and a lot of people do that, do this, me included. I’ve gone through this, I’ve done it. When you don’t know what makes you happy, you end up just doing things that gets you that external validation. And for some people it might mean, okay, you know what? I actually do enjoy this new car. It does bring me happiness. But for others it might just be a facade. And later on they, later on in life they just realize that actually no one really cared. The only person who cared was me. And although I did it for other people, it’s now I realize that all the trade offs I had to make.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As a result of it because happiness and external validation, they’re like cousins, but they’re not the same guy. Do you know what I mean? They’re like, they look, they’re kind of like of the same family, but one of them’s the like dysfunctional sibling. But they kind of look the same. You know, when you look at that guy in his Ferrari, you go, oh, I must be happy. And he comes in and he’s probably got a smile on his face because he’s talking about his Ferrari.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s what he’s built himself on, I guess.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I don’t know if that’s happiness. You know, the guy without the Ferrari.

NISCHA SHAH: Might be, I think universally most people, what they want is the freedom and the choice and the time. I think more people are after that and that can make more people happier than any status symbol. Because when you do end up going down the route of buying something to make your make you happy, you’re on a hedonic treadmill. But then buying the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and you get those spikes of happiness. There never is really long lasting, fulfilling happiness.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So investing strategy number one is asking your employer about their investment scheme, finding.

NISCHA SHAH: Out if your employer has, yeah, A retirement plan and making sure. That you’re invested into it enough to cover the match that they offer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s strategy number two?

Tax-Advantaged Investment Accounts

NISCHA SHAH: The strategy number two is your own individual tax advantaged investment account. This is the ISA in the UK and this is where you put your own money after tax into an investment account and then the money grows over time, tax free. So when you pull it out at the end you could. With the UK you could pull out in five years and 10 years or in retirement, then you could withdraw that money tax free.

So both of them have tax advantages. One is when you put the money in, you’re getting the tax advantages, the other one’s when you draw the money out, but they both have tax advantages. And so you’re putting the money in and it’s growing tax free. That’s really a big deal. That’s huge. That’s money that’s compounding for you and you’re not paying tax on that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But there’s a limit.

NISCHA SHAH: There’s a limit. Annually it’s 20,000. But in the UK it changes year on year. At the moment I believe at $7,000. But with a quick Google search you can stay on top of whatever the current limit is for the account or the tax advantage account that you’re investing in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I get paid, I put it into my. In the UK it’s called an ISA and the limit is 20k. So if I put 20k in, let’s say if it goes to 100k because the investments go really well. Is the whole 100k tax free?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. You’re not paying capital gains tax, you’re not paying interest. I mean dividends tax.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So pretty much that’s the first place everyone should really be investing if they want an alternative to investing in their pension.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. That’s the first thing you want to cap out because of the tax benefits that come with it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it called a Roth IRA in the US?

NISCHA SHAH: That’s right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It says max contribution is 7,000 to $8,000 a year if you’re 50 or older.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. The specific amounts depending on who you are, where you are. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Standard employee contribution limit of $23,000. Interesting.

NISCHA SHAH: Whereas in UK is just a flat 20,000 is the current.

Choosing Your Investments

STEVEN BARTLETT: And with my ISA, this tax free ISA that everyone is eligible to invest in, do I then have to pick the things it invests in?

NISCHA SHAH: Yes. Okay, this is the next. Oh, we could talk about this now, actually. Yeah. So when you are deciding what to invest in, this is with the employer sponsored account. The employer sponsored retirement account, you actually just choose what risk profile you have and it will do that investing for you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’ll say I feel really risky or I’m not very risky at all and it does it for you.

NISCHA SHAH: It does, it will invest on behalf of you. So most people don’t even realise that they’re investing, but they are investing through their company. If they have that employer sponsored plan then the individual account is you doing the investing yourself. You’re picking what to invest in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what shall I invest in?

NISCHA SHAH: My principle with investing is very, very simple and it’s just keep it simple and do it for the long term. So I say index funds and target date retirement funds is what you want to invest in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

NISCHA SHAH: An index fund is put out an index. Think of it as a list of companies. So The S&P 500 is a list of the largest, the top 500 companies. To keep this really simple, FTSE 100 is the top 100 companies on the London Stock Exchange. The fund is a pot of money that invests in the companies on that list. So by investing in an S&P 500, you’ve invested in a small piece of the top 500 companies in the US. That’s what an index fund is. And so even if one company goes down, you’re diversified and so there’ll be another company that will and the other companies will bring it back up again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what kind of performance can I expect from investing in the S&P 500?

NISCHA SHAH: Historically speaking, the long term average has been 8 to 10% per year depending on the years and the timeframe that you’re looking at. That is different to a one year holding period. It could go up, it could go down, you just don’t know. So the longer you invest for the chances of you getting that 8 to 10% on average increase.

When to Focus on Income vs. Investing

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is 8 to 10% going to make me rich?

NISCHA SHAH: How long are you doing it for?

STEVEN BARTLETT: You tell me if you have a.

NISCHA SHAH: Lump sum amount that you’re saying, okay, you know what, I have 2,000 that I want to invest, what should I do with it? I’m just taking me five years to invest this. I would say 1,900 of that. Don’t invest it. 100 of it. Invest. I’ll say why I’m saying this, A hundred. I want you to invest it. For anyone listening, I want you to listen. I want you to invest that because I want you to see and feel the emotions when you see your money go up over time. Sure it’s going to be small, it’s not going to make you rich investing that, but you’re going to instill that good habit early on and you’re going to remember that because the remaining amount, you’re going to put that towards increasing your income. That’s the first thing you’re going to do.

Think of your income as a river and your specific milestones, life milestones, as buckets across the river. So you have retirement, you have your house deposit, you have your car payment that you’re all saving up for. Those buckets will fill up faster the quicker and wider that river is. That is your income that’s coming through. If you don’t have much of an income coming through, those buckets going to take ages to fill up. That’s why I say if it’s taken you a long time to save that amount, I actually would recommend you putting that money towards increasing your income first before investing it.

If, however, you have disposable income, you have a reoccurring amount that you can invest monthly, use that to your advantage. Harness the power of long term compounding growth, because that is the thing that is going to make you rich. Sure it will take 25, 30 years, but that is leverage that you don’t get through your day job. It’s your money working for you without you having to be there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you would suggest, if you’re really at that early level, to focus on increasing your income. Investing in increasing your income.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, that’s the first thing if you’re figuring out, okay, I need to increase my income. It’s taken me a while to earn this amount and I only have a lump sum of 2000, 5000. Focus on increasing your income. Yeah, that’s what I would say.

How to Increase Your Income

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does one focus on increasing their income?

NISCHA SHAH: There are a couple of ways to do this. So the easiest way to increase your income is asking for a pay rise, increasing your responsibility, the work that you do, your contributions, and saying to your boss or your manager, this is the value that I bought. This is the responsibility that I’ve taken on. This is what the market is paying for a similar role. And this is why a pay rise is fair. The other option, did you ever ask for a pay rise multiple times? Multiple.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Multiple times when you’re in investment banking?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, it’s one of those things where if you don’t ask, you don’t get. Of course you’ll get. But you sitting there and thinking the hard work is going to show without you asking for it, it’s unlikely you’re going to have to build a case and say, okay, these are the things I’ve done. This is the things that we said we were going to do or I wanted to work on in my performance review, which is what I had go to the end of the performance review. And these are the things that I actually did. And this is where I went above and beyond.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So if I’m your boss, Nischa.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If we just replay one of those conversations you had.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You were sat in a performance review and what did you say to me?

NISCHA SHAH: I would say, hey, Steven.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Hey.

NISCHA SHAH: Three months ago or six months ago, we spoke about the things that I needed to do to get promoted or to get a pay rise. And we mentioned xyz. And I’ve done all of those things here. And here is the feedback that I’ve got. Here is where I’ve gone above and beyond. And this is some extra things that other people. The 360 feedback that I’ve done. And this is what it says. Yeah. And that’s when I’ll say, do you think that this is the bracket that we discussed? Do you think that’s fair?

Gender Pay Gap and Negotiation Strategies

STEVEN BARTLETT: Research shows that women are much less likely to ask for a pay rise and when they do, they are less likely to get one compared to men. Is that kind of what you found?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, I’ve seen those facts and I think it’s really such a shame that when a woman asks for a pay rise, it may not be seen in the same way as when a male counterpart asks for the pay rise. And the fact is that we can control are the being prepared, having the book of all the things that you’ve done. But I recommend, and this is things that I’ve done when I was in an organization or when I felt even I was being paid less than my male counterpart is speaking.

Firstly, if there’s a HR team in your department speaking to them and asking, am I online or am I aligned to the average for my department and for what my role is, they can give you a really good guideline as to what whether you are underpaid or whether you deserve a bump to be more aligned to the general pay in that role.

And the second thing is have an ally or have someone in your workplace that you’d always speak to, whether it’s a mentor, whether it’s a colleague. And it’s worth always speaking to other people about money. It’s such a taboo topic. We hate it. We hate talking to someone else about their salary, what they’re making. But the more financial transparency that we encourage, the more we can learn from each other. Openly ask the person next to you, hey, this is what you get paid. As hard as that is, open up that conversation.

But the other way to increase your income is actually through switching jobs, switching companies. Because there’s so much research that’s been done, and the most popular one is actually one cited by Forbes that says people who stay at the same company for two years or more on average earn 50% less over their lifetime. And I’ve made a video on my salary year by year over the last, over the nine years I spent in banking. And the biggest pay jumps that I saw were from switching companies. So those are the two ways that I would actually say, yeah, increase your income by asking for more or by switching.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I do think one of the most effective ways that I’ve seen as well is just looking at the industry as well and presenting a case from the industry. And people have done that to me several times. They’ve, over the last 10 years, they’ve come to me and said, the industry paid for my role and my seniority level in this part of the world, in this city, is this, I’m currently on, this is, can we have a conversation about this to rectify it?

