13 Years of Brutally Honest Financial Advice

If you've budgeted, cut back, saved, maybe even bought an index fund and you still feel behind, this video is for you. Because most money advice is polite. But I'm going to be honest with you, this one isn't. I spent nine years in investment banking in London and I walked away from a banking job that paid the equivalent of $300,000. I made most of the mistakes in this video myself. On my first salary, I didn't save a single penny. And after 13 years around money, I can tell you coffee and budgeting apps. Have almost nothing to do with who ends up wealthy, but just a handful of big decisions do. And unfortunately, most people make these decisions on autopilot, often because they rely on the advice of a person who profits from that decision. But if you get those decisions right, an ordinary salary can buy you freedom. Whereas if you get them wrong, even six figures could keep you stuck. So I'm going to go through each of these decisions in the order that life hands them to you from your first real paycheck to the day you can walk away from your job. And I'm going to give you the brutally honest version today of each one so you stop losing years to them. I do have to say one careful thing first. I'm a chartered accountant, but I'm not your accountant. So this is education, not personal advice. But I promise that is the last careful thing you'll hear from me today. So let's start with the first big thing most people buy with their first real paycheck. And that leads me to number one, the monthly payment is how they sell you a car that you can't afford. So as soon as I got a job in banking, it didn't take me very long to spend my first couple of paychecks on a car that was out of my range, completely out of my price range. And I was paying for that decision for a while. And it's so easy to do because the dealership just wants you looking at one number, which is the monthly payment. So say your budget is $25,000 and the salesperson nudges you towards the one that's $35,000. As a lump sum, that is a huge difference. You'd say no straight away. But framed as an extra 80 a month on finance, it doesn't really feel like that much. It might even feel like a deal. When I ran the numbers on a brand new £35,000 Audi A3 over four years, after selling it at the end, buying it outright cost about £17,850. The same car on a PCP cost £26,665. PCP is the finance deal most dealerships push where you mostly pay for the drop in value of the car and it came out almost £9,000 more for the exact same car. They push it because that decision is the most lucrative for them. It keeps you coming back to upgrade so they keep making money from you. The monthly payment only tells you what leaves your account each month. It tells you nothing about what that car actually costs you. If a new car eats 40% of your take-home pay, you can't afford to lose your job. You can't afford to take a break. You can't probably even consider other opportunities. You're kind of stuck. So before you sign anything, ask for the total cost of owning that thing, not the monthly payment. And if you can, buy a car that's already two to three years old that has already depreciated substantially at someone else's expense. So the car is usually the star because it's the first thing that people see. Now let's move on to number two, and that is looking successful is the most expensive habit there is. In my early days in banking, I had two very different colleagues or types of people sitting next to me. The man opposite me came in in his Ferrari. On a Monday morning, he would talk about the Michelin star restaurant he tried, the last minute trip to Italy that he booked. And on his computer screen was a photo of the next car that he wanted. And on my left was a colleague who later became my mentor. He came in with a packed lunch and he wore the same shirt tie combo so often that I can still remember it and draw it from memory. Fast forward 10 years later, I visited him at his home in the countryside with his wife, his two kids, his dogs. He was enjoying early retirement. He bought what he wanted, which was freedom. It was time. It was choice. When I started out, I was much closer to the Ferrari side. I had the designer clothes. I had the latest things. I had a nice car. I spent so much of my income on things that made me look successful, even though I knew my bank account showed the opposite. But no one could see that side. So every pound or every dollar you spend looking rich is money that can never make you rich. And honestly, it never really stops at one thing. You upgrade your sofa and then suddenly the coffee table looks old. So you buy a new one and then it's your lamp and then it's the curtains. This effect is called the Diderot effect. What changed for me was a stretch where my spending on wants went down to pretty much zero for six to nine months. During that time, everything went into learning, investing, building the business. That's what built the financial security that later let me walk away from a six-figure bonus and a high-paying job. So my point here is spend on what you'd still enjoy if nobody ever saw it and be honest about the things you only buy because people do or to be seen. Most people think earning more will fix all of this. I thought so too. But that leads me to number three, a pay rise won't fix you. I began my career making £35,000 at a top tier investment bank in London. And I did not save a single penny that year. I lived paycheck to paycheck. And I remember thinking life would be so different if I was just making six figures. Years