Investment Masterclass for Medics - March 7th Edition

So that you're not leaking money, you don't have to sell when the market suddenly So that you're not leaking money, you don't have to sell when the market[No speech] The basics. What you can see here on the screen, ISA optimization, cash ISA, stock and share ISA, lifetime ISA, is part of what we're going to address basically from a practical point of view. And if you're based in Canada, sorry, um, no ISAs for you. You guys have got your TFSA, which is similar to ISA but a little bit inferior because ISA has an allowance of £20,000 per tax year, tax-free, and while TFSA has just $7,000. Okay, um, so we're going to look at tax relief hacks. Okay, we're not going to focus so much on tax relief hacks, but I'm going to mention a few resources that will help. We're just here for tax-efficient investing, so that's what we'll focus on. We look at the 7 steps to start investing. In my book, I call it the SCRUBS framework. SCRUBS, um, yeah. So we look at avoiding the 60% tax trap. Of course, I usually would get questions around combining the NHS pension and your SIP and all that. And then financial protection strategies. Now, just to check, was that about what you were hoping to learn, or were you hoping I might talk about relationship or career or something like that? Just give me a thumbs up if, if it's in line with what you are hoping for, right? You weren't hoping I might talk about politics or what's happening in, in the Gulf, okay? Right, good, good to hear that's not— good, good seeing the thumbs up. So, because we don't want to waste any of your time, you're busy doctors and all that. Yeah, so I'm not going to talk too much about what's happening in Iran. I'm going to talk about investing for now. Okay, right. 7 steps to investing. If you want the material you can refer to after the session, you can download this. It's all totally free. You just take out your phone, scan the barcode, and download it. I'm sure Andy, as always, will share the link in the description. Now let's get into the meat of the matter. Most times I see doctors run into investing without doing the 7 steps, and this is where the risk starts from. This is where the problem starts. Practical examples— I, I get so many of these that it's part of what wakes me up in the morning, and I'm devoting like 90% of my time working on Moneywise Doctor. I do like maybe 20 days clinical work in a year. That's 40 sessions to keep my license, um, but it could go like months. Part of what keeps me going is the massive mistakes doctors who reach out to me, sometimes in the community, sometimes through DM, some of the massive mistakes they've made because they didn't follow these 7 steps to investing. One of them, fantastic GP, shared with me how he lost over £100,000 in an investment that turned out to be non-legitimate investment, lost money because it was a platform, some crypto stuff nonsense. Lost about 100K. These are brilliant doctors. These are not like dumb people. This is a brilliant doctor. Um, of course he learned his lesson, but it set him back. Now, one of the more painful ones is a doctor who shared with me how she lost £40,000 in a platform that was legitimate investment, so not like a scam or anything. Lost it 5 years ago, um, because she had never invested, didn't know how to start. But during COVID and all that, a lot of people were excited. They were investment opportunities. People are doing like games— was that GameStop? Or game, you know, so many things. People are investing in all random stuff. And she joined her friends to make an investment without doing the 7 steps. The result of that, she lost the 40K. Um, this is really— I don't know about you, but 40K, it's a lot of money to save up 40K. Um, my first salary in the UK when I started working as a doctor was 30K. So I know 40K is still a lot of money. Um, for me, I don't know about you, but she lost it. Now she had a second loss from that loss, not money, within 5 years, within the 4 tax years. There's something she could have done which she didn't do. If you lose money on an investment platform in the UK, you are entitled to register it as a loss. If you register it as a loss within the 4 tax years, that means you can claim it forever, infinity. If you lose any money in the future, you can claim— if you make any money in the future, you can claim it against that loss. So if you make any capital gains tax, you can claim it against that loss. So didn't do that, attended our masterclass, I think that was like ending of last year, found out, but it was already a bit late, right? Because that 4 tax years has already gone, elapsed. So that opportunity is gone. Why do I highlight these examples? It's just to let you understand why it's really important to get these 7 steps in place. And for some of you, you could get the 7 steps in place by the end of the weekend. Some people might take like a couple of months or 3 months. But I usually say if you do this, you build a basic financial background before you start investing. That way you've got some defense in place. Okay, um, number 1 is invest in yourself. So this is number 1 step. You're boosting your financial IQ. It's the first step to be becoming a confident investor. It's harder for anyone to run circles around you if you really understand what you're doing. I'm not saying you need to become an expert or a guru in investing, no, but you can learn the basics, right? Could I just ask here, anyone who's read one book on finances in the last one year? Anyone? Just tell us the name of the book in the chat. Let's just check and see. Just a quick— I know we read really a lot of stuff, we do CPDs and all that, So anyone who's read just one book in the last— or you can just tell us the name of the book in the chat. Go ahead. I'm sure someone's going to say Money Wise Doctor, so that's great. I can't see the chat, so I'm just relying on you to read them out. Yeah, lots of people are saying Money Wise Doctor. Okay, okay, okay. I'm going to stop. Money, Money Medic. Okay, someone said I've not read any. Simple Path to Wealth, Psychology of Money. That's good, thank you. So these are all great books. Thank you, these are all great, fantastic books. Now, do you— must you have to read one book every week? No. One book every month? No. We've got an approach we call 1-1-1, and you remember it with NHS 111. That is my approach to investing in yourself, and this is how it works. One book every single year. It doesn't have to be like anything complicated. It could be a simple book like The Moneywise Doctor. I think I have a copy somewhere. Okay, one minute. Right. The Moneywise Doctor. There are multiple ones like you've mentioned, some really good ones as well, like The Psychology of Money and Simple Path to Wealth. But you read one book every single year. That will help to build up your financial IQ and reduces the chance that you're going to have to make massive mistakes. Imagine what that would be if you started reading one book from the point you became a doctor. You've been a doctor for 15, 20 years. That's 20 solid books compounded. That's the first one. The second one, I'll say you're already doing it by being in this seminar today. So attend one masterclass one workshop, one webinar, one course, one training, just one, one of these things every single year around their finances. It might be on your pension, it might be on investing, it might be on tax efficiency, but just one. So for every one of you here, if you can find the emoji for clapping for yourself, I want you to clap for yourself for doing that one at least. If you want to clap yourself, I'm seeing like clapping emojis show up. So good. If you've done that, you've invested in yourself through reading a book, one, you've attended a workshop or masterclass or something. Now the other one is basically following a podcast or newsletter or a blog or an Instagram account. You just want something that gives you a weekly dose. I like long form. I like either a podcast, newsletter, or blog that gives you a weekly dose of it's really quite timely because then you get information around things like changes that might affect you. I'll give you a practical example. Um, last year, the Autumn Budget that came out about the time my book was coming out, um, that was when there were some changes. That's when, for instance, some of you don't know, the interest on savings is going up by 2%. So if you're a higher rate taxpayer, you're going to be paying 42%. On your savings interest, which is crazy. If your savings interest— if you save money in the bank and you exceed your personal savings allowance, which is basically £500 if you're a higher rate taxpayer, you don't have to pay 42% on that savings interest. In the past, HMRC will wait for you to declare it in your self-assessment and then you pay tax on it. But these days they've got powers to actually access it directly to your bank, change your tax code so that you end up paying it directly either way. That's why some of the tax codes you see are all over the place. You wouldn't have known that if you were not following either a blog or a podcast or newsletter or something that would tell you that this change happened. And I included it in my book. That's part of why at the point my book came out, it was the most up-to-date finance book in the UK because it came out like a few days after that budget. So that's the point of the last one, having like a way of keeping updated, knowing what's going on and all that. I'll give you another practical example. 2024, October, Halloween budget, just before the budget, a week before that, in my weekly newsletter, I shared a tip. You can actually get it on moneywise.com/subscribe. Um, in my weekly newsletter, I shared what I was doing. I said I was selling all my non-ISA stock and shares. Why was I doing that? There's a new sheriff in town. The new Labour government, they sounded— they were sounding like they were going to increase capital gains tax. Now if you know anything about capital gains tax, you know that if you sell something like a house or you sell stocks or if you dispose of an asset, you have to pay a tax on the gain, and currently is 24%. Now at that point was 20%, and I had some non-ISA stocks and shares that I thought, well, if I don't sell it now, I have to pay more in capital gains tax. So I wrote that in my weekly newsletter. A lot of people say, wow, I read that. I didn't realize that was going to happen. And what happened, less than a week, the Labour government increased the capital gains tax from 10% to 18% for basic rate taxpayers and from 20% to 24% for higher rate taxpayers. Now, to bring some practical numbers to it. The last masterclass, we had a GP who said he had been investing for a while. I think it was the last two masterclasses in January. He said he had been investing for a while. He had about— he had now accumulated about £100K in his portfolio. Smart guy. He's been investing for 7 to 10 years. He did it through the wrong accounts. Not wrong, but not the most tax-efficient accounts. So now if he had accumulated a capital gain of £100,000, his capital gains is going to be 24% of that £100,000. Of course, after deducting what we call CGT allowance— that's the amount you can gain without having to pay tax— after deducting £3,000, that's the current CGT allowance. Um, after deducting that, he had to pay 24% of £100K, so that's almost like £24,000. Um, it's very funny, CGT allowance used to be roughly $12,000 or thereabouts. It just kept dropping and dropping. I think it's about $3,000 now, $6,000. At this point, we want to not be in a position to even be considering it at all, because if you use the right tax-efficient account, if this JP has used like maybe a stock and shares ISA or a SIP or, um, lifetime ISA stock and shares, then he wouldn't have to even be talking about any tax on that capital gains. So this is why number 1 is really important. Invest in yourself. 1, 1, 1. Okay, good. Now going forward, I'm just going to ask a question because I like push and pull to understand whether you are kind of like know where we are, what we're doing. I'm just going to ask a simple question. When I talk about investing yourself and understanding tax efficiency and all that, can someone tell me in the chat what is the current ISA allowance? What's the current ISA allowance in a tax year? Right here, I can't see the chat, so read out the answers for me. Good. We have 20K, 20K, 12K, 20K, 20K, 12K, 20K, 20K, 12K, 5K, right? 10,000, right? Oh, thank you. Okay, so good attempts, good trials. So, but basically the ISA allowance is currently £20K. It's something really important to know. And, um, I know why some of you are saying £12K, basically because there's a new change from the last budget as well. Going back into what I said about knowing what's happening from April 2027, you couldn't just put £20K cash in your ISA anymore. Your cash ISA allowance will reduce to £12,000, but your overall ISA allowance remains £20K. Okay, good. Well done, guys. Number 2, when we talk about steps you need to take before you even start talking about investing, this is something we did last month in the Moneywise Doctor group. We did something on Valentine's Day: audit your finances, find £100 at least. So one thing you want to do before you go headlong into investing, conduct a detailed financial audit. You want to organize your finances, gain a clear understanding of your financial situation. A lot of the big mistakes I've seen doctors make when it comes to their finances is that they never really ever stopped to think or understand what's going on with their finances, and they just jumped into investing. For instance, if you are a higher rate taxpayer, think about this, and you're not using your full pension allowance, but you're using stock and shares ISA that you don't plan to cash in, you don't plan to liquidate or sell till when you retire, you need to really think about it carefully. Am I better off using my pension allowance through a personal pension? That way I get like a 40% tax relief gross, which basically is like 50% net before I even start investing. Or should I be using— should I be using a stock and shares ISA? I explain— let me just explain that with numbers. A higher rate taxpayer who wants to invest £20,000— and by higher rate taxpayer, I'm assuming you know, but if you don't know, higher rate taxpayer in the UK, especially in England, means you earn above £50,271. Okay, run through, quick run through. From £0 to £12,570, zero tax. That's your personal tax allowance. You don't, you don't pay any tax on that except you fall into a tax trap, the 60% tax trap, which we'll talk about. 0 to 12,570, no tax. From 12,571 to 50,270, basic rate tax, 20%. From 50,271 to 150K, higher rate tax, 40%. Above that is 45%. It's just That sneaky 60% tax trap that HMRC doesn't mention directly on their website. They, they write it in language that's not really, really easy or straightforward for a busy doctor to understand. And this is what happens for any income, adjusted net income above £100,000. For every £2 above £100,000, you lose £1 from that, your tax-free allowance. Your tax-free allowance is £12,570. I think there are 5 people waiting to enter. Let's let them in. For every income £2 above £100K, you lose £1 from your tax-free allowance. That means more of your money comes into the taxable income. If you earn £120K adjusted net income, you lose £10,000. So divided by 2, you lose £10,000 from your adjusted net income. And can someone remind me in the chat, how much is the total adjusted net income? Sorry, how much is your total tax-free allowance? That is tax-free. Can someone tell me in the chat? Let's see. 12— good, 12— 570, Rita. 2570, that's brilliant. Fantastic. Okay, so at the point you hit 125,140, that exact number in adjusted net income you've lost your entire £12,570. Basically, just take £25,140 divided by 2. So this is what happens to a lot of doctors, consultants, dentists, GPs, even some locum registrars. You find that you're working hard, it feels like you're running on the spot, but you've lost your adjusted net income. So you're paying an effective tax rate of 60% on any of your income, any of your adjusted net income above £100K. We're going to address what I've done about that in the past, what lots of thousands of doctors in Moneywise Doctor community have also done. So you can understand what your options are, but you're not going to know about it if you've not done a financial audit. So that is where to start. Lots of people are ready. Today is Saturday and we— if you have to work, you have to work. If you're on the route, I have to work. If you need to look, that's fine. But lots of doctors and healthcare professionals are more than happy to book extra shifts to make an extra, you know, £700 or £1,000, but wouldn't take an hour in a whole year just to look at their taxes to see if they are losing £10,000, £12,570 adjusted net income. I've spoken to a doctor, fantastic lady, um, Opsengain consultant, Um, born in the UK, lived in the UK, went to med school in the UK, has had 15 years. In our one-to-one session, um, she shared, and she shared the testimonial about this. She found out she's not claimed tax relief on her professional expenses since she started working in the UK. Remember, you can claim up to £2,500 through tax relief, the normal process for expenses you've made for your professional expenses. So she's not claimed any of this for 15 years.. And of course there are years you could even claim more through your self-assessment. So what that practically means is if you take £2,500, I don't know how much she could have claimed each year, but that means she basically has lost about £25,000 or more in tax relief, basically by just not having the opportunity to sit down and do this. Of course, hope from the community and the support, she was able to go back and use my step-by-step video guide, which I'll share. Is in the chat somewhere. I'm sure Ndubuisi would share it. It's a free step-by-step video you can use to claim tax relief on your professional expenses if you don't do self-assessment. She used this, she was able to claim back this year— sorry, not this year, the current year, because this, this chat didn't happen this year. She claimed that current tax year and 4 years back, but she had to forfeit about 10 years. Why did that kind of massive error happen? Haven't done an audit. Working so hard because doctors, we are really busy. You're busy with life, you're busy with family, I get it. But now you know you've got two jobs. You're a doctor, you're also the CEO of your life. So you don't want to work so hard and your money is not working as hard as it should. So you need to do an audit. How often do you need to do an audit? You can do once a year. For those of you in the mastermind, you know, in the Moneywise Doctor Mastermind, my financial coaching, We insist on once a quarter, and that means you don't get caught out by any tax traps. This is a good time to do a financial audit because the tax year ends in less than 4 weeks. So go through your taxes, check your bills, check your account. Do you have direct debits? The last time we did this whole stuff as a challenge, people were finding out they were paying £200, £100 for a club or gym or something they don't use anymore. Or you're paying for a credit card, you're paying 25% on the credit card. You know, interest that you've got outstanding debt while you're trying to invest to make 10% back. So do that financial audit. If you're not sure where to start, if you go to moneywise.com/medscan, um, you can get a financial health scorecard within 3 minutes. So you can run through that. And some of you who've already read my book, it's the first scorecard you do to know exactly where you are. So analyze your income, your expenses. You can take advantage of our tools like the financial health scorecard. It's a bit like a a news score, sort of like your early warning score, lets you know where there are leakages and you deal with it. Okay, good. So that's number 2. We've done the hard bits. Now let's move on to the more interesting bits. Number 3, emergency fund. I've explained emergency fund multiple times, and in my book I use a concept called AMASS for building up your emergency fund and then starting to invest. Um, so I'm just going to pause here And then, you know, step back and ask someone who is brave to volunteer to just tell us what an emergency fund is, how to build one. It would be helpful if you've built yours as well. Anyone who wants to help out at this point. Emergency fund. Emergency fund.

