Forging Resilience
Join us as we explore experiences and stories to help gain fresh insights into the art of resilience and the true meaning of success.
Whether you're seeking to overcome personal challenges, enhance your leadership skills, or simply navigate life's twists and turns, "Forging Resilience" offers a unique and inspiring perspective for you to apply in your own life.
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Forging Resilience
76 Kevin Halborg: Creating Financial Resilience For an Uncertain World
What does a former commando know about financial freedom? As it turns out, quite a lot. In this illuminating conversation with Kev Halborg, chartered financial advisor and military veteran, we explore how true financial resilience creates the foundation for everything else in your life.
Kev shares his remarkable journey from council estate to financial advisor, revealing how early exposure to entrepreneurial thinking shaped his understanding of money. With refreshing clarity, he breaks down his three-part framework for building financial resilience: knowing your number through comprehensive auditing, establishing a fighting fund for emergencies, and implementing proper protections for yourself and your business.
The conversation takes fascinating turns as Kev explains the unexpected spillover effects of financial awareness - from weight loss to improved sleep and relationships. He challenges common misconceptions that financial resilience requires wealth, demonstrating how people at any income level can implement these principles. Parents will appreciate his practical approach to teaching children healthy money habits without transferring anxiety.
Business owners receive particularly valuable insights on continuity planning and protection strategies that not only safeguard families but enhance business value during potential sales. Kev's military background brings a unique perspective on risk management and preparedness that translates perfectly to financial planning.
Throughout our discussion, one truth emerges consistently: financial resilience begins with awareness and honesty. By understanding your current financial reality and implementing basic protective measures, you create the security needed to pursue growth in all areas of life. Connect with Kev on LinkedIn to continue the conversation and start building your own financial resilience today.
Connect with Kev through LinkedIn
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Welcome to Forging Resilience, exploring for a different perspective on strength and leadership. Join me as we discuss experiences and stories with guests to help gain fresh insights around challenge, success and leadership. By the way, I only record audio, I'm not using a video, so you can spend all that time doing your hair and doing press-ups.
Speaker 2:I was going to say, yeah, I've been getting the pump on me. It's a bit awkward that no.
Speaker 1:Today on Fortune Resilience, I'm joined by Kev Holberg. He's a chartered financial advisor, but he's not your typical one A former commando and a father, somebody whose passion is helping people and businesses become financially resilient. In a world full of noise and fear around money, kev helps bring clarity. I like my words, kev. Welcome to the show, buddy. Thank you for having me, mate. It's a pleasure to have you here, bud. Mate, straight off the bat, I'm going to ask you what is financial resilience, and then we'll tap into your story. So give me your definition of that, mate. Mate, and we'll dig into some frameworks later. But okay.
Speaker 2:So I think my definition of financial resilience is there's a number of components within it. I think the first part is knowing our number and we'll talk about this more knowing that we, we do not need a sleepless night because ultimately, we've got enough resource behind us for a given period of time. So part of that is understanding our number, our audit of how much we need each month, knowing that we've shared it with our significant others and we're working together. So there's a resilience in the relationship around finance, which is something I think is a key component that's missing. There's a resilience in the relationship around finance, which is something I think is a key component that's missing. And then, before we start a journey of growth, having that safety net, that sort of body armour before we go, because there's a lot in the space and we talked about noise there's a lot around sort of manifesting money and all this good stuff and there's something in that. But you can't do it without a baseline sort of place of security and safety, in my view, and basically creating that security.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we'll definitely dive into that later on, buddy, but Kev for our listeners, what brought you into the world of finance?
Speaker 2:It's a bit of a story of chance really. But if I go back to the very beginning, I grew up on a very sort of poor council estate and very grim actually, in south wales and, um, what was interesting is that the narrative around why we were there was always blame someone else. I think at the time it was probably thatcher's fault. We were all there, it was something along those lines. But there was a small group of us that identified that, whoever's fault it was, it was our responsibility to get our way out of it. And from a very young age I just found myself being around people who were very entrepreneurial and their parents were quite similar. I mean, we would refer to it today as a sort of side hustle. So from about quite graphically remember, from about 10 and 11, I was just surrounded by people who were constantly trying to run a business, to trade, and I just grew up in that environment.
Speaker 2:I then joined the military at the age of 16, 17 actually, sorry and I just knew from day one that my mother forced on me you are going to have to own something, assets. You are going to have to own something assets, and for me that was property and also, if you like, skills and experiences that money couldn't buy, which is where the military came in. I then was quite lucky within the military because I'd invested quite early and, given that I was one of the few people in my unit that didn't spend all their wages on the first weekend, that sort of made me, in their eyes, warren Buffett. So I became the sort of go-to, very unqualified financial advisor at that stage where I was trying to help people get a grip of this thing that they'd not touched before, which was money, because, as you know, the recruitment pool back then, then I don't know how it would be.
