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TEBI podcast 52: Simon Bullock on life, the universe and money goals
379 Plays6 months ago
In the 12th of a series of 12 TEBI episodes looking at meaning and money during later careers or second lives, Jonathan Hollow talks to Simon Bullock, founder of Mulberry Bow, the chartered financial planning firm that has supported the series. They look back at Simon’s favourite clips from the previous 11 episodes. Jonathan also talks to Simon about his own milestones in life and business, including his change of heart about life and work in his late twenties, and what it’s been like to set up and run a successful business while spending half his time in France.
This podcast series has been developed with financial planning firm Mulberry Bow. Based in London, they offer a highly personalised service to around 150 individuals and families. Robin Powell and Jonathan Hollow are very grateful for their enthusiastic support for "Second Lives”.
Transcript: https://www.evidenceinvestor.com/simon-bullock/
Mulberry Bow: https://www.mulberrybow.com/
Jonathan Hollow and Robin Powell's book "How To Fund The Life You Want": http://tinyurl.com/how2fund --
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Transcript
Introduction: Jonathan Meets Simon
00:00:03
Speaker
Hello I'm Jonathan Hollow and welcome back to Second Lives. In this series I've been discussing money, life and meaning with a series of guests who are either experts on these topics or who have struck out in midlife to make a radical change.
00:00:19
Speaker
Today I'm talking to our final guest in the series, who's a bit of both. I'll be talking to Simon Bullock, founder of Mulberry Bow, the chartered financial planning boutique in the City of London that has generously supported this series throughout.
00:00:34
Speaker
Simon and I will be looking back at his favorite guest from the series, playing the extracts that really caught his ear, and talking about his own midlife change to set up Montrebeau, and later, moving to France. You'll hear
Mulberry Bow's Unique Approach
00:00:50
Speaker
about his own lessons in life changes, money management, and finding satisfaction in community.
00:00:58
Speaker
Mulberry Bowe resonated with Robin Powell, the producer of this series, and myself when we were looking for a suitable partnership. Our book, How to Fund the Life You Want, set out a manifesto for evidence-based investing and putting life planning before money goals. As you'll hear, that's the approach that has made Mulberry Bowe a successful business with very loyal clients. So now, to Simon Bullock.
00:01:28
Speaker
Simon, tell us about Mulberry Bow and your role in it. Sure, absolutely, Jonathan. So, Mulberry Bow is a privately owned boutique firm, a chartered financial planning practice in the city of London that I established about nine years ago. And effectively, a sort of throwaway line is that we help smart people avoid doing dumb things with their money. We cap our client numbers at 50 per advisor, which
00:01:56
Speaker
It's quite unusual in industry. I'm really seeing it anywhere else. I
Values and Philosophy
00:01:59
Speaker
think that the average is somewhere probably around 250 clients per advisor, something like that across the UK sort of wealth management industry. And we just felt that at those numbers, you tend to be quite reactive and it can become quite a transactional conversation. Whereas we wanted to do what we would call sort of proper financial planning, really understand, you know, clients sort of tax planning and
00:02:22
Speaker
and financial sort of objectives and pensions and estate land and all of that in some detail and of course that takes time. One of the things that Robin Powell and I were impressed by when we started collaborating with Mulberry Bowe on the series was our sense of the values behind you and the business and I'm curious as to whether you've
00:02:43
Speaker
had kind of, you know, brainstorming sessions to document these values or whether they more arise from your personality and who you choose to recruit? Yeah, it's a good question. I probably a bit of both. I think we definitely have involved the whole team in that and we have got a document.
00:02:59
Speaker
that's called what makes more different that is mainly now an internal document but it's a good reminder for us of what we're not. I think in many ways a lot of businesses that start up as we did coming up to 10 years ago, you look at what else is out there in terms of financial advisors.
