#041 The Meno-money Mindset, with Rebecca Penny

0:00Hello and very welcome to another episode of Mad with the Menopause. I am your host, Anel Quilliam. I am delighted to introduce to you Rebecca Penny, an independent financial advisor who helps women feel confident and in control of their finances during perimenopause and menopause. A life stage that she is navigating herself, making her advice both relevant and relatable. With more than 25 years of experience, Rebecca understands how many polls can affect careers, confidence as well as earning potential, which can often lead to career breaks, reduced working hours and significant pension gaps. Yet this financial impact is rarely talked about. Let's jump straight in and hear from Rebecca. Very welcome to Mad with the Menopause. I love the title, I just love it. Thank you, yes, it's been, it was chosen out of my personal experience, so I think it certainly does what

1:03it says on the 10th. So without further ado, let's have a conversation. I was so excited to have you on because I want to know how the menopause and our financial planning, how that sits together and how you found yourself in, in this space. Yeah, the reason I started up that my little menopause, my name, Instagram page was actually because I don't think it is being spoken about in this space. No, it's not, which is why I was so excited to talk to you. And I think there's lots of reasons why, partly the reasons why are we're also busy trying to manage what we're doing and cope with this. Let's call it a thing that has come at us, maybe out of left field or has been with us for a while and we didn't really realise it was with us and then suddenly we wake up and go, oh, maybe, maybe this is what it is. And as I found myself getting more interested in this space and reading more and obviously my algorithms picking up more and more of this stuff itself, both on

2:08my kind of commercial pages and my personal pages, because it all listens to what we're doing, isn't it? Where's the money conversation in this piece? And part of that comes from my background in finance, because I'm always thinking about that. But I'm kind of on a one woman mission to bring this to the forefront, because I think we have to include finances part of our self-care, because if, and there's, yes, there's lots of moving parts to it. In its simplistic form, if we don't have enough money, how are we going to buy all these supplements and treats and bits of collagen and all these other things that we're doing or being marketed to, you know, not always in the right way that the marketed to, but there is definitely, and I've seen it in myself, I'm buying things that I was not buying five, it's five years ago. Absolutely, yeah, because we need it. Yeah. So, one, it's a recognition of

3:09actually, this is quite an expensive phase of life for various reasons. Yeah, it can be, yeah. But the other part to it for me is most of us are probably just getting to the point where all those financial planning things that we were going to do and we haven't done, we're just about to do them and in swipes, perimenopause or menopause, and we go, oh no, I can't deal with that, I can't cope with that. So, I'm not going to do anything with it, and then I'm being very simplistic about it, but let's say we kick out the other side of menopause, we go through this process and let's go forward. And then we're about, we're genuinely thinking about retiring, we're thinking about this, and it's never too late to get on top of this stuff, but we could be in this period, I could be in this phase of my life for 10 years, 15 years. Easily, yeah. That is a long time to ignore

4:12your finances, and I think when we think about getting on top of our finances, especially in this kind of mid-life space, there's a lot of noise from external sources around the fact that we, no one already has any money, apparently, because we're in this cost of living crisis, which is affecting lots of people, I'm not saying it's not, but we've got lots of noise about women should be learning to invest, women should be doing this with money, women should be doing that with money. We're trying to cope, first of all, so my approach to this stuff is what can we do with our finances that can kind of retain the status quo that can mean that we don't need to worry about this stuff, that it is all going to be okay? Does that make sense? Yeah, it makes perfect sense, you know, and what you've said there is so true, you know, at a time when we think, but we're going to tackle this money stuff now, then we side-stroke by paramount applause, and then we're like, oh, I haven't got the headspace, I haven't got the energy, you know, to get out of bed most days, let alone think about this, this money thing that requires a little bit of strategic

5:18planning, yeah. And sometimes, I mean, I'm happy to share sort of my experience, which I recognize is skewed because I come from a finance background, so I've, but I mean, so I've done 25 years in finance, always worked in finance, always worked in kind of big client-facing, big corporate, and I was fine doing myself, I was dropping my daughter to school in the morning, and then I was going to work in tears, pulling up in the car park, sort of myself out, going into the office, morning everyone, you know, how is everyone, and just cracking on, and it got to the point, and this probably, this was for a good few months, and it got to the point where I said, I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to leave, I'm going to have to leave, I knew that my job wasn't something at the time, I think we're moving a bit with it maybe, are we there yet probably not, that I could really do part-time, and because of the level of job I had, I could go part-time,