Speaker 2:The same is that it's typically the same type of people that join the military, right, typically escaping something as well as running towards something right, and, um, yeah, I think them, I think it's fair to say in the military, the management of money for the individuals is relatively questionable. And, um, yeah, that was that. And I then carried on through the military career and then a sort of paramilitary career, if you like, in consultancy and things like that, and I was just very lucky that, as more money arrived, I just knew what to do with it, or to be less, um, less questionable with it than than most um what sort of advice were you giving?
Speaker 1:that? That's really interesting, that cover when you're in, when you're already serving, that, that lads are coming to you to learn how to not spend all the week, the money by the weekend.
Speaker 2:But what sort of things were you telling them back then then, mate, or well, I think a lot of it, nine times out of ten, because I was quite lucky I got promoted very early and I became a sort of two section, two I see in the section commander I think I was section commander by like 24 um, so I had all the problem children thrown to me anyway, because I was just the youngest lad right and you know what they were rough diamonds all of them, right, um, but typically it was around debt management because, bizarrely enough, we joined the military, you just sign everything you had access to to loans that made no sense and no one could understand. Um, I have a big issue with sort of duty of care of that looking back. But I think we all experienced it, we all saw it right. So a lot of it was just debt management. And then a few people then wanted to, once they turned that around, wanted to then start to buy property back since the early 2000s at this point and it was quite a popular thing to do.
Speaker 2:And obviously there was an opportunity for some people who managed to get to that stage where they could do a couple of northern ireland tours, get a lump sum. Please don't book an ibiza trip, just do something with it that you'll be, that your future self will be thankful for, and a few other guys did, and it's interesting that they've gone down a path of a similar route, where they haven't gone into finance but they've gone into law, they've gone into, and intellectually they were no different than the others. I just think there was a foundation, a financial foundation, around them that gave them that opportunity to lean into something new without fear. And I think I know we're moving into the psychology side of it. But I just think that's where we're missing a trick around the financial resilient component part of general resilience, if you like, but that was really.
Speaker 2:It was quite often nine times out of 10, it was debt management issues. Turn that around Once the debt disappears, don't fill that void with the same thing that caused the problem in the first place. Try and build something that your future self will be thankful for. And funny old thing, now I'm a chartered financial advisor.
Speaker 1:It's very similar because the foundations, the, the principles of it are pretty universal yeah, so after after the military, you did did a few years, uh, consulting mate and yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So I was in iraq for eight years and then I went across then to work for a middle eastern government, if you like, and then you know, if you're like a non-hostile environment, and it was during that period that you spend more time. I think you've worked well. I know you've worked in similar roles where you spend a lot of time reading books because you're in coffee shops and hotel lobbies for six, seven hours at a time. It's not as glamorous as it sounds and I was quite lucky. I was a reader and one night, one fateful night, in Paris, we were looking after the embassy there and it was due to it's actually Boris Johnson's fault that I ended up in financial planning.
Speaker 2:The sheikh arrived and I won't say what country it was for, and it was quite an interesting issue where at the time, there was political uncertainty. Boris Johnson was the foreign secretary and he's quite open now. He didn't trust the embassy. He didn't want the meeting there. So we were having to book lots of hotel rooms all across the city because another Middle Eastern country were deliberately trying to listen to our bosses' meetings, so we were creating an evening of deception.
Speaker 2:So we were bouncing around and it was probably about one in the morning by the time I ended up in this hotel lobby and I'd finished my book. There was no client to look after and there was a small corner of almost like a small library and the only book I could see that was in English was a white book and I picked it up and it had to do with finance and I just started reading it and I thought, wow, this is amazing, this is interesting, and I had little tests at the end of every chapter and I was filling it all in and checking my answers at the back and I was getting them right and I thought wow, this is interesting.
Speaker 2:I've never had any formal training around finance and I still had no idea what this was. So I then rang the company and said see if I do the exam, um, um for it. And they suggest they put me on the exam. Just kept reading this book, literally couldn't let go of it. It was almost like a child with a teddy bear just wouldn't let go of it and um, I sat, the exam passed and it was this start of, if you like, the financial planning career. It was one of the first ones. It's called uk financial regulation, so you can imagine how interesting I am if I think about that and get excited about it. Right, and that was where it started. Um, all because of boris was late.
Speaker 2:I ended up reading it for about an hour before he turned up and bumbled him into a, into a, into a hotel room with everyone else and then but it was strange because what it really did was my journey from the council estate right to where I was.
