E19: Can you afford to have kids? With Justine Roberts CBE, Kalpana Fitzpatrick and Jonathan Lister Parsons
The following’s a transcript of our monthly podcast, The Pension Confident Podcast. Listen to episode 19 here, watch on YouTube or scroll on to read the conversation.
PHILIPPA: Thanks for joining us on The Pension Confident Podcast. My name’s Philippa Lamb, and this month we’re asking a very big question. Can you afford to have kids?
This year The Times Newspaper worked out how much it costs to raise a child to the age of 18. The answer? Over _threshold_income. Now that’s including housing and childcare, but still - ouch! Then again, it’s impossible to put a price on all the joy that kids can bring you. So we’re not even gonna try. Instead, we’re going to talk about how much you’re likely to spend on them at every stage as they morph from bump, to bundle of joy, to self-sustaining adults. And how to make a plan to keep your finances and your work on track as your family expands. Who better to help us with all that than Mumsnet CEO, Justine Roberts CBE. Justine, we’re delighted to have you. Thanks for coming in.
JUSTINE: Well, I’m very happy to be here.
PHILIPPA: Financial Journalist and Senior Digital Editor at Money Week; Kalpana Fitzpatrick joins us too. Hi Kalpana.
KALPANA: Hello. Thanks for having me.
PHILIPPA: And new dad, Jonathan Lister Parsons’s our third guest today. He’s PensionBee’s CTO. Hello Jonathan. How new are you?
JONATHAN: Hi Philippa. Six months yesterday.
PHILIPPA: Okay. And it’s a daughter?
JONATHAN: It’s a daughter. A little girl called Lyra.
PHILIPPA: I’m gonna say how’s it going?
JONATHAN: It’s good. It’s certainly been an interesting journey, but six months in, it’s definitely looking up.
PHILIPPA: It’s a steep learning curve in the first six months.
JUSTINE: You’re still here.
JONATHAN: I’m still here. I’m awake!
PHILIPPA: I’ve got some personal experience here too. My son’s rather older. He’s just finishing university now . I raised him on my own from when he was seven. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. Justine, how about you?
JUSTINE: Yes. Well, mine are nearly all gone from the nest. I’ve got four.
PHILIPPA: Kalpana, do you have kids or are you childfree?
KALPANA: I have two boys and yes, they’re keeping me busy and not just me personally. They’re certainly keeping my bank balance busy as well and I don’t think that’ll ever stop.
PHILIPPA: No, I think that’s probably about right.
As usual before we start, please remember anything discussed on this podcast should not be regarded as financial advice and when investing your capital is at risk.
PREPARING YOUR FINANCES FOR HAVING A BABY
PHILIPPA: Before we get on to how to make a financial plan for raising kids, I want to ask everyone around the table, since everyone does have kids, did you try and put a number on how much you thought you’d be spending before you had them?
JUSTINE: In my case, no. I didn’t think about it at all.
PHILIPPA: Me neither.
JUSTINE: We decided we wanted to have kids and within seven months I had two. So that was it. From there, basically, I don’t remember planning anything ever again.
PHILIPPA: Within seven months? So, they were premature?
JUSTINE: Yeah. So, I had premature twins. I got pregnant very quickly and from then life was just so chaotic. There wasn’t much planning after that.
PHILIPPA: But then you had two more?
JUSTINE: Then I had two more, yeah.
PHILIPPA: So you obviously got on top of it?
JUSTINE: I waited a few years. After twins, you think one’s just a piece of cake.
PHILIPPA: Yeah, I guess you do. Kalpana, did you think about the money?
KALPANA: To be honest, as a Financial Journalist, I would like to say yes. But I hadn’t thought about money because, for me it was more about, am I ready physically and mentally to have children? We decided to go ahead with it. But then, when my son was born, he wasn’t very well. So, the first year was quite a challenging year for us. And actually, that brought up all sorts of challenges afterwards like, am I gonna go back to work? My work patterns had changed.