6:18but I'd still be doing that work. Yeah, very corporate, yeah. So large corporate predominantly male-led, which often happens in, in finance, essentially, I quit, I spoke to my husband, there was some discussions around it, but I, I was fortunate because of what I do, I knew that we could do it, we have to make decisions. Yeah, presumably you had a put plans in place, and financially you're in a position to make that decision, because obviously cutting your financial or cutting your finances literally by 50% is significant and not something everybody can weather. Yeah, no, it's not something everyone can weather. I didn't feel I had the option to go part-time with what I was doing, just because of the level I was at in my career, and like I said, if I'd have gone four days, I'm still doing five days working for it, it wasn't, you know, so it was cut my losses, but I remember, I remember thinking, and I have a really great relationship with my husband and we have some great chats about this, but I remember at the time thinking,

7:19this is my only option, I can't do it anymore. And also, do you mind me asking, did you realise this was presumably the start of Pyramanopause? Did you have any inclination? I just thought I couldn't do it anymore, I was like, what is going on here? I just can't do this, I'm going to have to do something, something else. And I didn't really know what that something else was, and it's only now, when I look back on it, that I was like, clearly, there was something else going on here, that was making it harder for me to cope with everything. And what were there, I know you said, you found it really difficult off the back of the school run to sort of pull yourself together, because everybody with young children or children that they need to do the school run for, know that it is probably one of the most stressful parts of our day. So other than, I say other than that in itself is big, but what other symptoms did you experience if you don't mind sharing that? I've certainly had weight gain, I've certainly had

8:19hair thinning, I've certainly had this kind of rage that comes out of nowhere. And I've also had, and I'm happy to share again, because my husband knows that this irritates me. My husband has developed this thing where he's sitting a chair and he'll like tap his legs or swing his legs on his knees. Oh, so does mine. Why do that still? Well, I thought that my husband had just, had just started doing this. And I saw just, not because he wants to irritate me, but I know you're doing this to irritate me, you've just started, why are you doing this? I saw a video of us sitting on the sofa here in our old house about 10 years ago, and he was swinging his legs, and I was like, I never noticed this until recently. So it was stuff like that. I was like, that never used to irritate me. Now, so I have been guilty of sitting on the sofa like this, and he said, what are you doing? And I'm like, I can't, I can't, I can't, look at it. But that stuff has always

9:20been never irritated me. Now it drives me insane. And so I, we sort of sidetracked a little bit, but so then you realized you have to leave the school for a job because it was just not for you. So what happened from there? So I always worked in big corporate, and I knew we were very fortunate in that I could take a bit of time off. Not everybody has that luxury. I'm well aware of that. But we, my daughter was seven at the time, and I decided, actually, this is a nice time to spend some time with her. So I took a year off, but within that phase, I then went through this period, which I think lots of people do from big corporate is, what an earth have I done? Number one, you know, what all of this is career, what have I done, what am I doing? And then secondly, what am I going to do? And that was a bit of a roller coaster, but I did have the breathing space to cope with it. And when I look back on it now, I think actually maybe my symptoms of, of my hormonal symptoms, because I wasn't fortunate enough to have that time out, were much easier to manage.

10:26And the status quo kind of reverted a bit more back to normal, because I wasn't coping with, having to cope with going to work, and I wasn't having to cope with a high pressure role and work. So I was fortunate in that. And then I, after that year, how's it happening? It's quite difficult for someone who has built a career in finance to watch their finances go backwards quite rapidly, even if it's planned for, you're thinking, I've spent my whole career helping people with this. And now mine is going in this direction. So I started to work out what, what, what did I want to do? And I looked at going back to Big Corporate and I applied for one role, doing what I'd done for Tony O'Jeeze and the response, the response was we were looking for someone with a little bit more experience. And I remember thinking, no, you're just looking for someone who's not me, shall we, shall we say? Yeah, yeah, we'll leave it there, enough said. It was very difficult to, and I'd never experienced that, but it was very difficult,

11:31as a woman in their mid-forties, to get myself back into corporate again. So I decided to do it myself, which is when I then started the ball rolling of setting up my own regulated financial planning firm, which is not something you can just go and do. My background allowed me to do that. I was able to get my regulatory positions, but it was quite important to me that I was able to choose the types of clients that I wanted to work with. And the older I got and the more my life was changing, I was like, there could be some real value here to working with people in similar situations, because I think when we find ourselves wanting to leave work or wanting to change our hours, it's very difficult to find people who have done the same thing and done it successfully. So just finding your tribe and working and then choosing who you want to be working with. So in terms of the advice you can give women at this point or this time of life, what advice would