Speaker 2:I'd come across financial services, a lot on problems, the problem of money, because most of us look at it as a problem, unfortunately, and so did I, and this book was almost giving me the tools immediately and I could almost picture in my mind oh, that's what happened then.
Speaker 2:I could have done this, this product would have worked for that. That was why I paid too much tax then and it was almost like reliving my life through this book and other people's. I mean, I've seen the pain points of, you know, on my estate, people's cars being taken off from the bailiffs, and they didn't just lose their car, they lost their dignity, they lost a lot. You know, nothing will kick your resilience out of your soul as quick as that as a public humiliation of a sort of receivership in front of your neighbours, right, particularly in those days this was the late 80s, early 90s, right and it just really allowed me to find that purpose again. And I think when we leave the military we all lose a sense of purpose, and it was just like all my prayers had been answered. I've now got a purpose and a duty to help others in an area where it touches everybody, and I'm eternally grateful for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in terms of those early days of learning mate you talked about, yeah, the problem of money. What is it? The biggest problem or the biggest blocker that you see, both personally and from your experience? People have around money or with money.
Speaker 2:I think so, martin, our mutual friend Martin Jones, professor Martin Jones, he gave a description of stress which I thought answered it perfectly. So the definition of stress anxiety, thought answered it perfectly. So he he, the definition of stress anxiety. All that stuff is is the imbalance between the load of the challenge and the resources you've got. I think with money it's unique because where we just do not, we run away from even learning about it, most of us right is that we've got a stress around money. Where we've got two issues there's an imbalance of the resources we've got to face the challenge, but in reality we don't even know what the challenge is, we just know it's there.
Speaker 2:And I think really and I'm fortunate enough throughout my unique lived experience, much like you, where I've lived with millionaires a billionaire, sorry and I've had friends lose everything through bankruptcy, and I've had friends lose everything through bankruptcy and I think everyone has a challenge around this relationship with money, and it just can't be a coincidence that we typically all go through the same system of training and schooling and then we inherit it from our parents as well, and I think there's no criticism to our parents. So I think the biggest problem is actually all progress starts with the truth and it's identifying the ground truth of our relationship with money or our understanding of our current financial situation. And that's really nine times out of ten where the problems lie. And once you fix it, I always educate people. So I don't give financial advice until people become my clients. I take people through a framework where it's just education and at the end of it they can sort of work out their own route and their own path and then we can then start layering in actual financial advice and specific stuff later.
Speaker 2:But actually the bulk of it is back to that. Oh, I do need to do my 10,000 steps a day. I was only doing 3,000. I do need to stop eating 7,000 calories because I, you know, and I wasn't even enjoying it I actually prefer this meal and it's 4,000. It's literally that within the world of money. But for some reason it has a real disproportionate negative control over us Not all of us, but most of us.
Speaker 1:So, as a father, then, mate, what, what sort of things are you teaching your lad? Or how do you speak about money in a way that's more neutral or balanced, so that he's not inheriting everybody else's fears?
Speaker 2:and assumptions. Um, it's a tool of abundance is the first one. I mean, you know the two central banks printed off trillions, trillions and trillions of dollars in the last decade. We are printing this stuff right Now. It doesn't mean we've got access to it, but you know there is an abundance there.
Speaker 2:But we also need to understand our day-to-day actions, like everything else is. You know, our children watch us with everything we do and I'm conscious of they will never see me flapping, even if the inside I might be. They'll never see me flapping about money. So that's the first start. I don't want to start them on the bad foot. If that's all I can do, that's a great start. Now, obviously, he watches what I do and I call it the wealth habits, and he will verbalize them, probably weekly, quite comfortably. He's nine now, but probably from about the age of six he understands what the diversification need of owning things that in the future will give us some income, will help solve some of the problems we face day to day. But I think, to answer your question, the starting point is just don't let them have a bad relationship with money.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great one, but how do we even?
Speaker 1:catch it if we're not aware of it. Well, there's no doubt. There's no doubt.
Speaker 2:I put perceptions of mine onto my kids and yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree, but it can always be undone, right. So, yes, yeah, similar. I mean, you know, um, we want them to understand the value of money. We want them to understand that we, you know, don't get me wrong he, he, he understands. He has 10 pound a week pocket money and he has to a minimum save two, and then a minimum he saves into what he calls invested into and he calls diversified assets. He calls it a thousand company. So that's it. That's a habit which is not breaking now. We've been doing that since he was six. He's never not. That's a good start, right?