And I can’t think of an instance where I haven’t been receptive to that, especially if it’s justified, you know, because actually sometimes the employer doesn’t know. The employer doesn’t know that they might be underpaying you. That’s a genuine possibility. I know that sounds crazy, but sometimes employees don’t know because a lot of roles that we’re hiring for these days are new roles. They’re not roles that existed 10 years ago. Even in podcasting, there’s, it’s hard to find benchmarks for what people were paid in podcasting 10 years ago for different roles that now exist in our industry.

So it’s worth having an honest conversation. And I do think from the employer’s standpoint, it’s worth leading with the value that you’ve brought, versus blunt demands, because humans are human beings and you can turn someone’s nose up or their backup, by the way, in which you deliver your message, but delivering it from an evidence based perspective and saying, these are kind of the accomplishments that I’ve made and these are the responsibilities I’ve taken on and this is the industry average and I love being here and I want to stay here. So I was wondering if it’d be possible to have a conversation about my salary, I’d receive that very, very well.

NISCHA SHAH: And even aligning it to your company’s objectives, this is what’s doing. Yeah, exactly. Here is what I’ve done. Aligned to your objectives that you’re looking for. Exactly.

The Psychology of Homeownership

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you talked about saving for a house as well. Do you see buying a house as a good investment? Because it is the first thing most people do. Right? It’s like the first thing we’re told as part of the script of life. When you get some money, save it up, get a mortgage.

NISCHA SHAH: A lot of our view about buying or renting or buying a house is actually formed from what we saw our parents do and what we saw the generation before us do. So even looking at my life, formed from the way my parents thought. They came to the UK as immigrants and when they bought their first house, it was like the epitome of success. They had this thing that they can, that represented wealth for them, that they could touch, they could see, they could feel. It represented stability, security.

And then when we moved out of that terraced home into another home, it was between two stations in a catchment area, so me and my sisters got access to better schools. That was then their happiness, that was then their goal and the milestone achieved.

And for the previous generation, and still the way people see it today, when people say, oh, we need to buy a house for wealth building, it’s because a big factor of it is that it was a forced mechanism of saving. So when you’re buying a house or paying for a mortgage, that’s not optional, you have to pay it. You then can’t then spend that money on anything else. And so as a result, those monthly payments are going towards building your equity and building this house’s value, and as a byproduct, is building wealth for you.

So for someone listening to this, if they’re hearing this conversation, they say, okay, you know what, I have a goal to buy. And they run the numbers. It makes sense for them. They’re doing it for the long term, then I’ll say that’s a really good goal to have. Go for it. But I think we put a lot of pressure on people today that they need to buy a house and as soon as they start working, that they need to get onto that property ladder. So if you’re listening to this and thinking that, that I don’t have a goal to buy a house, then there are also ways to build wealth that don’t require you to be in the real estate game.

Rent vs. Buy: The Financial Reality

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think there’s something psychological about paying rent that you never see again that makes you think that it’s a terrible idea.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And sometimes when you look at the mortgage payment versus the rental payment, you go, well, they’re the same and I’ll end up owning this chunk of concrete, so I might as well go for the chunk of concrete.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. But if you are choosing to rent, and actually there’s been studies that’s on this, almost 9 out of 12 regions in the UK and the same applies for other areas in the world as well. It’s renting is or can be cheaper than buying in that equivalent neighborhood. And so if you are renting and you’re saving money on that difference, then you’ve got to be disciplined and sensible enough to know that you need to invest the difference.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you mean?

NISCHA SHAH: So if your rent is 1500 and to get that mortgage and you take the mortgage payments and you’ve realized that with the interest that you’re going to be paying on the mortgage, all the other things that come into buying a house, so the stamp duty that you’re paying, the property tax, the repairs, the maintenance, insurance, if you factor in the cost of both and you do run the numbers and you say, okay, renting is cheaper than buying than getting a home, that difference is what you want to be able to invest.

Kind of a way for you to say, I’m creating my own forced mechanism of saving. This is my own version of a mortgage. I’m saving. I’m going to set up an investment account and I’m going to automate it and I’m going to put money into it every single month. And that’s the way you’re going to build wealth. That’s just as legitimate. And actually I went onto the property ladder and the money that I put in towards that flat hasn’t grown as near as much as the money that I made through the stock market.

Property vs. Stock Market Returns

STEVEN BARTLETT: Investing in the S&P 500. So tell me about that. So you bought a property in London or.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, somewhere in North London.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

NISCHA SHAH: To live in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

NISCHA SHAH: And I bought it in 2017.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. And it’s gone up in value. I’d say about 10%.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

NISCHA SHAH: I’ve had about eight years. Then you compare that to the stock market. So, sure, there’s a number side of it where people think, okay, I need to buy a house to build wealth. But that’s what I’m trying to explain that actually if you save that money and you invest it you might be better off financially.

But coming back to your point, yes, there’s that psychological thing of, okay, do I want to pay that money on rent or do I want to buy? The other psychological part of it is also the comfort of knowing that you have somewhere, and this is a big reason as to why I bought. The comfort of knowing that no matter what happens, you have this place, it’s yours. The landlord can’t serve you notice, you can do whatever you want to the flat within certain restrictions and rules, and you have this piece of that belongs to you. And so that’s the psychological comfort that came from it.

Sure, we could talk about the numbers and what investing will do and how much you can make on that. But the bit that often gets forgotten about is the invisible side, which is the peace of mind, the psychological comfort of just owning a home.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So can I ask, how much did your apartment cost in London?

NISCHA SHAH: 530.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you spent 530k on it?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Presumably on like a mortgage or something at the time?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, I was on a mortgage.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So 530k, it’s gone up 10%?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, it’s gone up about 50k.

STEVEN BARTLETT: About 50k?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s now worth 580. But if you’d put that amount of money into the S&P 500.

NISCHA SHAH: Well, the thing with the house and a flat is you could use the mortgage. You wouldn’t put that full amount in it because you had the mortgage. But if you put that deposit amount into it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, the deposit amount, yeah.

NISCHA SHAH: The amount that you would put onto the down payment, the stamp duty that I would have also paid if I saved that amount and then put in. Put that amount, whatever it was, and invested that. That’s the comparison that I would have made.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how much was that in total that you paid into the property?

NISCHA SHAH: I put about 50, I think K down 50K.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And probably the net return on that if it’s gone up 10%.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. So 10 55 K. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In the S&P 500 in the same time has delivered roughly 10 to 12% per year on average. It has more than doubled in value since 2017. So you would have probably got pretty incredible return on the S&P 500. Even in the last five years, the S&P 500 has grown 90%.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, makes sense.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s almost doubled in the last five years alone. Which means you would have basically doubled your money just investing it in an index fund.

NISCHA SHAH: Are you looking at that from the lows of the COVID Yeah, it says.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Even with the COVID lows, it says so. It has more than doubled in value since 2017, driven by strong growth in technology, despite the COVID crash and 2022 pullback.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, case in point, that we’re looking at building wealth just through one mechanism that feels like it’s urgent and needs to be done by everyone. But actually, if you’re looking at it purely from a numbers and building wealth perspective, there are other ways to do that.

Understanding Opportunity Cost

STEVEN BARTLETT: My brother was an investment banker. He now works full time helping with my money and helping my companies. He went to LSE. Very smart guy. He’s always been like the boffin in the family. He always talked to me about this term opportunity cost. So when I told him, I said, I want to buy this house in Cape Town, he was like, you know, this is going to cost you x millions. Think about the opportunity cost.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And he always, every time I say I want to do this, he’s like, think about the opportunity cost. And he basically stands in the way of it. What is opportunity cost? And why should people be thinking about this when they’re spending their money?

NISCHA SHAH: So every pound or dollar that we spend is one less that we could use for something else, and that is the opportunity cost, in essence. And we often don’t think about life in terms of opportunity costs because we only look at the thing that is in front of us.

So your brother was telling you about how you can make more money investing somewhere else, but what you saw is this one thing in front of you and you thought, no, I don’t even know if I’m going to make this money elsewhere. I don’t know if that’s going to happen. This thing is right in front of me. And that’s the thing with opportunity cost is always a trade off of what you can see and what you can’t see. But with every decision you make, there’s something else that you’re saying no to. It’s coming at the cost of something else.

The $100 Lunch That Costs $5,000

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was thinking about that as you were talking. And just to give a bit of color to this for people at home. And a good example of opportunity costs. So, like yesterday, I bought lunch for the team, right? And the lunch cost $100. It was like the salad bar in Los Angeles cost me $100. Fine, $100, who cares?

But then when I think about the numbers you shared earlier on, if I’d taken that $100 and put it into the S&P 500 in 40 years, assuming I got 10% return a year, which is like the average of the S and P that is almost $5,000. So in terms of opportunity cost, buying the team lunch for $100 has effectively cost me an opportunity $5,000 that I would have had presuming that return in 40 years from now. So that lunch yesterday actually cost me potentially roughly $5,000.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. And I guess for you it’s that’s.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The last time the team again.

NISCHA SHAH: But on the other side you might have missed out on how the team felt going to that lunch and the invisible benefits that you might have got from that. Whether it was just the memories at that moment in time, whether it’s a motivation, whether it’s the culture that you’re bringing in, that’s the thing that you might miss out on if you choose that $5,000 in X years of time.

Balancing Present vs. Future

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I guess it’s a balancing act as well. I was thinking about the guy you mentioned with a Ferrari and if he were to die today, one could argue that in fact he played life correctly.

