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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.

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In this episode, Steve is joined for the first time by his business partner and Chief Operating Officer, Hannah Knight Niblett the person who runs everything that clients don't see, and the reason Steve gets to be the swan gliding across the lake while she does the paddling underneath.

Hannah has spent 25 years in financial services, starting in a bank at 18 and qualifying as a financial adviser at around 20, in an industry that was even more male-dominated than it is today. She and Steve first crossed paths at Norwich Union without ever meeting, and eventually connected through a LinkedIn message Steve sent at three or four in the morning from a tent while camping. Nine years on, she has helped turn Lucent from a one-person operation into a fully-fledged business and this episode is the honest tour of what has actually gone into that.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Hannah's route into financial services at 18, and the comment from a senior adviser early on "you can't do this, you've got no life experience" that became a driver rather than a stopper
• The tiny bits of advice (like don't wear fluorescent nail varnish) that were meant to give a young woman in a male industry the best possible chance
• The Michael Kitces line on suits younger advisers should wear them to project authority, older ones shouldn't because it becomes intimidating
• The scale of the work behind every client meeting: evidence gathering, research, compliance, data protection, money laundering, reports, risk management, marketing and disaster recovery
• Why Lucent has 5 financial advisers but 18 people in total, and the external annual audit the firm has become an "example of what good looks like across the UK" for
• How Steve and Hannah actually met the four-figure number of people Steve says he tried to hire before her, the LinkedIn message sent from a cold tent, and the second-interview "coincidence" where a photographer just happened to be there
• The Christmas tree Hannah brought to the office on her first day in 2018, and the three years of Steve's health scare, COVID and network collapse that followed
• Steve and Hannah as visionary and integrator (courtesy of Gino Wickman's Rocket Fuel), why Steve comes back from every holiday with a hundred new ideas, and why Hannah occasionally wishes he wouldn't
• The Cambridge hotel story: Steve, recovering from an operation, overhearing another firm's adviser bore a couple to death with pie charts, and how close he came to throwing the china on the floor
• Hannah's take on what makes a great financial planner today empathy over qualifications, probing for feel rather than fact, and being properly human
• AI in financial planning: Hannah's view that it gives time back for the human bits but will never tell you what your actual goals are
• The two questions Hannah wishes people would ask a prospective planner instead of "how much does it cost", "how much better off can you make me?" and "what's the cost of not doing it?"

Key takeaway:

Steve and Hannah's argument is that a good financial planning firm is a machine of many hidden parts, most of which the client never sees. But the reason those hidden parts matter is that they free up the adviser to do the one thing no piece of technology or compliance policy can do: sit with another human being and actually listen. Financial planning isn't a pension, an ISA, a portfolio or a pie chart. It's a conversation about what you want your life to look like, held with someone who cares enough to ask, and backed by a team who care enough to make sure the answers hold up.

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In this episode, Steve is joined again by Jess, the podcast's resident psychologist, to look at the strange irony at the heart of a lot of financial planning: the very habits that get people wealthy in the first place frugality, self-denial, careful choices are exactly the habits that stop them enjoying the life those savings were meant to buy.

Jess has a name for it: FEDS - Financial Permission Deficit Syndrome. It isn't clinical. It isn't in a textbook. But Steve sees it every week in the office, and Jess sees it every week in her practice: people who have more than enough money, who know it's fine to spend, and still can't bring themselves to do it. This episode looks at where that habit comes from, why the numbers on a spreadsheet often can't fix it, and the small tools people can use to give themselves permission to actually enjoy what they've built.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Jess's made-up-but-accurate diagnosis: FEDS, or Financial Permission Deficit Syndrome
• The great irony of financial planning: the habits that get you wealthy are the ones that stop you enjoying it
• Why nobody ever set money aside thinking "I'll save this so I can never spend it", and why drawing down should feel like paying yourself a salary you earned earlier
• Muscle memory, identity and the tribal "how we do things around here" that shapes 50 years of spending patterns
• Inheritance guilt: how careful parents can leave children too anxious to enjoy what they've been left
• Loss vs gain framing: why "spending £4,000 on a holiday" hits differently to "gaining a family memory"
• Scarcity stories from childhood ("money doesn't grow on trees") that stick in your head like worms decades later, whispering "you don't deserve it"
• The five things money is actually for: security, freedom, experiences, relationships and making a difference and the sixth thing (more money) that Jess and Steve say does not belong on that list once you already have enough
• Jess's regrets about turning down GB kayaking training and an England basketball tournament in Italy because anxiety got in the way
• Steve's Machu Picchu regret the trip with a mate at 23 he turned down for a settee that's now sitting at his mother-in-law's
• The financial fix: showing people the numbers year after year and why that often still isn't enough
• Steve's "forfeit" trick pay yourself more, and if you don't spend it, buy him an ice cream
• Jess's "joy budget" idea pair the boring budget (Wi-Fi, water, electric) with one for horses in Morocco, super-fast cars, breakfasts out, and shows with friends