Speaker 2:So the money comes first and it's already part of it, is, is, is spent for your future self, um, and that will undo some of the negatives, because, you know, we talk about that and I talk about compounding a lot with him, and it's not just in money, but it's even things like he does five press-ups a day, does five air squats a day, does two minutes of boxing in the morning and he has to have five blueberries a day. I know this sounds a bit of a strange conversation when we're talking about money, but actually I can say well, how many is that a month? How many is that in a year, you know your 1,000 berries in one go. You're not going to be able to do it. But if I ask you now now we've saved £2 a week, we've invested £2 a week if I ask you to give me £1,000 in an emergency, you could. We couldn't do it overnight, so I think that's you know.
Speaker 2:He doesn't have a relationship around money and my wife. So it's an interesting piece when we talk about being surrounded by business owners. I married my wife's indian for driving, so I ended up gravitating to somebody where everyone in her family's a business owner and, to be clear, you don't need to encourage an indian family to to be, to be, uh, to be mindful about money. Um, you know they are. They are exceptional at it and where's and there's an interesting dichotomy of my upbringing and their upbringing it's the biggest thing that I was always told, but schooling and at home, never talk about money. I always talk about money. I don't want to talk about money, right?
Speaker 1:I don't mean one down the street yeah, just say guess what I mean?
Speaker 2:I mean, you know when, when ash's family and they, you know, there's a get together, there's always a conversation around money. What are you doing? Have you thought about this? Why aren't you doing that? Holding people to account, helping each other out, understanding the value of that is really important, and Yastim, my son, is around that as well. So it's not just me, I'm not, because I'm conscious that I might be over-forcing it and at some point I'm not going to be as cool. I'm getting significantly less cool in his eyes already because he's now nine. Um, is that him hearing it, hearing it from a third party, might help as well?
Speaker 1:yeah, there's some real interesting points there, mate, and probably most of us as adults can take away, and that's the, the awareness of of money, doing the basics, the literacy and and and those concepts. Introducing that an early, early, early stages is very beneficial. Like you say, it compounds it, regardless of whether that's press-ups for us as adults or steps or financial awareness. But yeah, so you talk about financial resilience, kev, and I know you've got a bit of a framework which would be great. Just to touch on and knowing your number, could you give us a quick outline of that framework so that any listeners could take a few things away as adding to their toolkit, mate?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly. So this is, if you like, the onboarding education piece, because I want my clients, if they become clients, to be armed with a level of financial resilience so we can work together as an equal partnership. Right, giving them something, but it also means that everyone I speak to gets something out of it. So I don't need you to be a client, you're going to go away with something and we start with this framework. And the first one and typically my clients are business owners or people that come to me are business owners but actually, wherever we stand back to that point, all progress starts with the truth. And I'll start with what I call profit and loss, and that's where we just basically encourage you.
Speaker 2:And it's the most painful part for many people and it's quite triggering for some people. But, with your significant other, you sit down on the coffee table and you do an audit of what I call profit and loss. Now, the profit is your income. That's a really easy one to work out, right, it's there, it's on your payslip, wherever else, if you're employed, if not, well, you can work that out later. But the expenditure one's more important.
Speaker 2:And, to steal a phrase from our friend Gaz, I like to think in ink. So I make them physically print off three months bank statements and then they have a blank piece of paper and they physically write in what they're spending. And it's a real eye-opener, that self-awareness, so they can be present. Because in a world of tap, tap, tap, knowing what you've been spending and this isn't about living in scarcity or austerity, it's just about knowing your number so I can then come to a point and go for a dignified life, we need I don't know as a household 6282 pounds. Brilliant. Now to have an accurate figure like that.
Speaker 2:I, I call it, I'm turning you into your own chief financial officer. Okay, so you've done a proper audit and you've used the word profit and loss, because it's a phrase that we use in senior level in industry. So when people sit there and say you know, oh, I'm terrible with money, I can't get my head around it I always add the word yet. Yet we're going to turn you into a chief financial officer with these first three points, right? So the audit starts with that. We're thinking in ink, we're getting to our number, we are sharing it with our significant other, right, and? Um, sometimes it goes well.
Speaker 2:Sometimes it needs marriage counseling, after whichever, way it works is that we get into that point of truth and and it's really interesting because I'll speak to some couples and I'll ask them things like well, what do you think you spend out each month? And they're saying nothing and you eating out sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they say nothing. Okay, well, this isn't about not eating out, but you spent 860 pound on average the last three months eating out. If you can't remember, it's probably not that memorable, so you might want to work on that now. If you say I eat a thousand pound a month, because I spend a thousand pound a month eating out and I absolutely love it, brilliant. We're aware we've got some awareness and we can work with it.