NISCHA SHAH: Absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because he did, he saw it, he did it. And this is I think the difference you see in people. Some people have that long term view where they think no, I want my money when I’m 65 or 70 in my pension fund and other people play a bit more short term in their life and go I just want to have good experiences now. So it’s hard to understand who’s right because we don’t know how this story ends. I guess.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. And I think there’s a fine line. But there’s also a way to balance living in the present. We’re planning for the future by understanding that you are going to allocate a specific amount of the money that comes in towards the here and now and then the rest you are going to look use towards the future you because there’s something very rewarding about spending now when you know the future you has already been looked after. It makes you want to spend it without thinking, oh, what is this coming at the opportunity cost of do you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Think people should buy a house if their objective is to make money? Or do you think there are other opportunities like the S and P500 like using your tax free ISA a lot.

Investment Strategy and Portfolio Allocation

NISCHA SHAH: Of people listening probably don’t have or on their way to building a deposit or working their way to have the money for a deposit. If they’re putting themselves under pressure and they think that they’re just buying a house to build wealth, I would say actually look into investing through that stocks and shares ISA as a start. That is tax free. If you haven’t even started investing through that stocks and shares ISA, which by the way, 75% roughly of people in the UK aren’t investing. So yeah, I would definitely say open that up first.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And do you think one should split a proportion of their investments into different categories of risk? Because you’ve got like crypto on the one side of it, which sometimes feel like being at a roulette table. And then you’ve got things that are typically safe, like the S&P 500.

The Psychology of Investing

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, I’m going to say with the stocks and shares, actually, when you invest in. And a lot of people also want to invest in crypto, but they also want to invest in individual stocks as well. Should I go after the next big winning company stock? Should I invest in this stock? What I want to say is that there’s two parts to think about. The returns, but also the behavioral concepts, how you feel when it comes to investing. Because one of the biggest impacts on market performance is your contributions, but also your behavior.

So Fidelity did a research and found that people who invested in funds underperformed the fund that they were in. It sounds ridiculous, it sounds impossible. How can you be underperforming a fund that you’re in? But then when they looked into it, they found that when fear and anxiety took over, when the market dropped, these people bought, sold, bought, sold. They essentially danced in and out of the fund as a result underperforming the fund that they were already holding.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so when it went down, they sold.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, when it went down, they sold. When they went up, they bought. And so what you want to do is you want to invest in something that makes you buy and hold. Fidelity looked into the groups of people that had invested in their funds to see which group performed the best. And when they looked into it, they found one group significantly outperformed all other groups when it came to investment returns. And that was dead people.

Dead people outperformed the living when it came to investment returns because they didn’t touch their investment account. They just set it, forget it. They didn’t chase the next company stock. They didn’t go after the thing that’s going to go up really quickly and down really quickly. And that all ties into the behavior. You’re not letting your emotions drive the investments. And by the way, they found out the second best performing group were the people who forgot that they had a fund in the first place.

So when it comes to deciding what allocation you want your portfolio to be, it’s understanding, okay, what is going to give you the returns, but also, what is the thing that’s going to help you stay the course? Even when the market goes and drops, what will make you feel like, okay, I could still stay and hold my position? That’s how to decide what kind of percentage portfolio you want for yourself.

And I’ve done that with my portfolio. With crypto, it’s less than 2% of my overall portfolio. I’ve invested the amount that I feel like it won’t make a difference if I lose it. And if it goes to the moon, great. And that’s how, when I say, somewhere here, the last thing I want to do is encourage people, before they’ve even set up the financial foundations, to invest in something that can go up and go down when 75% of the population isn’t investing.

And the reason why they’re not investing is because, and I keep hearing this from time and time again from the people I speak to is either they’re really scared that they’re going to lose money, or they don’t know where to start. And so when it comes to losing money, I always say, do the foundations first. Set up your portfolio there and then move on to speculative assets, should you want to go down that path.

Learning from Personal Investment Experiences

STEVEN BARTLETT: I remember the first time I invested and I downloaded this app and I put some money in there, and then I watched it, and I was watching it so much, and it was going up and down and up and down. And like, three, four months later, I sold it. And I didn’t really make a. I think I lost a couple of. A couple hundred quid or whatever. And then I watched that same investment over the next five, six, seven years just go to the moon.

Yeah, it went up, and I remember thinking, I should have just kept it in there. And then the best investment I ever made correlates to what you were saying, because I lost my password. I, like, lost the password to log in. And so I couldn’t do anything about it anyway. And I watched it and it went down and up and down and up and down and up. But over five years, it went really, really high.

And so when I first started investing in crypto and invested in Ethereum and now Bitcoin, my strategy was the same. My strategy was get the private keys and give half of them to one person that I trust and half of them to the person that I trust. And even if I want to, I can’t do anything about it. And that’s proven to be one of my greatest returns in investing, because I just. I don’t even know what’s going on with it. I’m not paying attention.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. And that’s the thing. You’ve just taken the emotions out of the equation.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

NISCHA SHAH: There’s no fear, greed. There’s nothing else that controls your financial decisions other than logic.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think actually on that first investment I made when I was like, must have been at my early 20s, I needed the money. Like, I didn’t have the emergency fund or a peace of mind fund. So when it started to go down a little bit, naturally you kind of panic. So I think in that the second season of life where I started investing in Ethereum and Bitcoin, it didn’t really matter if I lost the money. So it made it easier to hold my nerves.

And I think nerves are such a huge part of investing. It goes to what you said earlier. Like it’s worth taking $100 or 100 pounds or whatever you can, which is a really inconsequential number of money, and putting it into some kind of S&P 500 or even a stock, just to feel that, almost like train your psychology and emotions of like what the ups feel like and what the down feel like.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, exactly.

Nischa’s Personal Portfolio Breakdown

STEVEN BARTLETT: So your investment strategy, your portfolio, you mentioned it there.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does it look like?

NISCHA SHAH: It’s 40% funds.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, what kind of funds?

NISCHA SHAH: Index funds, S&P 500. I also do international markets, the UK, so emerging developed across all sectors. I also do, and I keep a very, very diversified S&P 500 target date retirement funds that automatically rebalance.

So target date retirement fund, for anyone who’s listening and wondering what it is, it’s essentially a fund that has different types of investments within it. So you could go onto a platform of your choice that you use to invest and you could type in target date retirement fund. And at the end of every fund, we’ll have a year. And so you want to pick the year that is the closest to the year that you plan to retire. So if you plan to retire in 2050, that’s the year that you’ll pick.

And what that fund does is it rebalances and the percentage of different investments changes to become more conservative as you approach retirement.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it starts to protect you a little bit more.

NISCHA SHAH: Exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it goes risk off, it kind of goes less risky.

NISCHA SHAH: It becomes less risky because you don’t want to be investing the same when you don’t have that much time. If you’re investing in your 20s, 30s, you have enough time to ride out the stock market waves.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that’s 40% of your portfolio, that’s 40%.

NISCHA SHAH: 30% is real estate okay in all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Parts of the world?

NISCHA SHAH: No, just in the UK.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just in the UK.

NISCHA SHAH: Then I’ll say about 25% I’m putting back into my business at the moment. And then the remaining is between crypto and cash, cash and cash reserves.

Investing in Yourself

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, what about investing in yourself? Because we think about education and skills and stuff like that. Should we be investing a small amount of money into ourselves in some capacity?

NISCHA SHAH: 100%. I think you just don’t stop investing in yourself at any point in time. It goes down to increasing your income, increasing your skills, increasing your value, which then has a knock on effect on everything else that you’re investing into.

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Essential Books for Financial Literacy

STEVEN BARTLETT: You actually you made a video about 40 books that you’ve read that improve your own financial literacy. If there was one book that you recommend people to read that you think is most accessible and will advance their financial literacy in the most profound way. That did that for you, what book would you recommend?

NISCHA SHAH: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. It’s not actually about financial literacy, but it’s around money mindset. And the other book to start with when it comes to financial literacy is also the Richest Man in Babylon. When people don’t learn about money is because they find it quite boring and not very interesting. So the Richest Man in Babylon does a good job in intertwining a novel into financial literacy concepts.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve not read that book. I’ve heard a lot about it though.

NISCHA SHAH: The underlying principles when it comes to money don’t really change much. And it really starts with the basics when it comes to saving and spending. So it’s a good starting point.

The 65-20-15 Rule

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there any other principles of, of building wealth that we haven’t talked about? I mean we haven’t talked about payday routines, but I’ve heard you talk at length about what we should do when we get paid every single month. Some of the things we’ve talked about already, like knowing your reference point, which was point one. Right.

NISCHA SHAH: That was your peace of mind fund. I guess knowing your reference point is essentially just understanding where your finances break down and what buckets they fall into. So I would actually say this is really important for anyone to know. And it’s the three numbers. It’s called the 65, 20-15. And it’s three numbers that anyone should know when it comes to money and their own personal finance.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. 65, 20-15. Okay.

NISCHA SHAH: And the way it works is you want to. The idea of it is to take your net income. This is your take home pay after you pay taxes, not the number on your job description, the number after you pay state contribution, all other taxes. And you want to split that into three buckets. The fundamental which is your core living expenses, everything that is essential to your living costs. Mortgage, rent, utilities, groceries, minimum debt payments, car payments, all of that should make up approximately 65% of your net income.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay.

The 65-25-10 Rule Breakdown

NISCHA SHAH: The 20% that’s for your fun spending. These are for the pottery painting that you booked last minute, the Glastonbury tickets, the Pilates class. That should make up about 20% of your take home pay. And the remaining 15% that’s for your future you. That’s today’s you planting seeds for tomorrow’s you. And that should go to savings, investments and extra debt payments.

And those are three good numbers that I think everyone should know and understand. It’s a good starting point to try and benchmark your numbers or your income against those spending categories. I would say, however, if you are someone who’s living closer to paycheck to paycheck, those numbers might look slightly different. And it might be that you want to dial down that fun percentage to have enough saved over for the future you so you can continue contributing to your savings, investments.