00:03:17
Speaker
And
Inspiration from Apple
00:03:18
Speaker
there's obviously just some very good ones, but our feeling was that there was, you know, there were some issues, if you like, some lack of alignment of interest. I think that we reacted a little bit to that, but then I also think we've put our own positive personality into it. I think it was Steve Jobs I was reading, and Steve wasn't yet. When they started Apple, they sort of said they designed devices that they themselves want to use. And we very much designed a financial planning firm that we would want to use.
00:03:46
Speaker
Well, let's listen
Personal Reflections and Guests
00:03:47
Speaker
to a few of the the extracts that you picked out and found particularly meaningful. Andrew Helen was one of my favorite guests. That was episode 41. I would describe Andrew as a writer and teacher about life, giving and happiness. You set out in your book some evidence about what I would call the shape of happiness that people typically experience in their lives with particular respect to their
00:04:16
Speaker
Twenties and then they're maybe late 40s or early 50s. Can you just talk about that that general shape that you found out about? Yes, it's it's you shaped and so by that what I mean is when you are in your early 20s The world is your oyster Generally when we look at global surveys on overall life satisfaction, it's very high and
00:04:44
Speaker
very high for
The U-Curve of Happiness
00:04:45
Speaker
most of us in our early 20s. But what happens is expectations start being put on our shoulders. Some of those expectations are genuine. Now, we need shelter. We need a place to live. We need to get a job. But coupled with those genuine expectations are the smoke and mirror expectations that we just perceive.
00:05:11
Speaker
but don't really exist. So they are the keeping up with the Jones's expectations. If I don't get this job, what will people think of me? Or if I pursue this kind of job, I can have some sort of status within my neighborhood. If I buy this kind of house, if I buy this kind of car. And it's interesting,
Living for Oneself
00:05:32
Speaker
Jonathan, because what that ends up doing
00:05:35
Speaker
is it actually ends up dragging us down based on life satisfaction surveys. The U drops into our 30s, into our 40s. It's at that point where we are basically living a life for other people without realizing it. And what the research suggests is that in most cases, once we get into our early 50s, the Joneses do not matter.
00:06:06
Speaker
So I've got to ask Simon, how's that been for you? Yeah, it's really interesting. I remember thinking when I first listened to it, and it was really interesting hearing it again, that my personal journey was that I could compress
Life Changes and Growth
00:06:18
Speaker
U-shape. So I went through those phases. He talked about pretty much from 20 to 30, and I was kind of at the other side. And when I was 20, that idea of living for other people
00:06:28
Speaker
It really resonates and that hit home for me when I was about 28. It's quite funny actually because I got sent to a career advisor or a career counselor by the company I was working for.
00:06:41
Speaker
And you got two free sessions. I ended up paying for a further sort of 102 sessions, because I saw that lady every week for two years. And we went on from talking about careers, talking about life the universe and everything, as Douglas Adams might say. And it was just incredible. And what I realized was exactly what
00:07:02
Speaker
what Andrew's talking about there, which is I was living for other people, I was living for what I perceived, you know, my family wanted of me or friends wanted of me, you know, it's not obviously realizing that. And another way that the lady that helped me talked about it was also living with my head and not my heart. And
00:07:19
Speaker
When I came out the other side of that, I shaved my head, I quit my job, and I went traveling around the world for a year. And I ended my long-term relationship as well, which was not a bad relationship at all, but I realized that it was someone that I was best friends with, and I loved, but wasn't the person that I was meant to be with. So, applicable parting, thankfully, and off I went. And I sort of never looked back, and there's definitely been some tough years since, and I think that the first
00:07:48
Speaker
kind of year after I set the business up was probably stands out as a really tough year. But other than that, I've been very fortunate pretty much from 30 through to being 48. Now I've been on the other side of the U shape. As he says, I think as you get older, you get better sense broadly of
00:08:06
Speaker
what you want to do with your time and what's important to you and you care less and less about what others think. Although to a certain extent, when you set up a business and as some of your guests have spoken about, you can't think about what other people think. You never do it. You have to have sort of no shame in a way or no fear of shame and just go for it. Because if you
Second Lives Series Overview
00:08:26
Speaker
really thought it through, you'd never do it.