Speaker 2:But what we're trying to do is stop the sleepwalking tap, tap, tap, tap expenditure. And there's there's a lot of, there's a lot that can be. There's a lot of gold that can be gained here. So, for example, the price of one coffee a day sacrificed into your workplace pension scheme right, and you put it into a compound calculator so this is just education here is that if you're a higher-paid taxpayer, then on a £4 coffee over 25 years at a 6% investment growth, you'll have £170,000 more on your pension. If you average a 6% growth right Now you and your significant other do that You're not going to notice these small steps combined are no small thing, but imagine the level of confidence and agency and resilience you've got now, because you're starting to call them their numbers, not my numbers.
Speaker 2:We associate shame, embarrassment to numbers, our numbers. We get them out of our head, we think in them, we put them there so we can control them. It tends to make you more financially resilient. It makes the household more resilient in terms of relationships. And we've got our number, so I've got my number right. So let's just say it's back to that. I know 4,600 and something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the next stage from that, we then talk about what I call a fighting fund. Now it's referred to in our industry as a contingency fund or emergency fund. My view is it's too tame a phrase. This is one of the biggest bangs for your book for physical resilience, in my view, and all the academic data and all my qualitative research that I do day to day proves that. And your fighting fund allows you to fight back against uncertainty around money.
Speaker 2:Because when do we worry about money, money? Typically two in the morning, when we can't sleep. We then don't sleep, wake up in the morning, be grouchy, we snap with the kids, we snap with that. We then hate ourselves. We're eating carbs all day. We're tap, tap, tap. We're back into the cycle of doom. All right, actually I can go.
Speaker 2:My fighting fund will be a representation, a multiple of my number. It'll be that three months, six months, 12 months, you can do it in. You can do the same for the business. The point is it might not happen overnight, but once you've got that, every things that trigger you through, be that I'm really nervous before a pitch, I'm, you know, I'm worried about a, you know, a direct debit that was missed. Your reaction to it is almost non-existent and you sleep better.
Speaker 2:Even the BBC did a survey last year, in July last year, I think, july 2024, where they identified the sleep survey and the people that slept the most had the most savings, you know. And so once you've got my number, I know I've got a fighting fund for six months, say, and at that point I'm probably going to get more useful at what I do, because I'm not panicking and wasting energy on money. I'm actually focusing on being more useful in whatever, whatever, whatever my gift is to the world. Right, and probably no, there's, no, there's, no. I don't have any immediate evidence of that, but you tend to change significantly in the eyes of your employer or or your colleagues mate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just just going back to that fighting fund. So yeah, three, six or twelve months worth of worth of funds to to tap into. So, should something happen is, is there some sort of calculations or other calculations that get gathered, that get added on to that, or is that just an extension of knowing your number and then projecting that out for a certain amount of time?
Speaker 2:uh, yeah, the latter my view, the latter right. And the reason why it is is that what it? It adds to the resilience because the actual recipients plan this correctly. So they feel they've got more agency now. And it makes perfect sense, by the way, because they will actually know.
Speaker 2:And you've got to sometimes hold somebody's hands and go, no, let's actually scrutinize the numbers. That's why I say the audit at the beginning needs to be quite brutal. It's not sort of big hand, small map. You know, I reckon 4K. No, you know it's right. No, we want this accurate, because if you're going to be a chief financial officer and you were sat in a board meeting and they said what's this year's expenditure for a certain product, and you went about this, you'd be fired. So it's back to that point. We take it seriously. But it then means that and again martin talks about this, and it's what I call in structural self-talk, and you think back to in the military, when you I never did military jumps, I know you would have absolutely you're jumping out. You're talking to yourself in structurally, yeah, I I don't know how you say it yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So back to that point I can go when I start flapping about, when I'm going on. A minute, get a minute, get a grip of yourself, kev. I know that we need 6,228, and I know we've got six months of that over here, be that cash, premium bonds, whatever it's there. Take a breather, chill out, stop being a dick, calm down. And it's instructional, it's not. We're not not. Because positive self-talk well, you know. Back to that point, you know you can't. When you're on a tight spot, you can't keep saying who dares wins, who dares wins, it's going to happen, right, it's not going to happen if it doesn't make any sense. You need instructional self-talk behind you, in my view.
Speaker 2:Um, so that's the sort of two, if you like, the first two stages of the framework which actually provide the biggest bang for the buck. It's all education. There's no advice around this. They, they are taking control of their own destiny and it, and you see, people have crazy spillover effects weight loss is one of them, by the way and it, it just layers out. It's almost like it flowers out, which is so. I'll give you one example. Um, uh, we'll call him dan. He's not done, but he's probably going to listen to this podcast because I've given him a list of podcasts. Listen to you. But we've actually dan's, lost a huge amount of weight. He's now met some, someone else. He was lost in the world when I spoke to him but he came to me around financial resilience and he is, and this is.