PHILIPPA: Yeah. Well I was the same as you. I was a Financial Journalist too. It’s shameful to admit it, but I didn’t think about it all. I’m hoping that Jonathan did make at least some sort of attempt to work out the numbers?
JONATHAN: Yeah. We did think about it a bit, but like Kalpana said, I think the decision about whether or not to have children’s often not entirely about whether or not you can afford to. You know that they’re gonna be expensive. You know your life’s going to change in many, many ways. So it’s much more about other reasons, I think. We did make a plan, but it just wasn’t the number one priority.
PHILIPPA: Yeah. Well I think that’s probably about right, isn’t it? Let’s talk about the plan. Justine, what’s your thoughts? If, like rational people, you’re thinking about the money ahead of time, how early do you think you should start thinking about that?
JUSTINE: I suppose for many people it’s actually about their living situation as much as anything. Having said I didn’t think about it, it was important that we moved out of our one bedroom flat, into a house with a spare room. I think people do begin their nesting without necessarily thinking and planning every financial detail. What people say on Mumsnet is that people focus a lot on the early costs. Things like buying pushchairs and all the paraphernalia that goes with babies. But actually, the real strain comes from childcare. That gap between the end of parental leave and when government support kicks in, which is usually when your child’s about three years old. It’s that and the fact they often then have to juggle their work choices, and don’t go back to work full-time as they perhaps anticipated. That puts a real strain on the finances. So, I do think you need to start thinking about it, because it’s quite big sums we’re talking about, reasonably early. You need to look ahead to that period, not just focus on the baby stuff.
PHILIPPA: Yeah. We’re gonna dig into the numbers on that. Thinking about the start, Jonathan, the smart thing to do has to be to audit your finances and your expenses at that point? So you at least start from as good a place as you can.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I wouldn’t say that my wife and I were the most organised people in the world when it comes to doing that, but we did actually sit down and do a spreadsheet budget, and went through everything so we could look at just where we’re starting from.
PHILIPPA: So everything’s on there? Groceries, car payments, mortgage, rent?
JONATHAN: Everything. It’s extraordinary how much money we were spending on things that we didn’t expect to be big expenditures like holidays, how much you spend on gifting, how much money you spend on presents for your friends and family. It’s nice to find out we were reasonably generous.
PHILIPPA: So, looking ahead at the new expenses, you’re perfect for this. Your little girl’s six months old. In terms of kit, the sort that Justine was talking about, you didn’t have to buy everything new. Did you buy everything new?
JONATHAN: No, no. Within a few months of my wife; Bonnie, being pregnant, we were being offered lots of useful things that people had from when they’d had children. Clothes obviously, but also, we were offered a buggy, a playpen - little things that we didn’t even know existed. Did you know you can actually get a tube that you use to suck snot out of the baby’s nose?
PHILIPPA: Okay, I can honestly say I haven’t done that!
JONATHAN: That’s a new invention.
JUSTINE: Not that new. I was doing that 20 years ago!
JONATHAN: The shopping list gets very, very long.
PHILIPPA: Kalpana, thinking about taking time off once your kids have arrived. You said you, unexpectedly, because your little boy was ill, had to rethink how your return to work was gonna go. That’s obviously gonna have huge implications for family income. It’s the balancing act though, isn’t it? Obviously you don’t wanna max out your income, but there’s bonding with your new family. So it’s tricky.
KALPANA: It’s tricky. I always say prepare for the unexpected. If you’re thinking about starting a family, try and live on one income for a while and see how that feels. That’ll prepare you mentally if your work pattern has to change for whatever reason. Because your child’s unwell, or you just feel you actually don’t want to go back to work or don’t want to do the same job, or your employer isn’t giving you the flexibility that you need.
PHILIPPA: And of course, parental leave’s the moment in which that financial reality kicks in for most of us, isn’t it? That’s surprisingly painful. Can you just run us through the statutory numbers on that?