later, I was making £120,000 a year. £47,000 of that went straight to tax and national insurance. I lived in London. I was still paying off that car. And six figures didn't make me feel rich the way that I once thought it would. When my income jumped, things that used to feel expensive just didn't feel that way anymore. Like a coffee on the way to work every morning. It used to be a luxury. Then it became a necessity. Lunch whenever I wanted or paying for plans with friends. I didn't track any of it because as far as I was concerned, I didn't really need to. Here's the thing, understanding money and managing your own behavior around it are two very, very different skills and nobody teaches you the second one, not even in the finance sector, not even in banking. What a pay rise really does, it just gives your habits a bigger budget. And if the habits don't change, the extra money disappears the same way that the old money did. So here's what I recommend. Save in percentages, not in fixed amounts. Take a set percentage of your take-home pay every single time that you get paid. And then that way, every time you get a pay rise, you automatically save more before your lifestyle catches up. You can't fix what you can't see. Now, anytime I want to buy something big, I use my money map. It runs the numbers on my biggest life purchases for me. And that makes me see the trade-offs against my other plans and goals within seconds. So I know exactly what I can afford and where I want to hold off. I'm about to release it publicly. I'm giving 50 people early access for free, and you can sign up via the waitlist in the description. Once your habits can handle a pay rise, the next job is getting a bigger one, which leads me to number four. You don't get paid your worth. You get paid your ability to negotiate. So in my third year at the bank, I moved into... the front office and I thought that meant I would get a huge pay rise but my salary that year went up six percent and I was told it's because I moved within the same bank and it would take me a few years to catch up with my peers in this new division. And I believed that until a year later, someone I knew made the exact same move and got a substantial pay rise. So the next time I negotiated for the first time and that year I got promoted and I got a 30% pay rise. The year after that, same team, same job, one more year of experience. Again, my salary didn't move. Not even in line with inflation. So I applied to a new bank, switched jobs and got a 45% pay rise. The biggest jumps in my salary over my nine years career in banking have all come from moving up or moving out. You don't get paid your worth. You get paid your ability to negotiate. So if you keep passing up the chance to do it, the gap between you and the person who does negotiate only gets wider every single year. That's why I don't really focus on saving five or 10 pounds or dollars here and there anymore. There's only so far you can cut. There's no cap though on the other side, which is how much you can earn. When you're given a number, don't ask, is this negotiable? Ask what went into calculating it. Ask, has it counted your experience, your qualifications? Talk to other people about what they earn because not having that information really can work against you. And loyalty is great, but only when that loyalty is rewarded. And that goes for your bank too, which leads me to number five. Your bank makes the most money from the people who never move. When I worked in banking, I had colleagues with $40,000, $50,000, $70,000 in their accounts telling me it was their emergency fund. And when we broke down what they actually needed each month, their real emergency fund was less than half of that. The rest was just fear money, losing value every single day to inflation. So your bank is perfectly happy with that. In fact, in September, 2026, the UK's biggest high street banks were paying an average of about 1.2% on their easy access savings. The best building societies, the UK's version of credit unions were paying around 4.2%. On 10,000 pounds, that's around 116 pounds a year that you can make with your savings versus 422 pounds. In the US, the average savings account pays under half a percent. A high-yield savings account pays closer to 4%. It's the same money with the same easy access. The only difference is whether you took the five minutes to move it. So work out your real emergency fund. Add up your core living costs, rent or mortgage, groceries, essential bills, minimum debt payments. multiply that number by three or by six if you want more protection or by nine if you're self-employed that's how big that emergency fund actually needs to be it doesn't need to be any more than that and actually what's really important here is that Having that emergency fund, three to six months of your living expenses saved actually does more for your peace of mind than earning over 200,000 according to a Vanguard research paper. So get that number right first. Keep it in a high interest account that's easy to access with no fees to withdraw and check what your current account pays you today. If it's under 1%, you're the customer the bank makes the most from. Now, before you put the rest of that money to work, there's one thing that you need to check first and that leads me to number six. investing while you carry expensive debt is filling a bath with the plug out. So imagine running a bath at the end of a very long day. You turn on the taps, you go and make a drink, you come back and then the bath is completely empty because you forgot to put the plug in. That is