Or if you’re finding that your housing and mortgage is higher than 80, 90%, start with when it comes to future you start with what you can, whether it’s saving 2%, 3% start somewhere. You just want to build that habit.

Car Buying vs Leasing Strategy

STEVEN BARTLETT: And in terms of spending, should I. You mentioned cars earlier and we talked about houses briefly, should I be buying a car or should I be leasing a car?

NISCHA SHAH: A car is, let me just say, it’s one of the two areas that most people overspend. And it’s because we don’t just buy the numbers. We buy the emotions of the car, how the car might make us feel, how we’ll look in the car, the family memories we’ll create in the car. And I know because I did this.

When I got my first job, the very first thing I did was upgrade my car. I went into a car showroom, found a car that I thought I’d look cool in, and walked out with the car. An hour later, drove out with the car and didn’t run my numbers, didn’t check if I could afford the monthly payments, and for the next couple of months was figuring out how I was going to make the rest of my finances meet.

And car dealerships know this, so they will manipulate the monthly payments in a way that makes you buy more car than you can afford. And if you don’t understand how the numbers work, this is probably one of the quickest ways to destroy your chance of building real wealth.

The way I recommend buying a car is to buy something that’s three to five years old straight. And I say three to five years old because at that point it’s depreciated enough as someone else’s expense and won’t depreciate as much during the time that you have it. But if you are someone who is wealthy and you don’t mind taking that hit on the depreciation, or you want a nice car every couple of years and you want to trade it in and you don’t mind the fact that it’s not the best financial choice, then lease. That’s how I think of the buy versus lease situation. Then you also want to think about how much can you reasonably afford as a monthly payment when it comes to the proportion of your income that you’re spending towards that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you do? Do you buy new cars or do you…

NISCHA SHAH: No, I actually, at the moment, it was more economical for me to get a taxi everywhere. So I don’t have a car.

STEVEN BARTLETT: She ran the numbers and thought, the amount I’m traveling away from home makes more sense just to get a taxi.

NISCHA SHAH: And Uber every time. Yeah, I’m saving on the… For me, and it makes sense with this point in my life, it might be in five years, 10 years time that I want a nicer car and I don’t want to restrain myself from having it. But for now with the numbers, I could use that amount somewhere else.

Hidden Spending Traps

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about other things we spend money on? Where are the big sort of traps in spending that we haven’t mentioned? So we talked about cars, talked about houses. What about iPhones and iPads and technology?

NISCHA SHAH: I think there’s traps in spending in almost everything that we do that we don’t even see. Going to a grocery shop, which is a fundamental living cost for everyone, you’re fighting against marketing to keep your money in your pocket. You walk to a shop, a grocery store, they have the eggs, the milk, the bread right at the back, which makes you walk through the shop to get there. They have the premium products at eye level, the sweets for the kids at the kids’ eye level.

So these are also areas where you don’t even realize that you’re overspending because there’s these subliminal marketing messages around you. So that’s one area where people spend, where it’s just spending on the necessities but not even realizing that there’s a way to save there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what do you suggest? Going into those supermarkets with a shopping list?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, I mean, that’s one way. Going into the supermarkets with shopping list. Also checking if you’re shopping at the cheapest supermarket near you. I mean, shopping at M&S and Waitrose is different to shopping at Aldi. If that’s where you want to save your money and you’re more paycheck to paycheck and you’re thinking about where to save your money.

Other areas where people overspend is everything now can be bought as an impulse buy. You can buy now, pay later. There’s Apple Pay on your phone. There’s so many debt financing methods that make you pay more. And so just understanding, running this budget, running these numbers, understanding what you actually have available to spend towards these things is a really good way of fighting against everything else that is trying to take your money away from you.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about iPhones and iPads and stuff like that? Do you think people should be getting new ones or…

NISCHA SHAH: The way I think about this is the law of diminishing returns. When you first get something, there’s a really big impact on your happiness. When you first get an iPhone and you don’t have an iPhone, that’s good, that’s big. You’re walking around with your iPhone. This is pretty cool. Then with every upgrade, that diminishing return starts to plateau. It’s not as exciting.

So actually thinking about, do I need the next upgrade? Or is that something I can pass up on, but always remembering that the first time you buy something is worth it. The upgrades, after that, the happiness doesn’t increase as much.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what about hair, nails, dyeing your hair and all those kinds of things? Do you think people should be trying to sacrifice those kinds of things as well, or…

NISCHA SHAH: I’m not in this camp of trying to save money on everything. I really do believe that you should have a percentage that you allocate towards the fun things in your life and not being restrictive about what it is that you love. If it is getting your nails done, getting your hair done, getting a new bag, go for it, enjoy it. As long as on the other side, that’s not at the opportunity cost of you in five years or you in 10 years.

Understanding Lifestyle Inflation

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because you talk about this term lifestyle inflation, which I’ve never heard before. What is lifestyle inflation?

NISCHA SHAH: Lifestyle inflation is when, as your income increases, your spending also increases in a way that you think might be necessary, but actually they are all necessities being hidden away as just upgrades and luxuries. So essentially you are spending rising at the same pace that your income is increasing.

And what you want to do to counteract lifestyle inflation is you want to make sure that your spending increases. Sure, you want to treat yourself, you want to reward yourself, but not at the same pace that your income increases. You want to make sure that the gap between your income and your spending is getting wider as you earn more money, not narrower.

Simple Money Tracking Methods

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the best way for someone to track their money? Because there’s lots of figures here. Some people aren’t mathematically literate. Many people don’t want to be in Excel documents. Are there simple tools or an app that I could use to track my spending and saving and income?

NISCHA SHAH: So many bank accounts nowadays have categorized spending within them and it will tell you what you’re spending and what you’re spending on. So if you are someone that… even me, I would say every single month and track every single transaction. But I do have a ballpark figure in my mind based on my banking apps about what I’m spending and where.

And the key isn’t, oh, should I be allocating this much here? I’ve overspent here. Oh, I spent a little bit more on my trip than I needed to. The key is, are you saving 10% minimum of your salary? Whatever you decide to do with everything else, that’s up to you. And when you think about it that way, you think of this whole budgeting, managing finances as a lot more freeing than something that’s restricting you.

If you’re someone who doesn’t want to sit in the spreadsheets, inputting the numbers, just think, what am I saving and what am I spending? Am I saving the right percentage? Cool. Doesn’t matter how I’m allocating the rest. That’s what I recommend for those people.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Are there budget trackers that are already built that I can use? Because, you know, my bank might tell me how much I’m spending, but it doesn’t necessarily inform me in real time of how much money I have left.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, I mean, I have a budget tracker which actually tells you in real time. It’s not connected to your bank accounts, but when you put your numbers into it, it will tell you what you have left to spend for the remaining of the month.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is that? Is that an Excel document?

NISCHA SHAH: It is an Excel document, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can I have your Excel document?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll link it below so people can use it if they want to use it.

Money and Relationships

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about money and love and how these two worlds collide? Because I was speaking to Kevin O’Leary recently on the show, and he was telling me that one of the reasons people end up in divorce is because of financial insecurities and pain and friction and arguments. Do you get a lot of messages from people about money, love, joint bank accounts, all these kinds of things?

NISCHA SHAH: I have a lot of questions from people asking, firstly, how to bring up the conversation of money, and secondly, how to manage their finances with a partner in a way that keeps the autonomy but still makes it feel like you have a shared life.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are those big questions when it comes to how to bring up a conversation with your partner?

NISCHA SHAH: This is really important because the top two reasons why people argue or why couples argue is money and sex. And when it comes to money, it’s lack of transparency, lack of openness, and lack of shared goals together. And that’s not to say, yeah, you should go on a first date and ask someone what their credit score or debt utilization is, but it is to say, having those conversations, asking the right questions in a way that can help you understand someone else’s money beliefs in a way that can help you create a financial life together.

The Right Financial Questions to Ask

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what should I be asking my partner? I’m your partner. What do you say to me and when do you say it?

NISCHA SHAH: I think there’s levels of the questions that you could ask someone, and if you’re just getting to know someone, you can ask them something along the lines of if you found, or if you won £10,000 tomorrow, how would you spend it?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Lamborghini.

NISCHA SHAH: That will tell you a lot about what they value. So then that automatically tells you that they probably value status. If you say, I’ll probably save it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I said, Lamborghini, I’m going to rent a Lamborghini for two months, yeah, what should you then do about that?

NISCHA SHAH: You take that information and you understand this is what the person values. Because money is just a symbol for what the person values. And if they want to spend on a Lamborghini, that’s not to say you should then judge the way they’re spending. But you take that information, you understand, what do you want to do with it? Is this way of thinking something that you want to have a life with?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, is there a good answer to that question?

NISCHA SHAH: I think it comes down to understanding, because even if someone says, I just want to save, you might think, okay, this is great stability, security. But you might be someone who wants experiences you want to spend on flights to take your friends and family away around the world.

So it’s just about understanding how your money values fit in with their money values. And are they completely in conflict with each other or are they actually, do they marry up? And can you see yourselves creating a financial life together? Because if someone’s like, oh, I’ll spend all my money on status symbols and not save anything, and you’re a saver, that is going to be a cause for arguments.

Financial Conversations in Relationships

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Especially if you get bad news and things get tight, someone loses their job. And then when things get tight, you’re really going to be focused on the money or you have kids and, you know, any sort of pressure on their budget.

NISCHA SHAH: Exactly. And like, other questions. And those kind of questions come down further, further down the line, actually. I guess as well when it comes to financial goal setting. But I guess another question you could ask someone is. And it comes back to what we spoke about at the start of the podcast is where did your beliefs about money come from? Because so much of the way we think about money is inherited through what we saw our parents do, what we saw during our upbringings. And it has an impact on the way we are with money.

