A decade of the This is Money podcast in our special live epsiode

Welcome to This Is Money Poggar sponsored by Charles Stanley Direct. I'm Georgie Frost, and joining me and Simon Lambert Day for a first ever live recording to celebrate our 10th anniversary is Lee Boyce and Helen Crane. And coming up, Brexit, Covid, wars, cost of living crisis, pension freedoms, trust, Trump, Woodford. What a decade it's been. But how have these events affected our finances and importantly, our attitude to money?

We run the rule over where the economy is at now and where it's all headed in the wake of a change of government and a big budget. Plus, we celebrate some of the This Is Money campaign successes over the last 10 years and the stories that the teams are most proud of. Plus, some of the weirdest stuff they've covered and bizarre read a question. Don't forget your sub-state with all the latest breaking money news, just go to thisismoney.co.uk or download the app.

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Take control today with Charles Stanley Direct. Sign up now. Investment involves risk. But first, Scotland had voted to remain part of the UK. Eurozone economies were faltering again. Oil prices crashed and Russia had annexed Crimea. And from a little studio somewhere in Pimlico, this is money first hit the airwaves hosted by some random former sports journalist when the global pandemics and lockdowns were the stuff of dystopian movies. Simon.

Take us back to 2014. What was going on? What were people thinking and talking about at the time? To give you a little snapshot, the housing market was booming in 2014 in the UK after it had been in the doldrums ever since the financial crisis because a certain Mr George Osborne was Chancellor of the Exchequer and he had been getting grief

ever since the Conservatives and the Lib Dems took over as coalition government for not managing to get growth going. And he rolled the dice in 2013 on the housing market, which in my view was foolish because I think he knew that one of the problems we have in this country is

two expensive homes but there was help to buy which he kicked off you then had the bank of England as well with funding for lending people suddenly started to get interested by homes house price inflation hit double digit rises that year when we first started recording the podcast it was at eight and a half percent.

The average home costs £189,000. It just surpassed the 2007 boom peak. And I think that's about £100,000 lower than it is now. Ed Magnus will be able to nod and tell me if that's correct.

The US stock market was slightly less of the global market but still dominated. People were very concerned that it was overvalued. The S&P 500 stood at 2000. It's now at 6000, which you don't need a degree of maths to know is three times as high. People are still worried it's overvalued.

We had super low interest rates. Interest rates have been stuck at half a percent since the financial crisis. There was a lot of debate about when they would eventually go up. Ironically, something then happened, which was Brexit, and they went down before they went up. That meant that you would get a savings rate of a princely 0.7% on your easy access savings. And if you were willing to lock up your money for two years, you could get 1.9%.

Lee, Simon mentioned the rabbit out of the hat, George Osborne. Do you have a favourite chancellor over the last 10 years? There's been about nine of them. I think George Osborne was just a rabbit out of the hat kind of guy, wasn't he? Like the sort of things he did sometimes felt like back at a fag packet type stuff, which just sort of came out of nowhere. And that made the budget quite exciting for a time. And then we kind of went the opposite way. Had someone like Jeremy Hunt, it was all very safe. And of course we had the

Was he? Yeah, that was a moment, wasn't it? That was a crackers moment. Yeah, I remember when we recorded the podcast on that one downstairs and we were just, yeah, it was a baffling time. We were trying to kind of frantically kind of decipher it all because it was so out there. George Osborne gets extra points for the fact that he then took over his editor of the Evening Standard and we used to bump into him on the stairs in the old building because he was on the floor below us.

All right, we can get extra points for that. Simon, give us then a potted history of the last 10 years in finance. I've mentioned some of the big stuff and we'll go into more detail and some of the big stuff, but there's also some other stuff that perhaps, you know, at the time we didn't think that much of, but actually it's been really quite significant.

Yes, I think that if you think back, it's been dominated by the big events, hasn't it? So if you go back to the point that I was talking about, we'd just come out of the financial crisis, you'd have the austerity years, things that started to pick up. We then had another election and the Tories then came into power by themselves. But then 2016,

you had the Brexit vote, which then very much disrupted everything because certainly the first half of 2016 was dominated by all of the talk about Brexit. And certainly at the start of that, people did not think that we were going to be voting for it, including I think the Prime Minister and the Chancellor who decided to

have the Brexit vote in the first place, then we did vote for it, which was a big surprise, and then that moved us seamlessly into the arguing about Brexit years, which really dampened the UK economy at a time when other economies were doing quite well, hung over people's finances, we had the political disputes, but also it was always weighing on the, we couldn't really ever get anywhere because we were being, there was so much arguing going on in the background. And funnily enough, in 2019, I was trying to move home, we were trying to sell off flat.

And it was almost impossible to sell. And their state agent was saying to us, we said to them, well, should we cut the price? And I'm saying, well, it's not the price. It's just people just aren't buying. They're just so nervous at the moment. And then Boris was elected. The Boris bounce arrived, lasted all of about three weeks before COVID started. And then we discovered that actually when we spent all those years worrying about Brexit,

We didn't really have that much to worry about at all because now we're all shut up at home. So you had COVID and then we moved seamlessly into the cost of living crisis. And now we have moved out of the cost of living crisis with everything just still a lot more expensive than it was, but not getting more expensive as fast into the brave new world of a new government. Helen, do you think in the 10 years that our attitude to money has changed, particularly with the cost of living crisis as Simon said there, are we more savvy?