12:32you give us? Yeah, I think there's a couple of really important things to be aware of when it comes to to finance. I think one is that we need to be kind to ourselves about this, because it's not something historically that we have talked about, certainly in the UK, finance is not discussed. We're living in a time without getting into politics, but we're living in a challenging time where there is quite a lot of divide between halves, halves, knots, quite a lot of divide between, well, what have you got to complain about? Because you earn X, I earn X, like we need to stay in our own lane with this. What is our life and our finances? And that's difficult when we've got things going on, you know, geopolitically and everything like that. So being aware of our own position is really important and being kind to ourselves. And I think the generations that came before us times were very different for them. People didn't talk to us about pensions because they weren't a thing like they are now. So I've spoken to people and I think I did an Instagram post on it

13:35a while back around that feeling of why did nobody tell me this stuff. And it wasn't that you haven't missed those conversations. No one just happened. So where people say, well, why didn't my parents talk to me about this? Well, no one spoke to them. And it wasn't even a thing for them. Yeah, how do we cut ourselves up slack? We show ourselves some compassion, but how in terms of practically, how do we how do we move forward to ensure that we have every time and that is is going to work for us, whatever that might look like because, you know, we can only plan with the knowledge we have now in the information we have. But so what can we put in place, Rebecca? I think that first of all, we all need to think about what retirement means for us. And there is a bigger question to that about whether we need to redefine what retirement is. A bit like we're redefining what menopause and paramanopause is, do we need to redefine what this notion of

14:36we go to work until this date and then we leave and we have a pension, you know, I don't see a I will at some point I'm sure, but I love doing what I do. I love speaking to people. I love interactive. If you told me that I had to just draw a pension and that was it, that's not the version of retirement I want. So we need to all have a think about what do we want life to look like? The word retirement I struggle with at times because it's a bit like the word menopause, isn't it? So you're you're in menopause, you're in retirement. Like what does that actually actually mean? In terms of the actual financial aspect of it, no one is coming to rescue your pension unless you do it yourself or you pay them to help you essentially. So there is an element of we have to get ourselves doing this because it's going to be action now. Yeah, you can merely ignore these things but the only thing that is finite when it comes to this stuff is time because of the way

15:39pensions work. It is time. So my daughter's nine, she has a pension. We don't put a lot in there, but she has one because she has a huge amount of time to build that. Who knows what pensions will look like when she gets there, but I often speak to women who say, well, I'll do that next year and then they come back to me in a couple of years and they say, I haven't done anything with it. There's some really useful information out there. The retirement living standards is a good thing to look at. Quite often, people don't start because they don't know where to start. Like what? How much money do I need for retirement? On that site, there's some really useful breakdowns of what a retirement could cost and if you want to go out for dinner in your retirement, how much money do you need? If you want to go on holiday in retirement, what does that sort of potlet like? So that's really worth having a little look at and sometimes it's less than people think they need. So that presumably take into account what we project inflation might look like and versus what things might cost? Yeah. 10, 20, whatever he is down the line, right? Okay,

16:45very useful. For the natural planning, it's quite a broad area but quite often what we see as well is certainly within couples with pensions and retirements, we've got quite uneven split in pension balances and one of the things I often talk to people about is actually if you have uneven pensions as a couple come retirement, we've got a household tax issue here because we might have run out of one pot and the other pot can only be drawn in one name so we can't be efficient from a tax planning perspective. So I do think sometimes having where it's relevant a collective conversation with others that might be party interlinked finances in later life is important as well but there is time and living sounds is a great place to start. And just incidentally I mean what you've said there is there any way to navigate around that if you say you know for example typically it's female that will have a smaller pot in the partner if it's male will have a more generous pot is there a way in terms of taxation to work around that and I appreciate everyone's circumstances

17:48is so different depends which tax bracket you fall in it depends whether you have other sources of income but is there a straightforward answer to that or is it just it depends. The answer to most financial questions are it depends. The challenge that you have when you have uneven pension pots like that is the tax allowances we have as individuals we have for life so each year you can earn 12 the 12 and a half thousand pounds when you're drawing from pension I'm ignoring the state pension here but certainly if we're looking at bridging between retirement and state pension age but it's very difficult to mitigate that tax if it's all going into one name there are things you can do that are probably slightly higher risks which come with tax breaks but you don't want to be doing that when you're heading into retirement. You want to protect your capital? Yes that does make sense. So really pension planning and starting as soon as you're able to is is really what we ought to be doing is are there any other things if we should be doing it?