KALPANA: This is a bit of a shocker to some people. I speak to a lot of new parents, who think, ‘oh I’m going to take a nice year off, it’s maternity pay’. Statutory Maternity Pay’s 9_personal_allowance_rate of your average weekly earnings for the first six weeks, and then for the next 33 weeks, it’s the lower of £172.48 or 9_personal_allowance_rate of your average weekly earnings.
PHILIPPA: Six weeks is the time when you get 9_personal_allowance_rate if you earn above £172.48 per week. Just six weeks?
KALPANA: Yeah. And that’s your average. So, if you’ve got income that goes up and down, you’re still looking at the average. And you pay tax and national insurance on that. And then for 33 weeks you’ll get the lower of £172.48 per week or the 9_personal_allowance_rate of your average income. That’s also if you’re registered as self-employed. Your income could actually be lower. So it’s not a lot of money. I think my message here’s that you can plan, you need to plan, but you also need to plan with a buffer in mind because the unexpected does happen. It happens and it can really hit you.
JUSTINE: Let’s get back to reality - our forums are full of people who didn’t plan at all and they say, ‘we made it work, it was really difficult, but we made it work’. And if you wait until you’re 10_personal_allowance_rate ready, you may never have a child.
PHILIPPA: I completely agree with you.
KALPANA: I agree with that. I absolutely agree. I don’t think you can 10_personal_allowance_rate ever be ready financially, mentally or physically. I don’t think that’s the reality at all. But I think you can just have a little bit of a thought process and make yourself feel like you’ve got some sort of security that you can fall back on.
PHILIPPA: Just thinking about the Statutory Maternity Leave and Statutory Paternity Leave, the numbers look quite encouraging when you look at them on the page. It says 52 weeks of Statutory Maternity Leave and what is it? A couple of weeks of paternity leave? Up to 50 weeks of Shared Parental Leave. This all sounds great until you look at the numbers. Because that’s the point, isn’t it Jonathan? It’s a key reason why, mostly men, don’t take much time off with their kids - because the household can’t afford it.
JONATHAN: The thing that’s always stuck in my mind about Shared Parental Leave, which when I read it, I just couldn’t get it out of my head, is that if you’ve got a situation where we’ve already got an existing gender pay gap in the household, then the rational thing to do if somebody has to take time off is for the lower earner to take the time off. And then, that’s just a slippery slope. It exacerbates that near term pay gap. It means that you’re just playing into the gender stereotypes. Then, when you get to the end of a period of parental leave and, say it’s the woman, is trying to go back into work, they’re then suffering from that problem of, ‘well we’ve been out of work for such a long time or we’ve been working part-time for such a long time’, and then the man hasn’t had that problem. He might’ve had promotions and salary changes. I think you’ve got to fix it right at the beginning.
PHILIPPA: But employers have got a big role here, right? Because some of them top it up, some of them will pay you full pay to be off for longer, but lots of them don’t.
JUSTINE: A lot of them don’t tell you. They don’t tell you their policies. So, at Mumsnet we’re campaigning for all companies to publish their parental leave policies because it’s very clear that it’s not the question you wanna ask in an interview. And actually in our surveys, employers say they do discriminate against people who ask about parental leave policies.
PHILIPPA: Illegally.
JUSTINE: Yeah, illegally. So, it’s really important because lots of companies do offer great, enhanced parental leave policies. We were talking earlier, Jonathan, about both Mumsnet and PensionBee offering up to around six months for both men and women when they have kids.
JONATHAN: And that’s fully paid.
PHILIPPA: At full pay?
JUSTINE: At 9_personal_allowance_rate for Mumsnet employees. But there are more people talking about their pet policy at work than there are about their parental leave policy. So that’s an easy change that I think the government could make to make this easier.
PHILIPPA: It’s important to remember, isn’t it? Not everyone goes through pregnancy. People adopt as well. What statutory rights do you have if you adopt?
KALPANA: There are different rules when it comes to adoption. So Statutory Adoption Leave’s 52 weeks. Only one person in a couple can take adoption leave. That’s important to remember. You get Statutory Adoption Pay for 39 weeks and it’s the same as Statutory Maternity Pay - 9_personal_allowance_rate of your average weekly earnings for the first six weeks and the lower of the £172.48 or 9_personal_allowance_rate of your average weekly earnings for the next 33 weeks.