I think emergency fund.

That's—

oh, hi, that's me, Rita.

Hi, Rita. Good. Thank you, Rita. So go for it.

I think emergency fund is part of a type of security for yourself, keeping money aside for what my father used to call a rainy day.

Okay.

Um, and apparently a good start would be setting aside 3 to 6 months of your usual expenses.

Fantastic. Fantastic. That's it. That's the summary. Thank you so much, Rita. If you've read chapter 2 of my book, you can see that I'm not a big fan of rainy day. And yeah, but it makes sense what you're saying. It's just that when you live in Wales or Southwest England like me, any day could be a rainy day. So we don't save for rainy days, we save for emergencies. So, Rita, I totally agree with you. You want 3 to 6 months worth of your living expenses One. The second part is where many people miss it. They don't save it in a tax-efficient account. What do they end up doing? They accumulate savings and then have to pay a massive tax. A consultant was sharing with me, she's been saving, but part of it was she was a little bit afraid of investing. She's not had any education in investing and all that, but she's a very, very bright consultant, does a lot of work and research and many, many things beyond just clinical work. Saved quite a bit of money, about £80,000 to £90,000 in her account and never invested. And she worked out that in terms of her interest she was generating, she was close to £100,000, even at 4% or 5% returns or savings, savings interest. If you use 5% for ease of calculation, let's say it's £100,000 at 5%, that's £5,000 in interest generated. Sounds really good, right? Until you realize she's a higher rate taxpayer. So she's going to have to pay interest on— she's going to have to pay tax on that interest at her marginal rate. Of course, she's allowed a PSA, a personal savings allowance, not prostate-specific antigen. She's female, by the way. Prostate-specific antigen, nope. PSA, yes. Yeah, because when I talk to financial advisors and coaches, they know what PSA is as personal savings allowance, and when I say it means something else in medicine, they look puzzled. But I'm glad you guys know what I'm talking about. But she there is a savings interest of £5,000, she's allowed maybe £500 out of it, and then 40% of that, almost £2,000, goes to taxes. So let's not do that. If you want to save your emergency fund, you want to save it in a tax-efficient account. And as Rita highlighted, it's 3 to 6 months' worth of your living expense, typical living expense, not your salary, your typical living expense. You think about your mortgage, your rental income, your utility bill or your car payment if you've got one, whatever is your typical living expenses, you want to cushion 3 to 6 months of it. It's a cushion for you. And I'll give you a practical example. When I was fortunate enough to get to that point of financial freedom, to say goodbye to my job or salary job and all that, um, about a bit, um, December 2022, so 3 years ago, almost going to 4 years now, And one of the things that helped me not to be too worried and to reassure my wife, because I had a young child then, is that we had an emergency fund. Look, we can go like 12 months, maybe a little bit more. So even if I decide, well, I don't want to do anything else for now, because then I then bought ChatGPTDoctor.ai and started doing quite a few things before I started spending a lot of time on Moneywise Doctor, started the blog. But having that emergency fund gave me that flexibility, that freedom to be able to explore those options. Um, so it's really important. And it might be you really love your job, you like what you do, you're not thinking about, oh, I don't, I don't need, um, any— but you still need an emergency fund. Why? I'll give you another practical example. We've got this couple in the Mastermind community. One is a surgical registrar, ST6, I think. The other is a GP. Last year, about this time, I think that was around April when there was the trade tariffs and all that going on with our lovely guy in the White House and trade wars going on. The stock market crashed, okay? At the same time, their boiler— if you've ever had boiler trouble, it's not something that can wait. They needed to fix their boiler. It was going to cost a few thousand pounds to fix because they've got little kids. One of their family cars had an issue. One of their cars, they needed to fix it up or change it. I can't remember exactly. At the same time, they had a family relative abroad. This all happened within a space of 2 to 3 months. A relative abroad needed healthcare. They needed to pay privately. The healthcare wasn't great in the country and they wanted to help to support. They had two options, they said to me. One, they could, you know, borrow money to do this through their credit card or whatever, and that's going deeper into debt. That's not what you want to do if you're trying to build up your wealth, you're trying to build up your financial freedom. They could borrow some money and do that. Two, they could sell some of their investment. They already have stocks and shares, they've been through our Investment Academy, they've started investing and all that. But that will be setting them back because you're interrupting compounding. What does a lot of the heavy lifting is compounding, because when you allow your money to compound over time— because a lot of people say, wow, you're fortunate, before 40 you got to your financial freedom. So yeah, just I started at 19, so I'm a bit slow, you know. But time does a lot of the work in investing. So they didn't want to interrupt the compounding, so they didn't want to borrow, they didn't want to sell their investments. So they had to fall back to their savings, their emergency fund. That's what the emergency fund is. At that point, if you've got an urgent thing come up— sometimes you're just unwell, sometimes you just need to take a break, and sometimes it just turns out that, look, there's something that is pressing you need funds for— you don't want to be selling your investments at that point. That's what the emergency fund is for. Big question, I believe many of you already know this: Where is my preferred account? Basically, where do I think, or where do I know, is the most tax-efficient account currently in the UK to put your emergency fund? For Canada, is it tax— is it tax-free savings account, TFSA? The allowance is not much. I don't even know if there's anyone from Canada in this section, so if you're from Canada, tell us so that we can keep making references to Canada. If not, we just stick to UK. So someone tell me, you guys see the chart? Okay, let me have a look myself. So I can see Ngozi said cash ISA, Dee said cash ISA, Prince said cash ISA, Brilliant Grace said cash ISA, yep, Rita said cash ISA, right? So basically the cash ISA, there's no tax on it, okay? If you think ISA, think no tax. That's where you want to put your emergency fund. That's where I put my emergency fund. Why? Because you can accumulate the tax-free. Here's a mistake many people make. They save without a purpose. They're just saving for the rainy fund, the rainy day. They're just saving and saving and saving. At what point do you decide, I've got enough now, I need to invest, I need to give my money ability to grow? In a year that the S&P 500 returned 25% return, the savings interest was 4%. If you compound that kind performance over years, you're just so well behind and you just feel like you're walking without actually getting to anywhere. And yes, S&P 500 doesn't return 25% every year, and I'm not recommending S&P 500. I'm not recommending you buy anything at this point at all. Um, but if you look at FTSE All-World, S&P 500, the broad well-diversified index fund, even if you look at a long period of time, you see them averaging 7 to 8%. Compared to savings account averaging 3 to 4%, the difference is massive over time. That's why if you don't understand compounding, it could work against you. But we're all bright here, we're medics. 1% fee your advisor charges you— oh, we don't charge anything, just 1% fees— that could compound to tens to hundreds of thousands over an investing career, which could be the difference between you retiring earlier, maybe a few years earlier, or not. But that's just how compounding works. So emergency fund, Back to the main point, really important. I want to keep it in a cash ISA. There's a second option which I don't really use. In the UK, there's something called premium bonds. It's not really like bond, like a proper asset investment. It's more like a raffle draw where you win prizes. You can put in a maximum of £50,000, the minimum is £25. Whatever prize you win is tax-free, and you can withdraw your money at any point in time. So that's premium bonds. That's where I've had a few people in the Moneywise.com community say they put their emergency fund in premium bonds. Okay, it's guaranteed by the UK government, there's no tax on the winnings, just that you might end up winning nothing as well and your money doesn't actually grow. Is that a problem? Maybe not for some people, because the emergency fund, the job is not to grow your wealth, the job is to preserve that bit of security so that you can sleep well at home as well when the market crashes. I've been through 3 market crashes. Sometimes having an emergency fund reassures people, you kind of like know, well, it's not the worst thing in the world if the market crashes. I know I've got like money to fall back on, and okay, whenever the market recovers, especially if you don't need the money straight away. If you think about my first market crash I experienced, 2008 global financial crisis, people who sold back then, especially if they had investments that they weren't sure of, imagine what's happened if they were holding it till now. A lot of those companies have sort of compounded and compounded, are more than like 10x what they were at that point. Of course, if you had invested in something on shaky ground, if you haven't diversified properly, or you've actually gone to, you know, take unnecessary risk and this, this company didn't recover, then that could be a problem as well. Okay, I think there are some people in the waiting room. Let's let them in. I've just let a few in. Good. So that's number 3. Now let's look at number 4. And well done, Rita, that was a good, um, explanation. Number 4, again, we're still on defense here. We're going to move into attack or maybe advance. Is a financial defensive strategy. You want to have a financial defensive strategy before you jump out to start investing. Um, and some of you already have some of these things. It's just that you've not thought about it from a holistic point of view and looked at it from a structured point, have a clear strategy. A financial defensive strategy will be referring to things like protecting your financial future, having the right insurance coverage, So when it comes to a doctor or a nurse or a dentist, non-negotiable, obviously having your medical defense, whether it's MPS or MDDUS or MDU, really important. So I'm not going to worry too much about that because I'm assuming you already have it. If not, you might not even be able to work. House insurance, car insurance, got a few packed out there. Yeah, you have to have your car insurance. It's a legal requirement. But here are a few that nobody tells you about and most people miss out. Your life insurance. Okay, if you haven't got life insurance, and again, I like to use practical examples, um, with these things. I gave an example earlier on one of my podcasts about a lovely childhood friend of mine. When we were teenagers, we were all like, yeah, we're going to go to med school. I'm crazy, guys. We didn't have any money, from background with no money, but somehow we were fortunate. We got into med school, different med schools, didn't meet again till when we're about in final year, and then didn't meet again till maybe like 5, 6 years later. I met in the UK. By then he worked in different country and moved to the UK. So brilliant guy, fit well, um, you know, it was a surgical registrar in London. Went to bed, didn't wake up. 36 years old. That was it. You know, it's about the same age as me. And then it's still a big, you know, shock to my system thinking back then. A big challenge here was that he was a breadwinner, not just for his direct family. I mean, wasn't— didn't have like a kid or anything at that point, but he had like siblings and, you know, depending on him. Both parents were already late. So there was no— nothing to replace that income. So when you walk out, basically it's like you walked out of life, basically, at that point, and the family is left hanging. If you've got a life insurance policy, the right life insurance policy, it should walk in to take the place. It doesn't replace you, but just make sure that the dreams you had for your family does not get cut off just because the person's life ended. It also prevents nightmares. Okay. Yeah. So it's obviously a very emotional topic, and I've had to deal with situations where, like in that situation where we raise money as friends and maybe even very generous friends might be able to raise £30,000, which is, is not money to be sneezed at in the first instance, but that £30,000 could go so far And I was thinking, what if my friend had a life insurance policy that cost him £10 or £20 or £30 every month, and it was a policy for £500K or £400K? At that point, the family gets that life insurance policy. So you want that defensive strategy, because if it's not there, you've got to sell stuff. They have to sell stuff, they have to move things, so that sets them back. So life insurance policy, really important. Now, a quick tip on life insurance before I forget. I know this is not the tax hack. In the Tax Hack X-ray workshop, we go really deep into things like this— how to structure it, how to make sure that it's tax efficient and all that. Quick tip: if you've got a limited company, your limited company can pay for your life insurance policy. That could be a deductible expense from your limited company, and the HMRC will allow that as long as you're structuring it as a relevant life plan. That's director's life insurance for those of you who have a limited company. Number 2, quick tip: whether you have a limited company or not, where you put your life insurance policy really matters. Now, if you've got a life insurance policy of 500K, your family might get the total 500K, or they might get 300K and have to give out 200K from— to the government. How? Why? Why would the family have to give up 40%? I'm now relying on someone who has attended my masterclass in the past or is currently my mastermind or read my book. If someone has left a life insurance policy of $500K, what conditions could make them have to pay— the family have to pay 40% of that to the government? Can someone give me some, maybe in the chat or jump off your