18:51Yeah so I think pension always gets the mention but I'm glad you asked that question because pensions aren't the bill an end all. Why do financial planning so financial planning includes so many other aspects that people don't think about so for example wills and powers of attorney they fall under financial planning lots of people have a will lots of people don't have powers of attorney but their parents will have powers of attorney. As we all well know we are not invincible you know if you are if something happens to someone else in your family and you need to make decisions on their health or their finances and you can't do that because you haven't got powers of attorney that is the sort of stuff that I'm quite passionate about mitigating in midlife because that then gives you an extra level of stress, some extra level of things to deal with. At the time when we we can't really cope with stress as much as well as we used to. No so I think you know that's really important insurances are really important you know but it doesn't even need to be you know the big one

19:54that gets thrown around is life cover and I'm always really blunt when it comes to life cover and I always I apologise if it causes offense but life cover is all very well as long as the finite thing happens the probability of the finite thing happening unless there's other reasons we know is much lower than anything else happening there are things that you can put in place to mitigate all sorts of things that get thrown at you so for example I have cover I'm self employed I have an insurance policy for my daughter that if she is ill there is a payout for me so that I don't I can just stop working and I don't need to worry about it we have things like virtual GPs so that if she needs a doctor's appointment I don't need to go and queue with a sick child on one hand a work phone on the other hand at eight o'clock in the morning to try and do that so there are all these things that you can fact it into financial planning that are quite removed from pensions but that make our life easier because I think the easiest way

20:59to navigate what we're navigating is to maintain the status quo and to have this kind of safety net around us that just bounces are the things away from us as they try and take us out of left field does that make sense yeah yeah no that makes perfect sense because as you say generally people think we're time and they think pensions they don't necessarily think of the other things and you raise a very interesting point about the lasting power of attorney as well and and I know my husband and I did it doing COVID because you know it sort of brought a lot of things into perspective and I forgot now you will probably be best placed to remind me of the website because you can go online and you do it you lodge it with there's a medical and there's a financial there's it's two different LPAs and just remind me what is the website you know the office of public guardianship there you go the office of public guardianship I shall put that into the notes as well and yeah and then you lodge it there and and and that is it's just a piece of mind if nothing else you know not that you're postulating anything like that to happen but you know it

21:59could happen it could happen yeah I think to give you an example last last weekend my mother-in-law had a fall in the city broken her ankle in three places fortunately that was all she did yeah but had she hit her head had something severely incapacitated her we would not have been able to make well we would because we've got the LPAs but without powers of attorney we would not be able to make decisions on her finances or on her her health so if you are already tight financially or already got all these things going on and something like that comes at you out of left field you might not be able to afford to pay for an adult parents care care as to go in for the next six weeks all those things will drain your not just your finances but your sanity while we navigate everything else yeah no and and I'm sorry to you then as you say thankfully that that was the only thing and I use I use the only thing in inverted commas

23:01that happened but but I think there's the the misconception that if you in a partnership romantic um whether you married or whether you were the partner for a very long time they're automatically we will be able to make those decisions and and I was really surprised when I when I realized this in lockdown because somebody else happened to speak to us we were having a conversation as we I think we all were about mortality at that time and I was just completely flabbergasted that it is so essential this is important this is in place so yeah I'm glad you you raised that as a point as well Rebecca so anything else we should be looking out for Rebecca that we should be mindful of and and perhaps explore a little bit further that isn't talked about as much as it should or talked about at all for that matter I think right at the beginning we talked a little bit about didn't we about staying in our lane and knowing our own position and what we need ourselves I spoke to a lady the other day who said to me all of my friends have told me I don't need a financial advisor and I said but what do you what do you think you need people are very quick

24:07to give their views and opinions of what you should do with your money or what you shouldn't do with your money which I find fascinating because we live in a world where we don't want to tell anyone how much money we've got but we want to tell people what they should do to do with it I'm very privileged because people do tell me what what money they have so I think staying in our lane and thinking about what we need and recognising our behaviours and patterns around finances so the way we interact and respond with money comes it's called our money our money story actually what experiences have you had in your life that shapes the way you spend your money and how interact with it so you know I lost a parent when I was young and that leads to me catastrophising I could testifies all the time so I've got every insurance under the sun because I'm like this is this

