Mumsnet really isn't the place to look for financial advice

[ItsFineReally]

Someone said on a thread yesterday that ‘Mumsnet really isn’t the place to come for financial advice’ and it struck a chord with me.

MN is a huge community of women, and yet when it comes to money, investing, or financial confidence, we lag behind. For example:
– Only 24% of women in the UK hold an investment product, vs 39% of men
– Less than half of women feel confident managing money
– Only 10% say they fully understand investing

Most of us are earning, saving, and running households therefore money is central to our lives. So why shouldn’t MN be a space where solid financial conversations happen?

I’m partly venting, but also wondering: should we try to make MN more of a hub for financial discussions, or is it better to accept that and just signpost people to other resources (MSE, Reddit, etc.)? I’d love to know what others think.

Mumsnet is confusing. It floats continually between being accused of being full of high earners to mostly catering to those who are financially struggling.

You can need support and be vulnerable and have money and need help with what to do with it.

As a previous poster highlighted OP, the reason MN would struggle to host serious financial conversations is because there's always someone wanting to create a race to the bottom. It's seriously no joke the oppression women face. But instead of creating environments where women can learn from eachother and maybe even realise they do have the means to make improvements and cheering on those who can make significant strides in financial stability, some will always drag it down.

I guess the only answer is to keep posting/talking. Despite the derails and whataboutery.

I found the "tone deaf" posters tended to be absent from this board but recently they are creeping in.

Mumsnet is confusing. I floats continually between being accused of being full of high earners to only catering to those who are financially struggling.

It's because there is so much bullshit. Someone asking for budget advice on 80k will simultaneously get told they are tone deaf, need to stop frittering money away or that they are poor.
My favourite responses are the "we earn 20k a month but didn't want to overstretch ourselves so have a £500 mortgage".

For the record, I worked on Wall Street, and for a huge US pension fund between 1980 and 1986 as an analyst and technical legal writer. I am not up to date with the detail of tax and pension law/regulation since but I think the US hasn't changed it much and Rachel Reeves is trying very hard to undo the 2014 changes. George Osborne re-wrote pension law so that saving money in a pension was outside IHT; Rachel Reeves wants to reverse that. Obviously it is all politics, but saving for a pension fund is a very long term plan. (I started our SIPP over 20 years ago). It owns a small industrial building that is let to a company that prefers to pay rent and invest in developing its technology. Honestly, I don't know why I bother to try to explain any of this here, because most of MN doesn't even hoist in the basics.

@LegoPicnic @MidnightPatrol @Funningitup All really interesting points.

It just seems to be such an opportunity. Mumsnet is the biggest forum of its kind and I like the idea of a space for financial chat focused on women. It's a shame it doesn't seem to be being maximised.

@funrunsunday I guess the only answer is to keep posting/talking. Despite the derails and whataboutery.

Probably true, yes.

@padso My favourite responses are the "we earn 20k a month but didn't want to overstretch ourselves so have a £500 mortgage".

I've seen a few of those! smh😂

Some things such as finances are certainly best left to the professionals rather than deciding upon social media comments.

Yeah and the shock over a massive mortgage or rent of 1.5k. It's more shocking for those not born a long time ago and have to pay it!

I think becoming the expert and saving the massive fees is way more appealing. Plenty of well regarded low cost platforms that allow you to keep more of your money working for you.

It's not just the investing , it's the tax implications as well that you need to know about
I was against paying off the mortgage on our buy to let but DH did it anyway apart from a thousand so the building society still have a charge on it , if he hadn't had done that recent tax changes and interest rates would have written off any profits .

you have to pay tax on interest over a thousand pounds , which actually can happen quite quickly so being tax aware is helpful and the penalties of not paying tax can be high

I'm certainly not advocating for blindly following random advice from strangers. I am not sure that finances are always best left to professionals, however. Especially for straightforward situations with lower investment levels. And it certainly doesn't hurt to have a basic level of knowledge - including tax as a PP noted.

Tax in and out needs to be part of your modelling and planning. Things can change but the essentials are not difficult at a personal level. It’s absolutely within the capacity of most women to get their heads round.

I can se why premium bonds are popular , they are interest free.

@Funningitup Completely agree.

Oops I meant tax free

I agree with that - also many other forums post in Avery factual way without considering whether their suggestions and advice have knock on issues in other areas of lives - money is complicated because we all have different priorities and relationships in many cases to factor in the mix too -

Haven't RTFT yet, but I just wanted to say that it's thanks to MN that I now have savings with a good interest rate, an ISA, and a premium bond for DS. Whereas before, we had nothing.

It's also thanks to MN that I keep a close eye on my pension and DH's pension. Collated and moved a load of old pensions that would have otherwise got lost, keep an eye on payments going in, etc.

I'm not financially savvy at all, and we're a low income household, so all of the above, which is directly thanks to MN, has been so helpful.

I think there’s a lot of really excellent financial knowledge on here but it gets swamped by the poorly informed posts, not least because the people with good advice to give often start by asking questions rather than just making statements. But IME this is true on Reddit etc as well.