I think so. I'm certainly more savvy. I should probably disclose at this point that I have only been a personal finance journalist for four years. So 2014, I was 24. I was particularly young 24-year-old to put it politely. I just got my first proper journalism job. The job before that, I worked part-time in journalism and part-time in the food hall in Selfridges.

So, not particularly savvy. If I remember, I think I opted out of my work pension, so I could afford to buy beer. So I've certainly come on at least in bounds in my personal way of engagement. Do you still could just not have a like just salary sacrifice your wages for beer policy? No, it's strange. You were lucky if you got some going off Mince Pie assignment. It was a different time.

Yeah, no, seriously, I do think, especially with the cost of living crisis, people engage so much more with their finances these days, especially looking at the people who've said they've just recently started listening to the podcast and who've come here today. I think there's more to think about, you know, energy bills, for example, before

was it twenty twenty one day when we're really used to if they were lucky enough not to have to you really used to think about their energy bills and then it became this huge issue are you getting the best deal your bills right are you you know what can you do to save money and I think you know obviously it was an awful time for a lot of people but I think it really focused people on

You know, even even small things like, can I switch my phone bill? Can I switch my internet? You know, am I on the best mortgage rate? And I think it really kind of focused people's minds. So yeah, I think people are much more engaged these days than they were back then. I actually was only as finance journalist for about two weeks before we start one week, maybe even four days. I can't remember, but it wasn't very long before I started this podcast. So thanks guys. Lee, what do you reckon?

I think people have become way more switched over their money, and I think a big part of that is it's a lot more accessible to invest, there's a lot more innovation, there's a lot more apps, there's a lot more things we can be doing with our money. I think if you go back even further in the podcast, I think accessibility to something like investing, I think people sort of

you know, men in pinstripe suits and you know, having to massive amounts of money to invest. That's all being flipped on its head. And that's all being flipped on its head. I would say since this podcast has been around, you know, over this time, the changes have been absolutely huge. And I think people are way more open. I think, you know, parents have a responsibility to teach their children about money. We're in a generation where there's a lot more information around. And I think for that reason,

people are a lot more switched on, but don't get me on this still, you know, financial education, you know, I'm a big advocate for it. There's probably not enough of that around. That's why things like this exist. Try and help people grow their money, understand finances a little bit more.

I want to, before we get to the now, talk about some of the worst and best financial decisions or policies over the last decade in your view. Simon? I wouldn't say it was one individual one. I would say it is a collective series of decisions which has been how much worse our tax system has got from a position where it wasn't great in the first place.

There's been a scenario where I think there's been a lot of concern over certainly dating back to the George Osborne years, the post austerity, post financial crisis years of not wanting to change what was obviously a bad tax because it might be seen to be favouring rich people by making that decision.

And so we've just got layers upon layers on the onion and we've ended up with things like the 60% tax trap with stamp duty that stops people moving with inheritance tax that is a perennial row despite the fact that not that many people actually pay it and the budget just made it worse and pulled farmers into this as well.

And so I think it's just that those run of decisions where we just keep making things progressively worse to pull a little bit more money in, a little bit more money in, and I think that that is genuinely holding the country and the economy back.

I'm just going to agree with somebody. The tax systems just become so beastly. And I think a lot of people feel, especially sort of middle classes, just how much of a tax they're getting. And you think about the tax on your take home pay, but then you factor in other things like counsel tax. We just feel like there's a lot of taxes on taxes on taxes. So there's definitely been there. One of the better things that's happened to have an argue is auto enrollment, which has just helped

get people saving into a pension and thinking about it more and you know, that's only a good thing. So I'm kind of glad that that's been ticking away nicely. I think people will start seeing the fruits of that quite soon. Thanks for that, Lee. That's huge. A bit of positivity, you know, because I don't want us to get too bogged down. Helen, have you got some good news? Some good policies? Some things you liked?

Yeah, so I think things that have, well, maybe perhaps don't work quite so now, but things like help to buy and the lifetime ISA when they started really helped people get onto the house. You know, I've got friends that managed by a property with help to buy that would not have been able to do it otherwise. So I think

You know, in the early years, those things worked well. Now, I think as the financial limits haven't been at rate of the inflation, they're less useful. But in their heyday, I think they were things that really helped people's ices as well. Obviously, it's been a great way to get people saving without paying tax. On the negative over the last 10 years, I would just say the constant tinkering in the housing market.

The best example, probably the stamp duty cut during the pandemic, which just caused a massive rush into property. And then a deadline where it will kind of stop short. So panic. I think the thing people don't need when they're trying to buy a house is panic and uncertainty about how much tax they're going to have to pay and when this is going to stop. And that led to big house price increases, which on paper is great. But actually, for most people who are saying they're house for more, they're also just buying a new house for more. So it really doesn't.

make a huge amount of difference. For me, just let the housing market be a bit normal for a while. Wouldn't that be nice? I'd probably put Bank of England's decision to keep interest rates low for so long, but we've discussed that in a short while. Let's go into some more detail about those major events that Simon talked about. How have they altered the way that we deal with money, some of the successes and the failures, the mistakes made, etc.