PHILIPPA: So, it’s the same but for only one parent?
KALPANA: Yeah and again, we don’t talk about it. So, ask the question. It’s important to know.
THE COST OF CHILDCARE AND OTHER EXPENSES
PHILIPPA: Okay, stage two. Your child, or children in Justine’s case, have arrived. You’ve taken your leave. If both of you want to go back, we talked about this earlier, childcare. Now, we’ve all read and heard about how extraordinarily expensive childcare can be. Is it actually true that the average full-time care in the UK for a child under two costs over £14,000 per year?
JUSTINE: Yep. I think that’s right. The UK has one of the highest childcare costs in the OECD.
PHILIPPA: OECD?
JUSTINE: That’s the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Otherwise known as the club for rich countries!
PHILIPPA: Okay, £14,000.
JUSTINE: It’s a huge number, yeah. And actually around _higher_rate of our users say they cannot afford childcare without going into debt or family help. It’s so prevalent now. This isn’t just affecting the poorest, it’s affecting pretty much everyone. We talked already about gender pay gaps and pension pay gaps. That has so many knock on effects on people because they can’t afford to go back to work.
PHILIPPA: Jonathan, this must be a conversation you’re having with your wife?
JONATHAN: This is a conversation I’ve been having for 15 years with my friends that have been having children in their 20s and 30. They’ve often said it doesn’t make sense to go back to work because we’ll be poorer.
PHILIPPA: Yeah. As you say Justine, this is all over Mumsnet and understandably. I’ll tell you one thing I noticed when my son was really young. Everyone talked about granny and grandpa helping out. My parents were still working full-time and people work longer.
JUSTINE: I think roughly a third of grandparents help out with childcare. So, without the grandparents we’d be really stuffed quite frankly.
PHILIPPA: If you’re lucky enough to have them, Because, of course, not everyone has that family support, do they? People who move to this country, or don’t have networks near them. We don’t live where our parents live anymore, do we?
JONATHAN: Especially living in London. A lot of people move here for work, but their families are still wherever they are. My family’s up north, my wife’s family’s in Birmingham and South Africa.
PHILIPPA: Not handy?
JONATHAN: Not handy, no.
PHILIPPA: So this is 1.7 million women lost to the economy because they’re deciding that these numbers just don’t add up for them. There’s some help available on childcare costs. Kalpana, have you got those numbers in your head?
KALPANA: I do. So, it’s the Tax-Free Childcare Allowance. And actually, it surprises me, I speak to mums at the school gate who’ve no idea what the Tax-Free Childcare Allowance is. Basically, you have to be working for this and there’s a threshold. If you’re working, you can get up to _tax_free_childcare per year from the government. I would say, go onto gov.uk and sign up to that and get some money. It’s not a lot, it doesn’t fix all your problems at all. There’s still an issue with childcare costs and I think that’s something the government really needs to address.
I also want to add, this is really important to me, and I remember when I wrote about this, so many mums text me. Mums that I hadn’t heard from for ages. When they read that this article was about Child Benefit. Now, I hate the complexity that comes with this. So if you’re opting to stay at home, but you happen to have a combined income of _high_income_child_benefit, then you don’t get the Child Benefit. But, you should still register for it because it gives you National Insurance credits and that goes towards your State Pension. Women miss out on something like _isa_allowance in State Pensions because they feel, ‘oh, we’re not entitled to this benefit because our income’s too high as a household’. I’ll always make a little bit of noise about that. If you’re not registered for Child Benefit, just register for it. Even if you’re above the income threshold because you still get the National Insurance contributions.
PHILIPPA: Yeah. So there’s a pension link there, in terms of State Pension entitlement at the end of your life. Because you need a full record of your National Insurance contributions.