Speaker 2:There's another myth around to be financial resilient, you have to earn a lot, or if you don't earn a lot, you can't be financial within complete nonsense, and this is a good example of that. So dan is in the top one percent of earners. Lives in the city. He's a sort of assistant fund manager. His life was grim, for his own peace and um he, he wouldn't get to sleep till two, three in the morning, wake up late, lag it downstairs, get to sleep until 2, 3 in the morning, wake up late, lag it downstairs, get to the tube station, wrestle himself one stop where he could have just walked. We never had time. It was too late, wouldn't have breakfast Half 10,. The lady comes around with a trolley, spends 25 quid, broadly speaking the time, on a load of crap, you know complex carbs and all this stuff.
Speaker 2:I'm not a PT, but that doesn't help, right, and then carries on and then eats later at night, probably at his desk, again goes home really resentful, lost, and we were like well, we started to go through the financial framework. We started to go through this because he was at a stage where he just didn't have any financial resilience and he found it mad because he was earning, you know well, over in excess of a quarter of a million pounds a year and he just had no money. It was bizarre, but when it was the bank statement that showed him his life, and now we've switched it to right, well, why don't you get? Now we can fix his sleep. He wakes up a bit earlier and he walks to work every day and he walks back to work. He wakes up a bit earlier and he walks to work every day and he walks back to work.
Speaker 2:Not massive, by the way, it's only one tube stop and not far. But. And then to stop him because his biggest problem was the habit. When the lady comes around, all my colleagues buy a load and I want to, no worries, five minutes before you make your own coffee, because we're doing a coffee a day, remember and you're going to go downstairs and you're going to go for a walk and listen to a podcast and we just did that, but it came from the driving force. From that was his bank statement, and now he's lost a huge amount of weight, he feels happier, he sleeps, and guess what? He's now investing for his future self and he met somebody else. Now, to be clear, I'm not a matchmaker, that's not what I do, but guess what?
Speaker 1:guess what the spinover effects are there, they're evident. Yeah, yeah, how much. How much of this work, then, kev is related to changing our beliefs. And and can that come before we, we build those financial foundations? Because it seems to me you're suggesting that once, once we start to get that awareness, once we can start to be proactive and take agency, um, there's a, there's evidence that that we're working for ourselves, that we're secure, and then we believe it, then we can nudge ourselves on to the next step. And, and I'm just curious, could, could that come the other way around as well, then?
Speaker 2:I'm not. I'm not. I think I think it's one of those horses for courses thing is that everyone will look at it a different way. I suppose I don't know is the honest answer, because again, it comes down to the individual, but everyone that I've taken through this. It's almost like we talked about this offline about the permission thing.
Speaker 2:Actually, quite often you need evidence to prove that you're better at money. So a good example would be if you look and I implore people to look at it themselves but if you did a basic bit of research and asked how many people have reserves in the UK, how many people know how much they spend, it's very, very low. If I change you to the point where we go, right, you now know what you're spending and you know you've got a reserve for six months. And let's just hypothetically, because I don't have the data here in front of me now, but let's just say that puts you in the top 10%. But actually last week you told me you were useless at managing money, but now you're in the top 10% of money management in the UK. That's no small thing, right? And then their belief will change. Their beliefs will change. So they've got evidence-based belief change as opposed to that.
Speaker 2:And the other thing I'd say around it as well is and as we go further down the framework is I'm a firm believer in to be a high performer and listen, this is a subjective statement. My definition of a high performer is someone that wakes up with the intention of being better than yesterday. All right, so that could be a professional tennis player, it could be. You know, some of my friends have scaffolders up in in in the valleys, right, it doesn't matter if their intention is to be better than yesterday and they're going to actually aim for that.
Speaker 2:Um, that's what I believe is a high performer. But to be a high performer, you need to be there's an element of you needs to be not an optimist, and to be an optimist, you have to believe that tomorrow's going to be better than today. So you need some evidence of that, and the framework does provide that as well. So it's sort of. I think this comes. This tends to um, this tends to change their relationship with themselves and their belief system, not the other way around, tends to be yeah love it, mate.
Speaker 1:So after the fighting fund, is there another, another level, that that you start to teach people yeah, so basically, we're still at the defensive stage.
Speaker 2:This is what I would call the defensive stage, right? Um? And the last one is just general protections. Okay, so if I'm gonna, if I'm out of work or if I walk in front of the bus and I survive, but I can't work, I've got six months of gas there, if you like you know, okay, that's great. But actually now I've lent into this and now I could start doing some basic research, is that if I walk in front of the bus tomorrow and I die, well, I get a lie-in for eternity. And as a business owner, that's the worst first lie I've had for a long time. So it's not a bad shout.