00:08:32
Speaker
You're listening to Jonathan Hollow and this is Second Lives. I'm looking back with Simon Bullock over the themes of this series and exploring the changes Simon's made in his own midlife. And you've also made a transition to a life in France as well, haven't you recently? Tell me about that.
00:08:50
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I suppose that when I was listening to your other guest on my second lives, I suppose that that's what jumped into my head was a going from a kind of corporate career into sort of running my own business was felt like a second life thought very, very different. But then about two years ago, I sort of
00:09:06
Speaker
having got that kind of up and running, one of the great privileges that came with it was an ability to shape how I wanted to work. And why I realized is that we've been in conjunction with my wife, we wanted to raise our children in France. So when their children were still relatively young, around five, we relocated to France. I still very much, I have a flat in France,
00:09:31
Speaker
in London, on the Elizabeth line and I spend more than half my time here. Unfortunately, because you get an awful lot of school holidays in France, the family's with me at least half the time that as well. So it's probably about one week a month. I'm here on my own. I just completely focus on work. So that's probably the one downsides away
Balancing Life in France and London
00:09:49
Speaker
from my family for that one week a month. But I don't work when I move with France, but obviously do a lot of thinking and planning and so on in my mind. And then when I'm in
00:09:57
Speaker
London, it's quite intense. I sort of effectively cram a lot in. And I know one of the things that you talked to one of your guests about was the four-day week. So in many ways, I'm doing something a bit like that, but for me to slightly watch three. Did you specifically wish your children to grow up bilingual and in a way more cosmopolitan?
00:10:22
Speaker
Yeah, I definitely saw that as a nice side effect of it, if that's what we're putting out. I mean, they're sort of tri-lingual because whenever my wife's alone with them, she switches to Polish. So they're going to end up with three languages. And I guess that will make learning, I think, so wish a fourth language a lot easier than something I would find learning language. So
00:10:45
Speaker
I like that. I mean, we both love to travel. We're obviously, we're a mixed family in terms of nationality. I'm in the quarter world, so we've got a bit of Welsh in there as well. So, you know, I think that's sort of how we see the world. And I noticed, you know, spending holidays in France and so on, and Spain and Italy, actually, that it's just seemed to be a lot more relaxed. And also, across the generations, you know, going to a restaurant and there's sort of grandma
00:11:09
Speaker
one end at a table with a glass of wine and a nice meal and then, you know, there's a kid asleep in the corner and, you know, and all the different generations are kind of hanging out together. And I really like, I'm not saying you don't see that in the UK, but it's maybe a little bit. You also asked to hear again from Scott Morehouse, who is, of course, a colleague of yours, but also a former Paralympian athlete. And in episode 49, he talked about his work with an organization called Amputees in Action.
00:11:39
Speaker
I worked for a while with a firm called Amputees Action and effectively they did casualty simulation work with the military. It serves a few purposes really, I suppose. Firstly, the serious aspect of
Altruism and Giving Back
00:11:58
Speaker
of training for the military and trying to make it more realistic. I think previously what would happen is they'd choose someone in the squadron platoon whenever that day and they were going to be the injured party and you'd write on their forehead, your arms blown off or your legs blown off and it wouldn't be very realistic. And so the whole point of this was that the first time that some of the soldiers might experience somebody with an amputation
00:12:22
Speaker
and how to maneuver those people in a pretty threatening environment wasn't the first time that they come across it. Effectively, we would get made up with special makeup and look like we've been blown up and we'd get placed in certain
00:12:41
Speaker
you know, certain scenarios where, you know, we'd get a cue, it would be, you know, the big 50 cal going off, and that would be our cue to come out and, you know, scream and shout and pretend that we'd just been injured.