Key takeaway:

Steve and Jess's argument is that money that never gets spent isn't wealth it's just numbers on a spreadsheet that quietly follow you to the grave. Life is not a rehearsal, money is a tool, and the mistake usually isn't spending too much on the holiday, the horse-riding, the cowboy hoedown, or the friend's round at the pub. The mistake is the one you never take. Notice the scarcity story you're still carrying, question whether it still applies, and give yourself the permission you've spent 50 years earning. Fill your cup up. Then fill someone else's.

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In this solo episode — the first time Steve has recorded without Jess — he opens with three impressions (Martin Luther King, JFK and Steve Jobs) before making a case he's been making his whole career: that financial planning isn't really about money. Money matters, of course. But investments, pensions, ISAs and tax aren't the destination. They're the vehicle. The destination is the life someone actually wants to live.

This episode is a walk through what it takes to uncover what that life looks like, why most people arrive at their first meeting with symptoms rather than goals, and why the best answer isn't always a rigid 30-year plan.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

● Steve's three-impression opening — MLK's dream, JFK's moon, and the Steve Jobs calligraphy story that ends with "you can only connect the dots looking backwards"

● Why "I want a better investment return" isn't really the goal, and the question that gets underneath it

● The difference between symptoms ("I want to reduce tax", "can I retire?") and real life goals, and why the money is a hammer, not the house

● The Five Whys technique — asking "why?" five times until you get past the round numbers and into something meaningful

● Goal discovery questions that don't mention money at all: what is important about money to you, what does success actually look like, if money wasn't a concern how would you live

● The magic wand question, and why the answer is almost never about ISAs

● The Maldives visualisation exercise, including the client who ends up flirting with the barman

● Why over half of specific savings plans never actually happen — because you change, circumstances change, and the area you loved five years ago doesn't feel the same today

● The slightly controversial line: too much planning can be the thief of joy

● Steve Jobs and the people who never set fixed goals but took interesting opportunities and let the dots connect themselves

● The three things money can actually do for you: pay for what you want now, pay for what you want later, or go to other people so they can live better

● The closing reframe: people don't want pensions, ISAs or tax planning — they want the things those tools let them do

● Steve's own admission that he didn't plan to be a financial planner, and the pork-scratchings story in a Norwich Union interview that shaped his career

● The closing line Steve borrows: "enjoy yourself, it's later than you think"

Key takeaway:

Steve's core argument is that great financial planning isn't really about the money. Money is a tool. The plan is a tool. The real work is understanding what someone wants their life to be, then making sure the money supports that life rather than replacing it. The best planners are students of human behaviour, not portfolio composition. And the biggest mistake most people make isn't with their investments — it's saving hard for a future they might not get to, while quietly missing the present they're already living in. Set a direction, stay flexible, and don't sacrifice today's happiness for a tomorrow you may never have.

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In this episode, Steve is joined by Jess, the podcast's resident psychologist, to look at why so many of us secretly suspect our success is a fluke, why the term "imposter syndrome" is more medically specific than the way most people use it, and how that quiet inner voice can be one of the most damaging forces sitting between people and their own money.