what happens when you pour your money into savings and investments whilst carrying high interest debt. You're filling that bath and draining it at the same time. Credit cards in the Now charging average of around 35% a year on per purchases. In the US, people who carry a balance pay over 20%. No investment reliably earns that amount. Most people think that the goal is to just avoid debt entirely, but rich people know that that is not the case at all. In fact, according to the Federal Reserve data, the top 10% of households by net worth actually hold more debt than the median households. It's just Completely different debt. It's credit card loans, personal loans, buy now, pay later. That's the anchor. A low cost mortgage that frees up money to invest. That's the lever. Two very different types of debts. So right now, write down every debt that you have and the interest rate on each one. Anything above 8% gets paid off before you start taking investing seriously. Attack the most expensive one first. And the moment it's gone, redirect every penny of that payment into building wealth. Once the expensive debt is gone, start investing, even if you don't feel ready. I waited years for that feeling, but actually, that leads me to seven, which is waiting to feel ready is the most expensive investing mistake. I started making money when I was 19, working in retail. I started making proper money at 21, but it wasn't until I was 24 that I actually started investing because I was too scared to lose money I don't know. Which accounts to use what to invest in. So I kept telling myself, oh, I'll start soon. I'll start when I have more money. One year of not investing turned into two, turned into three. And the truth was that waiting didn't actually make me a better investor at all. It just meant I missed out on those years of compounding. That's three years of my money doing nothing when it could have been working for me during that time period. And you might think I was just through three years, but let's put a number on it. If you invest 250 a month for 30 years. At an assumed 7% a year, you'd end up with about 305,000. If you start 10 years later and the same habit gets you about 130,000, which is less than half. When I did start, I made the opposite mistake. I bought individual stocks in companies I expected to do well, and I was checking the prices constantly. I didn't lose much money, but I did lose a lot of peace of mind. So if you haven't started yet, it's still worth putting 10 or 20 into an investment account. Open one, get it verified, and then learn the basics. Which leads me to number eight. Your index fund isn't as diversified as you think. The S&P 500, it's meant to be the safe. The simple choice, it puts around 500 of the biggest companies in the United States into one fund. But your money, it isn't split evenly across those 500 companies. In fact, as of November 2023, the 10 biggest companies make up about 40% of the whole index. A huge share sits in just seven companies, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Tesla. All seven are investing heavily in AI, so when those companies do well, the whole index does well. And when one or two of them have a bad year, the whole fund feels it. And also, no country stays on top forever. In the early 1900s, the UK was one of the biggest parts of the global stock market. In the 1980s, people believed Japan was the future. Today, it's the US. That's why I've I've always invested globally. Alongside the US and going forward, I'm putting a larger and larger percentage into global funds to spread my risk across more countries and more industries. An S&P 500 fund leads out huge companies like Samsung, Toyota, Nestle, AstraZeneca, simply because they're not American. So look what your fund actually holds, look it up and how much of it actually sits in the top 10. If you thought you owned the whole market, check whether you own one country. For me now, around 80% of my investments are in diversified funds, around 20% in individual stocks. If you're new, I'd keep that closer to 5% if that. Then There's the biggest purchase most people ever make, the one everyone calls an investment, which leads me to number nine, a house is a home first and an investment a distant second. I bought a flat in North London in 2017 and it cost about 530,000 pounds and I put down about 50,000 pounds. About eight years later, it had gone up around 10%. The money I put towards that flat hasn't grown anywhere near as much as the money I made in the stock market investing in an all-world fund. That's before you even count the cost. The lift in my building has broken multiple times and lift repairs cost tens of thousands of pounds and the company that owns the building passes that cost on to every flat owner. I pay ground rent to that company too and the service charge that I can't control. Wherever you live, there's a version of this. There are service charges, property taxes, insurance and repairs. The price is literally just the entry fee. If you're watching this thinking, I'd love to start a business one day, chances are you probably already have an idea. The part that is stopping you is everything that comes after. Building a website, setting up payments, managing inventory, shipping orders. It can feel very overwhelming and it's definitely kept me overthinking for far too long. When I started my business with Shopify, it took away All of those constraints are handled the technical side so I could focus on what I actually enjoyed, which is creating content, building a community and a product. Having one platform that