00:12:56
Speaker
That is a pretty extraordinary way of giving something from yourself to other people. I mean, what did this make you reflect on, Simon? I looked for a long time for something that really resonated with me in terms of giving back. My wife and I, we tied to religious term, really, that means giving 10% of your income.
00:13:19
Speaker
You know, it's still fairly popular for some people. For me, it was the simplicity of it. I felt like I needed something that is so difficult, isn't it? Because you could always, certainly those of us that are lucky enough to live in the West and have a sort of any kind of professional job.
00:13:35
Speaker
We're all very well off, aren't we, in sort of global terms and certainly historical terms as well. And I think that, you know, where do you draw the line in terms of what you could give up in order to give more back? And there's obviously always another thing that you could do without. And I think I was sort of trying to look for something that was simple, something that, and I think, you know, my wife thought the same, it was something that we could just stick to and commit to.
00:14:02
Speaker
we'd already
Influence of Investigative Journalism
00:14:03
Speaker
decided that apart from giving our children a reasonable sort of starting life that we would leave everything at the end of our lives to good causes so we'd already made that decision and we were sort of thinking that during our life you know what do we feel kind of okay with and for some reason just 10% on top of obviously payable of our sort of taxes and so on it felt like that was a reasonable amount to sort of give back and so far it's worked really well for us
00:14:31
Speaker
So, Spotlight, which you've mentioned to me once or twice before, which I've seen, and for those who may not have seen it, it's a story of journalists exposing sexual abuse in the Catholic Church in Boston, if I remember correctly. That's right. You've made a big impact on you. I mean, tell me more about that.
00:14:50
Speaker
Well, partly I looked at it. I mean, it's nice and terrible, but partly I looked at it as a business owner in terms of sort of the return on expenditure. I thought, I mean, you know, the human side of it's incredible. And then I sort of found myself thinking about, you know, this hasn't cost that much money. These people are working on a shoestring budget, incredibly brave and hardworking and highly motivated these journalists. And they're taking on, you know, a global organization with huge influence and resources and wealth.
00:15:20
Speaker
and standing in the communities and it's particularly in Boston you know that Catholic Church at the time that this investigation was happening in a lot of those communities which is completely untouchable the local priest you know was kind of God's representative on on earth as far as a lot of the the worshipers considered it and these yeah so i just looked at and thought for what that's actually cost in in time and money the impact is immeasurable and how many kids have they saved you know in the in the future from being exposed to some of the behavior
00:15:50
Speaker
I didn't expect you to come up with that perspective on it. Was that line of thought that led you to giving to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism? It was exactly
Formative Experiences
00:16:02
Speaker
that. And it was also some of the stuff I've been reading about evidence-based philanthropy and effective altruism and so on. And I know that, you know, sometimes I don't make press, but I think the fundamental principle is really sound that there's absolutely nothing wrong with applying some of the principles of good business to give it.
00:16:23
Speaker
lives with Jonathan Hollow. This is the final episode in a series of 12 which has been made with the help of Mulberry Bow, the chartered financial planning boutique in the City of London. Its founder Simon Bullock has been involved with the design of the series and helped us to find some of our great guests, so we're taking a look back at it together.
00:16:45
Speaker
So this is from episode 47. It's with Rosina Breen, who I would describe as a leader of investigative journalism. It sounds like from what you say that your mum always wanted to encourage aspiration and presumably independence if she was keen on you going away to India on your own for a year. Is that right? That she would have seen this as a natural path for you?
00:17:15
Speaker
I think she was highly nervous of me going to India on my own, but I, you know, at age 18, 19, those are difficult conversations, aren't they? And I would say that she was never specific about what she wanted me to do. And I feel
00:17:36
Speaker
the privilege of that really. She didn't try and drive me down certain career pathways. She was very open to the arts, which I think was quite unusual perhaps from a sort of community point of view and ultimately wanted, I have a brother and sister ultimately wanted us to feel fulfilled and happy also to be able to pay our own way.