It might be that we’re an impulse spender as a result of it. It might be that we see debt in a certain way, or it might be that we’re really frugal. But what that does is it opens up a conversation of empathy and compassion rather than judgment. And that automatically can lead to more conversations about, okay, how do you view debt. How can we manage our finances based on your views and my views and how can we work together as a whole to make this sustainable?

And then the next question is when it comes to family and kids and how you’re going to manage your finances there that’s when it comes to like the third layer of questions where you are asking someone, what does our 2 year, 5 year, 10 year goal look like? And if we were to merge our finances together, what would that look like?

Should Couples Merge Their Finances?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Should we merge our finances together, Nischa?

NISCHA SHAH: My straight answer to this is no. We have very unique individual money personalities and habits and we are getting married later in life where these personalities are really set in stone. And do you know how they say opposites attract in a relationship? The same goes for money. Savers typically attract spenders and spenders typically attract savers. So if you have a saver saving and then a spender who’s spending the savings, that’s going to be a cause for arguments regardless of if there’s financial shortcomings.

So what I recommend is having a team fund and then a ME fund. Team fund is for the grown up adult stuff, the joint expenses, mortgage, rent, bills, council tax. And this isn’t 50 50. You both pay into that proportionate of your income, 90% of your household income that you’re making. You pay 90% of the expenses, you’re bringing in 30% of the household income, you’re paying for 30% of the expenses. That’s the team fund.

And then you have the ME fund. And this is for your own individual personality to stay alive, your own money habits. No one else can see the way you’re spending here. If you have a match or addiction, go for it. If you want to buy that nice watch, go for it. You can do whatever you want, spend this money however you want. If you want to save it, save it. But that way you’re creating that unity but also having that autonomy.

And I think this is really, really important for both parties, women and men, but specifically for women. They want to. You want them to have their independent access to their finances. And I’ve seen situations, I’ve spoken to people who have merged their finances and it’s when the relationship has turned sour or unsafe, they haven’t been able to know what to do because they haven’t had the independent access to their money.

Prenups and Financial Protection

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think people should be getting prenups? Did you get pre. You’re married, aren’t you?

NISCHA SHAH: I am. I think everyone has a prenup, whether you know it or not. Prenups. You could either have your own customized prenup or you could have what the state is telling you as what’s going to happen if you decide to go your separate ways. Depending on where you are, the prenup holds different values. So some areas might not look beyond what the couple agree and they just say, okay, this is what the couple’s agreed, this is how the finances are going to be split or their assets are going to be split.

In the UK, and I’m not a divorce lawyer or anything, I don’t believe that the prenup is fully legally binding. So it’s useful to have in some circumstances, but it’s the courts will still look past it and see what is fair. As a couple.

Understanding Passive Income

STEVEN BARTLETT: This term passive income is quite a popular term. What is passive income?

NISCHA SHAH: The way I see passive income, it’s money that you do not have to work or to invest time in to make. And in all honesty, I think the word passive income gets thrown around a lot and people forget that the things that you do see that might be passive income streams required a lot of work upfront to start with.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are some passive income ideas that you think some people could pursue, like the average person could potentially pursue on top of their 9 to 5 job?

NISCHA SHAH: I would go back to the easiest way for someone to pursue passive income is through investing from like the S&P.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 500 and stuff like that.

NISCHA SHAH: That is the easiest way if you want to. Everything else, and this is how I see it, everything else requires some level of time or energy because you could increase your income through a couple of avenues if that’s what you’re looking to do. You can, like we spoke about, ask for a pay rise at work. You can, if that’s not available to you, start up side businesses to increase your income.

And there’s two ways to do that. There’s the tap and go that I like to call it. And it’s ways to increase your income that you can do immediately. This isn’t passive. This is things like putting a spare room on Airbnb or dog walking or Ubering. They require your time for money, but they are immediate. The downside is there is a cap to how much you could earn because it’s not leaning into your unique advantages, your market advantage, your unique selling points.

The other side is value and skill based income. And this is where you lean into your individuality, your unique selling point. You tap into your skills and you create businesses around that that can scale the downside with that, even if it is passive Say if you want to create content and then through that sell products which you could then earn passively with that kind of income stream, there’s always, it always takes longer to make that money and there’s a time period where you are putting in more time or even more money before you start earning that.

So when I talk about passive income, that’s when I say, sure, there are avenues for passive income, but the easiest one that’s accessible to everyone is investing. And everything else does require some upfront time or energy.

Digital Products and Entrepreneurial Opportunities

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I was, we, obviously we were talking before we started recording about Stan Store, which is a company I’ve become a co owner in. And that business allows you to sell digital products online. And we did this 30 day challenge and I was looking through the results of how much money people had made and also how much of a following they had because I think digital products are really like interesting entrepreneurial opportunity.

And there was this one, I was going through all of them yesterday over in the studio and there was like so many people, but there’s this one that stood in mind because she had a thousand followers and she’s helping women to get control of binge eating and other sort of eating disorders by selling like digital products and information and really like a community. She had like a thousand followers or something and in the last 30 days she’s made four or five thousand pounds doing that. She sold like 40 like digital products, basically PDFs and stuff like that. I just thought this is a massive untapped opportunity for the vast majority of people who spend 10 years, 20 years in a career and know something, have some kind of expertise.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. Using what you learning through your day job and turning it into a business on the side that can be scalable, not necessarily through creating content, which is what I think a lot of people think that they need to do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I’m actually like everybody knows something and there’s a demand now for people to buy that expertise that, you know, especially if you’ve been in the working world for like a couple of years.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, I’d say if you want to figure out what it is that expertise for you. Because sometimes we’re sitting on a mountain of knowledge but we don’t even know it until we kind of take a step back and then look to see what that thing is. Ask your friends, what is it that you’d come to me for advice on? Because I know I have people in my life who I go to for advice on specific areas or if I want a planning for an event. Hey, what should I do? How should I do this? If I need help with Excel, hey, can you help me with this formula if I’ve got back pain, a quick message or WhatsApp to someone saying, hey, what can I do in this situation?

Find out what people coming to you for advice on that kind of will give you a signal as to what people want to know about you, what people want to learn from you, and see if there’s a way to turn that into an income stream.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, it’s very much what you did.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, it is exactly what I did. It’s turning the finance knowledge, which at the time my tagline was sharing everything I know and I’m learning along the way to create a life that I love. And it was me kind of doing it as an online diary, sharing. This is what I’m learning, this is what I’m doing. And then it ultimately ended up into something that I do full time.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And that’s changed your life in a pretty profound way.

NISCHA SHAH: I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t take that.

From Spare Bedroom to Millions

STEVEN BARTLETT: Talk to me about that journey. Was it faster than you expected? And was it Are you in a place that is higher than you expected when you started? You’ve done 151 videos on YouTube.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And is it safe to say it’s made you millions?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. I would never have thought I was in the place that I am now through sitting in my spare bedroom and creating videos. Monday to Friday I’ll be going to work. Glitz and glamour, meeting clients. There was a kind of allure to it. And then the weekends I’ll be spent spending in my spare bedroom Googling. What’s a roll? What’s B roll? How do I do color grading?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which are all terms in terms of editing videos.

The Journey from Banking to Content Creation

NISCHA SHAH: It’s all terms of editing videos because that’s what I was doing on my weekends and evenings while I was still at work. I quit my day job just over two years ago. And so for a very long time, this was just a creative outlet for me and I loved it. I found so much interest in it.

But my purpose for it really grew as the channel grew. It grew very quickly from 1,000 to 50,000 within a few days and then 100,000 within a few weeks of that. And as the channel grew, I saw the comments that were coming in. “Hey, I’ve just invested in this for the first time because of what you’ve said here.” Or “I’ve just asked for a pay rise at work because of this conversation.”

And when you see something like that come through, there is no amount of money that can be made through a day job that beats that. There is nothing. What was previously external fulfillment for me turned into internal fulfillment. So it has been the best thing I’ve done, hands down. And it is the thing that I would continue to do even if I wasn’t making money from it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You made one video seven months ago about things you stopped doing to waste your evenings after work. The video is titled “Five Things I Did to Stop Wasting My Evenings After Work.”

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. Because I had to be really disciplined with my time when I was working in banking.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what is it? What is the essence of that video? Is it telling people to use their time as an asset more effectively?

Breaking Out of Autopilot Mode

NISCHA SHAH: And so often we just are living in autopilot mode. We don’t even think about the time that we’re using and how we’re using it. We are just coming home after work and turning on the TV and watching Netflix and sinking into the couch because we’ve done that the day before and the day before and it’s comfortable.

And the essence of that video is to say there’s probably more out there. If you’re sitting there and you’re in a place where you’re thinking, “I don’t really like my job, I don’t really like what I’m doing, I’m not really happy. I want to meet new people, but I’m not doing that.” Then this video is about saying, hey, come out that autopilot mode that you might be in and you have hours, maybe on the weekend, maybe in the evening that you can use to create a better life for yourself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s like budgeting your time.

NISCHA SHAH: It is budgeting your time. Exactly that. Thinking about how you can spend each hour in a way that brings you closer to the version of the life that you want.

The Compound Effect of Time Investment

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think about that a lot because ultimately our time is the center point of our influence. It’s the thing that’s going to determine our long term outcomes pretty much more than anything else. Whether we spend it reading a book that’s going to educate us, we’ll learn how to color grade for YouTube videos like you did, or whether we spend it watching Love Island on the TV or something.

In the same way that that hundred dollars is going to compound at 10% a year in the S&P 500, that choice is going to compound. So let’s play that out. So instead of watching Love Island, I decide to read that book you recommended about money. And then that means that I make a series of different decisions which change the trajectory of several areas of my life. I maybe stop spending as much, I start budgeting a little bit. I go and educate myself on a new skill.