JONATHAN: If we’re coming onto pensions, I think we’ve got the State Pension to look at, of course. If people are taking time out of work to look after the kids, they’re gonna miss out on National Insurance contributions and then their State Pension’s going to be lower. And that’s fairly straightforward to understand. I think what’s not so easy to understand is when we look at the private pension provision on the side of that and we look at the impact that taking all that time out of work, or just working part-time, has on, mainly, women’s pensions across the country. At PensionBee, we looked at this. We did this big survey from all our customer data called the Pension Landscape survey. And we looked at the ‘gender pension gap‘, that’s what we called it. And it’s roughly a third - the difference between a man’s expected pension pot at their preferred retirement age, let’s say 64, compared to a woman’s.
PHILIPPA: So it’s a huge gap?
JONATHAN: It’s 33% lower for a woman. So it’s a huge gap. And what we did was model out a few different scenarios for what you could do to try and close that gap. And unsurprisingly, the scenario that essentially reduces the gap to zero is for women to work the same hours as men on the same pay as men. Which means equality. It’s also that there aren’t any better scenarios that we can financially engineer by trying to be clever with the model. If you just achieve that equality with working hours and pay, then the long-term savings gap goes away.
PHILIPPA: I guess what you can also do is get your partner to pay your pension contributions for you while you’re taking time out to raise kids?
JONATHAN: Yeah you can do, but the magic in the system’s that if you get, say your male partner, to take more time off work and look after the child so that you’re reducing their hours and you’re increasing the amount of hours that the woman can work. So you get to parity where the man’s working fewer hours but the woman’s working significantly more hours. Then you get to a point where even though the man’s working fewer hours, actually net, as a family, you’re better off because the woman’s not affected by this long-term trend of much reduced pay over the duration of their career. Missing out on promotions and opportunities. And so, by just introducing a little bit more support from the man earlier on, you can then both have a much healthier long-term career and that’s how you can end up with much better long-term savings as a family.
PHILIPPA: I’m gonna say everyone wanted to do that, that I knew, including me. And I’m gonna ask Justine about this. This is about provision of high calibre part-time work for women though, isn’t it? Because pretty well every woman I know took lower calibre part-time work to achieve what you’ve just described because it’s just not available. You can’t get part-time high calibre work in whatever you were doing before having kids, necessarily.
JUSTINE: I think things have improved a bit since the COVID-19 pandemic because that showed the possibility of hybrid work, working from home and more flexibility, and the world didn’t fall in, despite what people may have thought beforehand. So I think it’s got a bit easier. It’s certainly the thing women want most from their employer.
I feel I should balance the conversation a bit because we’ve talked a lot about women who want to get back into the workforce straight away and don’t want to miss out on promotions - not everyone wants to make that choice. Some people want to take time off to be with their kids. And you’re right, I think flexible and part-time’s something that all employers should think about just as a sort of diversity and inclusion thing as much as anything.
HOW MUCH WILL YOU SPEND AS YOUR CHILDREN GROW UP?
PHILIPPA: Time’s moving on. I’m gonna say we need to move on to older kids. We know there’s a lot of costs in the early years. It doesn’t stop there, does it? Kalpana, your boys are heading towards being teenagers. One teenager, one nearly there. There’s a lot of stuff when they’re teenagers, isn’t there?
KALPANA: There is. I feel like the world’s moved on as well. It’s not just toys, it’s gadgets - expensive ones.
PHILIPPA: Sports kit, music lessons, school trips.
KALPANA: Extracurricular activities or even just going on a camping trip, like my son did recently. Just kitting him out for that cost hundreds of pounds. I’d like to think I’ve taught them well about money. They just happen to hear a lot of conversations in my household about money. But it’s still difficult. And also, as they get older, there’s this thing called fear of missing out (FOMO) that kicks in, so they want what everyone else has got.
PHILIPPA: Sure. Smart ways to plan for that? And I’m also thinking about the fun stuff - the holidays, the celebratory things, all this is part of having kids but I want suggestions for smart ways to make this a bit more affordable. I’m thinking about planning ahead here because there’s quite a lot of stuff you can get at discounted rates if you think ahead, right?