Let's go with Brexit first, the biggie. The project fear predicted that the economy would tank if we voted to leave, unemployment would rocket financial markets would be meltdown. Do you remember? I think George Osborne said that house prices would fall 18%. Many people think if only. Well, Simon, is that what we got?

No, we didn't. And I think Project Fear, as it was dubbed at the time, was particularly foolish. And actually, we talked about this on the podcast at the time. I remember that it was just, the more you tell people, oh, don't do that. I wouldn't do that. You shouldn't do that. The more they're like,

going to push the button. So I don't think it worked in that way. And it just seemed so outlandish to people, oh, your house is going to fall in value. This is going to happen. That's going to happen. And I think it missed the point. And I think actually maybe some more of the points that should have been made were around things that have changed since conversations around, well, do you want your children to be able to go work in a foreign country and stuff like that? And I think that was what was missed.

But reflecting on that, some of the things that did come out of it weren't the things that were talked about before the vote. So for example, I talked about all the arguing we did afterwards. And I think actually the main disappointment around that time was that obviously leave one, but then there didn't seem to be a plan as to what to do next, at which point the Prime Minister resigns. And you're like, oh, OK, right.

And we ended up, I think, getting a much harder Brexit, and there were people who argued we didn't get as hard a Brexit as we should have got, right? But I think we did actually genuinely end up getting a much harder Brexit than what was promoted in the run-up to the vote as to what Brexit was going to be. So I think there's things that

have come out of it that people didn't expect. Like, I don't think people expected us to completely, you know, come out of the free trade and the free movement and stuff like that. And there's things that were suggested from Project Fear that never happened. And no one will ever know what the real impact, positive or negative would be. And I don't think it was about economics anyway. It was about

people deciding whether they wanted, you know, an extra level of government that they didn't feel was accountable. So I don't think that the economics really, there was no economic argument for it whatsoever, whether there was a political one, possibly.

And as we would say, this is not a political podcast, but Lee, the financials of it, how has it affected us? And not just finances, sort of consumer rights, employment rights, all those sorts of things. Day to day, the average person you and I, how have we been impacted by that?

Well, first of all, just to go back to that project for 18% house price video, I had a look at this earlier. In January 2020, which is when we actually formally left, the average house price was 231 grand, and it's now 292,000 pounds, so it's grown 26%.

percent. So that kind of stiffens that argument. And also the economy, I was looking at this earlier, has grown faster than Germany, Italy, Japan, and is on par with France. So you can argue that it's kind of, we wouldn't have known what would happen if it went the other way. So it's kind of hard, right? But I think that fundamentally a lot of people

don't really know what the benefits have been. There's been so much that's happened that I think it's kind of got lost in a way. One of the most sizable things that's ever happened in this country and it's kind of got washed away with everything that came after it.

And of course, the argument still rumbled on and still still happened to this day. I think one of the things we can definitely pinpoint is it kept interest rates for lower for longer. So Simon said earlier, we were in that 0.5% range and it was 0.25% in April and in the pandemic, it went to 0.1%. Which I say that out loud now, I just feels bonkers, I remember seeing it on the screen thinking. Right now, articles about whether it would go negative.

I know, it's crazy. And I think that we have really got used to that low interest rate environment. And I think a lot of people have had very low mortgage rates, for example, that they're now seeing the buy of a 5%, 6% mortgage rather than a 1, 1.5%, 2% mortgage. So we've been hitting all of those kind of ways. Can't blame Brexit for that because

There's lots of other things that have happened, but it was definitely one of the things that it dragged down was interest rates, probably for longer. And then the pandemic happened so poorly, we would have gone lower anyway.

Well, the interest rate one, as I said a bit earlier, a good chunk of the last decade. The Bank of England kept interest rates really low, Helen. Obviously, it was in the wake of the financial crisis. You mentioned their house prices, the sort of inequality, I suppose, making it more difficult. House prices soaring. Are the Bank of England to blame for some of that? What's been the impact of having ultra low interest rates apart from ridiculously rubbish savings accounts?

Yeah, I mean, Morgan just fell pretty much constantly from about 2009 after financial crisis till 2022 when we all know what happened, the mini-budget blew everything to have some of the rings. Yeah, we were in a very low environment for a very long time. I think 2014, the average mortgage rate was about 3.5%. Today, it's about five and a half. So, yeah, it was really, really

cheap to get a mortgage to buy a house but that didn't mean it was easy to buy a house so obviously after the financial crisis we had all these new rules rightly come in you know you couldn't get a 110% mortgage anymore apart from in very sort of rare circumstances you couldn't just sign off your own mortgage and you know that those things happen for good reason.

