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In this episode, Steve is back with Jess, the podcast's resident psychologist, to look at one of the most powerful (and most ignored) forces in financial decision-making: fear. Not the dramatic, horror-film kind the quieter, more corrosive kind that sits behind the mortgage anxiety, the "I can't bring myself to invest" conversation, the Sunday dread, and the little voice that goes off every time your boss says "can I grab you for 10 minutes tomorrow?". Jess's argument is that fear isn't the enemy, it is a brain that evolved for sabre-toothed tigers trying to help us make sense of a world of emails, markets and open-plan offices. The trick isn't to get rid of it. It is to notice it, name it, and ask the one question that keeps turning out to matter more than any of the specific worries themselves.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Jess's childhood fears (falling down the stairs, dentists severe enough that she couldn't say her own name in the chair) and Steve's Essex-boy-in-Birmingham Easter play story where the audience laughed at his first-ever public speech
• Why the human brain hasn't caught up with the modern world we are still, physiologically, scanning for sabre-toothed tigers while worrying about Monday morning meetings
• The "Sunday fear" and the boss who says "can I grab you for 10 minutes tomorrow" without context and why the lack of specifics is often the real problem
• Fear of judgement, extrinsic vs intrinsic motivation, and why "poor Henry" keeps asking his partner the same reassurance question ten different ways
• How fear shows up differently in different people some go quiet, some avoid, some get angry and why a lot of what looks like anger is actually fear underneath
• Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's research on loss aversion losing feels roughly twice as painful as winning feels good and how that quietly shapes every money decision
• The mortgage anxiety case study, including Jess's own honest confession, and the "self-fulfilling fear" of leaving money in cash because you're scared of investing then losing purchasing power to inflation
• The one question Jess says every fear ultimately boils down to: can I handle this? And the usually-very-strong evidence from your own life that the answer is yes
• The tools that actually work: writing it down, giving the fear a name, the superhero pose, saying "I'm excited" out loud three times, and the RuPaul technique ("Hey girl, I hear what you're saying, but you go over there right now")
• Why the financial planning plan-B-through-D approach to money is really the structured version of the same conversation making concrete the thing your brain was being vague and scary about
• The retirement "who will I be?" fear, and why losing the title "director" or "CEO" lands harder than most people expect
• Steve and Jess's closing reframe: every challenge you've overcome proves you're more capable than your fear lets you believe and the better question is "what if I can handle it?"

Key takeaway:

Steve and Jess's argument is that fear is not information about the future it is information about your brain. The specific worries change (public speaking, dentists, the market, the mortgage, Monday morning), but the mechanics are the same: an evolved alarm system trying to protect you from threats that mostly aren't there. The way out isn't to argue with it. It is to notice it, name it, write it down, ask whether it is helpful or unhelpful, and ask whether you could handle whatever it is afraid of. In nearly every case, backed by every challenge you have already overcome, the honest answer is yes.

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In this episode, Steve is back with Jess, the podcast's resident psychologist, to look at the beliefs about money most of us picked up before we were even old enough to open a bank account and why those beliefs, quietly repeated for decades, do more to shape our finances than any spreadsheet ever will. Jess's argument, running through the episode, is that we don't learn through facts. We learn through stories. The ones planted in our heads as children, watered by repetition and by the feelings around them, grow into oak trees of belief and those oak trees decide, without asking us, whether we spend, save, invest, feel guilty, negotiate, hoard, treat ourselves or refuse to. This episode is about noticing what has been growing in the back of your mind and choosing whether to let it keep growing.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

● Steve's win at the Money Marketing Awards, Jess's newly-booked solo Morocco horse-riding trip (yes, the one from the magic wand question), and the two theatre nights she's booked to prepare for it

● The "acorns and oak trees" model of belief how ideas planted by parents, repeated at the right emotional pitch, become the invisible rules we live by decades later

● Steve's mum telling him not to mix tomato sauce and brown sauce because "they're poisonous" and Steve still not mixing his sauces to this day

● Classic inherited money stories: "money doesn't grow on trees", "never a borrower or a lender be", "don't buy things on credit", "rich people are greedy", and the equally powerful "you only live once, spend it"