00:18:01
Speaker
You know, she always encouraged us to try our best and to feel fulfilled and to achieve our potential wherever that may lie. So I felt very emboldened by her. There is no point feeling or being safe if you want to achieve. You have to have a stretch in order to grow. This obviously touched a nerve in you in a positive way, I think, Simon.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, it did, Jonathan. I think the bravery, obviously, to go to India at 18 is pretty incredible. I know, of course, Rosina had a very interesting childhood, so maybe she was a little bit more prepared for that. We lived in different countries already. But it did make me think, my first wife actually spent a year in Nepal when she was same age, teaching village school and living with the headmaster's family and so on.
00:18:51
Speaker
and i remember her saying how that you know set her up to sort of you know almost any future challenge in her life she felt she could take it on having you know survived that and thrived in that environment and much less impressively i do think back to the three freight exchanges i went on as a teenager i think the first i was only 12 or 13 and it was quite daunting you know living in a
00:19:12
Speaker
family of strangers who spoke at different angles that I was supposed to be able to speak but I wasn't necessarily the best student when it came to phrase. Even at 12, 13 years sort of personal sort of hygiene and all getting organized with your clothing and all that sort of stuff that you know you take for granted when you're older but even for a week 10 days is pretty challenging and I think you know those sort of experiences when you're younger
00:19:32
Speaker
not just
Embracing Risk and Innovation
00:19:33
Speaker
with money, but all aspects of managing your life really do set you up. And I thought that Rosita's experience was pretty incredible. Well, let's turn to John Drahon. This was from episode 46. He's the gym group founder and definitely would be described as a serial entrepreneur. This is him on the sense of risk taking.
00:19:58
Speaker
you created and then sold a chain of health clubs in the decade up to 2001. And then in 2007, I believe you were in your early fifties, you set up the first location of the gym group. And so you built two major businesses from scratch. I'm really interested in what was going through your mind as you set off the second time around. Here we go again.
00:20:25
Speaker
I mean, to be honest, the low cost gym sector was very different. And I suppose that's what particularly excited me by it, that it wasn't just replicating what I'd done before. I suppose the other big spur for me was everybody told me it wouldn't work.
00:20:46
Speaker
Nobody wanted to use a gym 24 hours a day. You couldn't make any money only charging £10 a month and nobody would want to join online. Well, 800,000 members later, I can tell you that they were completely wrong.
00:21:04
Speaker
Did you see a connection with your own risk-taking there, Simon? I did, Jonathan. I mean, John's, as he was very kind enough to sort of talk about in his interview, he's a long-standing client at Mulberry Bow, and very fortunate to call John and his family to become friends as well, myself and my family, and he is an inspiration for me, to be honest. I obviously didn't know him when I set up Mulberry Bow, but as I got to know him,
00:21:32
Speaker
And I'm obviously very proud of what I've helped to build with Moravo, with the team and so on. But what John achieved, it was just quite incredible to go to from one gym to, I think, 350 gyms. It's just an incredible achievement. And as he rightly said, he helped remake an industry, really. Because before that, I mean, I remember being a member of another gym chain and painted over 100 pounds. And I'm going back 20 years. And for these guys to come in and make gym
00:22:00
Speaker
membership site or affordable, you know, I'm a member I go I go regularly and you know, I'm fought in a fortunate position now where I could afford a more expensive gym But I said don't really want one. I'll need one. I think that John's achievement is is is incredible and of course like several of your guests He's you know, he's achieved obviously in a different field before that as well in terms of being a top flight to elite squash players so I think there's again an inspiration there that whatever you achieve, you know, you can always take on another challenge and
00:22:27
Speaker
Let's now
Reimagining Retirement
00:22:28
Speaker
go to Hector Garcia, who is a writer and I would say an investigator of contemporary Japan. He was in episode 45 and it was certainly one of my favorite interviews. Does the Japanese language actually have a word for retirement?