So I think saying cheap mortgages and saying it was sort of easy to get a mortgage and borrow two different things. But I do think that period, and I think it was late 2021 when you were seeing mortgage rates of, I think, below 0.9%, I got down to about 0.87, which is absolutely bonkers. I mean, I can't believe that there are people

Fixing for two years at that point of course fixify is never gonna get better than that and there still were I have a friend who did it is what on earth are you doing? It's obviously never gonna get better than this but the flip side of that is that Obviously when things did go up, you know people were seeing their mortgage rates their mortgage payments everywhere to go up by I mean in some cases the thousands hundreds of pounds a thousand pounds and and

You know, you can say, oh, you know, you should have prepared for that. But really, I mean, the whole mini budget, no one could have seen that coming, could they? It just shows, you know, it is difficult when you have a mortgage that's so cheap, but always expect the worst, I guess, have a financial safety net. And, you know, I think if the last sort of tenure show anything, it's honestly that anything can happen. There's been so many ups and downs and just sort of be prepared, I suppose.

I've spent nearly 20 years as a financial journalist writing about interest rates, obsessing about interest rates, some would say. And we bought house, we moved in 2020, and I took out a five year fix rate mortgage. And I remember my mum saying to me, you should take a 10 year fix rate mortgage.

And I said, no, I don't need to do that. She said, no, you should do. You're going to regret it if you don't. I said, yeah, but we might move. Which is literally the thing I say every week to not take a short-term mortgage, because you go, well, we might move. If you won't actually move, we're one year away from it. We're not going anywhere. I wish I'd taken my mum's advice and taken that 10 year fix rate mortgage.

Mum's no birthday. More generally, we talk about the generational divide now. How much do you think that ultra low interest rates for that period of time benefiting certain people with assets had to play into this?

I think it is exacerbated. I think there's a lot of unintended consequences of very low interest rates for a very long time. It's skewed markets substantially. There's a world where basically it made money very cheap and people have made a lot of money out of money being very cheap. It's been very good for entrepreneurs as well, for example.

But it has also meant that at the other end of the scale, a generation that is richer, is more wealthy. The boomer generation has benefited more from that rising asset prices in stock markets. They haven't seen their savings go up to be fair. But in stock markets, in house prices, in all those things that have been driven up by low interest rates,

And that has come at the expense of the younger generation that don't necessarily have the same benefits as the older generation had in terms of things like defined benefit pensions. They don't have to pay double-digit interest rates, but houses are much cheaper. We're much cheaper back then. We talked about this on last week's podcast. So I think it has made it worse. And I think actually the main reflection from all of those years of super low interest rates

is that we probably could have got away with putting them up sooner. I think that's what we should have learned is you look back and you go, yeah, actually, we could have put them up. We didn't need to give them at half a percent for that long. They could have gone to like 1%, even 2%. And actually, that's been the lesson of them going up so sharply over the last couple of years until they hit the peak recently, is that actually, yeah, we could have put them up.

And that's the point, isn't it? If it's one of the levers that the Bank of England can pull in troubled times, they just didn't have that lever when Covid and the cost of living came about, because interest rates have been kept so low for so long. They felt like we were really modelling along at that kind of low interest environment. And, you know, I know a midget mortgage rate system. It was very hard to generate wealth.

in terms of getting a good savings rate, for example. I was looking back in the history of NS9 income bonds. They were paying like something, sorry. You know what I'm saying? And they were paying something like 0.1%. You know, absolutely, incredibly difficult to get full protection on your money and to generate wealth. And I think that there was quite a lot of that going on.

Yeah, of course, some people got a mortgage rate under 1% that fits for a long time. I can include myself in that. Sorry, smug brag that I kind of bring up on the podcast sometimes till 2026, baby. Come on. Yeah, it's kind of.

That's something that says unintended consequences of having them loathe. And then, you know, you're right, the lever gets pulled. Rates went up so far so quickly. Everyone's kind of in a tornado of interest rate hikes. And every month it felt like there was another nudge higher. And then we've had lots of talk about what's going to happen next. And when interest rates are going to fall in one minute, it's kind of like it's going to be two cuts. And there's going to be five cuts. And it's like, wow, like what's going on? It's just like,

a lot to deal with, and even Andrew Bailey today, the Governor of Bank of England saying four cuts next year. Doesn't he know? I mean, he should know, but it's just a lot of swings around about. I mean, it does also mean that people have been rewarded for taking very big risks. If you basically held your nose and went, I don't care that people say the US stock market's expensive, or I don't care that this tech stock's expensive, I'm going to buy it.

You'd made a lot of money. Bitcoin, for example. When we started recording the podcast, I looked this up, Bitcoin was $100. It's now about $95,000. I don't know. It might be like $100,000 or $90,000. It might move while we're talking.

You know, and actually, funnily enough, just before we started recording the podcast, we sent one of our reporters, Mark Schofman, to East London, to a Bitcoin and crypto conference where he bought some Bitcoin from a crypto cash machine, an ATM. And we were talking about this the other day. How much would a Schofman made? I know that he actually sold it in the first boom because it had gone up to about £2,000 worth and his wife made him sell it.

But I looked up the story. He actually only bought £10 worth. So he would have £9,500. He would have done very, very well on there. But he wouldn't be retiring on it. No. So he probably feels a bit better about it now. I haven't asked him. OK.