25:07is going to happen this is not going to happen but for some people if they've experienced something like that their catastrophising goes in another direction it goes in I can't be bothered to do any of this because I might go under a bus tomorrow because I've seen it happen before so I'm just going to spend everything people just say to me all the time I'm bad with money I'm not very good with money there's no right or wrong there are things you can do that are better things that you can do that maybe aren't so good but we do these things because of how our lives have been formed and this phase of life throws things at us that might change the way we are with money I think also it's so important to have a budget and to review it I would you agree that that is a good thing to do I think it is I think there's two things I would kind of say there one is I don't like the word budget right why is that why is there Rebecca I don't like the word budget because I think it has negative connotations okay I think I try and encourage people to think of things

26:14as a spending plan I think it's a bit more gentle and I think subconsciously there's a negative fear around budgets I mean the government used it to control how much money we have don't have what we you know and I think spending plan if we say something's not in the budget it almost feels like we can't afford it I think if you have a spending plan and you have so what's my spending plan this month something might not be in your spending plan but you've chosen not to put it in there possibly that month so I prefer spending plans just going back to pensions I know we sort of jumping from one thing to the next but that's so other brain work sometimes in terms of pensions would you recommend having a personal pension as well if you have a pension at work or is the answer simply it depends yet again I think what we have to think about with pensions is that our employers are obliged to provide us with a pension they are not obliged to help or support or

27:18assist us with where that pension is invested yes you might have portals you might have this sort of stuff so it's really important to look at what you have and to try and understand that before getting too caught up on do I need another pension do I need this do I need that if you have if you have a workplace pension we need to remember that that is your money it's not your employer's money it is your money you just cannot get it for a while so I often say to people I'll ask you the question would you give thousands of pounds worth of your money to someone to look after and never ask them where they've put it or what they've done with it or how much is in the pot or even look at it from year to year you might stop being friends with them but you just leave the money with them would you do that no absolutely not and I will say I look at where the funds are invested I look at how it's performed and you know move it around as well if need be but

28:23I know that's not something that everybody does because we sort of we are conditioned just to they employ it takes it out we leave it there until we we need it away 55 and people generally don't look at it they don't look at how the funds are performing they don't even know which funds it's invested in and and and so forth yeah for me good advice I think in terms of having a private pension because lots of people move around employers now we are increasingly seeing people who have more than one pension there's a lot of noise out there about consolidating pensions what's your view on that Rebecca that is a good idea for some people what we need to be mindful of is that we are not giving up benefits within pensions without checking properly and that's what when we do this type of work for clients we would do quite a lot of due diligence on actually what is in that pension have you got what we call protected benefits that you are giving up before you move

29:26these pensions elsewhere so as an example you can have a protected tax free cash amount so the standard is 25% some pensions may have more than 25% tax free cash you do not want to move a pension that's got more than 25% tax free cash into of course a different one unless there is a specific reason to do so or there might be other considerations but when you use these portals and these things like this they don't always look at these things always check on these things so consolidation can be key another reason people often consolidate pensions is for exactly what I was saying there actually we don't want to leave our money with our old employer we left them for a reason it's not always a good reason yes yes so let's let's have that money and that that control over those those funds ourselves and ease of ease of management you know we can see if we've got

30:26things in one place and I think what lots of people don't realise often actually there's lots of our clients use their pension to pay our financial planning fees so there are lots of clever things that you can can do with them but pension consolidation is it can be really useful and it can be really good but you just need to know what you're moving about before you do it really yeah it depends and certainly that leads me on very nicely to to you know as we conclude really how can women work with you away can they contact you and what is the best way to reach out in the first instance Rebecca so there's there's two ways really so we've got the the regulated financial planning firm which is financial so you can find us on there on the socials there's email contact addresses so that's at planet financial and then I've got the menopause money page me answering DMs and things like that on there what I'm hoping to do in time because there is in us but in our

31:30industry actually it's known as the advice gap there is a real issue with people not being able to get the kind of financial guidance and support that they need within the regulated space for various reasons so what I'm hoping to do with menopause money over time and I've just done it this week actually was launch a newsletter so the menopause money newsletter which is completely free that will go out once a month and we're hoping to add some more resources into that it's been fascinating speaking to you Rebecca it's been really really helpful thank you very much and I know many of the listeners will find it very very helpful so thank you so much for your time no you are you are welcome and I just really hope that we can get these financial conversations going they don't need to dominate the topic but they just need to be a part of it I knew doing a great thing you know you really are because you know if we don't know how can we know to do things differently yeah so thank you very much yeah no you're welcome thank you very much I hope you have enjoyed today's episode as much as I have do like subscribe and share with

32:31anybody that might find today's episode useful and also more importantly so you don't miss out on any of the future action thank you for your company and have a beautiful day raging hormones aside