KALPANA: I would say a healthy budget and I hate that word ‘budget’, and I’m sorry I’m using it. But it comes back to those early days of planning and knowing what your expenses are, your essential costs. Then, create some sort of ‘fun pot’ where you’re saving up for certain things. So you can say, ‘this is our holiday fund’ et cetera. And just constantly keeping that going. Don’t let it be your credit card. Try and build that buffer. Just keep building it throughout your life. You can start from even before they’re born and just keep going because you’ll always need to access that pot.
JUSTINE: The other thing you can do’s actually encourage your children to get part-time jobs to pay for their discretionary expenditure. Particularly on things like branded goods, which as you said, there’s a lot of peer pressure. But I think it’s fine as a parent to say, ‘well if you want that, because I wouldn’t buy that for myself, then you’ve got to save up for it.
PHILIPPA: So, did your kids all work while they were at home?
JUSTINE: No.
KALPANA: It’s easier said than done!
JUSTINE: They had summer jobs but not so much Saturday jobs. I used to have a Saturday job in a shop and pretty much all my friends did.
PHILIPPA: Yeah, me too. And a paper round when I was really young.
JUSTINE: That doesn’t seem to exist so much anymore. But I would say, they probably work a lot harder at school now than we did in our day.
PHILIPPA: I think that’s probably true. My son worked in a restaurant when he was in the sixth form, doing A levels. He worked in a restaurant kitchen because he did want to buy a lot of stuff and I did kind of say, ‘Hey, that’s discretionary spending. You’re gonna have to ante-up the cash yourself.’
JONATHAN: But I realised my parents made a saving by substituting my infant labour for the local car wash. I’ve just realised the clever trick. £1 to wash my dad’s car. This was in the 90s though, so £1 went a long way.
KALPANA: I think there’s loads of clever ways that you can just save for your children now. For example, it’s a very big thing in Indian culture to give cash gifts. So every time my children were given cash, and they were literally given it from the day they were born, I stuffed it all into an ISA.
PHILIPPA: You took it from them?
KALPANA: I took it and I put it into a Junior ISA, and it sits there for them to do what they want with it when they’re 18, hopefully something good.
JONATHAN: Just to make the pension comment. Junior pensions are a great idea.
PHILIPPA: And there’s a lot of opportunity now to save quite small sums, I mean really small sums every month and still take advantage of that sort of investment. That’s always my mantra. It doesn’t matter how tiny it is, it’s the regularity and that you start early, and you keep doing it.
KALPANA: Yeah, exactly. And then, another trick that I quite like, and I’ll tell every new parent to do this, is babies grow out of things. Actually even older kids, they grow out of things. So, I sell all their stuff and I actually let them have the money. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve sold your old Smiggle backpack. You’ve grown out of it but it’s still in good condition’. It all sells on the Vinted app.
JONATHAN: That’s me buying it all, by the way.
PHILIPPA: Now look, I’m gonna drag us on to older kids now because you do need to think about planning for university or some form of training. Whatever it might be at the end of the education process. It’s expensive. This again’s about setting up savings early on, isn’t it? Just so the money’s there because it’s serious money. Having just put my son through university, the rent alone’s savage.
JUSTINE: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of surprise on Mumsnet actually, that the maintenance grant doesn’t really cover the rent and living costs. And when you put in things like travel, and the cost of food and what’s happened to that in the last year or so, it’s simply not enough for most students to get by.
PHILIPPA: And that’s why most of them are working, aren’t they? There was some data out recently, wasn’t there? _pension_release_tax_amount of them are in paid work. This is during term time. 76% of them saying they’re reporting a negative impact on their study due to the cost of living. So anything parents can do, you kind of feel you want to help them out here because if they’re working, there’s only so much they can do, isn’t there?
JUSTINE: Yeah. And unlike the USA, we don’t really have this culture of saving for college, but I think we’re gonna have to get there.
KALPANA: We’ll just find fewer children end up going to university or wanting to go to university. They might just want to take up an apprenticeship or just go straight into work.
