Here we are at session number 31 , and we’re going to be looking at some of the best resources around to help you further your financial education. It’s true that there ARE other resources around in addition to your favourite podcast and accompanying site, so I’ll be looking at what is out there.

You’re listening to this podcast probably because you want to learn about managing your money better. Either that or you have a fetish for a Yorkshire accent.

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This week’s reviews

Not one, not two but THREE five star reviews this week. I have broken my unbeaten run of five stars though, I currently have 41 five star review and one four star. All those who have taken the time to write a review – 35 of you – have given me five stars and I’m very grateful. I’m still grateful to the person who gave me four, kinda… 😉

DrJohn57 writes:

“Great content and pace – well done Pete”

Thank you sir. The good doctor is a man or a woman of few well-chosen words! Ralph Sanders writes:

“This is a series of informative podcasts that are designed to help people manage money And contains many really useful tips and advice”

Thank you Ralph – great to meet you again last week at conference. And finally MrTomOllerton writes:

“This podcast has literally transformed my life by giving me simple, straightforward advice on how to manage my money. Pete’s a charismatic and charming bloke who has a soft spot for talking about finance on the edge of a cliff near the sea. This is a bit strange, but all part of the charm of a brilliant show”

Thanks Tom (great to speak to you via Skype the other day) and thank you all for your kind words. Also here's a message from Ken from Durham:

[I play a voicemail from Ken]

Thanks Ken. Ken has been to MeaningfulMoney.tv and watched one of the 295 videos on the site about pretty much every financial topic imaginable. Why not do the same?

Sponsor Message

This podcast is brought to you with the help of Seven Investment Management, a firm of investment managers based in London. They put their name to my show and to my site and videos because they believe in what I’m doing, and I’m very grateful for their support. You can see what they’re up to at 7im.co.uk

Introduction

The idea for this show came from listener Andy Norman, for which I’m grateful. He’s an avid listener of podcasts and a lifelong learner and his efforts have borne much fruit in his own financial planning.

So rather than the usual what you need to know and what you need to do format, here are some resources you might find useful, which I read and listen to myself.

Remember all the links I mention today are at the shownotes meaningfulmoney.tv/session31

Websites

As you can imagine there are tons of website devoted to financial matters. Many (most?) of them have some kind of pitch attached. So while you can learn lots from, say the Vanguard site, they are obviously hoping you’ll one day buy a Vanguard fund. Nothing wrong with that at all; it’s how most marketing is done these days it seems.

For my list of sites you should check out to further your learning though, I wanted to stay away from these kinds of sites and instead look for some blogs which you’ll find useful.

Monevator.com

I think this is my favourite financial blog at the moment, and it has been for a while. Written by two contributors, The Investor and The Accumulator the message of Monevator is consistent:

Get rich slowly by spending less than you earn and investing the rest wisely using a passive investing strategy (more on that in a future session of the podcast). They also extol the virtues of protecting against the worst case scenario with insurance where necessary. In other words, these guys encourage basic, simple financial planning.

They’re quite clear that they don’t encourage the use of advisers. In fact that’s putting it mildly. One post from 2010 is entitled: Financial Advisers: Swindlers and Leeches! Reading that post again, he has a point, but is of course tarring all advisers with the same brush as the one advising his friend who was clearly old-school.

But despite our differences of opinion on that score, Monevator has some of the clearest writing and actionable advice around. It’s no wonder he is apparently getting 100,000 unique visitors a month and it is well deserved. A great place to start with the site is the ‘Best Of’ collection

Lovemoney.com

Lovemoney is a big old site, but a good one. It has a good blog with articles covering a wide range of financial subjects. There is an excellent Q&A section where you can ask any financial question and get an answer from the community. I’m sure that experts get involved in the Q&A section, I’ve even answered some questions myself on occasion. The Q&A is searchable and maybe the question you have has been answered already.

There is a comparison area of the site which allows you to compare all the usual things like life insurance, credit cards and mortgages etc. I haven’t used this recently but these sites are much of a muchness and usually feed of the same kind of data. I imagine that Lovemoney get some kind of commission if you click through and buy a credit card or a personal loan from a link on their site.

There are a couple more interesting things like the MoneyTrack service which is a kind of aggregation service for all your bank accounts. I’m not sure how happy I would be giving my bank details to a free service like this – how about you?

Finally they are launching something called Plans which looks like a kind of document tidying service. You can scan and upload the statements and policy documents for all your plans, policies and investments and the service will intelligently aggregate them and get valuations for you. It’s isn’t launched yet but looks interesting.

The Q&A and the blog are the main reasons I like Lovemoney though.

Cashquestions.com

CashQuestions is all about Q&A so in many ways it is similar to Lovemoney, though a lot more focused. Here though, the questions are answered by experts including my friend Annie Shaw, the founder of the site and frequent financial columnist. I’m registered as an expert there myself and I really should make an effort to spend more time on the site.

CQ is a site that deserves more recognition. It is well-established and is one of the few places you can ask an honest-to-gosh expert a question and have it answered. That’s as opposed to the free-for-all you’ll get on the MoneySavingsExpert forums.

FinancialSamurai.com

Financial Samurai is a site with incredible traction, getting hundreds of comments on each post. It is US-based so some of the content won’t be directly beneficial to my UK listeners, but getting a US perspective can sometimes be useful.