mic? Oh, right. Sonia said inheritance tax, maybe no will, writing, Rita, Power said IHT. Yes. So all correct on trust. Good. So these are all really, really important things. Um, maybe no will in writing, stop my life insurance till I'm 60. Okay, good. So basically in the UK, you've got an estate. If you don't know you've got an estate, the government knows you've got an estate, and that would include things like your bank account, your investment. And, um, to my annoyance and to many people's annoyance, in 2024 they also included your pension. So if you've got like a SIP or defined contribution pension, that could also be included in your estate if you're above 75. If you're below 75, that's fine. Your family could inherit your entire SIP pot without any— you know, they don't have to pay inheritance tax on that. However, your estate, which will obviously include your property, If you pass on things to your family, you've got to pay inheritance tax, and currently that's 40%. Now, there's— it's not 40% of everything. Just like you see in your income, there is a personal tax allowance of £12,570, no tax. For your estate, it's £325,000. It's called the nil rate band. I promise you, you don't need to remember that figure or exactly, um, new rate band, but you can write it down. I also explained it in Chapter 3 of my book. I believe Chapter 3 was on financial protection. So the new rate band, if you have assets above that new rate band, $325K, anything above that, 40%, that's what the tax is going to be on it, okay? And if you've got a property that you've lived in that you're passing on they might increase your new rate band by £175,000. So they will give you what they call residential new rate band, so £500k if you are including your property. But if you've got a life insurance that's £500k, you're already above the new rate band, and then you've not even calculated your investments, which I'm believing if you're in a class like this, long term you're going to have quite a sizable investment pot. Um, or maybe you've not even calculated your cash in the bank or any other assets you have. Once you're above that £500,000 for residential new rate band, or above £325,000 for normal new rate band, you've got to pay inheritance tax 40% or anything above that. I'm coming to a point how this relates to your life insurance policy, so just come along with me, don't get lost in the weeds here. Um, of course, for couples, that could be like £1 million new rate band because inheritance tax is on the second death. So £1 million, um, residential new rate band for a couple. Again, don't worry about these numbers, I explained them in my book, and you can also ask questions around it at the end of the session. Now, why is it important to understand this? Because if you've got a life insurance of $500K and it wasn't in your— is in your name but is not held by you, is outside your estate, like some of you have mentioned on the chat, if you put it in a trust— so it's— the trust is not reserved only for the rich and powerful, the Grosvenors, you know, it's not only reserved for them. Yes, you could also use it. That's a beautiful thing about these laws. When they are made, they're made for the super rich. But you learn how to use your limited company, learn how to use your trust, learn how to use your ISAs, learn how to use your SIP. Take advantage of those things, you know. That's just the game. Sometimes you have to learn the game and play the game, and it's all done in a legal way. So if you put this insurance policy in your trust, it is now outside your estate. That means it doesn't have to go through the process we call probate. So probate period where HMRC is checking— when someone passes, they freeze the bank account, freeze different things. HMRC is checking and balancing how much tax do you owe, do you owe tax. That might be the point when your family really needs that money. But if it's in a trust, then it's outside your estate. It doesn't have to go through probate. They can get paid the entire 100% of that policy quicker, faster, without having to go through probate. If it's inside your estate, of course, then it has to go through probate. It might take a bit more time, and then there's a 40% tax to pay. And that's why you see sometimes when people pass on, their houses fall into disrepair, the family is struggling, and they have to sell things quickly once probate is done in order to raise money to pay the inheritance tax. So that's a big part of your financial defense strategy— life insurance. And life insurance is usually the cheapest type of insurance for most people. It doesn't cost as much as the second one. The second one, I believe, is more important to me. The life insurance is good, it's fantastic, it's great for the family. And of course, you can get it. I think, I think if you've dependency issue. But the second one is where many people miss it— income protection insurance. Okay, why is this important? Again, practical example. I had on my podcast the lovely Dr. Ruth. Dr. Ruth was a radiology consultant, brilliant consultant, been a doctor for 20 years, worked in Canada, different countries, um, consultant in the UK. Woke up on Christmas morning— I've given this example previously and I also mentioned in my book— Christmas morning 2020, woke up on December 25th with severe eye pain. At that point, she didn't know what it was. I mean, she eventually found out it was, um, that corneal neuralgia. There's a few ophthalmologists here can help. I think Priya last time told me exactly what it was. Corneal neuralgia, severe eye pain, blurry vision. Went to the emergency department. She didn't know at that point that that was the end of her medical career, and she was just in her mid-40s at that point. Hmm, so what happened from there? Of course, if you work in the NHS, if you are fortunate to be in the NHS pension— I haven't got access to the NHS pension obviously because I don't work in the NHS anymore— but if you're still working in the NHS pension, the lovely NHS pension has got what you call like sick pay. You've got also, apart from the basic normal sick pay, you've got like illness cover. So you have that illness cover, but she started getting that pay when she couldn't work, but it lasted only for 6 months, right? Even if you've worked in the HS for 5 years, you might be entitled to 6 months of it. If you work fewer years, you might be entitled to fewer months, maybe 3 to 4 months. I put a whole table in my book about this thing in Chapter 4, right? So she got to the point where, okay, that pay for ill health ran out. Remember, she's a consultant, she's got a massive house, she's the main breadwinner in the house. Um, unfortunately, or fortunately for her, she had an income protection insurance which she took out much earlier in her life. Maybe she said in 20s, not even thinking about this thing. And that's when that income protection insurance kicked in. They had to pay her every month up till last year when she gave up her license and retired due to ill health, when she was allowed to retire due to ill health. By then she had already retrained to do something else. She's now like a health coach. Lovely lady, fantastic lady. So this is where income protection worked. And when I asked her on my podcast— the podcast is available, you can check it out on my YouTube channel She said, um, they were worried about losing their house at some point if there was no income because there's no other income apart from that. So that income protection saved the day. Okay, so having those defenses in place means you don't have to sell your investments prematurely because you might want to say, well, I have investment, I can sell them. But what if it's when the market is down? Then you lose out the opportunity to continue compounding and growing to when you want to retire. Um, so that income protection, save the day, really important. Some people do something I find really, really interesting, not very smart. They go to search online for income protection policies and, you know, kind of like different comparison websites. I'm saying no, this is something really important. Talk to a qualified advisor, talk to someone who can help you check. Any qualified advisor, you want it to be an independent advisor, at least someone who is specialist, understand your work as a doctor, that can help you. So I don't sell insurance policies. Of course, if you go to moneywise.com, you can find out we vet people and all that who are qualified. They deal with doctors, but that is not about who you choose to get it. It's about the type of policy you get. For her, Dr. Ruth, she got own occupation cover. So have to make sure that income protection covers your own occupation. So not just any random stuff, because you could get the cheapest one, it covers you, As long as you can't work, and then you find out that, look, you're not, you can't work as a radiology consultant because in her own words, she said, what is a radiologist without a good pair of eyes and a good sense of sarcasm? So maybe you can't work as a radiology consultant anymore, but if you've got a general income protection that is not specific to your occupation, you might be asked, well, maybe you can work as a receptionist. How about that? Have you thought about that? Or you could do like some sort of administrative job. At that point when you're not feeling your best, when you don't feel well, that's not what you want to be dealing with. So income protection insurance, really important. Of course, there are multiple insurance. There's critical illness insurance in case you have cancer, stroke, or, you know, basically, um, heart attack. Those three, those three big ones. But what is important here to understand is insurance is money that you ultimately hope is wasted in inverted commas. So you don't want to overbuy insurance. You don't want to pay for too much, but you just want to get what's really important for you. For me, I think a good place to start with income protection, then life insurance, um, and for some people, critical illness insurance as well, which pays you a lump sum if you become ill. Of course, it was created by a doctor many years ago, a South African doctor. Another day we'll talk about that. So why do you need these things in place? So that you don't have to find yourself selling suddenly because you were ill or because you found yourself in a very difficult position. I've had a GP who smashed up his knee. Sadly, he was a locum GP. Playing sport, and then just went 6 months without any income, liquidated his emergency fund. At some point had to start selling some of his investments that he started making in his 20s because he just didn't have the income. He couldn't get any job remotely. Um, he's back on his feet literally now, which is a good thing. Um, but that set him back, and that has moved his FIRE, his financial independence retire early goals, he has to move it like almost 3 to 4 years. Okay, so these are really important. They are not investments, they are securities. Right. Okay. So a little bit now, when you've done all that, one of the areas people make a big mistake is high-interest debt. I've had someone, and I think that was in our community, in the Moneywise Doctor Mastermind, when he joined to say— this guy was, um, I think it was a registrar in emergency medicine. He was making an investment, giving his mate who was in property development, um, $20K, and the guy had promised to give him 10% every year guaranteed. So that's how— wow, okay, you can't even buy gilt, like UK government gilt wouldn't pay you a guaranteed 10%. And then of course his mate is not UK government, so the risk is different. This is really important to, to put in perspective. Um, but he was getting 10%, which was very happy with, but he had a credit card debt of £12,000, which was at 27%, which for some reason he didn't seem to notice. So basically, if he had just paid off this credit card debt— I don't mean that you're using your credit card and paying off every month. I mean, like, the debt is just there, he's paying the minimum and paying 27% interest on it. I said, dude, if you paid off this 12K, basically you get 27% on your money. Which is better than the 10% you're getting already. So it's a guaranteed return. So if you're a doctor thinking of investing, if you're a dentist thinking of investing, think about those high-interest debts. And if you don't, if you already have them, think about do you really need to accumulate more? Like basically, like if I want to buy a new car, I love nice cars and I've got a couple of them, but last time I paid in cash and also in a very tax-efficient way. Those of you who were in my tax hack I explained exactly how that happened. Um, you do that 100% capital allowance for electric car, as long as you're using it wholly exclusively for your business. And if you use it for something else, you have to pay benefit in kind, but that's all tax hack discussion. But what I want to stress is you eliminate high interest debt or at least reduce it as much as possible. There's a temptation. I've seen people who went through, I had this lovely consultant, pediatric consultant who went through our mastermind last year. I think she attended Investing Academy, which is part of the mastermind. I'll explain all that to you. She had a lot of debt. She learned how to invest. She wanted to jump in to start investing, but she's like, well, she needed her plan and her goals. So she had to wait 3 to 6 months, pay off those debts, sort out all the steps, and then she went into investing. And that meant that when the market was wobbling, she's able to sleep, sleep better at home. Okay, sleep better at night as well, right? So eliminate high-interest debt, and then here we are at investing. Okay, so at this point I'm just going to say, when it comes to investing, there are two types of investors. There's active investor, there's passive investor. Before we go into this bit, I want you to tell me in the chat if you're active investor. Say active. If you're a passive investor, say passive. If you don't know which one, you, or you haven't even started, just say none. Let's get a feel. So there's passive, active. I mean, some of you are mixed, you can say mixed as well. Let's see, right? Yeah, you did. I can't see the chat. Okay, let's see. Okay, so we have passive, mixed, non-passive, non, right? Thank you. I see something here. Thank you. Majority of none. None. Thank you. So I think, is it Dr. Gessova? Ziget says, I believe ISA is passive. Is ISA passive? Who thinks ISA is passive? Does anyone want to tell me? I think especially those of you, if you're here, you've been to my Investment Academy, you probably know the answer to this. Um, Sonia says no. Carol says not sure at all. Obiagelu says yes, it is. Girish says both, depending on how you proceed. Excellent, Girish, excellent. Now someone else said you can choose. Yeah, of course, who said you can choose, Sonia? So this is a really