JONATHAN: We’re very fortunate that we’re a few years on from when apprenticeships were seen as a second class type of education and vocational training. It’s received a lot more attention and prestige. And now, if you come out of college and you go and do an apprenticeship in software engineering or civil engineering, you can do things that set you up for a really high profile career. I think it’s really switching people’s attitudes.
PHILIPPA: I need to wrap this up, but I am gonna ask the question of when does it stop? Because we’ve been talking about the bank of mum and dad closing up maybe when kids start work. But of course, most young people under the age of 34 are back with their families, aren’t they? So there’s still costs, isn’t there? Higher food bills, putting them on your car insurance, all that sort of stuff. Justine, are yours back with you?
JUSTINE: One’s at uni and one’s at home because he’s 17, so he’s allowed to be at home. I think the costs do go on and it’s not surprising given the cost of housing. That’s the thing, they’d happily move out. I don’t think there’s any desire to continue living with your mum until you’re 34. But the cost of rents are astronomical, particularly in London and the Southeast. I actually quite like having them around now, but there’s a raging debate on Mumsnet about how much and whether you should ask them to contribute.
PHILIPPA: Well, that was my next question. What do you think?
JUSTINE: Well, I think if they’re working full time, they probably should.
PHILIPPA: I agree. I mean, they’re not kids anymore, are they? It’s just exploitation otherwise.
JUSTINE: But the flip side is that certain parents seem desperate for their kids to move out and so they want them to save that money instead of paying it to them. So that they’re able to get onto the property ladder or onto the rental market. So it’s swings and roundabouts.
PHILIPPA: I guess if you can afford it, you can take the money off them and save it, and then hand it over to them at some stage. But I think in a lot of households, the kids still retain that, ‘But I’m your son, I’m your daughter. You can’t take rent off me’. Yeah, I really can. You’re 28!
JUSTINE: I think we get into the habit of still doing the washing and all the rest of it. So you have to be quite firm and realise it’s not the same as before they were 18.
PHILIPPA: We could keep at this all day, but I’m gonna say thank you very much everyone. Having children, it may not be the simplest or indeed the cheapest experience of our lives. Will you be glad you did it? I would say yes, most of the time. Around the table?
JUSTINE: Absolutely.
JONATHAN: Yeah.
JUSTINE: We’ve got short memories.
KALPANA: Absolutely. I feel like even if we may have sounded negative about the financial aspect. I think it’s just important to remember we do make it work. We just need to get it mentally prepped in our heads.
PHILIPPA: Exactly.
Once more before we go, please remember, anything discussed on the podcast should not be regarded as financial advice when investing your capital is at risk.
We’ll be taking a short break in August, but keep an eye on our feed. We’ll be sharing lots of bonus content to help you boost your financial confidence over the rest of the summer.
We’ll be back in September with a discussion about an issue we mostly try to forget about, death. We know it’s gonna happen. So, how should we financially plan now to make life easier for the people we leave behind? And what do you need to think about if you’re the one dealing with the admin after the death of someone close to you? In the meantime subscribe to The Pension Confident Podcast. Keep up to date with everything we’ve got coming up for you and why not give us a rate or review while you’re there. We always want to know what you think. Have a great summer!
Risk warning
As always with investments, your capital is at risk. The value of your investment can go down as well as up, and you may get back less than you invest. This information should not be regarded as financial advice.
Period | Market Event | FTSE World TR GBP (%) | 4Plus Plan (%) |
|---|---|---|---|
4Plus Plan’s inception – 6 Sept 2013 | QE Tapering, China Interbank Crisis and its aftermath | -5.44 | -2.41 |
3 Oct 2014 – 15 May 2015 | Oil price drop, Eurozone deflation fears & Greek election outcome | -5.87 | -1.77 |
7 Jan 2016 – 14 Mar 2016 | China’s currency policy turmoil, collapse in oil prices and weak US activity | -7.26 | -1.54 |
15 June 2016 – 30 June 2016 | BREXIT referendum | -2.05 | -1.07 |