00:22:45
Speaker
It has many words for retirement, but when you get into the nuance of what it really means, it feels, once you learn Japanese, it feels to me that the meaning is not really...
00:23:02
Speaker
is not as negative as the word retirement. So in Japanese, when you use the words retirement, it's more like you are transitioning to another phase in your life in which maybe you were doing something, you were focused on a daily job,
00:23:18
Speaker
and now you're going to be focused in your family or maybe you're going to be focused in a more relaxed work like daily work like in Japan you can work even after you are 65 or 70 you can work 20 hours per week and it's perfectly legal you can keep making money if you want
00:23:41
Speaker
Most people, they retire in the sense that they stop working for a company, but they keep doing all the things. You can focus on mainly like focusing on your hobbies. You become an artist or you focus on your family, on your community, things like that. So the mindset is different. You are moving to another phase of your life.
00:24:03
Speaker
For me, the word retirement in English, it feels like you are not going to be useful anymore to anyone. You are retired. You use the word also for other things. When you retire like an old furniture, you don't need it anymore. You are going to throw it away. So you're an expert on retirement planning. What did this extract from Hector's interview make you think about, Simon?
00:24:33
Speaker
Yeah, I certainly would agree with him. I think, you know, retirement to me has become a bit of an outmoded work. We do still sometimes talk about it, sometimes it's helpful, a helpful sort of shorthand, I suppose, but more and more we talk about
00:24:48
Speaker
wanting to get into a position where you only work if you want, how you want, on what you want, when you want. Our clients want control over their time and flexibility much more than they want to retire in the traditional sense. And I think what's interesting, just observing with my own families and the clients I work with, generally,
00:25:10
Speaker
retirement is not necessarily good for you, you know, even, you know, even at 70, I think properly sort of retiring in a sense of I'm just going to kind of play golf or whatever, you know, whatever people sort of imagine doing, it's not necessarily good for you. You know,
Financial Planning vs. Investment Management
00:25:24
Speaker
I think if you can keep your hand in, even this week, right after just met a new client for the first time that we're probably going to be working with. And she was talking about her mother.
00:25:34
Speaker
retired in a traditional sense and sort of did nothing but leisure and actually has now got back involved with sort of a charity and is going to be a trustee and realized that she needed you know even in her mid 70s she needed to keep her hand into something and have a bit more sort of structure and purpose or whatever and that certainly fits with me.
00:25:55
Speaker
You're listening to Jonathan Hollow, and this is Second Lives. Over the course of this series, we've explored lessons in life and meaning from all over the world. I'm looking back over them with the founder of Mulberry Bow, Simon Bullock. I'd like to play you a clip from my interview with your colleague Scott Morehouse.
00:26:18
Speaker
He was drawing a distinction between what you can achieve with financial planning versus what you can achieve with investment management. I'd just be interested in your perspective on that. So let me play the clip now.
00:26:32
Speaker
With Fundage Planning, there's a lot more tools that you've got in the kit bag to be able to help clients with. And unfortunately, with investing, nobody's figured out how to predict the future. And so you have very bright individuals working on something that come up with very seductive, very well thought out ideas. But fundamentally, they can still be wrong. And that always bothered me. And actually, I like the fact that with Fundage Planning, you could obviously part of it is the investment strategy. But a big part of it is things that are very firmly the new control that
00:27:02
Speaker
If you do these things, then they will lead to good outcomes and you can quantify some of those things. How do you feel about the distinction that Scott draws between planning and investing in relation to what you can predict and control?
00:27:16
Speaker
I think
Transparency in Financial Services
00:27:17
Speaker
there's a lot to that, actually, and it's funny because we work with some very good investment management firms, but I think sometimes they collide and they're a little bit jealous because it's quite tangible, isn't it? If you can show someone a clear financial brand, they can immediately, I think, see that it's going to save them time, hopefully give them a bit more peace of mind. You can show them pretty clearly that they're going to probably reduce the leakage, if you like, in terms of tax.