Agree that the tedious derailing needs to stop.

This. But MN also has its weird obsessions, in particular, paying off mortgages when the OP has said they're still on an old cheap fix, which is akin to winning the lottery and burning the ticket compared with saving your spare money instead until the fix ends.

Also making your life more inconvenient and expensive by not using credit cards (paid off in full every month not for getting into debt).

But most people don't even need an IFA, but just need to familiarise themselves with MSE for anything 'consumer' or budgeting, the financial flow chart as an order of priorities, which will tell you that investing instead of saving when you're worried about making your last £30 stretch until payday is like trying to run before you can walk and then the likes of Meaningful Money to really inform yourself about finances and investing.

@ItsFineReally thank you for starting this discussion. I do think Mumsnet is a good place for these ideas to be discussed. As a number of pp have mentioned in most cases the discussion here will spark an interest in the topic which can be further researched and discussed.
However I do get frustrated with the posters who jump in with how tone deaf it is to talk about having spare money but also those who immediately jump to ‘you need an IFA’ when the amount involved doesn’t justify an IFA at all.
We should be more willing to talk about such an important topic and help each other rather than frighten people away by saying oh it’s too complicated or you shouldn’t talk about that as it offends me.

There are many topics on here that are hard to read at certain times in our parenting journey but we don’t shut them down. Should a parent whose young adult son has had to leave uni for mental health reasons go on the uni threads and try to shut them down as they find it difficult to read? Obviously not you just avoid reading those topics. Finance and investing is just as relevant to women as any other topic and should be freely discussed.
As with any forum we need to understand that not everyone with an opinion is right and we need to use other sources, same is true of any parenting topic so again no reason not to discuss. There are many parents on here with good advice that are kind enough to take the time to give the basics and point you in the right direction for further information.

My personal situation enables me to actively invest and plan for retirement and I am hungry for information and ideas. I am savvy enough not to need an IFA but to do it myself and would love to connect with other women in a similar position just like I did when my kids were babies and I couldn’t get them to sleep, or when I wanted to help them learn to read in primary school, navigate friendships at secondary school and then apply to uni.

However due to the tone deaf and IFA issue I would never come on here to ask my questions. Nor would I ask on Reddit, however having a SIPP with interactive investor I found their ii community which is to investing and pensions what Mumsnet is to parenting and I get much more value from the non-judgemental and encouraging posters on there. None of the tone deaf jealousy or referral to expensive unnecessary advice and some really valuable ideas.

The basic thing with investment is that you will need to take an element of risk in order to achieve some return.

If you want a guaranteed ‘return’ of at least base rate, then your only option is to put it in a fixed interest vehicle (mostly cash). There is no scope to get a higher return.

The whole question of risk (and volatility) is inseparable from the question of time. Investing in a broad basket of shares (eg through a tracker) is high risk in the short term but low risk in the long term (10+ years). That’s why people posting questions on here often don’t include all the info that’s needed to give a useful answer. The thread the other day about paying off a mortgage is a good example of this (op had a short time horizon, low risk tolerance and her main aim was to pay her mortgage off- so a very different question to just “how do I make maximum returns?”)

Agree about the endless pointless advice to find an IFA.

I think there are a range of things linked to finance with posts varying on usefulness. Budgeting advice can be pretty good but broader financial planning less so.

The best advice I had (from my parents and widely my a-level history teacher) was to start a pension as soon as I started work and put in 10% not 2-3. You still see a lot of posts on Mumsnet where people have thrown everything into the mortgage and neglected retirement savings. You just can’t make up 30 years of missed compounding. You also very rarely see pensions as part of the nursery v sahm calculations that people often talk about. I also see a lot of women limiting themselves job wise because they don’t want to use wrap around at all. On retirement the fire communities are far better than here re investment, strategies, planning etc.

Yes but many people buying them or being advised to buy them on here would have other, also tax free, methods to save which pay more interest on average - eg £20k per year ISA allowance, and £1000 per year interest tax free if a basic rate taxpayer and £500 if higher rate taxpayer. Plus a 20% taxpayer may well on average (based on savings interest available and average PB returns) find better interest rates even if they pay tax on it. I know people like the excitement of the possibility of a big win, but on average they offer poor returns for many v alternatives and that’s before you even think about taking risks on investment gains.

I’m probably a person who would benefit a lot from more MN financial discussion as opposed to advice. Unlike other posters I I find the breadth of comments oddly helpful, because when there’s a post that says ‘pay off your mortgage’ and then someone explains why that may not be the best advice, that’s much more helpful than a bland generalist blog from a financial institution that wants to sell you something. I was brought up by a father whose only talent with money was to give it to crooks, and a mother who was legit brilliant at investing and money decisions, including ‘how to feed a family on decent food when your husband has started a failed business and sold the house to a conman’, but who never spoke about money because she would have had to undermine my dad’’s masculinity to do so. So I find the mix of genuine information, class stuff, feminist and personal viewpoints, a good mix, a d I would say that overall I probably do know more than I used to thanks to MN.