important bit to sort out, and I'm sure this will come out in the Q&A as well. ISA is just a tax container, just like your SIP. It's just a container, just an investment account. It doesn't determine whether your investment is passive or active. You determine that. That's different discussion. Okay, um, I've heard a lot of people, not just here, but I've spoken multiple events. In fact, next week I'm speaking in Royal College of Emergency Medicine in their, in their Wellbeing Day. So I've got to go up to London and all that. I've booked my hotel and all that. But, um, I've been in events where people say, oh, I just do something on ISA, I put in money and then they invest it for me and then I can get it when I'm like a bit older. No, ISAs themselves are just the containers. So what you put in your ISA or your SIP is different. Just like me, I've got an ISA that I do passive investing for my family. I've got an ISA that I do active investing as well that I manage. Okay, so an ISA is just the account. It just prevents you from having to pay tax on it. It just defends against tax. That's what the ISA is. But what you put inside is totally different, and I'll come to you how to determine the approach to use. But basically, the ISA is just a tax-free container. Same with your SIP. If you've got a self-invested personal pension or a SSAS— small, small self-administered pension— basically different for business owners, and they can have up to 11 directors. Let's not worry too much about that. But if you've got a SIP, your personal pension, or you've got like an ISA It's just a container. So you can decide to put bonds inside the container. You can put like UK government gilts, which might pay you— I don't know what bond rate is today— might pay you 4% or whatever. You can decide to put— if you are risky, you can go and put in more risky assets as well. Um, like I gave an example the last time, when people say that bonds are always safe, I laugh at them. Like, would you— will you invest in Argentinian government bonds? And their 7-year bond gives you a 49% return, which is massive. A guaranteed return, not like a stock return that you're not sure how the market is going up. The question is, are you sure they will pay? How many times have they defaulted in the past? Argentina, Mexico, Russia— 60 countries— sorry, 151 countries over the last 60 years have defaulted on their national bond. So what you put in your ISA Could be stocks, stocks and shares. It could be passive investments like ETFs, like index funds, basket of stocks and all that. So it's not entirely passive or active. You determine what you want to do. Sometimes it could also be mixed. Okay, but thank you for all your great answers. Okay, so that is what number 6 point is all about, is investing through tax-efficient accounts. Okay. All right, let's see. I want to— I want us to be able to have a bit of time for Q&As. And what time is it now? I can't see my clock for whatever reason. Let's see. Okay, good, we've got some time. So 11:45 at the moment. So basically, when it comes to ISAs, whatever you want it to be is what it's going to be. Um, and there are 3 ways to look at it. One, it could either be a DIY investor like me, like everyone who has passed through Investing Academy, 95%, if not 100%, because once you learn how to invest, like, oh yeah, I could do this myself. I don't have to pay somebody a massive fee, 1% delay in my future, um, to do it, especially if they're not showing any clear advantage. They're not doing better than the average market returns. I don't have anything against financial advisors. I just want to see what they do. Most times I like to know what I'm paying for. Okay, so DIY investor, you could invest by yourself if you've taken out some time to learn, and doesn't take forever to learn. I mean, you learn neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, and neuro— you learn biochemistry, and you could do Krebs cycle. Uh, for everyone who's passed through Investment Academy, it's 4 weeks, so 4 weekends, not like every day, like a Saturday like this, 1, 2, 3, for, and it's all recorded and you can go back, look at it, as well as do things like ask questions in the community. And then you have the whole 6 weeks follow-up support so that within weeks you can actually invest. You're not going to become Warren Buffett, but you know enough for the rest of your life to know how to invest. So that's DIY investor. The second option is obviously you could hand over the money to the platform and pay them a fee to manage it for you. And then there's a third option in between where you could buy already pre-packaged investments. I'm not talking about index fund now, I'm talking about prepackaged pots. They could call it target date funds or something, but they charge you a fee because you are using up their prepackaged pot. Yeah, but if you do that through a tax-efficient account, then you don't have to pay any tax on the capital gains or dividends. And we've already talked about ISA. ISA, the allowance is £20,000. You can put up to £10,000 in the tax-free, totally tax-free. Any growth on it, the capital gains, you don't have to pay tax on. Any, um, dividends, you don't have to pay tax on as well. Um, and of course there are 3 types. There's your Cash ISA, which is basically for saving. We've talked about it, an emergency fund. There's your Stock and Shares ISA, which is basically for investing. And then there's a Lifetime ISA. There are 4 ISAs. Don't worry about the 4th one, okay? I'll mention it. I've talked about the Stock and Shares ISA for investing, the savings, which should be Cash ISA, and then Lifetime ISA. If you're above 40, forget about this one. You don't have to worry about it. Life does not start at 40. Lifetime ISA does not start at 40. But if you are below 40, anything between 18 to 40, you can actually open a Lifetime ISA and get 25% top-up from the government, basically. So that means you put in £4,000, you can get £1,000 on top of it every single tax year until you're 50 years of age. But you can only use it for two things: for buying your first home or for saving, for saving or investing for retirement. That means if you don't use it to buy your first home, the next time you can collect it absolutely tax-free and without the penalty will be at 60 years. And you can either invest it or you can save it as savings. So that's your Lifetime ISA for you. Of course, you have to be wary of the fact that the maximum house you can buy, the maximum house price is £450K. Above £450K, you can't use the Lifetime ISA. But there's also other tax-efficient accounts because I've had doctors say, well, I've used up all my ISA allowance now, I've used up my £20K, but I want to invest some more money. Let's just say this doctor is married. Let's say she's, she's married and the husband doesn't have an income per se or doesn't work and doesn't have any extra money to put in the ISA. But as a family, they run their finances as a family. And they've got 2 children. Let's say this doctor has got £58,000 in total. We assume she doesn't have any pension allowance left. How can she invest that £58,000? I've given this example multiple times. I'm hoping someone actually got it and will give it back to me. Let's say you are in a fortunate position, you've got like more money to invest than your ISA allowance allows you. You've got £58,000. If you use up your entire 20K allowance, you still have 38,000 left to invest. Maybe you've got an inheritance, or you're just some lucky guy, you're making money from your private practice, or you've got some extra money from locum and you want to invest in a tax-efficient way. Does anyone want to have a go? Let's see. Gary said marriage allowance. Marriage allowance is fine, but it doesn't help it, you know. Marriage allowance just gives you tax-free, you know, about £252 max, because you get like 20% of your partner's tax-free allowance. So good, well done. I like where your head is at, but there's still much money to invest. Um, let's see, let's see, let's see. Um, my allowance— oh good. Yeah, Femi, you— Femi, you're my mastermind, but that's a good catch, right? She said JISA, that's Junior ISA. Renika said donation. Yeah, but maybe you want to donate it to your family first. I mean, we like donations, it helps you with tax efficiency and all that, but I'm assuming We're investing now. Um, Bumi said SIP. SIP is an excellent choice, could be an excellent choice, but I'm assuming at this point that you don't have a SIP allowance. Um, so the answer here is, uh, Femi said Junior ISA, and because he said, of course you can use your partner's allowance if not used. So yeah, this is practical, and we've had people do this in the Moneywise Doctor community. 20K to the, to their stock and shares ISA. 20K to their partner's ISA, of course all in agreement. And then the children have Junior ISA, which is an extra £9,000 allowance that they could also put in there, their Junior ISA. So basically they've got like 9K, 9K, that's 18K. And that's how to create that allowance. And like Bumi said, basically if you also, you want to contribute to your pension, you've got you've not used up your pension allowance for the year, um, you could also put that money through your Self-Invested Personal Pension, um, if you want to, and then invest it. Basically, you can access it at 55. That's the age we call that, um, normal minimum pension age, 55. That's when you can access your SIP. And from 2028, it's going to go up to 57. Okay, so this is how you can invest through tax-efficient accounts. Okay, now the final step— we've been through these 7 steps— the final step I I would say is seek some guidance. If you could get like a specialist financial advisor, if you get like a financial— don't just jump into investing if you don't really know what you're doing. Not everyone needs a financial advisor. I've never had a financial advisor my whole life. Of course, when it comes to getting life insurance, I go through a financial advisor. I use an insurance advisor that specializes because I can't buy it myself. It wouldn't make any sense, and I want advice counsel for that. When it comes to things like a mortgage, I don't buy directly. But when it comes to investing, I've never had a wealth manager or someone I'm giving money to manage. Now, that's not the same for everyone. You might prefer to have someone manage that, but it does help if you know a lot, or at least a little, about what's going on so that you know when you're being taken for a ride. It's not like the financial sector will ever take a doctor's money and then give them any hidden fees. It's not like it has never happened before, right? I don't know. I've had doctors complain that they are being charged 3 to 4% without even knowing. There will be the upfront 1%, and then there's platform fee. There's multiple other fees, right? So this— get some guidance, get some help. If you are here already, you're doing something about it. If you're reading a book, you're doing something about it. But if you need to go deeper, I think it's not very wise to try to invest $40,000, $50,000, $20,000, $10,000, even $5,000, and you're not willing to even take out like maybe like £10 to buy a book or sit through a lecture or even go through a course if you need to. So get some help, get some guidance. That will be penny-wise, pound-foolish. And if you need to get specialist advice, why not? These are the 7 steps before you start investing, okay? Right, I'm not going to talk about this right now. I'm just going to take your questions because I know some of you have asked questions about, um, I got some of your DMs and messages from people who want to go a little bit further. You want handholding, you want to go through our Intensive Investment Academy, um, but it's not for everyone. You don't— you can't even pay to join. You have to apply, and then if you get in, um, we invite you to then, you know, move forward, right? But for now, I want to get questions. Have you got any questions around these things? I'm just going to start from, um, the first question I saw. Someone was asking about index funds and ETFs. I think I'm just going to bash that out of the way. When you're investing, you can either be a passive investor or an active investor. If you're a passive investor, you can buy a broad, well-diversified index fund. A broad, well-diversified index fund will be referring to things like S&P 500, which is diversified but is limited to one country, US, but is the top 500 countries in the US— sorry, top 500 companies in the US based on their size, what we call capitalization. So those top 500, these are the companies that go into S&P 500. It reduces your risk through what we call diversification, because then you're not worried that one company is going to crash. Um, in my video from last Sunday, I explained this thing in a way like a football team. You can either bet that Chelsea is going to win the championship, or you can just bet that it's going to be a team from the Premiership. So that way you're diversifying your bet, and then the risk of losing is less. Okay, so when you buy index fund ETFs, you are diversifying. If you buy a FTSE All-World, you're buying like a global index fund. They are diversified across countries, across sectors. Okay, and of course you have to check whether it's accumulating or distributive. You have to check things like the total expense ratio. So that's passive investing. Active investing is a totally different animal. I mean, in the Investing Academy, the first 2 weeks you're looking your risk tolerance, understanding your risk capacity, capacity to bear loss, your goals, and understanding index funds and understanding asset allocation, how to stay safe, how to take risk without exposing yourself too much. For instance, I give an example of me investing in startup companies, or since I've seen as riskier bets, but I put in like 5 to 10% of my portfolio so that even if it goes down, it's not the worst thing in the world. Um, while you might have the bulk of your funds in a global index fund So understanding, okay, you want to invest in property, how much of your portfolio should be there? So that's usually week 1 to 2. Then week 3 to 4, we're doing deep dive, looking at things like analyzing companies, income statement, balance sheet, and all that. Yeah, but depending on where you are, the type of person you are, you need to understand where you are and decide the type of investor you want to be. Because if you want to be passive, it can very much make things automatic, which is basically you automate the investment, it goes direct to your direct debit. It goes into your account and then you invest from there, right? Okay, so I'm just going to stop now and take some questions. If you, um, let me stop sharing and I'll take some questions. Good. Okay, right. So, um, can you let us know direct, um, who's— just call out the person, they bring up their questions, that will be faster.