00:27:43
Speaker
Our clients can't have a pay tax, but there's nothing wrong with structuring things in a sensible fashion to not pay more taxes than you really need to pay. They can maybe support their family a bit more or give more to good causes and so on. That's all very tangible. You can really show it and certainly within a year or two, our clients hopefully see the impact of
00:28:02
Speaker
of our advice, whereas an investment manager can be really difficult. It can take time to really show the value of giving investment advice. For some of our clients to give investment advice, for some of the other clients, particularly the larger clients, we're often working alongside other investment managers collaboratively. And yeah, it's tough. It's really tough. And I think sometimes on the investment side, the market can go up and kind of get the credit.
00:28:27
Speaker
the market going up when they really it's just sort of the tide raises all boats and equally when times are tough an investor major will be doing actually quite a good job but client can get quite frustrated if they've sort of lost money whereas you know I think financial planning you can point at it if you like and demonstrate it maybe a little bit more look easiest. Yes I mean one of the big problems with investment management is where do you put the counterfactual?
00:28:54
Speaker
Yes, exactly, exactly. Not exactly that, Jonathan. It's really tricky. I mean, we've done some estate planning recently for clients where because of a combination of inheritance tax relief and capital against tax relief and income tax relief, they were getting tax relief of around 80%. Now, we don't know exactly what the investment return will be within the vehicle that that money is going to sit, but they're going to be 80% up effectively on day one from
00:29:24
Speaker
You obviously feel quite strongly about transparency in the financial services industry, but for people listening that may not understand the nature of the issue there, how would you describe the problem and how would you describe your own and Mulberry Bowe's response to it?
00:29:45
Speaker
One of the issues is that you've got an asymmetry of information. And I think it's interesting if you look at it, it's definitely reducing. I think investing used to be one of those areas, a little bit like cars, where you sort of walk in a car showroom and
00:30:01
Speaker
You don't really know how much a car should cost. Of course, the event of the internet and comparison websites and everything, both buying a car and I think to some extent investing your money has become democratized and there's a lot more information now available to all of us if we want to look for it.
00:30:19
Speaker
I think the difficulty with financial planning and tax structuring and estate planning is you're going into another level of complexity. So I'm not suggesting people shouldn't get advice on investing. I think many of us should. A lot of that is to do with behavior. If we're honest, I've got a financial advisor. I think we're all our kind of worst sort of guide as it were when it comes to our own money. But you've also got this issue that when you start thinking about estate planning and tax structuring and things like that,
00:30:47
Speaker
that
Conclusion: Success and Values Alignment
00:30:48
Speaker
there is another level of complexity that you kind of go to.
00:30:54
Speaker
So finally, as Mulberry Bow has been so critical to the development of this series, Simon, I'd like to offer you the last word. I think it's been a great series. I think you've done a terrific job. I think you've spoken to some really interesting people and it's such a variety of different stories as well that those people have shared, which is one aspect I've really enjoyed.
00:31:20
Speaker
I often think about a sort of a Venn diagram of sort of what's important on one side and and sort of your relationship with money on the other because obviously it's something that we do for a day job and it's really where those two things overlap you know where your money kind of comes into alignment with what's important to you that
00:31:40
Speaker
that sort of that's for me that's a really sort of enjoyable bit of what what I do and I think there's been a number of examples in the people you've spoken to where absolutely there's obviously a money element to it but but it's also been about what was really important to them and how did they kind of bring those two things into alignment because it's not it's not straightforward and it's such a personal such a personal thing right everyone has a slightly different view of of what's going to really work for them so no I think it's been an excellent series and we've really enjoyed
00:32:09
Speaker
playing a small part in making it happen.