● The new money stories emerging in real time cryptocurrency, online banking distrust, the manosphere's borrowed-fortune performance, and what happens when a generation forms beliefs off social media rather than parents

● The Cambridge finding that most money beliefs are set by the age of seven or eight and the honest note from both Steve and Jess that this makes parenting a rather high-stakes business

● Why financial advisers (fund managers, heads of compliance, heads of proposition) use financial planners themselves, and the "builder's house" problem of knowing the rational answer but never applying it to yourself

● The three patterns Jess sees most often in the room: overspending, oversaving, and the person who is happy to spend on everyone else but cannot bring themselves to spend on themselves

● The retirement transition problem the belief that money is earned through work, and the emotional pain of watching hard-earned assets start to go down for the first time

● The practical fix: pay yourself a "salary" from your investments so it feels earned; and Jess's reframe that it IS your salary, just 20 years after you actually earned it

● The four-step way to work with a money story: notice it, question where it came from, identify the underlying belief, and plant a new one

● Morgan Housel's line from The Psychology of Money doing well with money has little to do with how smart you are and a lot to do with how you behave

Key takeaway:

Steve and Jess's argument is that money is almost never a numbers problem. It is a story problem. The scripts installed in childhood often by well-meaning parents who were themselves running scripts from theirs run underneath every financial decision most of us make without knowing they are there. The way out isn't more information. It is a slower, more curious conversation with yourself: what did I inherit, is it still true, is it still helpful, and what would I plant instead? The acorn you water today grows into someone else's oak tree tomorrow for you, for your partner, and quietly for your kids.

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In this episode, Steve is joined by Ellie Pemberton, chartered financial planner at Lucent (and, at 25, one of the youngest chartered advisers in the profession) while Jess is off on holiday. It's the second in a semi-planned series where Steve turns the microphone on the people at Lucent that clients may or may not have met the ones actually doing the work.

Ellie fell into financial planning the way almost everyone does. She googled "finance places near me" during the summer after her first year at Liverpool, messaged a handful of managing directors on LinkedIn, and one said yes to a coffee. Six years on, she is a chartered adviser at Lucent, has done her professional exams faster than most, and has already built a book of clients who have walked over hot coals, retired years earlier than they expected, and one who was told after seeing five advisers that Ellie and Steve were the only ones who actually listened.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• The Liverpool coffee-and-LinkedIn story that got Ellie into a financial planning firm entirely by accident, and why she thinks the profession is far too invisible to young people
• What she loves about the job the blend of technical problem-solving and human psychology, and the professional euphemism for being "very nosy"
• Getting chartered fast: the six-month diploma sprint (an exam a month for six months), and why Lucent having all five advisers chartered is unusual in a profession where only around 20% carry the qualification
• The lesson the exams could not teach her that it doesn't matter how technically correct the plan is if you cannot communicate it in a way the client understands
• Being young and female in a profession where the average adviser age is 48, and Ellie's blunt take on the "clients won't like you because you're young" advice she was given at 20
• The genuine advantages of a younger adviser thinking about your retirement rather than their own, sticking around long enough to see it through, and helping the next generation too
• The fire walker story: the client who retired, then went on to do charity events walking over hot coals, glass and breaking arrows on their neck
• The moment Ellie first told a client "yes, you can retire" and the 74 times she'd checked it first
• Ellie and Steve's new YouTube channel, Ellie and Steve Tackle, and why they think the profession's information needs unpacking for a generation getting its financial advice from TikTok
• Carl Richards' line that clients don't hire advisers for technical knowledge they hire them for what that knowledge lets them do
• The closing case for peace of mind: why the best question a client can ask is not "what does it cost?" but what they'll know afterwards that they don't know now

Key takeaway

Ellie's argument is that the future of financial planning does not sit inside the exam syllabus or the pension calculator. It sits inside the ability to sit with a person, actually listen, and communicate the answer in a way that lets them do the thing they came in wanting to do retire earlier than they thought, take on the fire-walking gig, give a leg-up to family, or simply relax into the plan they have already worked their whole life to earn. The exams matter. The chartered status matters. But communication matters more.