I'd never be able to forget it. I'd have sleep this night to be thinking, oh, I find it. So there's horror stories you read about. There's people that lose keys and stuff. Yeah, it's not as bad as losing it in a big rubbish tip somewhere in. Yeah, it's the one I was thinking of with your ex-girlfriend or something or whatever it was. I want to talk about COVID in the cost of living, because actually, am I right in thinking that's where the pod really took off. I mean, I certainly got a lot more engagement from people. Helen, you became a financial journalist then, right?

What a time. December 2020. What a time. I remember all the this is money team. I just knew his little squares on zoom for about four months. And then the first day I went to the office. I wore high heels the first time about a year, fell over in the ice and split my knee open. So what a time. Yeah, I mean, it's a very strange time. Did you start in lockdown or did you start as we were rapidly escalating up the tears that were being invented with every week that passed?

I started, I think, when we were just going into, like, you know, that crazy Christmas lockdown. Yeah. We went from tier one to tier, to a new tier above tier three that they'd invented in the same week. Yeah, we were definitely post like in the sausage roll era. Yeah. Strange times. It was a strange time. How long lasting an impact do you think the cost of living crisis will be? You're talking there about mortgages and actually Lee and Simon, you've mentioned a few times that you, while we're talking about the cost of living,

being over, actually, especially with mortgages, there's a bit more to play out here, because it's not like prices have gone back down. They're just not going up by as much, but they're still ridiculous. I mean, yeah, life is expensive. I don't need to say that to anybody in this room that, do I? It's really expensive. There's things that still feel really expensive.

Going out for dinner is really expensive nowadays, isn't it? Coffee. Why? Yeah, coffee is very expensive, but that's why I make my own in the office with my air repress. That is true, my money, my little money saving tip. But yeah, no stuff is really expensive. A lot of it is the big ticket stuff and also the day-to-day stuff, so it's not like you can even remove it from there.

And I think the other thing that's hitting people to go back to the mortgage thing that you said is there's still a lot of people whose mortgages are still to come up through a meal, myself included, and all of a sudden your monthly payments shoot up by £400 or something like that. And also your energy bills are £150 more expensive than they were, your food shopping is this much more expensive than it was and so on.

So, I think the problem is, is coming off the back of all of those years that we talked about, is that people have stopped feeling richer every year and you want people to feel that little bit richer. And that's why you need people to get real increases in their wages and productivity to increase and all these things that we here talked about in economic stuff. The real impact of that is basically everybody just feels a little bit richer every single year.

And if that happens, then you just get that uptick in sentiment and everything moves along. So I think it's difficult. But I would say that I do genuinely think that next year is going to be much better. Yeah. Next year we're going to be millionaire, Slee.

I don't know if we're going to be millionaires, but I definitely think that there has been a bit of a kind of tide shift to feel like things are getting a little bit easier. But we have to remember that there are certain aspects of our lives that are way more expensive. You know, the food shop, for example, you know, it rose very, very rapidly. And a lot of people are still feeling that. I kind of got to a point with the cost of living crisis, where I banned the words cost of living crisis from stories, because I was just getting fed up of it. Right.

I think the reason why I was getting fed up of it is that you only had to go, yeah, we're in Kensington, but I'd be out back home in Essex. And it felt like there was just people still out spending money, doing stuff, eating out, things were still really busy. So it kind of felt like some people were living through across a different crisis and some people were just completely riding it out.

It's a hard one to totally judge to say we're out of the woods and it's done. Inflation's back under control, that's the most important thing. And actually go back to something I remember saying to you in the studio in Pimlico a long time ago about energy. So obviously, energy bills were absolutely shot up. We had that horrible time and it was like three and a half thousand pounds to price cap.

I remember when there was lots of energy providers out there, and I remember saying to you, you should just switch your energy provider every year. It's going for the cheapest deal. You can't get a different quality of energy, electricity and gas coming through your house, just make sure that the firms, legitimate, you've done your research, read reviews, and then it all imploded.

I don't remember it like every day or every week there was another one that went under. Yeah, it got taken over by another. It was a crazy little period of time. That was a weird time, wasn't it? Yeah. So, you know, we're facing up all of those kind of realities and lots of people are feeling probably better off. There's a lot of people that won't be.

Do you think, Helen, I mean, how do you square that circle? I was exactly the same. Whenever I go out in Guilford or wherever, it would be packed. You know, like, what cost of living crisis? Or is it just the haves are right and still going out and the have-nots are really...

It's just so difficult, isn't it? And Lee's right, it was difficult when we were writing about it because, you know, you say the word cost of living crisis and to some people that would mean just giving up a few luxuries, like, kind of one of their streaming services or something. And then for other people, you'd know that that meant I can't afford to turn my cooker on to make dinner. Like, it was such a casual term for something that affected people so differently.