Anything?

Peter Bruce. Oh, Peter, please go for it. If I've answered your question in the process of mine, you can just, um, say hi.

Thank you for taking the question. Um, I typed it out in the chat. It was more about, um, this may not be something specific to you, this might be something for a general financial advisor to give advice on. Um, I had— I do self-assessment tax returns. I had a 1250L cumulative tax code and a 1260L cumulative tax code. I claimed all of my professional expenses, so BMA, MDU, GMC, um, and I think I was able to claim on some courses that I attended so that I didn't get taxed on them. I still had a £2,500 tax bill despite being on PAYE. Is there anything that you can advise on that? I feel like I claimed for everything that I could. I did go through an accountant, but they weren't specifically specialized to work with medics. They were just a general accountant.

Is there anything else you could advise on how to get the tax bill down? Yeah, I feel your pain. It's something— come on, you think I've done the right thing, I've claimed the right stuff. Where I would start, I would say you should go and look through a checklist that we've made to make sure you've really claimed everything. So we've made like a checklist. If you go to moneywise doctor.com/pacscore, so you can do your scorecard and, and sort of like see whether there's any areas lacking. And I've also done a step-by-step guide that will help you check through HMRC, your professional expenses, make sure you've claimed everything because I don't know exactly everything you've claimed. You mentioned your GMC and all that. What role, what your, what was your job? What do you do?

I am sorry, I work in acute medicine.

I'm an ST6 medical registrar. So that is all PAYE, there's no limited company or anything involved?

Um, no, that, that's my only source of income.

That's the other source of income. Good. So I'm assuming at this point you've claimed your GMC, you've claimed your, um, Royal College You've claimed your medical defense, you've claimed your mileage. Have you claimed your mileage as well?

Business mileage? I don't drive. I live very close to work, so I just cycle, use public transport.

Do you ever have to work anywhere other than your primary place of work? No. Okay, I thought people rotated. Don't you have to sometimes go to a posting elsewhere?

What do you mean within? I mean, I worked within the South London Deanery, so I had—

All right. Okay. So it's all in the same place. And then of course, there's a whole list. I'm not sure I'll be able to go through all of that in an investment masterclass. That's sort of like the kind of things we delve into in the tax hack. But there's a whole list. So I'm sure my colleague, my team member, shared the link. You can go— Thank you. Download all of that. Okay. And of course, if you're still having trouble with that, email us support@moneywise-doctor.com, and we're usually happy to help either to point in the right direction. Sonia said she didn't claim enough as a trainee. Yeah, many doctors don't find out. And what gets my goat is people like Peter who has gone to use an accountant, and sometimes you get accountants who— I don't know if they don't really care enough or they don't know. But you find out that people still lose out a lot of money even when they've used an accountant. So knowing a little bit about it, I'll give you an example. When I bought an electric car, I had someone saying— spoke to an accountant, said, no, you can't do that, and fielded lots of reasons. Can you just mute? I don't know if someone needs to mute. Then my co-host, can you look at mute? I'm getting some sounds. Yeah, so an accountant said, oh, you couldn't do that. And by the time we went to look at the HMRC records and all that information the HMRC has put out, they found out that, oh, actually you could. So most times the accountant might just ask you— I'm really sorry, I've got to stop, it's distracting. Someone's mic is on and there's some scratchy sounds. If you could mute it, please. Or if you mute everyone and unmute everyone. Okay, I'm really sorry, I had to stop. It's just distracting. I'm sure it's distracting other people as well. Good, thank you. So most times the accountant might not know exactly where you are, and I've even seen some specialist medical accountants advising a GP. A GP in our community said, oh, I use a specialist medical accountant, they never told me all these years I've got a limited company, I've not been claiming my use of home as office, and she was paying a sizable mortgage. She could have been claiming £500 every month, and that's about £6,000 a year she could have been claiming. She wasn't claiming that. That's why in the tax hack, what we do is that we go through a fine-tooth— we use a fine-tooth comb. We'll come up with a whole practical checklist, ABCDE. That's a framework. That's the whole thing Chapter 5 of my book is about, ABCDE. You get a checklist, you're checking all your allowances. Have I claimed all my allowances? Is there any business expense Have I fallen into a clawback? Like, a doctor just found out 2 weeks ago in our community they've not claimed any child benefit. They weren't aware they were entitled to it. And on the other hand, one was claiming child benefit but was having to pay back almost everything because they were getting high income child benefit charge. But they could have done something— adjusted net income. They could have actually reduced their adjusted net income by contributing a little bit more into their pension, and that would have dropped their child benefit it. I'll just give this practical example. Two neighbors right next door, both of them earn £59,000. Two parents, £59,000 each. £59,000 adjusted net income is £118,000 adjusted net income. And then the neighbor next door earns £61,000 adjusted net income, and the partner earns £0. So their gross— their adjusted net income is basically, um, they're getting both families, they adjusted net income, not gross income. Their adjusted net income is $61K on this side, and this guy's joint adjusted net income is $118K. The government sees the $61K guy as a high income, you know, high— has to pay high income child benefit charge. So you have to pay back some of the money they get for child benefit. So this is why paying close attention to taxes Nobody's going to care about your money more than you, unfortunately, whether as an accountant, as an advisor. So that's why I talk about the 1-1-1, understanding these things, even if it means showing up to a class like this or joining a community like our free Money Wise Doctor community or going through a structured program. The Tax Hack is, um, is a 2-hour session. I lied, the last time it took us like more than 3 hours. In fact, one Saturday we did 5 hours. It's a session where we just go through it like a tax Tax Clinic. We're going through everything around taxes, whether it's inheritance tax, capital gains tax, PAYE, tax code issues, just going through it. And we're going to see, you might be able to squeeze in one on the 18th. I think there's one on the 18th of March and 25th of March. That's basically because the tax year is about to end and lots of people have tax issues, and I run out of appointments. I'm usually not able to provide any further appointments, especially except for those already in the Mastermind. Um, so, um, if someone from my team could put down the link to that tax hack, anyone who wants to attend, you don't have to attend. Um, you can book that and attend, or you can use some of my free resources as well. Good. Um, I'm just going to take some more questions. I'm going to do rapid fire now so we can run through more questions. Okay. Okay. I'll take, um, 4 more questions. Um, let's, let's do it quickly. So we have one from the chat. Oh, okay. Do you want to go, Dachau? Oh, should we skip along then? Okay, Girish. Girish has a question. Girish, go for it.

Thank you, uh, for today.