Speaker 2:But what happens on Monday to my family? I've got a family, so this is where it becomes far more bespoke to the individual, right? So, for example, dan Dan doesn't have a family yet, right, he might do now he's met his woman. But what's going to happen on Monday to them? That's important for me to know. Back to my financial resilience as it happens, it's going to be okay from a financial perspective. Obviously, my wife will be devastated. I'm an absolute stunner, but it's, you know, it's… we're not recording video.
Speaker 1:I told you that already. Oh sorry, I keep forgetting.
Speaker 2:I'm sorry that pump was wasted, but no, no. So from my perspective, if the worst was to happen, my family are okay, okay. So we look at that and then we work back. So what we're really trying to do is war game, all the drama that we worry about at night when we can't sleep. I die. I know what I'm spending and I'm you know it's less than I earn. I know I've got a fighting fund. If I die tomorrow, my family's going to be okay. If I get a phone call from the GP that I don't want to hear and I need to fight something awful, there's a lump of money landing in, there's policies for that. And if I walk in front of that bus but survive but I can't work for the rest of my life, then I can protect my income, an element of it, right up to retirement age.
Speaker 2:Now, all of this can be done because we've created the surplus, because we've done the audit, we've changed our habits, our expenditure right. So we might be doing that through savings or just the fact that we identified that this plugs the final gap. We've taken all the risks that we can be aware of off the table. It then becomes very difficult to worry about money. When we've done this right, then we can go on the offensive. But at this point we've got that right and you know yourself, if you try and overstretch, you think back to. You can't go up on on huge, huge patrols if you don't know. You've got enough logistics and support and you've got a safe base to go back to sleep or a safe harbor when you're out. Right, it's. It's a similar thing. I know that's probably a rubbish analogy when it comes to military and funding, but there's a lot in it, right, it's back to that basics. So the final piece is what I say then, and we split what I call protections up into documents and policies. The policies, of course, would be life cover, some critical illness, some income protection, but then the policies would be things like well, what's the battle plan?
Speaker 2:If I walk in front of the bus and I'm dead, the world needs to know what's going to happen, and this is something that's often overlooked and it's basically a will. It's the ultimate SOP. Do I have a will for both me to tell my family what, what's going to look after them, and the business, and then we can do things like trusts, and what I do is I'll educate people on what trust is. So it's not financial advice, it's just just so you can understand how a trust works. And that puts you back to the belief system.
Speaker 2:When you understand a trust isn't as complicated as it is. It's basically a safe deposit box in the sky where we can signpost money to typically via the will sits outside of your state for inheritance tax purposes on a new will basis for life cover. So if we look at to avoid GDPR, we think of myself as a. My million pound life cover goes straight to my wife and my son into trust. The reason why I want that is that I don't want HMRC to get 40% of my life cover. A lot of people don't realize that, but that's what would happen. Is it land in my estate? It's going to go to them, but that's the tax benefit of that trust. But the control element of that is my son. I don't want him to have half a million pounds on his 18th birthday.
Speaker 1:That's the recipe, isn't it yeah?
Speaker 2:can you imagine? I don't know if were you in at that point, but I mean I was 18. Not quite not quite, but not quite ready to receive half a million quid.
Speaker 1:No, definitely not Still being a recipe, yeah exactly that.
Speaker 2:So I can appoint people like trusts who will guard the money, who are also very good at money, and they might be professional trustees and all that, and they guard the money on behalf of the SD Right. That's what I said and and that is the element of control there. So you've got some trust and control. So already now we can go down a rabbit hole of catastrophization all day long and I can go yeah, I've got an answer for that, got an answer for that, got an answer for that. But guess what? You came up with it because you're now your cfo.
Speaker 1:We're still not on advice, you know, to people that say, yeah, that all sounds great, I get it, I understand, but I, I think I need a certain amount of money before I do that. What, what, what would you have to say to them, kev?
Speaker 2:well, the big part is, um, this is, this is a path, and and sometimes it can be quite triggering because some people are in, are in financial hardship, where this, this just might make things worse. You might literally be pouring more on on someone who's already drowning, but actually the audit stage doesn't cost you anything. It might be depressing, but you know it's back to that point, um, moving towards spending less than you earn and then trying to find some, some, some barrier on top of that which is your fighting fund. It's just a path to progress that we're going to work on right and just start. Is that just start? Is that you know.
