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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.

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In this episode, Steve is joined by Sonya Lutter, a researcher and money psychologist based at Texas Tech and the founder of the Institute for Systemic Financial Professionals. Sonya has spent years studying what actually happens inside couples and households when money turns up — and turns up the temperature.

Most fights about money aren't really about money. They're about values, identity, and what we want our lives to mean. And yet the financial planning profession still spends most of its training time on investments, tax and retirement, while the human bit — the bit that decides whether any of the plan actually gets followed — usually gets a single course.

This episode looks at why money sits so close to our sense of self, what the research actually says about couples, conflict and joint accounts, and the small, practical tools advisers and clients can use to make better long-term decisions rather than panicked short-term ones.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Sonya's accidental route into the field, from wanting to teach deaf children, to financial planning, to marriage and family therapy.
• Why the profession still underestimates psychology — and why "we haven't got time for that in a one-hour meeting" is the wrong answer.
• The research finding that how much a couple argues about money early in a relationship predicts long-term relationship satisfaction more reliably than later arguments do.
• Scott Rick's two-year study on couples and joint accounts: why being told to combine accounts measurably increased relationship satisfaction, while the other two groups declined.
• Why disparity in earnings — and especially women out-earning their husbands — is statistically associated with more money arguments and a higher divorce risk.
• The "values bullseye" exercise Sonya uses with couples who've spent decades skirting around the same disagreements, and how it turns vague conflict into a shared centre.
• The childhood roots of financial anxiety, and the research showing that hearing parents argue about money tracks into adult behaviour — while simply receiving an allowance largely doesn't.
• Why cold hands are a literal red flag for short-term decision-making: the fight-or-flight response routes blood away from the brain, and we end up agreeing to things we don't actually want.
• A practical "sandwich technique" for opening up emotional conversations with clients who came in to talk about investments and don't think they signed up for anything else.
• Why financial advisers carry more emotional weight than the profession admits, and why some form of study group, supervision or coaching is not optional once you're listening to people for a living.

Key takeaway:

Sonya's central argument is that the psychology of money has been approached haphazardly so far — a tool here, a technique there — without a proper framework. Money isn't just a preference like toothpaste or what to watch on TV. It's a near-direct reflection of values, identity and the family system someone grew up inside. The advisers and couples who do well are the ones who stop treating the emotional layer as a tangent and start treating it as the main event. And the tip Sonya leaves listeners with applies whether you're an adviser, a client or just a human being in a relationship: see a need, meet a need.

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In this episode, Steve and Jess talk about why our brains chase certainty, why money can't really deliver it, and how to build a financial and psychological life that bends with whatever comes.

Certainty is one of those things almost everyone wants and almost no one can have. Our brains are wired to chase it, our spreadsheets pretend to deliver it, and politicians, advertisers and well-meaning financial guarantees all dangle versions of it in front of us.

This episode looks at why that craving sits so deep, why money is a particularly bad place to look for it, and what a healthier relationship with uncertainty actually looks like in practice — across investing, careers, family life and the small daily routines that keep us functioning.

In this conversation, you'll hear about:

• Why we crave certainty in the first place, and what evolutionary wiring has to do with predictable berries, hypervigilance and modern information overload.
• Morgan Housel's line that "the illusion of control is more persuasive than the reality of uncertainty", and why feeling in control often matters more than being in control.
• Alex Hormozi's idea that the wealth you build later in life depends on how much uncertainty you can put up with, and what that means for jobs, businesses and investing.
• Why guarantees in finance usually come at the cost of lower returns, and why money sat in the bank can quietly lose value to inflation.
• How to build a financial plan that's "bendy like the grass" (courtesy of one of Steve's clients), with cash buffers, diversification, stress testing and plans A through F.
• Why obsessing over forecasts and spreadsheets doesn't change the universe, and where that energy is better spent.
• How OCD, eating disorders and addictions can begin as attempts to feel in control before quietly taking control of the person instead.
• Practical ways to train your brain to sit with uncertainty: keep some routines to lower your mental load, then deliberately push your comfort zone in small ways like changing your route to work.
• A few tangents along the way, including Santorini photoshoots, a German sun-bed lawsuit, galloping horses in Morocco and whether tea is due a comeback.
• The closing reminder: "Ships are safe in the harbour, but that's not what ships are for."

Key takeaway:

The only real certainty is change, and trying to engineer guaranteed outcomes tends to cost you twice: once in the price you pay for the guarantee, and again in the smaller, duller life you have to live to keep things predictable. The healthier move is to control what's worth controlling (your coffee, your keys, how you load the dishwasher), then build enough flexibility into your financial plan, your mindset and your week that you can ride the wobbles instead of trying to flatten them. Plans A, B, C, D, E and F. A bit of jelly wobble is what makes the whole thing worth eating.

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Steve sits down with Dan Sanders, optician and founder of Perspective Opticians, for a candid look at what it really takes to run an independent business for 21 years.

Dan opened his first practice in February 2005, aged 26, after deciding he didn't want to spend his career running people through the machine in a high street chain. What followed was a steep learning curve nobody had prepared him for. Three weeks in, with the bills landing and almost no one walking through the door, he came close to packing it in. He didn't. Three years later, he was finally able to draw a proper salary.

In this episode, Dan and Steve talk through the parts of business ownership most people never see from the outside: the wobbles, the 4am worries, the cycles of high and low that hit every few years whether you want them to or not. Dan shares how a six-month notice to leave his old premises felt like a disaster at the time, and why it might end up being the best thing that's happened to the practice.

They also get into the good stuff. The freedom to make a decision and just do it. The buzz of building a team that delivers. Winning a national independent award. Manifesting a big enough year to take the whole team to Ibiza. The quiet satisfaction of a client putting on a new pair of glasses and walking out a bit taller.

Along the way they cover:

• The earthquake moments every business owner gets, and why the change forced on you usually moves things forward
• Why personal recommendations still beat almost every other form of marketing
• Working with your spouse as a business partner, and the one rule that keeps it sane
• Looking after a team like family without burning out trying
• Why isolation is the silent killer for small business owners, and what to do about it
• The hardest lesson Dan has learned in 21 years of trading
• Going private after COVID, and what changed for clients
• Why media doom and gloom rarely matches what's actually happening in your business

There's also a real moment near the end where Dan talks about what working with Steve as his financial planner actually did for him, and it isn't what he expected when he walked in.

If you're a small business owner having a wobble, or a couple of years in and wondering whether the highs will outweigh the lows, this one will land.

A reminder that you're rarely as alone as it feels.