Can you just explain briefly how a SIP works and how we can pay more into our NHS pension? Oh, fab. Thank you. Um, so a practical example, Gesh, what's your job role? Let's just be as practical as possible, or just give me any job role. Salary GP. Salary GP, fantastic. Let's say salary GP, I used to be a salary GP years ago. Let's say salary GP is doing maybe 8 sessions or something, and I don't know what salary GPs are paid per session these days. Let's say £12,000 or £10,000. If you're earning, let's say your adjusted net income, you have other income and you just said net income crosses £100K. And you want to do something about it, one of the big options that a lot of us have used is to pay money into your pension. And there are two options. You could contribute more into your NHS pension. That would reduce your adjusted net income. And if you want to know how to do this, go and play around with nhs-salary-calculator.com, nhs-salary-calculator.com. Or you could contribute to your NHS pension, which is limited. They don't allow you to contribute unlimited amounts of money to it, and you have to go through a pension administrator, and you can't invest that money. You have to wait also till you're 65 or 68 or whatever, whatever is NHS pension age. That's one option, not the worst option, but gives you little control. The second option, you can put the money through a SIP, so Self-Invested Personal Pension. How does a SIP work? It's basically an account where you put in money for the purpose of investing for your pension And then you get tax relief from the government because pension is not taxed till you start drawing it as an income. What that means is that if, Girish, if you put £20,000 into your SIP, you open a SIP, you can open a SIP just the same way you open an ISA. I would usually say the same things you check for before you open an investment account to be: is it low cost? Is there any hidden fee? If there's a free alternative, why wouldn't I use it? Is it better? Do they provide all the services I need? Um, like for instance, I have platforms I use like Um, there are multiple platforms really, but I use a platform like InvestEngine and they're not charging a particular fee. Not particularly promoting InvestEngine here, but then they don't provide phone, you can't ring them. I don't care, I don't want to ring them anyway. So these are things you check. So you can open an account straightforward online, and that you can open a SIP the same way you can open an ISA, okay? Or if you have an advisor, they could open one for you, but it will not be a SIP. They open a personal pension so you don't invest in it by yourself, they manage by themselves. So now when you open that account, the rest of it is just the same as your ISA except the tax relief. You've put in $20K, you get an automatic 20% gross, you know, gross boost on the, on the SIP. So your $20K will go from $20K to $25K. Okay, I know you're wondering like $5,000 is not 20% of $20K. That's because it's gross. They're looking at the money from the gross point of view. A quicker, easier way to think about it would be net. If you're 25%, you've put in— they're trying to refund the tax you've already paid on it. So if you're a salary GP, your tax is usually about 40%. So when it comes to a SIP, you put in money, the government wants to give you back the 40% that you put on that SIP gross. And that 40% is actually 50%. So if you put in your 20K, you're going to get automatic 25% on top of that automatically, not instantly. That means you don't have to do anything to get it, but it may not happen immediately. So you get that extra £5K boost on your SIP. You haven't even started investing, you haven't taken any risk, you haven't even invested. Even without investing, you've gotten that extra £5K. Now, as a side GP, higher rate taxpayer, you do self-assessment, which is basically you and HMRC trying to balance the books. Do they owe you? Do you owe when you do self-assessment, you say, well, I'm going to claim an extra £5K. That's an extra 25% net or 20% gross on top of the £20K that I've already put in my SIP. So basically, the £20K you put in your SIP gets you £5K in the SIP account and then gets you another £5,000 from HMRC, basically, because it's as if they're saying, hmm, Girish, we didn't realize you're going to put this money in your SIP. We've taxed it, but now here's your tax back. That's what happens with the SIP. Now when you get it, that's the only one part of it. That's the tax relief part of it. The next bit is now investing it, and investing it will be based on your risk tolerance, your capacity to bear risk, your skills, your goals. If you're like 40 years or 38 years and you're thinking, I'm not gonna need this money for 20 years, I would wonder why anyone would just decide to then leave it in cash or in just bonds, except maybe you're really, really risk-averse. But if you leave it in bonds and it's generating 3 to 4% over 20 years, you're going to miss out on a massive opportunity for growth in the stock market. So how you approach the SEP as an investment, or any investment really, depends on when do I need the cash back. Do I need the cash back in the next 1 year? It's not a smart thing to be investing in the stock market if you need it back in the next 1 year to buy your house. If you don't need it in the next 3 years, okay, you might be thinking, do I need short-term like bonds and even some kind of investment that look, you know, relatively less volatile? Not— I don't say safe, I'll say up and down volatile. But if it's like a long-term thing, for instance, you've got a baby, brand new baby, you open a Junior ISA account and you have their money in Cash ISA, what are you doing? They don't need the money for 18 years. That's the point when you should be thinking about, how do I invest this money to get growth?. And that would be kind of like an engine, like a stock market. Not just advice for you to do, but that's what I do. I'll be thinking long term because even if the market crashes next year, guess what? They're fine. They don't need the money now. For next, next year it recovers, it gets better. Because if you look at the trajectory of the market, as people are working in those industries, it's growing, it's compounding, it's growing on your behalf. Obviously these are the kind of things we delve into in Investing Academy. You get a firm grip of investing, you understand it and it stops being some random complicated thing. Um, we had, um, 60% of doctors say in our poll— we did a poll for 1,300 medics— 60% said they find investing very risky and complex. 71% said they feel financially behind for their age. And that's understandable. You've worked all your life, I've gotten to this point, but you still don't know what to do. With your money. You have no control over whether you want to retire 10 years earlier or not. Yeah, sorry, I've gone off tangent there, but I don't know if that helps give you a general picture, Girishi, of how SIPs work.

No, that's, that's really helpful.

Thank you so much. And, oh, just one final question, because I'm— before, before your final question, there's a guide on SIP. I've done a free guide. Um, hopefully someone in my com— in my team will share the link. There's a SIP step-by-step guide You can go download it and, you know, have a read, or even go to my YouTube channel. I've made videos on sleep. Okay, sure. Thank you so much. Right, I'll take your question.

Um, because I'm a salary GP, I will obviously get paid as PAYE, but if I say do my locums, uh, is it better to do it under a limited company then if they are outside IR35?

Um, I'll tell you what I do. There's a massive massive flexibility comes from doing it through a limited company. Um, and if this is any clue, since I finished training, I've never done any single locum in my name, even when I was very clinically active. I do it through a limited company. Will it save you tax? If done correctly, if done strategically, this is a whole— we spend like 35, 40 minutes on this in the tax hack. The last time, going through like 25 deductions you can make to your limited company that you can never do as a salaried person. For instance, I've got like an admin assistant, I can pay them to my limited company. And this could be like, I've had a radiology consultant who employed the son as the admin assistant, pays him £9,000 per year for that, which is totally tax-free and is deducted as an expense. And the son does real work, obviously helps out with admin and herself. And guess where the 9K goes? Anyone wants to guess? You've had 9K today. It goes to the son's junior ISA. Good one, Sonia. This is— can you see how the money is bouncing around? It bounces out from her company account, it goes to the son, and this is all legal. We didn't set the rules. We want to make the best use of it. We don't mind paying our fair share of taxes, but why should we overpay just because we're doctors or dentists? So in this case, using a limited company is giving that flexibility. I'll give you another example. My limited company, which is the parent company of Moneywise Doctor, I need this to do my job, so it's got to pay for it. The laptop, the webcam, stuff like that. You're a locum doctor, you sometimes need your, you need your car, not you sometimes, to get to locum points. Guess what? Limited company pays for electric car. Of course, you might need to pay benefit in kind if you use it for personal stuff. And we haven't even begun to talk about other things that a limited company can pay. For instance, some of you watch my Christmas video know that your limited company can pay for a Christmas party, a minimum— a maximum of £150 per person. Um, we haven't begun to look at some— so this is stuff for the tax hack. If you're a doctor and you're wondering if you're overpaying tax, I invite you. It's a no-brainer. Just book a slot in the tax hack. We open it to 30 people usually. Yeah, so open the tax hack. It's going to be one on the 18th. So someone on my team share the You can attend the tax hack, you work through it, you fine-tooth comb and find all these opportunities. Sometimes people find out, I think last time Dr. Nkechi, who is an acute medicine consultant, um, she was able to find out about £13,000 basically by the time she was able to use her SIP effectively. And then I think she had a company as well. I can't remember if she had a company, but by the time she used that SIP effectively, HMRC had written her that she owed them a lot of money. I think like £20-something thousand. But after everything, they seem to be owing her some money because by the time she put in money in the SIP, they had to pay her some tax relief on that, claim tax relief on— and basically on the SIP again in self-assessment, reduce her adjusted net income. Just doing a little bit here and there, um, could actually pay a couple of months or 3 or 4 months income. Really, really important. Okay, good. I hope that helped. Yes, thank you so much. It's been really helpful today. Thank you. Should we take a couple more questions? And I just have one question.

Yeah, who's speaking now?

Yeah, this is GK.

Hi, GK. Hi, thanks for your time. Um, so just on the topic of the SIP, so if you are a full-time NHS consultant and if you're contributing fully to the NHS pension, yeah, and then you then open a SIP on top of it, then all the pension contributions, both NHS and outside NHS, are allow— the annual allowance comes into effect, isn't it? Then you then attract big tax bills. So is there an option for full NHS pension contributors to have SIP as well?

Fantastic question, GK. I think that will answer Carol's question as well. Carol said, should most doctors have both NHS pension and a SIP? Okay, excellent. Now everyone has got an annual allowance, how much you are allowed to put into your pension tax-free. Without getting a tax bill. Um, fortunately, 3 years ago that was increased. So, GK, do you know how much that annual allowance is?

I suspect you do.

Yeah, 60K now. Fantastic. So it's 60K now. You're allowed to put £60,000 into your pension and there will be no tax on it. You don't have to pay any penalty. If you cross that 60K, it becomes a problem. HMRC also gives you charges. Now, if I understand your question correctly, you're an NHS consultant, you're already getting money into your NHS pension. You're thinking, how do you not go afoul of HMRC by crossing that annual allowance? Is that what you're asking?

Yeah, that's correct.

Yeah, because the pension pot is growing. Yes, good. Now there are two things to look at. There's your NHS pension, which is a defined benefit pension, right? The calculation of growth is different. They don't look at it based on how much you've put in. Obviously you're putting in 12.5% of your salary that goes into that pot. Pot, your employer is also putting in 23.7% into that pot, which is why it doesn't make sense for people working in a salary job to opt out of the pension because they are losing out on that big employer contribution. Every year, every tax year, you get something called pension growth on your NHS pension. Pension growth, that's pension input amount basically. So if your pension growth for the year— and this is something you usually get from your pension administrator there's a formula to calculate it, but it's easy to get it from your pension. The easiest way, not the quickest way, is to get it from your pension administrator. If your pension administrator has given your pension growth as £20,000, £40,000, okay, GK, let's do a little bit of back and forth so that I'll make sure that we get it clearly. If your pension administrator has given you £40K as your pension growth, how much more can you put into your pension? Let's say you've got a SIP. You got 20K. Yeah. Okay. 20K is a trick question and it's an unfair question.

The whole 20K.

That's what I'm saying. So you can't put the whole 20K.

Yeah. Good.

Why?

Because you need to take into account the growth from the previous years and then what it's going to grow.

No, no, no, no. Okay. I'm assuming that you've already gotten that growth and it's 40,000. From your NHS pension, that tax year. So how much more can you put in your SIP? This is really important because that's where people miss it. So, and anyone else can answer, do you know? 50% of the remaining £20K. Okay, that's, that's good. So thank you very much. So GK, you've got £20K allowance left, but you can't put in that £20K K. Why? Because when you put in £20K, remember the government gives you 20% automatically, that's 25% net. So if you put in £20K, you're going to get £25K, and that takes you above the allowance. So what can you do if you've got like— you've gotten your pension growth, your pension input amount, which is usually calculated basically from your pension statement, um, there's a formula for it. Usually you take like the beginning of the— beginning of the pension period the amount, the pot is, and multiply it by 16. That's B minus A, which is basically— A would then be at the— sorry, B is at the end of the period, what your pension amount is, multiplied by 16, and then minus A. A would that be at the beginning, multiplied by 16, and then by the uplift of inflation. If that sounds confusing, that's because it requires actually putting pen to paper and working it out. So there's a formula for it, but you can also get your pension input amount or your pension growth from your pension from your pension admin. If you've got like pension growth of $40K, you've got another $20K, but that $20K, you can't put the entire $20K because you're going to get that uplift, that 20-25% net uplift from the government. So if you put in another $15K, that gets you to $55K, and you haven't used your entire $60K allowance. Okay, now what happens? You get that uplift, that would be an extra 25% net on top of your— 25% net on top of $15K will get you closer to £60K. Let's use £16,000. I'll give you an extra £4,000. Okay, but here's the question, the challenge where I think you are. You're thinking, what if I use up my £60K? What do I do next? Is that, is that the issue here? I want to make sure we're addressing the issue.