streamlines the setup and the backend is such a huge unlock. Whether you're selling online or in person, Shopify has everything you need to help you do that. And it grows with you as your business grows, whatever stage your business is at. So if you haven't already, sign up at shopify.com forward slash Nisha. That's shopify.com forward slash Nisha. A lot of our view on buying a house comes from what we saw our parents do. When my parents came to the UK and bought their first house, it was the epitome of success. It was something that they could touch. It was something that they could see. It meant stability for them. And for that generation... It worked perfectly because a mortgage is essentially a forced way of saving. You have to pay it so that you can't spend that money on anything else. But in a lot of places, renting can actually be cheaper than buying that same kind of home in the same area. So run both those numbers properly with... Including all the interest, the fees, the taxes, the repairs, the insurance. And if renting does come out cheaper for you, decide to go for that option. You have to be disciplined enough to invest the difference. Set up an investment account, automate it, and put money in every single month. That's your own version of a mortgage. And it's just as a legitimate of a way to build wealth. If you have a goal to buy and you've run the numbers and it makes sense for you long term, that's a really good goal. Go for it. Part of why I bought was just the comfort of knowing that no matter what happens, I still have this place. I have this roof over my head. And that gave me a huge amount of peace of mind. But I understood the reality is that it wasn't an investment. I bought it because I wanted the home. So don't buy a house because someone told you renting is throwing money away. Actually run the numbers yourself. And that. idea actually goes for a lot more than property, which leads me to number 10. The person selling you the product is the last person to ask about it. When I sat in a car showroom for three hours running the numbers, the option they pushed the hardest was the one that made them the most money. And most money advice actually works the same way. A lot of people giving the money advice are paid by the product they recommend. Their fees look tiny. 1% a year sounds like nothing. But take that same 250 a month from earlier, I mentioned that example at 7% for 30 years, it grows to about 305,000. Take 1% a year off that return, and you'd have about $251,000. That 1% costs you about $54,000. And this applies for people like me. I'm paid by sponsors. When I recommend certain platforms, I often get a commission for introducing you to them. And sure, I've never said or recommended a platform that I don't believe in or that I don't use, but... And regardless of that, you should always judge all of us the same way. Always verify on your own. The best money I've ever spent on advice was about $200. And I was for a one hour call with a tax advisor. That one call saved me $40,000 in taxes. They weren't selling me anything except their time and their knowledge. So before you take anyone's advice, ask one question. How do you get paid if I say yes? Pay for advice by the hour where you can and check the fees on everything you already own. And that question... Works on one more relationship too, which is the one that pays you. And number 11, your employer doesn't owe you anything but a paycheck. In my banking career, I saw the same situation happen multiple times. People walking into the office thinking their job is secure, only to be told to pack up their belongings and leave within an hour of arriving that morning. There's actually a term that people in banking would use. called bloodbaths. It's literally used to describe mass redundancies and it's a word I heard so often whilst working in banking. And through my experience across all those years, one thing I learned was that the company you work for ultimately owes you nothing beyond a paycheck. So the only real job security that you have is the money that you save that lets you walk away. I stayed in banking longer than I wanted to because my salary was paying for my My emergency fund, I was paying for my investments. I was paying for. All the experiments that I was doing on the side. And then when I did resign, it was an 84% pay cut two months before what would have been the largest bonus of my entire career. But I had an emergency fund that would have lasted me nine months and my side hustles had matched my fixed costs plus an extra 200 or 300 pounds a month. Only then was I comfortable taking that risk. Work out your walk away number. That's your core costs every single month times the number of months that you need to feel safe. Then build one income that doesn't depend on your employer, even a small one. Having seen both sides, being able to walk away from something that no longer serves you completely beats the feeling you get from anything new that you can buy. Your income is the thing that buys you your lifestyle, but it's net worth that buys you your freedom. So now you know the truth about the big decisions. The next step is a system that makes them easy every single month. And in this video, I go through the whole system in one place. How to work out your real net worth, how to set goals you'll actually hit and how to build a 12 month plan with a quick check-in every month. That way these big decisions stop being a one-offs and start becoming a habit. Close to 3 million people have watched it. It's the most complete thing I've made on money. Watch that one next.