And if you zoom out on that as a graph over 10, 20, 30 years, you’re in an entirely different position because you used one hour differently 30 years ago. But you’ll never see the return because it’s so compounding. It’s so hard to see. It’s invisible in the moment. But I really think about this a lot. I try and remind myself on a frequent basis that the actual currency I’m spending is these hours that I have and how intentional and well placed and aligned they are to my long term goals is maybe the most important thing.

NISCHA SHAH: And it’s the most powerful thing that you have. Exactly.

Finding Purpose and Happiness

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about your happiness? What makes you happy?

NISCHA SHAH: The way I’m living right now, which is doing what I’m doing for a living, is making me extremely happy. And it’s the happiest I’ve been since starting a career in banking. It comes back to finding a meaning and a purpose in what you’re doing.

And to say that I make money from helping people get better with their finances, I don’t think there’s much better than that. I don’t think there’s many jobs in life that are more rewarding than giving back in some way. However that looks for you, through your own skills, your own expertise, your own unique selling points, I can’t imagine a better place for me, myself to be in. And it’s taken a long time to get to that. But it’s been good. It’s been a journey, but it’s been a good one.

AI and Financial Advice

STEVEN BARTLETT: AI, is this the topic of the moment? Because it’s just impacting everything. It’s impacting people’s ability to get jobs, it’s impacting how I’m hiring as an employer. It’s impacting how I do my creative work and even me as a podcaster as well. I was wondering how you’re thinking about AI.

NISCHA SHAH: I’m seeing more and more people leaning into AI to get money tips and money advice. And I think that’s great because there’s so much more information that is vastly available at your fingertips for you to learn financial literacy and be prepared for it.

The thing that I’d always ask people to remember is don’t forget the emotional side of money, because greed, fear, that all comes into how you’re managing your finances as well. So use AI. Use it to your advantage. I think it’s brilliant and I think you should always lean into it. But there’s the human component that can never be taken out of the equation, especially when it comes to money and finance.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Could I not just go on ChatGPT and ask it to be my personal accountant every month and tell it my situation, tell it my goals, and then tell it to give me advice every day, week, month on what I should be doing?

NISCHA SHAH: I think that would be a great starting point to understand what do I need to do if I’m absolutely clueless. That’s not to say ChatGPT is always correct. As you probably know, there’s some errors in it, so take it with a pinch of salt. But if you’re starting from scratch, even saying, “Hey, this is my income, this is my spending, how do you recommend I budget? Give me three or four ways to consider it.” If that’s a way for you to take that next step, then definitely think that’s an avenue to be explored.

Real-World AI Financial Success

STEVEN BARTLETT: Jack, you were telling me the other day that you’re now using AI a lot for financial support and advice. What are you doing?

JACK: So I’ve got this prompt on ChatGPT where I’ve asked it to be the world’s best financial advisor for me. And I screenshotted all my bank statements and every time I tell people this, they kind of wince because it’s a lot of window into your life. I don’t know the GDPR or whatever around it, but it’s been so useful.

So I’ve screenshotted everything on my bank statement and then it tells me how much I spend a month, how much I can put into investments and stuff. And I also screenshotted this investment account I had and it told me that I was overpaying on my investment account and that I should switch to another one because the fees were better.

And then it was like, “You don’t have enough in savings, so you should stop investing and put your money into savings.” Gave me advice on a savings account to put it into with a high interest, like 4% interest. And it’s actually been game changing because it’s kind of a base knowledge that I wouldn’t have had an understanding towards.

And I get very excited when I listen to these podcasts because I sit here and they tell you ones to invest in. And I think it was a particular guest we had on, and she said, “You should invest in this kind of stock.” And I said, “Oh, what do you think about this stock?” And it was just like, “Don’t be silly. You’re not this person.” And it’s just been really helpful for me to kind of understand it’s advice changes and adjusts.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, was that Cathie Wood? Was it Tesla?

JACK: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I told you to behave yourself.

JACK: I asked it to be brutally honest about all the advice it gave me. And I was like, “Cathie Wood had this advice, tell me, should I put all my money into Tesla?” And it was like, “Look, you’re not Cathie Wood. You don’t have enough.” It’s kind of what you said about having emergency funds. So you don’t have enough in your emergency funds. Top that up first. And if you want to invest in Tesla, we’ll have another pot.

So the new one I’ve done Trading 212 and you can do pies. So I’ve got a safe one and a not so safe one and then a high interest account.

The Power of Personalized AI Financial Advice

NISCHA SHAH: That’s really interesting, Jack, that you’ve done that. And I think that just shows the power of AI now. And there’s two really interesting things that I picked up on then.

The first is that it’s very tailored based on you, which with AI probably understood who you are as a person from the information that you fed to it, your risk profile, your amounts, the bank statement had your savings and from that it derived a profile and gave you the correct information based on your current situation.

And the second thing that probably doesn’t get mentioned in maybe podcasts that you’ve done so far, Steven, is the savings, the putting it into a high interest savings account. It’s the very easy basic personal finance tips that actually do make a difference when it comes to habits. But also it’s easy. That’s passive income for you. They would get missed out on a lot of the advice if you’re watching a specific investing focused YouTube video or podcast.

So it just harnesses the power of ChatGPT. I don’t know yet if we have any information about how much information we can actually feed into ChatGPT and where that goes. But it sounds like you’ve given it the underlying framework of this is my current situation and it’s given you the correct initial guidance at least and then you’ve been able to say, “Okay, that makes sense for me,” or “No, I’m not going to listen to this.”

JACK: I keep asking it, “Am I on track?” And it changes its advice. So although it’s been really good initially, I think I’m now with that base knowledge going to go and sort of… And everything I’ve learned on these podcasts as well just kind of go and run with it.

Finding the Right Financial Philosophy

NISCHA SHAH: And that’s really important because there’s so much information online when it comes to money that you don’t actually know who to listen to and who to get advice from and who to trust. Because you could be scrolling through TikTok and the first video you see is “put all your money into Tesla or crypto or one asset,” or you can see another one that says, “Stop buying lattes or otherwise you’ll die broke.” And then the next video might be mine. And you might think, “Oh, well, the last two people just told me nonsense, why should I listen to this person?”

And so finding a person whose principles and philosophy align with your way of thinking is a way that will keep you motivated and inspired to want to keep getting better with finances. And so you’ve probably got that information from ChatGPT and it said to you, “Hey, based on your profile, this is what’s important.” And you’ve kind of leaned into that and thought, “This is right for me, actually, this makes sense.” And you’ve probably actioned it.

And so it’s a fine line between finding someone who you resonate with and also understanding that their principles align with yours.

Credit Scores and Financial Awareness

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think about credit scores? Because I absolutely butchered my credit score before I even realized it existed. My credit score was in the bin. I got two CCJs, which are county court judgments, which is where you really mess up, because I didn’t know anything about money when I was 18, 19 years old, and they gave me these credit cards and I’d overdraft and defaulted and didn’t pay them back and went to an ATM, put it in, it didn’t come back out. And then I found out that I had destroyed my credit rating before I knew what it was. And I hear this quite a lot from people. They don’t understand the importance of it.

NISCHA SHAH: Or, you know, you don’t realize the importance of it until you’re looking to buy something big. Yeah, because that’s what it impacts, the credit score. Two people can go into a car showroom and choose the same car, and the amount they pay for it will be completely different based on the history, the credit background.

And so there are… It is something that you need to think about, is something that you need to make sure you’re paying off in time, in full. Your credit card, for instance. And it is definitely one of the main things or one of the things people should always look at and consider. And you can check your credit rating online for free. There are websites that do that and you can check it. Just make sure all of your details are correct. If there’s any anomalies, correct that. But most importantly, just make sure. And it really comes down to are you paying the things that are outstanding on time?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think most people, especially younger people, don’t actually realize that they have a credit score and that they can check it right now for free. And they also probably don’t realize that things like being registered to vote has an impact on their credit rating. Because I remember the first time I logged in to check my credit score and I was like, 45. And it said the reason why, one of the reasons why it’s low is because you haven’t registered to vote. I was like, what the hell?

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah, register to vote. That’s one of the things. Even something like you call up your credit card company or the company that you have a debt at and say, hey, can you increase the amount that I have available? What that does is it reduces your utilization when you’re using debt. And by just saying, okay, you have, instead of utilizing 50% of your credit available, you’re now using 20%. What companies now see is, oh, okay, then they’re being sensible. They’re not really relying on this debt on their day to day living.

So there’s a couple of things that you could take into account. But even if you do, and again, people don’t realize this, even if you do have interest rates because you’re not paying your debt off in time, you can negotiate that. You can call up the company and say, okay, this is the interest rate I’m paying, but this is what I have planned. This is how I plan to pay off my debt and I want to do it over the next 12, 18 months. Can you reduce or can you look at reducing my interest rate?

Applying the 65-20-15 Framework to Different Life Stages

STEVEN BARTLETT: I have these personas here. There’s three of them. And I was wondering, there are three different people at three different stages of life. When you think about the advice you’d give these people, does it come back to this framework, this 65-20-15 framework? Really, regardless of what stage they’re at, you know what?

NISCHA SHAH: Most things in finance do come back to that framework, the 65-20-15 or even a variation for it. With Andy, he’s just started his job, he’s early on in his career, he’s making less now than he will in 10 years, 20 years time. So it may not be that his paycheck allows for 65% to go towards his rent and his car, which is what he wants. Something new of it might be that it might be 70 or 75%.