The tribal wiring that once kept our ancestors safe from being picked off by the group still lives inside modern brains. The problem is that fitting in and keeping your head down was a useful survival strategy for a hunter-gatherer — and a much less useful one for someone trying to run a business, sell a company, or spend the money they've worked their whole life to build up. This episode looks at where that voice comes from, why it hits so hard around money in particular, and what to do about it.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Why Jess has a chip on her shoulder about the term "imposter syndrome", and where the clinical version sits compared to the everyday one most of us mean.
• The concept of self-efficacy — confidence in specific situations — and why you might feel like a natural in Tesco but a total imposter in Waitrose.
• The evolutionary story: how tribal survival made standing out risky, and why our brains still haven't quite caught up with the modern world.
• The Marianne Williamson passage Steve reads out — "our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure".
• The gender research: why women are more likely to attribute success to luck or the team, and men are more likely to own it — and why "you go, girl" is Jess's take on that.
• Why the 70% figure people quote for imposter syndrome is, in Steve's view, probably far too low.
• The financial consequences: people who won't spend money they've earned, people who cling to it because they're scared it will never come back, and people who feel guilty just for having it.
• The pattern with inherited money — how careful parents can leave their 60- or 70-year-old children unable to enjoy what they've been left.
• Business owners at the point of sale, and why a lump sum can trigger a whole new wave of "do I really deserve this?" thinking.
• Jess's practical approach: notice the thought, question it, ask if it's true or helpful, and try a different response.
• The horse-riding-in-Morocco daydream Jess keeps talking herself out of, and Steve's own story of being terrified into stage-fright and forcing himself onto the podium anyway.
• Why "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" is a cheesy line that has genuinely earned its keep.
• The closing reminder: you do deserve it. Try. See what happens.

Key takeaway:

Steve and Jess's argument is that imposter syndrome, in the loose sense most people use the term, is a normal human experience — but the way we respond to it is a choice. The thoughts themselves aren't the problem; the problem is treating them as true and letting them quietly shape decisions about money, work and life. Notice the voice, question where it came from, and then take the shot anyway. The Aston Martin, the horses in Morocco, the posh tea bags, the safari, the business sale, the inheritance you were left — none of them are less deserved because someone in your head decided you weren't good enough. You do deserve it. Now go and do the thing.

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In this episode, Steve is joined by Rhiannon Goff, founder of SENDA (Special Educational Needs and Disability Advisors) and a financial adviser with 26 years of experience, the last 10 of which she has spent working exclusively with families who have a child or relative with special needs.

The traditional financial planning playbook assumes a future of independence: get money into the client's hands, maximise their inheritance, plan towards their retirement. For around one in five children in England, that playbook can quietly do harm. Inheritance can wipe out means-tested care. Junior ISAs that mature at 18 can disqualify someone from support. And money in the wrong hands can turn an already vulnerable person into a target.

This episode looks at what financial planning actually has to look like when the person at the centre of the plan might be non-verbal, dependent on means-tested care, or at risk of exploitation — and why this work shouldn't sit on the periphery of the profession.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Rhiannon's personal route into the field via her 16-year-old son Tristan, who has complex autism and is non-verbal, and how that lived experience shaped her practice.
• The ARC framework — Access, Risk and Care — and why every special needs financial plan has to be tested against all three.
• Why the natural estate planning instinct (get the money to the child) can be the single most damaging move a family makes.
• The role of trusts in special needs planning, particularly discretionary and disabled or vulnerable person's trusts, and how they protect against the "three harms".
• "Mate crime" — financial exploitation by people who befriend a vulnerable person — and why protection has to be balanced against autonomy.
• Why Junior ISAs are usually the wrong vehicle for a child with complex needs, including a real-world story involving a car auction, four bangers and a cul-de-sac.
• Steve's lived experience as a brother to someone with similar needs, and how his family has navigated bank limits and the tension between protection and independence.
• The importance of building "a team to carry on" — solicitors, trustees, accountants, planners and family — before the parents' hand is forced.
• How to find the right professionals: looking for TEP (Trust and Estate Practitioner) members, vulnerable client experience, and links to professional trustee corporations.
• The launch of SENDA in 2024, the LIBF-accredited foundation course now available for financial planners, and the community Rhiannon is building to support both advisers and families.
• Rhiannon's closing call: be ambitious. Don't plan around what someone can't do — plan towards what they can.

Key takeaway:

Rhiannon's argument is that special needs planning isn't a niche corner of the profession — it's a field where standard financial planning instincts can actively cause harm if applied without thought. The damage is rarely about bad intentions; it's about gaps in knowledge, professionals working in silos, and well-meaning grandparents funnelling money into vehicles that quietly disqualify a young person from the care they need. The fix is genuine collaboration, the right qualifications, and a mindset shift towards ambitious, hopeful planning. Build the team while you still can, look forward not back, and signpost to the right specialist even if you're not one yourself.