To think being intelligent or successful doesn’t necessarily mean you’re good with money?

[HeartyMintLurker]

It sometimes surprises me how often people assume that if someone is very successful or highly skilled in their field (e.g. a lawyer, dentist, etc.), they must also be good with money. To me they feel like completely separate skill sets.
AIBU?

I have a big fat pension fund. I have a very chunky amount of equity in my house.
I'm not interested in having piles of cash in investments. It just seems like avarice to me.

I should hopefully make it to retirement age before I get too ill to work, and I love my job and earn a good salary. But if I have to stop sooner it is definitely a disincentive that to have mounds of savings would affect my benefit entitlement were I to need them.

Enjoy your pots of investments. I hope it gives you a big thrill watching the numbers go up. I am happy with how l live my life. I don't have zero investments, they just aren't my priority and I prefer overpaying my mortgage. Each to their own as they say.

There is a phenomenon I have seen in some older male doctors, where they feel their mind is on such a rarified plane that they cannot comprehend day to day tasks. “Oxford Don syndrome”. Obviously they are more than capable, they just can’t be fucked and so they pretend they are incapable of dealing with quotidian things. Usually indulged by their wives, nurses, research students, admin team and everyone around them.

Interestingly in 30 years of being a doctor in a “brainy” specialty, I have never met a female doctor who claims to be too clever to cope with practical things. Because it wouldn’t be indulged at all.

YANBU.

The dentist/consultant/GP clients I've had over the years have been generally utterly hopeless with money and admin generally. I'm talking about unopened envelopes territory where they just sent a carrier bag of unopened envelopes for me to sort out their taxes etc - not even opening their bank/credit card statements.

One guy who'd been previously a 100% NHS consultant started to do private work and asked me naively if he just had to post all his invoices, bank statements etc to HMRC for them to sort through it all and send him a tax bill. He was aghast that he had to actually do his own book-keeping, make a record of his expenses, mileages etc. He said his "secretary" previously did all that was needed for reclaiming expenses from the NHS etc!

Another guy, a self employed dentist "outsourced" it all to a book-keeper, including checking off NHS payment schedules, paying the practice bills (utilities etc) - he just gave her a book of signed cheques and told her to pay people as and when necessary - complete abdication!

Similarly with other professionals, sadly, such as architects, solicitors, financial advisers, quantity surveyors, etc. Clearly not interest in doing their own "books" presumably because they earn enough it doesn't matter to them if they end up paying a bit too much tax or over-paying utilities etc - certainly they seem to think it's not worth their time to spend on "trivial" things like money!

A really good case was a very high paid IT consultant - talking £1k per day. She was paid on a 4 weekly billing cycle rather than calendar months, and when I came to do her year end accounts/tax return, I immediately noticed only 12 payments from her client, so there was one missing as there should have been 13 in the year. Turned out despite her filling in her time sheet every week, the client had "forgotten" to process one 4 week period, and amazingly she hadn't noticed as she'd got a banking from them every calendar month and didn't realise one month there should have been 2. That was around £15k-£20k she nearly lost and he didn't even realise! Thankfully, the client was still in business and she raised it as an issue and they paid, but if they'd have gone under in the meantime (like lots of consultancies do), she'd have lost that forever.

Nail on the head. That's my DH perfectly. He didn't even pass his CSE Maths at school, but he's really on top of his money. That came from "experience" as a teenager, doing jobs around the house to earn pocket money which he saved to buy things like a cassette recorder (in the 70s!!), or clothes etc. He did weekend and Summer jobs whilst at school/college and squirrelled it away in a savings account earning interest. He always took his passbook(s) into the building society every x months to get the interest written in, would close accounts with low interest and open new ones with higher interest, even when he was still in college, he had an instant access account alongside fixed term accounts, to "match" his savings with when he thought he may need the money! Very impressive when you're only 17/18 years old! He didn't get it from his parents either - neither of them were particularly financially savvy - he just worked it out himself. Likewise with credit cards, he got one when he hit 18 and right from day 1 he always made sure he could pay it off in full, never once paying a single penny in interest or late payment fees. He never had a clue about the compound interest equation, but he knew almost instinctively how compound interest meant he earned interest on interest - he just worked it out without needing to be told! He'd also worked out that certain NSB accounts paid tax-free interest so he'd compared the tax deductions from "Normal" bank account interest with the lower interest on tax-exempt NSB accounts to decide which produced the best "net of tax" rate of return! Not bad for someone who "didn't do Maths!"