A lot of it depends on what your life situation is, doesn't it? Say if you're a younger person, you may be renting, your rent's gone up, everything feels really expensive, maybe you haven't got to pay rise, but then if you're someone may be older, paid off their mortgage, that's not an issue, you're still feeling

a bit more, a bit more flush. It's one of those things that affects people so, so differently. And I don't think it is as easy as, you know, looking at different parts of the country or, you know, people of different ages, necessarily. It was so dependent on what your kind of circumstances are. And I think actually for a lot of people,

It probably hasn't finished. We don't talk about it as much, but the impact definitely is I think just, you know, depleting your kind of savings pot is maybe a thing that will kind of come back to bike people as we sort of go forward. You know, there's only so far a lot of people can go.

The two other things that I want to talk about in terms of big events. The first, you know, may not seem such a big event for a lot of people that doesn't affect, but actually this was pretty seismic. The pension freedoms that were introduced in 2014, so as we were starting our first pod, where did they go? Did we all just leave by Lamborghinis?

Oh, you're giving a nod to our pensions agony on called Steve Webb. Yeah, Steve Webb. That was him. Of course, right. So a weekly knockout pension series. It is very good. It's very, very good, if I do so myself. And we didn't all rush out by Lamborghinis. Although if you do stay in this office long enough, you can look out on that road and you'll see enough of them. We're in the place for it.

I think what the pensions freedoms move did is just gave lots of people lots more flexibility over their income and the argument is that if you have saved wealth for your retirement but you don't see the fruits of that until you're sort of in your mid 60s, late 60s, the time might not necessarily be on your site, that sounds a bit morbid but I think that being able to tap 25% of your pension pot

It's a fairly good idea. And I think actually time has proven that people have been quite sensible with what they do with that money, whether it's house improvements. Maybe it's a once in a lifetime trip. I reckon it's probably given the economy a bit of a boost because people are out there spending some of that cash, rather than it being locked away for another 10, 15 years. So it was a massive, massive thing at the time. And it still is a massive thing because when we had the budget recently, that budget,

Oh, that was some headaches coming into the weeks before that. And the lower speculation about that, wasn't it? That 25% was one of the things that could have been tinkered with. That's what we thought. I think that the chance to really drop the ball on that one, I think there should have been a guarantee that either that was changing or it wasn't changing because right up until the moment of the budget, people making seismic decisions

with whether to take that money or not, because they're panicking. Can I do it now? Can I not do it now? What should I do? There was so much murkiness around it. That's one real criticism I would say of that budget, that the pension freedom thing, it should have been now down. And it wasn't, I think, not good.

No, it wasn't good. I'll talk about that budget, but there's another budget, Simon. I want to ask you about, and we've mentioned it. The quasi-quatting trust. What are we going to call it today? Ill-fated. There we go. Ill-fated. That's your favourite. But has there been any long-lasting effect of that? That was a moment, wasn't it?

It was a moment. I mean, I think it's worth mentioning that it wasn't actually technically a budget or even a media budget. Well, you know what I mean? It was merely a statement. Yeah. It was taken on a significant sense, but it wasn't even actually an official budget or an autumn statement or anything like that. And that's why it hadn't been costed by the OBR, which was one of the problems. I think the other problem was maybe just being a bit too gung-ho.

A bit. Yeah, just in my reflect now, I think they were a bit too gung-ho. I think the irony is that they had latched onto a genuine issue that we needed to get growth going. Yeah. I don't necessarily think throwing the kitchen sink, the dishwasher, the bin, the bread bin, and everything else they could find in the kitchen at it at the same time was a good idea. Personally, if I was going to cut the basic rate of tax for everyone, let's give everyone a tax cut,

I wouldn't overshadow it in the same speech by cutting tax for the highest earners. I might even just say I was thinking about doing it for the highest earners in the future, but I probably wouldn't undermine myself and make it that the focus was on. They've cut taxes for the rich. It's like, well, they've also cut taxes for everybody.

But yeah, it was uncoasted. It also intersected with some awkward stuff in the pensions industry and the bond market. And there was just this very rapid readjustment where markets said, well, look, this is great that you want to do this.

But you don't actually have any way of paying for this, which means you're going to have to borrow more money off us. And we're going to want a higher rate of interest in order for you to borrow that money. So you saw guilt yields move up substantially, and then you saw this, the stuff in the pension market drive that upwards. And then you had to see the unwinding of it, of the sacking, of course, equating, list trust, resigning, the Bank of England stepping in, all that kind of stuff, which is, it's not a good look. I think it's safe to say it's not a good look.

And actually I think unfortunately we're still paying the price of that now because what had then happened was Jeremy Hunt came in with his best sensible school teacher act and said okay.

You look like you're having a party here? Time to go home. I'm here with the fun police, and we will not be having a party anymore. And he not only unwound all of those things, but he then imposed a load of tax rises on people. And actually, it was probably the worst time to impose a load of tax rises on people, because we were just coming out of that post-COVID period with the economy was coming out of that period. We had had obvious political instability and all that kind of stuff. And it was too soon. I think the problem that we did

after that was we tried to claw back all that money we spent on covid too quickly and actually we should let things be a little bit looser but maybe not as loose as quite squatting and this trust that day yeah quite all in one go yeah well that was then this is now what about the future where we're heading

Let's have a brief quick fire round of some predictions. We've got the experts. We talked about it last on last week's pod about house prices. Lee, what are the predictions for 2025 house prices? Well, it's kind of all of the house price indexes are kind of suggesting slight movement upwards next year. So we had Zoopa, Knight Frank saying two and a half percent. We had some of a bit more of a spicy kind of prediction of four percent. Somewhere around about that would probably sound about right.