I’m quite new to this site and found out about it from Monevator. I like Sam’s (The author’s) style and humour. Read the about page to get a feel for Sam and his mission, but again, it is straightforward stuff, like the Monevator and like MeaningfulMoney for that matter.

I wouldn’t mind his traffic though – he’s apparently getting 200,000 unique visitors a month, and deservedly so.

Podcasts

Money Box – BBC

MoneyBox is BBC Radio Four’s flagship finance program, hosted by the legend that is Paul Lewis. There are two episodes per week. On Saturday the main show is released which is a kind of financial magazine show. On Wednesday you get MoneyBox live which is a interactive phone-in type show.

Obviously, being BBC it’s impeccably produced. Paul Lewis is to my mind very balanced, unlike many BBC journalists.

They only keep the last month’s worth of episodes on the feed, so you won’t be able to get episodes longer ago than that, but as it’s a topical show that makes sense.

Highly recommended.

Motley Fool UK

One for investors, this. The Motley Fool is a powerful brand in the investing arena. If you’re after independent comment on individual shares or a particular sector of the stock market, the fool.co.uk is a great resource. I don’t personally recommend investing in individual stocks, but I do advocate the use of tracker funds.

The podcast shows are between 20 and 30 minutes and are almost always in the form of a discussion or interview, which generally makes for easy listening. The podcast is a good addition to the site itself.

Which? Money

The number one personal finance podcast in the UK, this is everything you’d expect from Which? It is full of tips and ideas for every part of your financial life. Again, it is often in the form of a conversation, and the fairly rapid fire nature of the show is easy on the ears.

I do wish they would make their session titles more useful, and the last few episodes they have got their ID3 tags wrong or something because the latest session says it is 21hours 36 minutes long on iTunes – amateurs!

Fact is there is a real dearth of rounded personal finance podcasts in the UK, which is why I spotted an opportunity!

Books

[Note – links in this section are Amazon affiliate links]

The Total Money Makeover – Dave Ramsey

I love this book for it’s basic teaching about getting out of debt, careful money management and the important things about money. Be warned though, it is written by an evangelical Christian, and an American one at that. At one point Dave talks about how God gave him a Jaguar after teaching him a lesson about finance. Now I am a Christian, as many of you will know, but even I squirm a little bit when hearing this stuff.

BUT, and it is a big but. That stuff is a tiny proportion of the book. The rest is straightforward money management techniques which will serve anybody very well. I don’t agree with absolutely everything he writes – I think his investment approach is too simple – but it seems to have served him pretty well.

I really do recommend this book subject to the happy-clappy caveat above. If you’re in debt, this is especially good for you.

The Automatic Millionaire – David Bach

This is a book that I sometimes give to clients when I meet them for the first time, particularly those who are young and beginning to save for their future.

The book tells the story of two clients, a husband and wife, who walked into Bach’s office one day. They arrived in a normal car and wore normal clothes. They both had normal jobs and had children that she had stayed home to bring up. But when they began talking to Bach about their finances they were very well-off indeed. He asked them how they had achieved it and they told their story of how they had learned to save and how they had invested in property and pensions and all sorts.

It is a real-life story of how (here it comes again) simple financial discipline can lead to good things – for ANYBODY. I find it inspiring stuff, and I’m sure you will too. It’s not so much an educational resource as an inspirational one, but I recommend it highly anyway

The Number – Lee Eisenberg

This is the other book I sometimes give to clients who are within striking distance of retirement. The book’s subtitle is ‘What do you need for the rest of your life and what will it cost?’ And this is the premise of the book. Can you identify the future cost of your desired standard of living? Is £1million enough? 2 Million? Five? Eisenberg offers hep to identify your number and gives some idea as to what it will cost you now to amass a figure that size.

When I first read it, I lost interest a bit towards the end but on second reading I found it much better. It’s a good high-level financial planning book which lifts the reader’s head up from the minutiae of fund performance or tax wrapper choice and instead focuses on the big picture.

Fundology – John Chatfeild Roberts

The author is a fund manager for Jupiter – fair to say a pretty successful fund house. He is a fund of funds manager, that is, his job is to pick portfolios of other funds. It’s a while since I read this book and it’s now only available in Kindle or hardcover versions.

Chatfeild-Roberts goes into detail about the process of fund selection – including how to decipher past performance figures and how to understand the different management styles of fund managers.

The book is a manifesto for how C-R runs the Jupiter Merlin funds, but there is a great deal that interested investors can learn too. Understandably, he errs towards active funds management rather than the use of passives like I would suggest, but I’ll let you make up your own mind about that.

Summary

So, four websites, three podcasts and four books. That’ll do to get you started. If you have any resources you particularly think are useful then do share them with other listeners. Leave me a comment below or a voicemail – click the green link at the right hand side of any page on the website.

Outro

That's it for this session of the MM podcast, I hope it was helpful.

If you like what you hear on this podcast, please leave a rating or review on iTunes by going to meaningfulmoney.tv/iTunes. This helps others to hear about the show and to subscribe, because it keeps me near the top of the rankings.

I hope you enjoyed this session. Next time we'll be talking about the three uses of money

If you have any questions about this, or anything else finance related, or just want to verbally pat me on the back go to meaningfulmoney.tv/feedback and leave a voicemail

Thanks for listening – I'll talk to you next time