But the key is, especially at this stage, the most important thing that he has going for him is time. So save, invest early, do it recurringly, which is often, and harness the power of long term growth is what I’ll say to Andy. When it comes to the new phone, remember that there is a trade off for every decision you’re making. If it’s not an absolute necessity or an urgency that can be spent. And the value of that maybe thousand dollars today can be worth significantly more in 10 years or 20 years time. So balance that together again. If there’s budget after he’s put down the money for his savings investing, if he wants to spend that on the fun, then go ahead.

STEVEN BARTLETT: With him though, do you think his risk appetite should be a little bit higher? Because when I look at Andy here, he looks like his early 20s, maybe late teens or something.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: With him I think you need to take risk, you need to go work at an AI startup because he wants to fill that bucket of knowledge with really high yielding, relevant skill.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I don’t know, I think of him, I go, bro, roll the dice. You’ve got nothing to lose. You ain’t got a mortgage yet and…

NISCHA SHAH: Got kids in your 20s, you can play the long term game. Absolutely everything feels like it’s urgent. In your 20s you feel like you need the promotion, you feel like you need to invest right away, you feel like you need a pay rise immediately. But decades over dopamine and he’s got a long time and the things that he learns now, the things that he invests in, the skills and the risks that he take, he can bounce back from that.

And even when it comes to investing, actually when you’re in your 20s, you can be more risk averse because you have the upward trend of the market that will see you through. So 20s is the time to take the risk, take all the tiny experiments and just be a sponge where you absorb everything. Yeah, that’s what I’ll take.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about Lisa in the middle there?

NISCHA SHAH: Lisa is, she’s got a mortgage, she’s got an income and she’s got a good amount of savings and she is keen to start investing but she doesn’t know where to start. And this is where a lot of people fall into. They have the savings setting aside and this is she’s doing really well. Someone like in Lisa’s position. But if anyone listening to this is similar to Lisa’s position, chances are they’re not investing because they are scared and fearful of what to do and they don’t know where to start.

So Lisa, I would say have your emergency fund in place, pay off any debt. It doesn’t look like you have any debt. If your mortgage isn’t over 8% you can make more from instead of paying down your debt, you can make more investing. So you’re great to start wanting to invest. And I would say keep it simple, do it for the long term. Keep it simple, you want to. Especially if you’re just starting out your emotions and the behavior is going to play a key part in your investing. So 100% of your portfolio stick to index funds and target date the retirement funds at the moment. And then if you are ready as you get more senior, you haven’t increased your income, then you can dip into other assets should you want to.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’ve got Matt over there who’s a single parent earning about… So Lisa was earning roughly 140,000 a year. Matt’s earning 60,000 a year.

NISCHA SHAH: Over 50% of his income is going towards his rent. He has credit card debt of 1,500. So the first thing I would say looking at someone in Matt’s position is if you’ve already saved for your peace of mind fund, the first thing you want to do is pay off that high interest rate debt. It is like running with weights on your ankles. You want to take them off so you can start moving on to the next path of your financial journey. So focus on paying off that credit card debt.

He wants to increase income sources but has little time outside of work and being a dad. So that says to me that he probably doesn’t have time or energy to spend on trying to see if something’s going to work and see what comes out of it. He wants to make an immediate source of income. So the easiest way to increase your income is getting an increase in your current job, getting a pay rise and if not switching companies to see if you get a pay rise that way.

When I’m looking at my own career, when I stayed at the same organization, it was increase was between 3%, 5%, sometimes a bit higher. If I got promoted to 10%. And then when I switched companies, it was always between 20 and 30% when I moved. And I know that is I was in a lucky place where I had the movement to get those pay jumps and to get that salary increase. And not everyone’s in that position. But if you have, or if you’re in an industry which there is more path to earn more, then I’d definitely say first and foremost increase your income. You don’t have to put any more time towards that, given you also have children to look after as well.

If you’ve stopped, if you’ve already exhausted those two avenues, then the next thing I’ll say, if you want an immediate income, is picking up income streams that unfortunately might be tied to your time, but they will have an immediate impact on your income because that’s probably what you might be looking to do because your rent and I’m guessing your other living expenses are taking up a lot of your take home pay. So you want to find out that extra buffer to start paying towards the debt that you have. Things like, so this could be things like selling secondhand stuff online, selling products online, renting out a spare room if you have that on Airbnb, things that you don’t actually need to put capital in to make money straight away from.

Spending Priorities and Personal Values

STEVEN BARTLETT: Other things you never spend money on.

NISCHA SHAH: At this point in my life, me specifically, I don’t think I bought a designer item in two years, which is a lot for me because I was stripped out in the designer way beforehand. I’ve found that my validation in life has come through by work and through internally. And it took me on a journey to do that. And I just don’t believe in the premium prices that you pay for promoting another product or a brand.

If it’s for utility. If you’re buying a branded item or a designer for utility that is this design or this brand works better, then go for it. But if you’re doing it purely to show, then for me at this point in my life, it’s just a no go. I could spend that money in other ways that brings me a lot more fulfillment in different ways.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you spend on fast fashion instead of the luxury high end stuff?

NISCHA SHAH: Oh, that’s a good question. No, I don’t spend on fast fashion unless it’s a really urgent last minute buy and I haven’t found anything else. But I tend to have a capsule wardrobe, which means I could play around. I spend a good amount on quality pieces and that’s important to me. Quality pieces I could use time and time again and can switch in and out of. And I think for me, when it comes to clothing, it’s more just okay with work. It’s what can remove the decision making for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about books?

NISCHA SHAH: I think that is one area that I love spending money on. There’s an infinite return. There really is. And actually some of the breakthroughs I’ve had have come from the books I’ve read. Even the first book I read, which is Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That just that concept of understanding assets versus liabilities, just knowing that from an early age can start changing your thinking in a way that you wouldn’t be able to having a normal conversation.

Because the people you hang around with, the people who you spend time with, they have a massive impact on where you end up. And I think it’s easy to say just hang out with another crew or just hang out with a new crowd that pushes you, but actually for a lot of people, they don’t have access to that. And that’s where books, podcasts, YouTube videos, it almost has that averaging effect of the five people around you, it mirrors that effect. So even if you don’t have access to the people who you want to learn from by reading their book, watching the videos, listening to the podcast, you can still gain that knowledge. And it’s almost equivalent to you sitting with them for an hour.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re saying people should definitely subscribe.

NISCHA SHAH: Subliminal messaging.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You wear black a lot like me. Is that an intentional choice?

NISCHA SHAH: It started off because when I was doing my YouTube channel alongside working in banking, I had to find every way possible to eliminate any sort of decision making that will stop me from doing the thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

The Power of Systems Over Motivation

NISCHA SHAH: And so it was a way for me to create a system, not rely on motivation. So there was about four outfits of black that I’d always changed from, and it made my life a lot easier. Now this has carried through. It’s been a lot of. It just makes me think about things less. But no, I do also wear other colors just as much. It just happens to be that black is 60% of my wardrobe.

The Closing Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: Nischa, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where they’ll ask us to leave the question for the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question that’s been left for you is who is the one person that was, is responsible for the person that you are today and the reason why you are sitting here?

NISCHA SHAH: It goes back to the person who, when I started my YouTube videos and I got a lot of noise and a lot of people saying, oh, like, what is she doing? Does this make sense? The person who really kept me going was my dad. Yeah. He saw my videos and he said to me, what you’re doing is so good for the world. Your education is going to help so many people. Don’t stop. And I didn’t. So thanks, dad, for believing me when there was like nine or ten views on my videos. Wasn’t expecting that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s crazy how someone just saying a few words at the right moment can be so sort of pivotal to your like, trajectory. Does he know how much he inspired all of this?

NISCHA SHAH: I don’t think he knows that you sent to him. I sent him like a message a few months ago telling him like, hey, remember that day when I showed you my YouTube video and it was just me in my dining room and I couldn’t even speak properly and it was set up in weird lighting and it was getting nine or 10 views and you said, don’t stop. Keep passing this education down. And I said to him, I didn’t send that message to him and said, I’m so glad you did that because I’ve continued because of that. And we’re not really wordy with each other, but I think he heard it. I don’t know if he knows the extent, but I think he’ll be happy to know the extent of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Now you’re there with your tissues, Jack.

NISCHA SHAH: Thank you. Thanks. Yeah, I think we’re good.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Who is the one person that was, is responsible for the person that you are today and the reason why you’re sitting here now? And that is dad.

NISCHA SHAH: That is dad.

The Shocking Career Change

STEVEN BARTLETT: He must be pretty shocked to some degree like no one could have imagined and your channel would be this big and you’d be reaching this many people.

NISCHA SHAH: He didn’t expect it, I didn’t expect it. I think he believed that for him, he believed that a job was security for us. I’m one of three girls, I’m the middle sister. And all he wanted was for us to get a good job and be secure. So whilst this is beyond I could ever expect, when I quit and I quit taking a big pay cut, that was hard for him.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How big was the pay cut?

NISCHA SHAH: 84%.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you were on 220. 220, yeah. Which is about $300,000.

NISCHA SHAH: Yeah. And I was just about to get a six figure bonus. Well, I left before a six figure bonus just before the biggest bonus of my career. I negotiated it, I spent months negotiating it and two months before that, six figure bonus. Landed. I resigned.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why didn’t you just wait?

The Risk of Waiting vs. The Risk of Missing Out

NISCHA SHAH: There’s always going to be a carrot waved in front of your face. And that carrot’s going to come in different shapes, sizes, forms, and it’s going to be a distraction to keep you on the default path. The carrot for me was that bonus telling me, hey, just wait, just wait another two months and then wait another year and another year and five years and 10 years and just wait till you’re 60.

And I had this once in a lifetime opportunity that was just exploding on the side, and with it came all these people saying, hey, I’m so thankful for all of this. And I was getting DMs from people just pouring their life story to me. And there is no monetary value that beats that. There really isn’t.