It's growing, isn't it? Like, you know, so then your allowance is going to be exhausted by the growth and the—

Yes, so the growth itself has to be accounted in. The pension growth is the same thing as your pension input amount. So that's basically the first starting point, but there's also something called carry forward. Okay, so if you haven't used your pension allowance from the previous tax year, you can use any unused allowances. For instance, let's give you an example. Um, a consultant who was registered the previous year didn't use up their entire £60K. Most people don't use up their entire £60K in a tax year. Let's say they've got like £40K used up. Any allowances you haven't used in the last 3 years, tax years, you can carry them forward. So you can also use up those allowances. So that's why someone could actually go in and you have a £60K allowance for this year, but you've got an extra like £10K, £15K you haven't used. And in some years it's even much more than that. So that's where the work is, basically getting that pension allowance, finding out what was your statement from last year. You, if you get in touch on Monday with your pension admin, ask them for your pension statement that you need to know what your pension growth is. They won't be able to give you the one for this tax year straight away, but you should be able to see the last 3 years, and that tells you what your used and unused allowances are. That gives you a bit of idea where to go from there. And if you need any help from this, email support@moneywise doctor.com or message me. Usually it's not the kind of thing we can walk through in the masterclass, but getting you an idea of how it works would usually help. Um, a financial advisor as well, especially financial advisor, can help you walk through but nobody can actually do much about it until you get that pension statement. Of course, you can do an estimate as well, um, but if you've got like unused allowances from the previous taxes, you could still use them, but you're at risk of actually losing the entire allowance if you don't use it at all. Like, for instance, by April 5th, you've lost the entire allowance left for 2023-2025 tax Does that make any sense?

Yes, yes, it's a complex topic anyway, isn't it?

So yeah, I understand where you are. This is the kind of issues that we kind of, we deal with in the mastermind because then it requires a deep dive, it requires handholding, it requires you to go through things, and it's not something that we could just, um, casually talk about. But yeah, there's a, there's an approach to it. It's totally doable. I understand your pain. We've had some consultants get really upset because they were charged and they got this pension charge that they weren't really expecting.

Okay, GK.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Lovely. Right. Thank you. So I'm just going to quickly, before I forget, because my team gives me a hard time that I forget to talk about the Mastermind. Um, for those of you who are interested, we take 30 people. Um, it's our financial coaching program. I'll answer more questions after this as well. It's a financial coaching program. It's for people who need handholding. You want to work through things like your pension, taxes, investing, you don't want to do it all alone. Look, for some people, you're more than fine to just go get my free content online, and then you can get my free content. I've got like multiple YouTube videos, you can go watch it. And if it's you, that's fine. I've got one on NHS pension, I've got one on investing, tax efficient, and all that. Um, but if you want handholding, you don't want to mess about, you don't want to make mistakes, and you want to do it with the support and you want that sort of like positive, you know, group— I wouldn't call it peer pressure— where you get other people who are working on the same path with financial clarity and freedom, um, then the Mastermind could be for you. I don't know if it's for you or not. I don't know if it's a good fit. You've got to apply. Um, so someone share the link to the application form to the Mastermind. Um, it's a 6-month program. We're starting it next week. So March 14th is next cohort. We closed it on March 14th. You can't join after March 14th. Of course, if you want to join the waiting list, then you've got to message um, but there's a waiting list, there's an application list. You can apply to join the Mastermind. So what do we do in the Mastermind? We get like deep dives. Not like the masterclass is great, but the deep dive— sometimes Investment Academy is a 4-weekend, and then it turns out not everyone who joined the Mastermind is able to attend the 4 weekends, which is perfect. It's structured flexibly, so it's all recorded and you can assess it. And if you don't attend this one, you attend the next investing deep dive. And you take what you learn from there. If you get stuck, there's a community to support you for 6 months. You get me there daily coming, answer questions and sort out things. And also with our advisors, we get like, um, specialists who work with— if you need to work with an accountant or advisor or insurance policy and all that kind of stuff. So that's what the Mastermind is. Um, in the Mastermind, they've got a 4-week Investing Academy which starts on the 14th next week. Um, the Investing Academy, I think just tell you a little bit about it. The Investment Academy is basically part of the Mastermind. There's 100 testimonials. I'm not going to flash too many of them at you, but we've had doctors who've passed through the Mastermind that found it really quite helpful. Anthony, I've gotten more control over my finances and my investment journey. Oh my, words can't really describe how beneficial it was. Of course, I always am— family physicians in Canada. There's got Chi who's a consultant. And Vanessa is an ex-investment banker and a doctor. Is it multiple? We've had doctors, so we know what we're doing. Basically, the mastermind goes into the investing academy, which helps you get a grip on investing. You understand it and you can definitely walk through it by yourself. You learn how to invest for yourself. I give an analogy that for many years of my life, to my mid-30s, I couldn't swim. Then at some point I thought, oh, you know what, I'm tired of being scared of finding myself in a situation where my baby might be drowning and I can't help them. Because one of the days I ended up on a beach in Cornwall and I was almost drifting away on my bodyboard. Okay, so I decided to hire an instructor, learn, and I got that skill. Now for many years I'm fine. I'm not going to swim in the Olympics for Great Britain, but I'm fine. I can swim to save my life. So the mastermind has stuff like that. Your Investment Academy, the 4-week deep dive, is a life or workshop is recorded. You can refer to it, you can go back to it. Starts from March 14th. And then we've got the tax hack. It's part of the mastermind. Some people attend the tax hack as a standalone, but it's part of the mastermind. If you're in the mastermind, you can attend all the tax hacks. We've had like 3 in the last couple of months. 3 tax hacks, deep dive, walking through checklists, making sure you're not overpaying tax on anything like that. Questions, Q&A. Um, we've also got a few secret weapons in the mastermind, like my Moneywise Dr. Brain. Brain. So this is an AI that I started building last year, July. It's not available to the public, it's just available in the Mastermind. Basically, if you wake up by 2 AM and you're burning to ask me a question and you don't want to post it in the Mastermind group on WhatsApp because I think it is basic question, you can chat to the Moneywise Doctor Brain, get access to the AI and get like feedback, questions back and forth. It's trained on all my content, you can assess my content, you can assess my book and all that kind of. So that's Moneywise Doctor Mastermind. You get vaults. Like, for instance, someone asked me— I don't know if it was, um, Ndubuisi— about, um, how to open a SIP account and all that. So you get the step-by-step videos, the walkthrough videos. And of course, if you get stuck, that's where the support is in the community. Um, so this is a little bit about the mastermind. There's a vault as well where you get all the step-by-step videos. There's checklist. And I wouldn't say it hurts my feeling a little bit, but I get feedback from people in the mastermind that sometimes part of why they have benefited most is not just because of me being there. Of course I know I'm contributing, but it's because of the community, the curated community. We've got people developing checklists and sharing things. Like I've had someone using a checklist developed by someone else in the mastermind, which is basically like help them with tracking their expenses and all that. But most importantly, you want to understand key concepts around investing. Bonds, stocks— this thing stop floating in your brain, risk versus return. Because you think things are risky now. Why? Because you haven't got any training around it. The same reason if you're a consultant in acute medicine and we get like a brand new medical student to come to do your job, they will shit their pants. Forgive my French. They'll make massive mistakes. If you're a GP and you take off for 2 weeks and look for an F1 to staff your clinic, guess how many cancers they're going to miss? Quite a few. You. So you, if you feel a bit risky in investing because you haven't had any training or education around it, that's the same thing. Not because you're not smart. This is the gap that medical school training and all our postgraduate doesn't fix. That's what the Mastermind is for. And of course, it's not just about learning investing, it's understanding your financial goals, your risk, making your, your, your long-term financial goals, thinking about things, what we call your financial strategy document. And of course we do simulation. It's not like a lecture webinar, like practical sessions. I think one of the favorite exercises in week 2 is when I give everyone £100,000 to go invest and come back and tell me how they've invested it within the next 10 minutes. Okay. I don't actually transfer £100,000. It's a simulated activity and it gets people really excited. Practical application in real life. And of course we look at things like how to evaluate companies. So this is all part of the Mastermind Tax Optimization. Like I said, if you're interested, you have to fill out an application form. I want to believe that someone has dropped it in, um, in the chat, or you could message support@moneywise.com if you're interested. Um, but for the rest of you, of course you can get free content. I hope that's helpful for you going forward. But if you're someone who's thinking, well, I don't want to mess about, I want that handholding, that support, then the Mastermind could be for you. But we've got to check if we're a good fit for you and if you're a good fit for us. Um, it's open from now till March 13th. That's when applications close. Why? Because the first cohort starts on March 14th. So sorry, the cohort for March starts on March 14th, and then we can't really get you in after that. I mean, we've had people join after the deadline, but yeah, it's not ideal. Once to start from the beginning. I want to know that you can work, you know, with the plan, right? Okay, so that's a little bit about the Mastermind. Um, if you want to join, we've got a free WhatsApp community as well where you could chat, ask questions. Some of you are already there. If you take your phone and just scan— if you scan the barcode, you can get access to that 7 Steps to Investing. Um, because lots of time you've got questions, you've got things you want to ask ask, and then we do our best to make it as high value as possible to get in there. There's a bit of screening as well, so we've got the right set of people there, right? Okay, so I'm just going to say, if you want to be sent— um, before I take more questions, just to make sure I don't forget, um, if you want to be sent information about the masterclass, if you type in the chat MM, someone from my team— if you type M like Mike Mike someone from my own mastermind, someone from my team will send you a link so that you can fill out the application form. Or you could just drop a message on the number there. So that's my number for the mastermind. You could drop a message there. And of course, the tax hack challenge is on the 25th. There's one on the 18th as well. Um, so if it's something you need help with, you can also message us. Um, but other than that, yeah, more than happy to, to support you in any way I can. Like I said, Moneywise Doctor, 1%, the 1% get like the premium and then the 99% obviously get like audience free stuff. And that's fine. I'm more than happy with that. Good. Right. Okay. So I don't know, have we got any more questions left? Could we take a couple more questions and all that before?

Okay.

Is that Sonia? No, this is Ma.

I have a question. Yes, we have from Sonia. Oh, hi, thank you. Um, I've had various questions, uh, just trying to understand what's happening there.

Right, okay, go ahead, Sonia.

Can you hear me? Oh yeah. Um, I, I've got various questions.

I'll just choose one of my latest ones.

Okay, choose one. Yes, you were talking about the, um, annual allowance and the carry forward, um, and I grasped that concept But the question is, so for me, I'm involved in the McLeod judgment thing, and so I eventually finally received my, my brown letter thing envelope. Yep. I thought I had a charge to pay, and then I went on the HMRC site and you do various input loads of information, and it fortunately came out to say no charge. But now I'm not— hooray! I know, big relief. I'm now not clear How much have I got out of my previous 3 years to carry forward? Because I'm in the situation where, uh, I don't earn anywhere near the, the 100K tax limits. I know I'm mixing pensions and tax, but I would like to do locum work to help. We've got gaps in our rotas. If I do locum work, I'm worried that because I work less than full-time, my locum salary will go into my pension and then potentially I, I don't know how to figure out if it will take me over my, my $60K allowance. But then even if it does, I said to myself, oh, it's fine, you've got your 3 years. But I don't know how to figure out what the 3 years carryover is.