But so much can change as we do know. But what we do know is that house prices have just about gone past the 2022 peak where they were at before that mini budget. There wasn't a mini budget. So things have been ticking over a little bit more. There are things that are at play though that could change that, including stamp duty changes in April, which is going to make it more expensive. If you're going to buy a home, you've probably missed the deadline now if you want to try and beat that.

I think that will have a bit of an effect. And of course, the big one is what happens next with mortgage rates. So I mentioned earlier, Andrew Bailey talking about four cuts next year. A lot of that is already pressed in. What the mortgage market is going to do. I think we're kind of at a new normal. God, I hate that time. I don't know why I just used it. I've used it.

It's we kind of we're getting used to that level of mortgage and I don't think that that's going to go much up and down and that she enters mortgage rates and I think as a result that stability should just keep house prices ticking a bit higher. All right. Helen savings.

Yeah, and obviously we've seen over the last probably year or so, saving rates kind of trickling downwards as the base rate has been cut. So, you know, we knew that was going to happen. I think they've probably got a fair way to go, would you say, Lee? They're what? 4.5%? The best is the access now.

Yeah, I think what we've seen in the last couple of months is savings rates slightly coming down. They've been propped higher a little bit by new providers. So big banks have completely steered clear. Ever since the savings rates have been going up, big banks have been doing absolutely nothing. It's all driven now by new challenges, new providers that are coming out there.

As Heather said, you can get about 4.85% best buy easy access. That's been coming down a little bit. You could have got plus 5% a little while back and we had the NS&I products last October that was paying 6%. That was the real top of the market. You can still get plus 5% on a cash icing, as I always say on the podcast, if it's outstripping inflation, jobs are good.

Yeah, kind of. I don't have a very proper daddy diet side. Jobs are good. But I do say that something along those lines, if you can beat inflation with your savings, you're doing something right. And we're at fixed rates, one year fixed, 4.8%. I think all of that's going to gradually start going a little bit lower next year, but not back to the bad old times where you were scratching around trying to get a percent.

Valley. You're good. It was Lee, the coin man boys. It was Lee, the scam man boys. Now it's Lee, the stat man boys. Like it. Thank you. And there's something that happened in America of interest that may impact things like investing. What's going to go, what are the themes for investing next year? Do you reckon?

Anything to do with America? I'm Donald Trump 2.0 is the big theme. So his love in with the tech bros I think is the big thing. Which is quite interesting really because if you remember Donald Trump's first presidency he wasn't the biggest fan.

of the tech bros, but obviously him and Elon Musk are having their romance. I mean, we could do like a quick sweepstake on how long everyone thinks that one's going to last. It's going to last out in the full presidency. I somehow doubt it. They do both have a history of falling out with people.

So it would be interesting to see, but that's driven the US market up since you've seen, you know, all of those stocks rise substantially. And you've also got the tech industry very much trying to get on side with Donald Trump. So I was reading earlier that apparently Mark Zuckerberg went and had dinner with him recently.

Yeah, wouldn't you pay to be a fly on the wall at that dinner, right? Watching Trump and Zuckerberg have dinner in a chat. That would be an interesting one to watch. But I do question how much of this kind of Trump effect on those kind of stocks has just been pulled forwards and is already in the market.

There's talk that what might really benefit is the middle-sized companies in the US, the mid-caps, and the smaller companies. A smaller company in the US is the size of a large one here. And it doesn't matter to them that America will be more insular, and you might get trade wars and things like that, because it's a huge market within America. And so actually, within that insular market, that's totally fine for those businesses.

It might impact businesses around the world. But actually, if you look at tariffs and trade wars, they don't tend to have that much of an effect on companies and their share prices. What I think is the bigger issue is that the stock market is so concentrated now. What has been driving up the S&P for 500, which has risen 26% this year, has been the magnificent seven. They take up such a huge amount of that stock market and such a huge amount of the global stock market.

Nvidia roughly the size of the UK stock market, that kind of stuff, that I think, you know, there's going to come a point where that turns and that stops. And then all of those other markets that are cheaper, maybe those are going to do well, hopefully, because the UK is one of them and people have been saying that. But then to go back to what I said earlier, people have been worrying about the US market being overvalued for the last 10 years that we do in this podcast and even longer before that. And it just keeps going up and up because the US is an incredibly dynamic place.

Mm-hmm. All right. Finally, I do want to get Crane on the case. Helen, you have been fighting a consumer corner, as it were, uh, readers' questions. I just want to find out what, like, what's the most standout for you, that you've done?