And so I took a step back, I ran my numbers. It was 84% pay cut. I thought it still covers my mortgage, it covers my basic living expenses. The biggest risk isn’t quitting my job. The biggest risk is letting this once in a lifetime opportunity pass me by and never knowing where that path could have taken me. That was the biggest risk. And the hardest part was actually just letting go of the identity that I’d wrapped myself in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, what was identity?

Breaking Free from Identity Prison

NISCHA SHAH: My title was my identity. I’d worked in banking for nine years and I could sit at a dinner table, cling onto my title, say I worked in finance, and feel externally validated. And so that move to quit at the time that I did, from a career, a corporate career, which I’ve worked so hard for, it’s like it’s what I wanted for so long, and then just let go of that and say, I’m letting go of that identity. It took so much reframing in my mind and so much mind work and so many things I had to do to make myself feel comfortable, to say, okay, I’m not letting anything else dictate the way my life goes from here. It was a lot of work.

And I would say, if anyone else is listening to this, thinking, I’m in a place where I’m unhappy, I really want to do something new, but I’m scared and I don’t know what other people are going to say and what’s society going to say if I quit or take this other path. I could say the things that I did that really helped me.

And the first is spend more time on the path that you want to go down than around the people that are telling you otherwise, because so often we’re half in, half out we’re interested in something, but we’re not obsessed with it. And when you’re interested, you just kind of just do whatever needs to be done. But when you’re obsessed, you’re going to do whatever it takes. And this applies to anything, to changing your career, to being a parent, to being an entrepreneur. Become obsessed with that thing that you want to do, because that will give you the courage to make the hard decisions when they come.

The second thing, I think I made a video on this too. I wrote down on my phone, on Apple notes, and I wrote down all the things people were saying to me, the external noise. And underneath it, I had what my inner voice was saying. And it’s really easy when your inner voice isn’t loud for it to be diluted by what everyone else around you is saying. That at that point, if anyone said anything or if anyone is saying anything to plant seeds with doubt in your head, look at what your inner voice is saying. Read it, repeat it. Let that be louder than anything else that is happening around you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what was the external voices saying?

NISCHA SHAH: Well, when my channel started picking up, it was being shared into WhatsApp, groups of people I know and friends and friends and friends and friends. And it was just, you know, when you’re just starting something new and someone is breaking barriers, it’s just trying to pull them back, pull them back a little bit. This isn’t you mocking them subtly. Yeah. Why are you saying your numbers online? What are you doing? Lol.

And you’ve just got to remember the reason why I’m saying my numbers online. That is hard to do. It’s hard to sit there and say, this is my salary over nine years. It’s hard to do that. But I remind myself it’s to be transparent. It’s to help people make the decisions that help them with money. It’s the same reason why I came back and said, I want to say this, because it’s the transparency. And I think the third thing I think everyone should, like, kind of take into account when they’re making. Hold on, give me a second.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where’s this emotion coming from? It’s very deep inside you.

The Pain Behind the Purpose

NISCHA SHAH: There was a lot of pain during my career, and I felt really trapped at times. I didn’t know how to escape. But also because I know a lot of people are probably hearing this and thinking, I’m also in that place. And so I really feel like my purpose is to help as many people to go from feeling trapped to freeing themselves and using money to do that.

And so I guess that’s why I’m feeling like it’s bringing it all up, because this is just alignment for me and it’s just like bringing back the memories of where I was at that time and what I had to do to, like, just take that cut. Because at the end of the day, no one else has to deal with your. With the decisions you make in life more than you. They have to deal with maybe the consequence of a moment, but only you have to deal with the consequences of all the decisions that you make in life.

Only you have to go to a job and work for a company that you don’t want to work in. Only you have to live that day. Only you have to be with a partner if that’s the reason you chose, if you chose because everyone else is saying it. Only you have to do that. Only you have to grow old with the memories of what could have, should have, would have been and live with the what if.

And that’s why, I guess there’s so many people that I know and that probably listening to this, that no, deep down, there’s something more out there. And I just want to, if anything, give them the courage to say, take that risk. It’s usually a calculated risk. And if it’s to do with your money and finances, spend some time, make sure you have your emergency fund or whatever it is that’s needed, but align your money to match your life decisions because it can really be freeing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you spoken much about the pain? Why?

NISCHA SHAH: It’s. My content is personal finance. It’s not really about me, it’s about personal finance. I’m trying to educate people. Yeah, I didn’t. I probably wouldn’t have spoken about it here if you didn’t ask me the question about where it’s come from. It’s taken me back to the start.

And sometimes you go into a journey and you get tunnel vision and you forget why you did it and you forget why you started and you forget all the people that helped you on that journey. And there was a lot of people that helped me at different points. My partner, my mum, my dad, my sisters, like, they’ve all helped me at different points. And people I learned from, my mentors, like, it’s just all a reminder as to how it started and how different things have lined up.

The Hardest Day

STEVEN BARTLETT: What was the hardest day? When you look back through that transition that you’ve been on, was there a hardest day, a hardest moment?

NISCHA SHAH: The hardest day was that morning when I emailed my manager to get on a zoom call. And I said, I’m turning down that bonus. I’m leaving banking. That was the hardest.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I was a fly on the wall, yeah. What would I have seen that day?

NISCHA SHAH: You’d see a girl in her late 20s taking or saying no to a path that could make money. That was very certain. And that followed the default path to go to a path where she wasn’t sure if she was going to make money. She didn’t know how it would turn out. But she did it because it meant so much to her.

And she did that because she saw the impact she was having. And in her 10 years or nine years in banking, she’s never felt like she’s had that impact on individuals. It’s been on for corporates or for sovereigns. It’s never been for specific people or day to day people who need it. And she did it and she didn’t know where it was going to lead her.

The Immigrant Family Pressure

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there an element of being a first or second generation immigrant that ties into this? Because I hear so often when people come up to me in the gym and you know, their mother’s African. Like my mother’s African and I was born in Africa and so my mother’s Nigerian and put tremendous weight on, you know, going to university and becoming a success in the eyes of the public.

And then I hear a lot from sort of more Asian first generation immigrants or second generation immigrants that they feel are, you know, the doctor, lawyer, can’t remember what the third one was. Doctor, lawyer, something, accountant, maybe finance. Do you think that plays a role.

NISCHA SHAH: Into why you go down a certain path?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. In terms of like if you’re at home and you’re, you have first generation immigrant parents and they see success as like one of three jobs, it becomes harder to break out. Like breaking out basically makes you a failure at home.

The Guilt of Leaving Security Behind

NISCHA SHAH: I think there’s two things. I think it’s definitely, that’s a big part of it, but also seeing what your parents did and how hard they worked to get you onto a path of security, which is a job, and then saying, yeah, you worked really hard and I’m throwing that away. There’s a lot of guilt that comes with that. So I think it’s both.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you feel that guilt?

NISCHA SHAH: I did at the time. Massive guilt. Massive guilt. I couldn’t tell anyone that I was quitting until after I quit. The only person who knew was my then boyfriend, now husband.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Your parents didn’t know?

NISCHA SHAH: They didn’t know till after I quit. I couldn’t tell them why, because I knew that if they said something, I might have just changed my decision.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You think they would have said something?

NISCHA SHAH: I don’t know. But when I told them, they supported it because they knew it was also too late. I think they might have just said, hey, this is secure.

Making Reversible Decisions

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, maybe there’s something in that. Maybe in those big decisions where, as you say, you’re going to deal with the consequences yourself, both the upside and the regret. Maybe consensus and focus groups aren’t needed in such a moment when we should be tuning into the voice inside. Because, yeah, external voices will just complicate those things.

But I also think, you know, I say this to people a lot when they come up to me and they say, I’m in this situation. I’m in finance, I’m working in the city. I’ve got this dream of being a violin player in Peru. The first question I often ask them is like, could you go back if you’re wrong? Because if you could go back if you’re wrong, then that’s what we call a Type One decision in business, which is a door that is reversible.

And so many people spend 1 year, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years of their life stood in front of a Type One decision, a door that they could walk back through if they’re wrong. And actually, it’s just such a crazy shame not to make those Type One decisions at speed if it’s reversible. And it’s so crazy because 95% of the time when I asked someone that question, they respond. They said, yeah, I could go back to investment banking if I was wrong. I’m like, go do the violin thing, then go fail. It might work out, whatever, but come back here if you can.

NISCHA SHAH: You won’t have that pain of what if?

STEVEN BARTLETT: The what if? Yeah. And I remember reading that study from Bronnie Ware, palliative nurse who interviewed people on their deathbeds. And I think the number one regret is not living the life that I think I could have lived. I’ve always remembered that. I thought, okay, so if it’s reversible, then maybe go through that door as fast as you can.

Final Thoughts and Appreciation

STEVEN BARTLETT: Nischa, thank you so much for doing what you do. It’s really incredibly important. And I think the very fact that your channel has been so resonant and so far reaching speaks to an unmet demand in people’s understanding of finance. But also having a voice that they can very much relate to, that simplifies, makes complicated things accessible, but also just a human being that is relatable in many forms.

Your intentions of why you’re doing what you’re doing are so abundantly clear. And I could see that in the emotion. I could see that you really, really do care about other people. And actually your decision to take a leap from the world of investment banking, which was much more secure and high status in many people’s eyes at that moment in time, was one also inspired by the fact that you want to do good for the world. And that is exactly what you’re doing.

So I highly recommend everybody goes and checks out your channel. I’m going to link it below if they want to continue this conversation, because you make very actionable, concise, clear videos on all the subjects we’ve talked about, but many more. And also to go follow you on social media, which I’ll also link everywhere else. But I just want to thank you for your time and hopefully we can talk again soon when you’ve written a book and the book comes out.

NISCHA SHAH: Thank you so much, Steven. It’s been a pleasure.

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