So any ideas on that? First of all, congrats on your MacLeod, and congrats on not going above. I know Sonny has been to several master classes and the community, so I know what she's talking about. Um, number one, You need to get your pension statement. So you must have heard me say it before, you need to get a pension statement from your pension administrator to find out what your pension input has been, because that's how you can work out whether you have any carry forward. Number 2, mixing pension and taxes. By all means, that's what we want to do, mix pensions, taxes, investing, because they all interact. So don't worry about that. Number 3, this is the area where you need personalized it looks like it's not like the kind of stuff that we can effectively manage in a masterclass, right? Or even in a community, because this is something very quite personalized and something that requires actually looking at the real document, looking at the numbers. Um, so I would say this is the point where I would suggest is a line where you get specialized personal financial advice. That's where you get coaching. That's where you get that support to get that education around it.

Okay. Coaching rather than a financial advisor type thing.

I mean, if it's regulated, if you're going to be needing a product, so look at education and coaching wouldn't give you access to buying a product. For instance, Moneywise Doctor wouldn't say, Sonia, buy this investment. We wouldn't say, Sonia, go ahead and sort of like put your money into this kind of stuff. We don't sell any products at all. That's what a regulated financial advisor would do. Um, but you could get education, you could get coaching, you could get direction, you could get guidance and all that. And then a lot of people see that that's what they need. Sometimes you need to know where is the line. The line is products. We don't do any products in Moneywise Doctor, and that's why we work with financial advisors as well who are vetted. They're independent, they're vetted, and they know what they're doing. Um, it's always— I would usually say the best place to start would be education, and then going forward, you know exactly what you need, but it's not something we're going to address in the masterclass or community, unfortunately. But congrats that you didn't end up in that tax trap. Okay. Right. I'm going to take a question from Rita now.

Oh, hello, Andy. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you for your time and all that you do. Very helpful. Thank you. Um, this SIP, is there an age limit for the SIP? Um, it sounds like it can go alongside with NHS pension, but is there a time limit for it?

Yes, thank you. The age— the maximum age you can contribute to any pension in the UK is 75. So I know, yeah, I know we haven't met, but so you're very far away from 75, aren't you, Rita? Yeah, so the, the maximum age after 75 can really contribute to any UK K. Before 75, there's some mistakes you can make that can trigger a loss in the pension allowance. Um, there's something called MPAA, I think it's Monetary Purchase Annual Allowance. So if you've withdrawn your pension in a certain way, they call flexible access, if you withdraw your pension in a certain way, you can lose some of your pension allowance. It can drop from 60K to 10K per annum. Um, also if you do something like maybe withdraw your pension and suddenly put the entire— let's say you withdraw 25% and put the entire amount back. HMRC might say, wait a minute, what's going on here? You're getting like double tax relief on it. Um, but you can contribute to your pension to your 75, basically. And yes, many doctors in our Mastermind combine their NHS pension and their SIP because it gives them that flexibility, right?

I hope that helps.

Yes, thank you very much. No worries. Okay, you know, guys, I know we've gone well, well beyond our time. We're supposed to end this thing by 30 minutes ago, thereabout, or 40 minutes ago. But I appreciate you've hung around and you still have questions answered. So I'm going to ask a couple more questions and tell you how you can get further questions answered. Um, so one, support@moneywise.tv email. Two, you can drop a message here, uh, if you've just got queries, you can drop a message. There's my number on the screen. Uh, three, there's a WhatsApp community which you can join as well. You can ask questions. Four, if you go under my videos or YouTube channels and you ask a question, we'll answer question. Even if we're talking about ISA, you ask about pension or tax, we answer the question just because we know, well, this is the question you've got, or any of the blogs. Um, and yeah, I'm on social media as well, LinkedIn and all that stuff. Um, yeah, so these are other areas. So even if we most times extend beyond our masterclasses trying to answer as many questions, because we clearly know that not everyone gets into the mastermind, um, in a perfect world that would be possible, but we have a limited number and Um, even if everyone wanted to get in, I don't want to have to meet with every one of you one-to-one. It becomes a little bit too much, and my wife might not like that. Um, but people in the mastermind get one-to-one sessions. So these are options of how you could ask, um, your questions, or if you need support going forward. So I'm just going to take a couple more questions. Anyone wants to jump in here, or you, you advise me on who, who needs to go next. Sorry, we have one from Janet. Okay, Janet, do you want to go? I'm sorry, before Janet, Sarah said, do you have any guides on how to understand NHS pension? And yes, so NHS pension, what voluntary contributions are. Yes, so if you could share the link to the NHS pension guide, there's a video on it and there's, um, a whole— or if you have, you already done that? Okay, yeah, okay, good. So Janet, do you want to go for it? Okay, if Janet's not here—

Good afternoon, Janet. Yes, I'm a little different from all of you because I'm a dentist.

Oh, guess what, a dentist. Fine, you're welcome here. We've got dentists in the community for sure.

Thank you. So we do self-assessment.

We have most self-assessments.

Doctors do self-assessment as well.

Salary people like, like most of you. Don't worry, let me help you. There are lots of doctors here that are not salaried as well. They do self-assessment, so you're in the right place.

Okay. All right. All right. So I'm just starting all of it. It's all new for me. Um, the emergency, uh, fund for me, I try to get the £1,000 first before doing anything else.

Yes.

So, um, so I was thinking, uh, where to put it, to put it in the ISA cash, as you say, or the MS— the Premier Bond, the MS&I account. And then I wanted to know if the MSI account accepts the money that you— they draw every month.

Do they have any interest? Oh, good. So, Janet, so cash ISA, where I prefer to put my emergency fund, um, you can put money in the cash ISA, your savings account. And well done. Yeah, some people might want to start with £1,000, and that's a good baby step to start. Um, number 2, premium bonds. There's no tax on whatever you generate. And if you don't— if you win any prizes, there's no tax on it. Yes, but there's no interest. Basically what you get is prizes from the premium bonds.

Does that make sense? Thank you.

Yes, that's clarified a lot of things. No worries at all. Like, if you want to give me a feedback, if this hasn't been a total waste of your time, um, if you take a phone and scan the, the code Yeah, we get like lots of fantastic feedback. And it's embarrassing, but sometimes I show it to my wife to say I'm not wasting my time here. Look, people found this really useful. I've got like hundreds of feedbacks. So if you're here till this point, I'm assuming that you found it useful. If you whip out your phone and point it at the barcode, I want you to give me feedback. I'll be grateful. If you do a video feedback, I'll do a backflip. I've never done one in my life. Okay, I'm not gonna say what I can do. I won't do a backflip, but I'll be delighted if you give me a video feedback, or if you don't want to do video, you can do a text feedback. Um, yeah, I really appreciate that.

Okay, thank you very much for the opportunity, Dr. Andy. This was very helpful. So I'm brand new, and I was just going to ask where to know the basic stuff, the very basic stuff.

That's my question. Right. The basic stuff. Sorry if that is lots of stuff, is like jargon to you. Sometimes we just need a little bit of basics as well to start. Um, the YouTube channel is your best bet. You can just go there, get lots of content there. And, but your best chance is the YouTube channel. That's the best place to start. Um, for, for those of you who've got my book as well, from chapter 1 to chapter 10 is basically walking you through it. So that might be a good place to start. Okay. I was trying to ask a question. Please, please go for it. Go for it, please. So I just recently accepted being in partnership. Oh, wow. Congrats. Yeah, thank you. And obviously I've been on the PAYE. I've not really, really disturbed myself regarding the tax aspect. Obviously, then it's about the transition and what exactly I need to know about. I'm doing my little bit in 1212, uh, uh, I have those basic knowledge, but the SIP was more of like my drawbacks. But I, it's hard to station. I'm gonna have to create a company and all that, but how to structure it is my own issue with it. Yeah, I think this is, again, this is really very important stuff. This is the area where getting it right could actually help avoid avoid overpaying taxes in tens of thousands. Um, if you become a partner, usually a good time to sit down and look at your tax situation. The question will be, how much should I be drawing a salary, and how much of that will push me closer to taxable income? Are there other ways I can draw money as well? Contributing money to your SIP becomes more crucial at this point, especially if you want to avoid crossing into that 60% tax limit. Yeah, so again, these are the kind of things we deal with in the mastermind. Um, if you need help around that area, if you comment MM, we'll send you the brochure. Um, specifically GP partners, locum GPs, locum psychiatrists, NHS consultants, dentists. If you do self-assessment, these are usually areas you want to really be careful about to get it correctly. So structuring it would depend entirely on what is your income, from your drawings? And what is your— basically, apart from the drawings, at the end you get a split of the profit. Do you have any other additional income? Um, do you have any sort of like limited company you've done? Look comes true. Have you used up your pension allowance? So again, it gets a little bit personalized at that point, Deji, but I hope that gives you some ideas of— there's— is not— it's not an impossible thing to do. We've got like lots of GPs, GP partners, who are very tax efficient. And the community as well. So that's something to think about. All right, thank you very much.

No worries at all. Pretty much, I just wanted to know what your advice is for someone who is trying to save towards mortgage and hopes to use it in the next 3 to 5 years. Now, because of the reduction in ISA allowance coming in, you know, when ISA allowance was £20,000, I mean, you can say, okay, every year you just do that and it's tax efficient. But now with the deposit sometimes getting as much as £75,000 or more if you want to do 15% or 20% deposit, and that's quite a lot of money. So if you've, if you've, um, if you've that money, you can't save that in 3, 5 years in cash ISA. What are you— what do you have? Does that mean that the extra has to be in non-tax efficient, or do you have any ideas what one can do? I mean, something else.

Yeah, absolutely, save that money. Absolutely, you bet I do. Um, so if you've used up your ISA allowance, have you got a partner that you can use up their ISA allowance as well? If you've used up that, their ISA allowance as well, um, what is the next step? Are you a basic rate taxpayer? If you're a basic rate taxpayer, you've got like up to £1,000 in interest before you pay tax, so you can save in a regular savings account as long as you're not exceeding the £1,000. If you exceed the £1,000 in interest, then you've got to pay tax on the extra interest. But hi, even if you're a higher rate taxpayer, what could you do? You've got a partner— if you've got a partner or someone else who is like a higher basic rate taxpayer, the money could be saved in their own account. So there are many ways to skin this cat, and if you're a cat lover, forgive me for using that analogy, that's the one I can find. Um, so there are many ways, but a lot of it depends on your specific situation, right? So these are multiple options you could look at, um, but in some cases, if you really, really need to save that money and you've used up all the allowances, then you may have to pay tax on it. The problem is when people have not even used up the allowances, they're not even aware of it, and then they are paying taxes on it because they are not using the right account. Okay, hope that helps. I really got to go now, and then all the best everyone else. And of course, if you wanted to That's good. If you want to join the mastermind, if you comment MM. Yeah, thank you. I'm seeing the feedback. Thanks, Dr. Andy. Patient understanding, very interactive, informative, informative and all that. More free sessions, please. Okay, well, I'll see what my family thinks about that and if my team is happy with that. But yeah, we'll do our best to provide more content. So if you want free content, it's right there on YouTube. If you need help, you need structured guidance, you need handholding, As a mastermind. So if you drop the link to the application again, UD, and if you comment MM, um, someone will send it to you. When the session ends, um, when I go off, um, we're going to record it and we're going to share it. I'm not going to, um, close it because we want to be able to send you a message if you wanted to join the mastermind. Um, someone has dropped their email. Sorry, we cannot send you an email if you just commented. We just send you the link, you fill out the application form. Will not be able to send you the application form via email. We just want to know if you're interested, you fill out the application form. If you're not interested, don't worry about it. Okay, well, all the best and have a wonderful, um, weekend. One key thing for those of you who are here, the tax year ends in the next 4 weeks. Do every single thing you can to make sure that you don't overpay taxes. All right then, cheers, bye-bye.