Speaker 2:It means that you know some, some people I work with. We can implement all of that immediately. Some people I've spoken to two, three years ago and they've rang me and they've gone. You know what, thank you. We've done this, we've done that, and over time, slowly but surely. But now I'm, I'm at this stage and wouldn't have done it if we hadn't have followed that framework. Great, brilliant, we're not clients, they're not clients, they're not going to be clients, but they've moved forward and ultimately it's back to that. You know, it's that taking the step forward and you don't need money for that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love that, mate, and I think there's a massive truth and this is what I'm going to take away from our conversation today is progress starts with the truth and, yeah, the awareness of what goes where and when is massive.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, like I say, coming back to giving them that education from that agency means that they're not taking orders from me. I'm not giving them advice. We're working together and even when I take clients who are, you know, very high-end clients selling, selling their businesses for tens of millions, they've still gone through the framework and we've worked on their plan together. You know, and, and I'll always, always, always, bring in the significant other there. There's nothing worse, because I can say I'm not going to let you translate what I've told you to your wife because she's the designated ad-logger household and you're going to just, oh, something about this and that, and it just becomes quite weird, right, quite quickly and ultimately it genuinely changes people's relationships with themselves, with their significant others, with their businesses, with their lives. And I know that sounds very idealistic and some of my peer groups think I'm a bit quirky on that front, but it really does.
Speaker 2:I see it. I see people lose randomly. The biggest metric, non-financial metric I see with my clients that go through this is weight loss. It's crazy, they're all unconnected to each other but they all seem to. That's the one thing that stands out. Obviously, that's not what I'm aiming to do. By the way, I'm not a pt. Obviously they're financially resilient and they're moving on the path of growth and wealth, but they also just seem to be healthier yeah, well, it does.
Speaker 1:It does highlight what, how our minds once that once we're shown something, we can't always unsee it, and then we look at things differently and then we think about things differently and then we do things differently. So yeah, no coincidence. Is there a final piece of advice that you would give business owners? I know you've gone through that framework, which is awesome, kev, but if we just start to draw it up and you wanted to leave them with one thing- what might that be?
Speaker 2:I think it's just so when I talk about people in the household. So they might not. I do have clients that aren't business owners, but I get them to run themselves like a business the household, right, and it's the same. So then everyone operates in a similar manner. And a thing we're aiming for is business continuity, right, and, as you know, because you work business owners all the time, they are the business right. If I die tomorrow, my business dies with me. What happens to my family? We've got answers for all that sort of stuff, but actually can, can I have a battle plan here, both for the household and the family and the business, where it outlines some, some continuity if, if bad things happen? Yeah, and that's really important because a lot of the business owners I work with, I get them to do that on day one, as if they're going to sell their business. Getting them business sale ready means you create that continuity from day one.
Speaker 2:And then when they go to sell, when the people come in to buy your business, they're doing a lot of due diligence and I'll say with a suspense, one of their primary motivators is paying less for your business than they initially stated right, and when they look for things like you don't have a business will, you don't have a will or any business consideration or you don't have any. You know the key people in that business aren't protected if they walk in front of the bus sounds really obvious, but a lot of people don't have it. And then if you can't get cover for those people, if they walk in front of the bus because of health issues, which you could have done early on but you can't now, they might not buy your business and I've sadly dealt with somebody recently where they were about to sell a business to you know for a large amount of money and they just weren't. They haven't done that planning. They called me at the end when it was too late and it was pennies, pennies. It would have been pennies to do a decade ago when they were sort of fit enough to do it.
Speaker 2:Now they can't because their businesses typically don't just buy you and let you sail off into the sunset to the golf course, right, and then take on the risk. They want you in it for a period of time. So always thinking about business continuity, basically an escape route, a battle plan If this goes wrong, am I okay? And guess what? It means that even if you don't sell the business, you have got a better business because of it. That's a big one that I try and nail home from day one, and you don't have to be big to think that way. But if you want to be big, you're going to need to think that way. That'll be my view on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Awesome, mate Kev. Where can people find you if they're?
Speaker 2:interested in having a conversation or learning a bit more mate? Um, I'm available on linkedin unique name. Um yeah, just just yeah, feel free to come and kick me in the shin. And um, yeah, I'm happy to help. You know, um, but I mean, I I would just implore people just to just to start with that, ripping the plaster off, identifying the ground truth and then working your way out from that. You can do a lot of this through self-help first, and you'll be surprised how many spillover effects you'll get from it.
Speaker 1:In my view, yeah, definitely Love it. It's a great message. Mate Kev, thanks so much for joining us today and taking us through that, the first part of that financial resilience framework. It's really interesting. Um, it's great, it's great work and I think, like you alluded to there, it's not just for the, the rich and famous. There's stuff that that everybody can do to, to build in those, those safety measures. It's uh, so there's a lot of value in that. So thank you very much for your time today, mate, mate.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me mate. Great seeing you. Likewise pal.