I honestly couldn't believe how much money he had in his bank accounts after we'd been together a while and we started talking about money. He'd never had a "decent" well paying job - always casual work or low-skilled work such as working in hotels/bars/shops etc., but by the time he was just 24, he had £25k in the bank! He had kept all his passbooks etc., and we once looked through them all and it was just an accumulation of lots of small deposits, at least weekly, from his various jobs, which had built up, and then compound interest took over - it was of course helpful that interest rates were pretty high in the 70s and 80s so the effect of compound interest was a lot more pronounced.

As you say, school Maths is nothing like real life numeracy and we're doing our youngsters a massive disservice by not teaching real-life Maths in schools, especially to the roughly 50% who won't get a "good pass" in Maths, the ones less likely to understand the compound interest algebra/equation.

Yep. Society had indulged this nonsense. It’s always the ‘boring’ stuff they claim they can’t do. Clean a house, buy a mobile phone, iron a shirt, book a holiday, remember a birthday. All stuff a 1950s wife or secretary would have done for them.

My sister is really intelligent, one of the cleverest people I know. Really well educated too. She's been skint her whole life because she's absolutely useless with money.

@DrRylandGrace I couldn't agree more and I've done very similar with my DC.
had their own accounts very young no pocket money but bday and Xmas money etc .
They both have junior stocks ISA and sipps and I've drummed it in about diversification and so on. They have sipps also I've left it to them to choose those funds.
They also have cash ISA because they know sometimes when they want to draw on their stocks the market will be low but also they can see in real time how their stocks ISA is growing but their cash ISA isn't .
There is a book for younger DC I liked called "grandpa's fortune fables " which is very simple to follow and lays out the basics with simple stories !

He calls it planting money trees.
We also show ours how we budget each month and save each month for bigger expenses and they see how I allocate my salary each month to bills and all my pots.

I am intelligent and earn good money. I am financially literate in that I understand how mortgages work, and pensions and compound interest etc. but I am too impulsive and don’t have anywhere near enough savings.

My ex husband is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met, successful too.

There are primary school age children who would be better with money than he is. It’s actually really quite staggering how poor his money management skills are.

I think it depends entirely on a person's risk appetite. The endowment mortgages scandal shone a light on the fact that you still need to pay off the capital at the end of the term, and if you invest your cash in something that has a few years' bad performance or even tanks spectacularly, you're basically screwed. You're also paying interest on the full capital amount for the whole term on interest-only. For people with a very low risk appetite, a repayment product is frequently a conscious strategy rather than an choice born of ignorance of the 'possible' benefits of capital investment.

But having no savings for care costs that even a great pension may not cover. Spending on redecorating so often, changing furniture that's hardly used, having 2 iPads in case you forgot to carry one upstairs...

Do we believe someone who could drop £18k on a holiday and can redecorate and buy sofas every year wouldn’t have enough coming in to pay carers?

the lifestyle spend shifts. If you need carees you won’t be going on £18k holidays. If a pension is paying in say £5k plus a month and the mortgage is paid off and the holidays have stopped you are probably okay for meals and wheels, cleaners and carers. Then if you need to goin into a home that well decorated house can be sold.

And an iPad is £300 - having two wouldn’t be a luxury to someone who goes on £18k holidays.

and do they really have nothing left at the end of each month - or are they just telling you that? Are they financing their life on credit cards or are they spending their pension lump sum?

No - that’s not it at all - both have only worked in the corporate world with no experience of feckless uneducated investors.

Totally agree. I work in Banking and am totally shit with money. DH is in finance and total opposite.

Being bad with money is a complex mix of psychology, education, upbringi and more.

Quite a snippy response given that someone is offering you good advice. It’s ok that you don’t care about money but you have responded to a thread about making the best of your money which you are not doing and that’s your decision, but I expect it’s a bit of a shock to you that someone thought you were financially uneducated. Being snippy and superior over someone who has focused on investments says everything about you - not them.

They don’t need to be as they have the money but then if they are and anything happens they don’t have to worry and have a lot of freedom of time to work out their next step so they should get clued in!!

Mil currently pays £72k a year on carers, I wish she had that coming in from pensions. The council will only pay half - we are having to pay half - care provision is changing - parents would do well not to give away their cash to avoid inheritance tax- they are likely to need it.

I would LOVE to hear her rationale on this!! 🤣

My husband is an auditor, and he's so risk averse I refuse to invest jointly with him.

I'm a pretty basic investor myself, but I'm willing to take risks and my portfolio considerably outperforms his.