I think there's been so many great stories over the last few years. I think one of the best ones that I was covering for a while was D-banking. Remember that? Oh, yeah. So obviously it started off by Nigel Farage. But the great thing about being a financial journalist is when readers get in touch with you and they tell you what's happening to them. And we found that obviously it wasn't just Nigel Farage being D-banked. It was actually people who were arguably a bit

I was saying we're important, that's why we're a bit rude, isn't it? But people are really doing good things in their community. So I got like a local bowling club wrote to me and saying they were being de-banked, a Welsh male voice choir wrote to me. So they'd had their banks shut down. And it just classic banks doing really silly behaviours. So they'd ask them things like, they obviously do these checks every year or so, you know, are you a legitimate organisation? But they'd be asking them things like,

Oh, he's your major shareholder. And it's like, we're acquiring the Welsh melody. And then they shut their bank accounts down, which is so sort of funny. But it would mean for them things like, you know, they couldn't pay their bills and they couldn't put on their Christmas concert, like they couldn't put on their heating. They're being threatened with being kicked out of their bowling club because they weren't

you know, paying the rent. And it is actually really serious and, you know, people trying to do these good things. They didn't kind of need that hassle. And I think there was so much campaigning on that from us and from other sort of financial publication. I think actually it does seem like banks have turned around. I'm not hearing about things like that anymore. So I think that was a really, yeah, a really good win. Funniest or weirdest stories you've covered over the last decade.

I've got one, Georgia. I was digging my brain for this earlier, and I was thinking about this really funny story that I had once. You know I've written a lot about coins. I had to pick like coins. I've stopped now. I've been cured of my hair, but obviously we did lots of coin stories. We were right at the forefront of all of that stuff. I had stories that were going millions and millions of hits. It was just a crazy time.

But there was someone who got in touch with me and he was doing this thing where he was using his credit card to buy huge amounts of commemorative coins from the Royal Mint directly. So he bought £29,000.

of coins with his credit card for the reward points for his avios to get rewards flights. Absolutely brilliant. He'd get the coins delivered, he'd take them into a bank, he'd cash them back in, pay off the credit card bill, rinse and repeat. So he was doing this for quite a long time. And then they cottoned on, the banks cottoned on, and they stopped accepting the coins. And he was left with this huge sack of like, I don't know how many kilos it was, but 29,000 pounds worth of coins. And it kicked off this huge

huge thing about legal tender. Huge thing, like whether it was legal tender or not. And arguing in the comments and everything, is this a real standout story? I just thought it was genius, that someone was like gaming the system and then they caught and don't. Have you touched base with that person? Do you know what happened to that thing? I reckon it still happened to be like the same prison, but it's something off piece more, I reckon. Yeah. No, these were like proper chunky, like, you know, I think they were like 100 quid coins. They were thick. And yeah, banks, banks are enough.

Christmas gifts for life there. Right, finally, it is Simon's second stat of the decade. It's at this point, Simon scrambles around, takes some time, looks on a computer and I go, it's okay, Simon. Probably play a bit of a game, Simon. Hang on a minute, I'm just gonna give you my notes. I can't remember. All right, sorry, go. All right, my stat of the decade.

I've already wasted my Bitcoin one earlier. My start of the decade is actually, it's a bit more boring, to be honest. My start of the decade is what the house price to earnings ratio is now, and it's 6.2. That's below the peak, which was 6.9 in 2022, but it's roughly level with the peak in 2007 of 6.4.

And it's way above the historic average in this country. And I genuinely think that the biggest problem that we have had with the economy in this country over the last 10, 15, 20 years has been the casino that the housing market is. And the fact that everybody has to put so much

thought and effort and weight into can they afford to buy a home or move a home. And it stops people doing other things. It stops people moving jobs. It stops people moving for work. It stops people setting up businesses. It stops people taking entrepreneurial risks. And I think it is a real genuine challenge

that also will not be solved by just building a load of houses on fields. Because if anybody's noticed anything about new houses, it's that they tend to be sold as a premium product, i.e. they're even more expensive than the existing houses, not cheaper than them. So I do think we need a better plan to sort out. Sorry to make myself the decade so boring.

It's a worthy start of the decade. I was rather disappointed because when we discussed this, he said he's going to look into how much George Osborne had earned since he left office. Did you find that out? No, I didn't find that out. I did find out. There was a story about George Osborne showing a £70 million payday with the other people who worked at his investment firm. And I said my start of the decade could be, who's made more money?

since, over the last 10 years, George Osborne, Nick Clegg or David Cameron. I think the answer is actually Nick Clegg. I'd go Nick. Yeah. I bet everyone's delighted by that. I think it's basically Nick Clegg reflecting the huge amount of money he's been paid by Meta. Right. That is it. Here is to the next 10 years. You can keep up to date with all the latest breaking money you just go to this is money.co.uk or download the app. And if you have any comments or questions for the team or anything you'd like them to look into, Simon,

You can email us at podcastat. This is money.co.uk. You can tweet us at this is money or access at this is money or whatever at this is money. And come to this is money.co.uk forward slash podcast to find all podcast, pass and join in the debate and read your comments. And if you like our podcast, why not rate us? Where have you found us? It helps other people find us too. Take control of your finances with Charles Stanley Direct, invest, save, coach or plan.

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